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Tumblr Watch

By: admin
09-12-2011
features

When it comes to stuff that tech-savvy ladies, lesbians  and fashion-holics alike, nothing is quite as popular amongst all three groups as Tumblr. Whether you Tumble yourself or you merely follow a billion different accounts, Tumblr is the number one blogging website for compiling a scrap book of weird and wonderful images.  For many years before reblogging was a surefire way to popularity amongst the cyber world and the ultimate procrastination method, girls had been slowing realising the web the was an amazing tool for self expression, grass roots activism and a networking platform for entrepreneurs. I really think it would have been amazing to find Feminist.com in all its Web 1.0 and early HTML glory. I’m so used to having access to my own little support network here in the blogosphere (here’s looking at you, ladies!),  so it’s hard to imagine a world where your average person couldn’t create their own media. But back in the 90s, when yours truly was only just discovering dial up internet and entering the scary world of chat rooms, young women across the world were starting up feminist networks to counteract mainstream media, street style blogs with DIY fashion shoots, and getting involved in grass roots activism, right-clicking and commenting till their eyes went square and their index fingers got stress fractures.

But still, the interwebs still manages to blow my mind. Case in point – Tumblr. Lesbians are all over it. I was introduced to Tumblr earlier this year. My old room mate had met her girlfriend via Tumblr and spoke highly of its capacity as an unofficial dating service. They would follow each other’s blogs and reblog the shit out of each other’s stuff. After realising they both loved beautiful clothing and the women who wore it, they eventually met in person and fell madly in love, and it didn’t end very well, but that’s hardly Tumblr’s fault now is it?

I made a post earlier about a few issues I had with the platform, but there’s also a lot of things about Tumblr that I really like. Tumblr doesn’t really lend itself to long form blogging, but is more suited to blogging imagery, quotes and linking to other blogs. I think it’s best used if you want to tell your audience/readers/fans something quickly, or have found something inspirational but don’t really have time to make a really long blog post about it. It’s great used alongside your main website to compliment existing content. I use it from time to time if I find something cool, or something incredibly sexy that I feel will put a smile on someone’s face somewhere.

I follow roughly around 100 Tumblr blogs, as well as maintaining two of my own (here and here), but here’s the cream of the crop. Enjoy!

 

1. Lesbians Down Under – A submission blog for Aussie ladies and the ladies who love them. Full of cute Aussie babes.

2. fuckyeahdykes – A blissful array of sweet androgyny. If you’re into the alternative look, love tattoos and piercings and Ruby Rose, this blog is for you.

3. Autostraddle - the photoblog for the web’s number one girl/girl culture website.

4. fuckyeahthelword – a Tumblr dedicated to those West Hollywood lesbians we either love or love to hate.

5. fuckyeahcharlottefree - a photo stream of the bad ass model with hair the colour of candy floss. Swooooon.

6. The Classy Issue – my current obsession. Features lots and lots of cutting edge fashion, beautiful art work, and lots and lots of naked girls. A definite follow for those who like their women mixed with a bit of culture.

7. fuckyeahautostraddle – I’m not sure who owns this Tumblr, but they basically grab their favourite bits from the Autostraddle website and reblog. It’s pretty cool, slightly meta.

8. fuckyeahfemmes – a Tumblr especially for the classy femmes out there. It’s feminism mixed with queer theory, and lots of pretty ladies.

9. Model Lesbians – Hot lesbians, or hot models who looks like lesbians. ‘Nuff said!

10. Fuckyeahdaria – endless gifs of everyone’s favourite sardonic four eyes.

11. LGBT Laughs – Funny stories about coming out, more hilarious gifs and just random funneh shit.

12. Women Artists – Highlights the work of contemporary female artists from a range of disciplines. Great for finding new talent, or if you want to impress a date with some intellectual fodder.

13. fuckyeahladylove – General photoblogging appreciation of the female form.

14. Stella Cooper – I love the stuff that this young Sydney girl posts. She really has an amazing eye for unique style, design and beautiful women, and she’s soooo young! The content’s fairly superficial, but gosh it’s all so pretty!

