Links For March 1, 2014
Facetruth: I Took Off My Hijab
It’s as if I was just another passer by, with no significance to the wrap around my head. The wrap around my head. Then it hit me. My knit hat and winter scarf covered my hijab (the head scarf part) entirely and all that was visible were my eyes behind my wannabe hipster glasses while my skinny jeans tucked themselves into my boots. They didn’t even know I was Muslim.
Jennifer Lawrence And The History Of Cool Girls
Yet the Cool Girl’s cool is ephemeral. We’ve been anticipating the J.Law backlash for months, but if and when it comes, it’ll have less to do with Lawrence and more to do with the need for a new articulation of the Cool Girl to keep the myth alive. This is an anxiety that needs constant soothing, and one star can provide only so much reassurance. One minute you’re cool, perfectly balancing the progressive and the regressive, but when that balance falters, you’re too much, too sexual, too loud, too performative, and the cultural backlash sweeps you under.
I Looked at the 2,500 Lean In Stock Photos So You Don’t Have To
The photographs have been carefully curated to give lie to the brand’s consumer-driven philosophies. They exist ready to be downloaded to illustrate stories about female entrepreneurs who are “bold,” “visionary,” corporate success stories. These chatty stories already populate LeanIn.org’s website: pointers on how to divvy up housework, lean in to your marriage, and first person essays by stay-at-home dads. Absent from the website are stories about poverty reform or child care legislation – stories that might address structural discrimination rather than self-imposed hang ups. Like the stock photographs, they produce a kind of gender norm and prescribe what women should look like now. But visibility’s relationship to “empowerment” is slipperier than that. Visibility can be a “vise,” as Barthes would have it, which locks in the predetermined, preventing us from turning away and seeing competing accounts.
Five Things I Learned as a Female Founder
But (obviously) when you’re invisible you have to work harder to call attention to your company and products. It can be very uncomfortable to do what seems to be “unladylike” self-promotion, but it’s essential. The best advice I ever got about overcoming this discomfort came from Roger McNamee, the chairman of the board of my company, Reverb Technologies, who told me that if I really believe in what we’re making, it is my duty to share it so that as many people get the benefit of it as possible!
The only thing that matters for startups is market fit, which seems kind of “duh,” but it’s easy to forget the obvious in Silicon Valley.
Lorrie Moore on Her Short-Story Collection Bark
“Walking City,” Universal Everything.