15. Girls Are Made From Pepsi – Occasionally I like to go on a reblogging spree and post images of cute girls, cute fashion or funny gifs I find. Check it out for a bite-sized version of GAMFP!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sunday Hustle 6/11/11

By: admin
06-11-2011
sunday hustle

A lady’s secret weapon of choice? The almighty bitchface. Bring it. (Rookie)

Tavi writes about first encounters with feminine objectification for her new online magazine. (Rookie)

It’s hard to imagine a blogosphere without the voices of the many women who’ve made 21st century feminism what it is today. This means you! Take a stroll down memory lane with this chronology of feminist blogging, and also check out the must-read list of the ultimate feminist blogs for some conscious-raising web surfing. (NY Magazine)

Perhaps more important, these sites inspired an even sharper cadre of commenters, who bonded and argued, sometimes didactically, sometimes cruelly, but just as often pushing one another to hone their ideas—all this from a generation of women written off in the media as uninterested in any form of gender analysis, let alone the label “feminist.” Freed from the boundaries of print, writers could blur the lines between formal and casual writing; between a call to arms, a confession, and a stand-up routine—and this new looseness of form in turn emboldened readers to join in, to take risks in the safety of the shared spotlight.

Pandagon, one of the web’s very first feminist blogs, has some nice things to say about the article too. (Pandagon)

The always articulate Meg is bang on point with her analysis of web-based ‘lady-snark’ against Kreayshawn and Lana Del Ray. (Good Morning Midnight)

Lana Del Ray

…the necessary performativity of sex appeal in the feminine, and the fact that feminine sex appeal is essentially defined by performativity, artifice, and decoration.  Personally, I’m fine with Del Rey’s big hair, pouty face, winged eyeliner, lipgloss, and staged nostalgia-sexy photos: I do the same thing on a lesser level every day when I tame the wild-haired bleary-eyed stubble-legged beast who wakes up in my bed into the groomed, coiffed, red-lipped vanilla-scented thing I am when I show up to the office by 10.  This is all part of an elaborate joke I’m playing on you where you think my eyes are actually this big and my skin this even, where you think I just roll out of bed dressed this nice.

Every now and then, I fall in love with someone on the internet. This is one of those such ocassions. Tati Kalveks is an 18-year-old British singer/song-writer with a sassy repetoire to rival the likes of Kate Nash and Lilly Allen combined. Meow-rouser!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvnblcywa04]
Sick and tired of all the rape jokes on Facebook? You’re not the only one! A dislike of epic proportions! (Ms. Magazine)

What’s it like to be a woman working in film behind the camera? Frustrating, says Mariella Frostrup. (The Guardian)

Did you like my post about Tumblr and street style? I’m not the only one who’s skeptical of street fashion blogs. (Jezebel)

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Dumbing Down Tumblr

By: admin
19-10-2011
features, rants

Style b­logging is a beautiful if somewhat chaotic medley of fashion, design, and the every-day-girl. As with a lot social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, anything and everything goes. It’s a candid mish-mash of individual perspectives, formed to create a sort of digital look book of all things stylish. Like moths fluttering towards bright lights bulbs, so too are the fashion-savvy towards the blogosphere. Blogs show case the lives and loves of normal girls, and if the success of tabloids and reality TV is anything to go by, we can’t get enough of the everyday Jane.

But therein lies the rub. What happens when the everyday girl is just as beautiful, just as thin, just as well dressed as the fashion models we see in magazines? Has the every-day become the glossy world of picture perfectionism? We crave diversity, but are we really rising to the challenge with the tools that let us do so?

Source: Tumblr

Let me illustrate. There is a girl I follow on Tumblr with thousands of fans. At just a mere 17-years of age, she has reached what is known as internet fame. Everyday she uploads or reblogs a beautiful mixture of images she finds from all corners of the web, creating a fashion-lover’s archive of inspiration for the self-confessed clothes horse. She is adored not just for her treasure trove of pictures, but also for own personal style. Self-portraits of thin, tanned legs reclining in a computer chair, a messy head of long blonde hair and a perfect pout receive hundreds of notes, likes a reblogs. She’s internet famous, and all she has to do is click her mouse.

“How did u get soooo skinny?!” One follower asks.

“can we plz get a rundown of what you eat each day?” Asks another.

The reaction to these images, whether they’re of the bloggers themselves or of catwalk models they admire, is uncannily similar to the way we react to the headlines that blazen the covers of magazines. We want to know what the other person does to look and feel good. What’s their secret? How can I be like them? How do I compare?

The girls of Tumblr are undoubtedly gorgeous, a community of style bloggers, amateur fashion designers and enthusiasts, writers and makeup artists alike. They love what they do, and best of all, they’re just like us. However, just like the perfectly choreographed images they post, web cam shots become DIY fashion shoots with real designer labels and some serious effort involved.

Fashion and beauty have always been about creating magical worlds, with control over these fantasies commanded from the top down. The Internet has given fashion and beauty lovers a place to openly share and create their own worlds, and take a little bit more control over what the media hands to us. The thing is, sometimes the pages of Tumblr aren’t that far away from the sartorial jungles of high-fashion magazines. The everyday fashion blogger and her Tumblr posts start to look more and more like the unattainable world we see inside the glossy covers of our favorite reads. Sometimes, it’s a little hard not to compare ourselves, especially when the girls responsible might even be people we know.

Social media tools like Tumblr are great for getting the creative juices flowing yes, but if something you’re viewing at is making you constantly look at yourself and how you compare, where’s the fun in that? And that’s what blogging should be all about – fun! Creativity! Expressing yourself and sharing your passion. Tumblr is just another form of media, and just as with magazines, television, movies and other images you see, it’s important to think about how blog content is created. Is it opening up your world to a variety of looks, styles and tastes? Or is it just reflecting the same old, same old?

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Sunday Hustle

By: admin
15-05-2011
sunday hustle, Uncategorized
  • The Class Boundaries of Veronica Mars – S. E. Smith over at This Aint Livin’ talks about the class politics of Veronica Mars. This post resonates particularly with myself right now. I was particularly stunned by the North vs. South class system in Perth. For those not in the know, North of the river = upper class, bourgeois society. South = bogan. Guess where I live!
  • Aw, man. Beat me to it! It totally wanted to write a post on breaking up with friends (something I recently had to do myself). I mean, is there a correct etiquette for cutting a non-romantic relationship out of your life? What do you say instead of ‘we can still be friends’ ?
  • The Princess Letters Project – This one’s really special. Did you love princesses growing up? My best friend did, and always tortured me with playing princess games. Luckily, I had a brother who taught me the important life lessons, like how to climb trees, race toy cars and fight like only little sisters can. I think indulging your inner princess is a must for all girls. Eat more cake! Play dress ups! It’s harmless fun. But this whole ‘some day my prince will come’ message might be potentially damaging. I partially blame Taylor Swift.
  • Self-professed Wordsworth and Proactive Pimp Alexandra Franzen has a lesson for you in modesty. Might have to stop describing myself as a wordsworth wunderkind.
  • I wish, oh how I wish, I wasn’t such a middle class foodie and had the guts to commit to the Live Below the Line challenge. Props to those (like fellow UNSWer and freelance writer Rachel Hills) who are taking the plunge and living on a shoe string budget.
  • My favourite zinester and all round bad ass grrrl Amber talks about girl hate in online forums, negative reactions to her tattoos, and reclaiming otherwise offensive insults.

I think that before someone does something seemingly innocuous like posting online about another person, it would be absolutely imperative to first examine where those bad feelings are coming from. Because once that action is taken, it cannot be changed and it can be destructive not just for the friendship (or pretendship, a term that I recently learned through the partner of a friend) in question, but for the communities that all involved parties belong to. Besides that, it’s a downright embarrassing situation to be in. I’d rather deal with it in a productive manner; by talking things out, and preferably not in a public forum, because that’s where the drama begins.

  • I love the tumblrverse. It’s addictive and there’s so much pretty! But sometimes, all the images of fashun models and the hoardes of girls who idolise their jutting collar bones and knobby knees gets a bit too much. However, skinny bashing is just as damaging. It’s like no body weight is good enough! Too fat? Too Thin? Reminds me of that scene in Mean Girls where The Plastics are all like ‘OMG EW!’ when Cady says she has fire crotch bad breath. Jetta knows what I’m talking about. Whilst I can’t personally relate to ever hating being called thin, it’s interesting to hear what it’s like for our fast-metabolism friends.
  • Speaking of Tumblr, Rhiannon from Fuck Yeah Women Artists has started a debate about whether  posts on Tumblr can be considered a form of artistic creation. I say yes. As informal and digital as it may seem, just as curators in galleries organise and archive collections by artistic movements, or artists, or themes, or periods etc, so too do Tumblr users organise and archive their content. This is done through the use of tags. It makes it simpler to locate images of a particular theme, or images of a certain person or thing. It’s the 21st Century way to cordon off sections of a person’s very own digital gallery.

Happy Sunday!


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I am 20-something-year-old who writes things. Sometimes I mention fashion, youth ISSUEZ, gender discussion, media analysis, and popular culture hype. Sometimes I'm NSFW. If you don't like that, that's ok. I still like you!

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All material, including feature articles, rants, slugs and photographs are the intellectual property of CAMILLA PEFFER unless otherwise stated. These may not be reproduced without explicit permission (see the Copyright Act of 1968 for some leisurely reading) . Where material reproduced on this blog is not my own, I do endeavour to give credit where necessary. Occasionally I like to feature the work of others, including a range of media such as videos, images, blog entries and feature articles. This material will be attributed and adored where necessary. If I have featured work of yours on GAMFP and not given you sufficient credit, please let me know!

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