Social Justice: Why yoni jewelry bothers me

I am troubled by the yoni jewelry on Etsy.

This is not to say that I'm troubled by the concept.  The original notion of the yoni is part of tantric sex practice, as I've been writing about for one of my copywriting customers: basically, "yoni" is Sanskrit for "divine passage," and it refers to the vagina/vulva as a sacred temple.  The penis gets a similar reverence as lingam.  All well and good.  Sex is sacred and beautiful.


It's hard to post even the very lovely examples of yoni jewelry in a post like this, so here are some cowrie shell earrings from D Rae Designs.

I think the problem comes in when women (and men) who have little interest in the Tantra adopt the idea of venerating the yoni.  The thing is, once you're worshiping something in a vacuum, you automatically mentally remove it from the realm of everyday practice.  To decide that we are now going to revere the vagina as sacred rather than thinking of it as dirty turns the vagina into a concept that is beyond the woman.

If my vagina is sacred, it doesn't belong to me.  Sacredness implies worshippers, implies a social construction and concept that is larger than myself.  I don't want to think of a part of my body as filthy, as shameful.  But I also don't want to think of it as bigger and more sacred than the rest of me.

I'm all for resisting the idea of shame, but replacing it with the idea of sacredness, without understanding the yoni concept as part of a whole person, doesn't grant a woman control of, ownership of, and pride in her sexuality.  It only estranges the woman from her sexuality in the opposite direction.

So all that polymer clay yoni jewelry on Etsy (some of which, admittedly, is lovely)?  When I look at most of it, all I can see is a woman desperately resisting the idea that sex is dirty ... by putting it away from herself and her life entirely, promoting it as a passage to the sacred experience rather than a part of herself, her sexuality, her pleasure.  How is this different from the Victorian narrative?  How is this helping anyone?

A linklist, which should really be one word

... this spammy blog (is there a term for this?) uses an article I found while trying to discover M's Ratemyprofessor rating, and it is just about the funniest damn thing I've ever seen.  M and I did dramatic readings to each other.

Is this a thing now?  Seriously someone -- is this a thing?

On a more relevant-to-anything note, here are two of the many cool things I've turned up while doing the copywriting for this lovely site, Keys of Paradise:

This mellifluously written essay on musk is fascinating, informative, and a truly beautiful piece of online writing which is a superb example of structuring lengthy content for the Internet reader.

There is an loa in the Voodoo tradition who protects abused women and lesbians, hopefully not always in combination: Erzulie Dantor.

And everything I ever wanted to know about alchemy can be learned from these sites: Alchemy-Works, which does sell some of its products but is more valuable for its wealth of information, and <"http://www.alchemylab.com/guideto.htm">a page on which I have wasted hours which  gives the alchemical properties of hundreds and hundreds of ordinary foodstuffs.

On a vaguely related note, many props to the makers of the Mystery Case Files games, available from Big Fish Games and on disk at many fine department stores.  They're a combination of hidden-object with item-adventure games; they capture the essence of the greatest old-style text adventures in their snarky humor, intertextual references, and complex plotlines, but are also absolutely state of the art in graphic rendering and in the incorporation of live-action film with digital art scenes.  They have a smoother and more graceful user experience than their imitators as well.  And, as I was playing the latest entry, "13th Skull," between pages of my novel-sized list of item descriptions, I realized they also apparently have a really excellent cultural consultant.

"13th Skull" has a few problems in terms of atmosphere, notably the fact that while the previous games, "Return to Ravenhearst" and "Dire Grove," had an engaging and incredibly atmospheric creepiness, this one had sort of a hokey Scooby-Doo ghost feel.  I'm quite willing to believe that this was deliberate (M was not so kind about it), but it's a little startling -- perhaps it's the lack of a well-developed and sympathetic victim to save.  Or the fact that there are about four actual Southerners voicing the Louisiana residents.  Anyway, the point is, despite the oddly built atmosphere, every depiction of voodoo and hoodoo spells is, as far as I can tell in my admittedly amateur experience, perfectly accurate.  Right on!

Crap, this post has no subject.  Unrelated photo time!


Available here.

A Review of Pottermore by Someone Unaffiliated with Sony

So, as longtime readers have certainly grasped by now, I have something of a love for Harry Potter.  I spoke on gendered intepretations of the broomstick as symbol in modern literature at the 2009 convention; here's some of the massive amount of Potter-inspired jewelry I've made (please excuse the older photos):





So it will surprise no one that M and I were among those who fought for a place in the beta for Pottermore, which is supposed to be an interactive companion to the books containing more information about minor characters, ghost plots, and other things that weren't told in detail within the scope of the series.

Overall, we've found it interesting but disappointing.  Most of the problem is in the advertising.  There was a massive amount of hype for this -- website countdowns, early announcements, competitions for early-admission spots -- and it was not made entirely clear whether this was a game, or a bunch of illustrations, or an interactive ebook ... or what.

It's set up like a collection of illustrations tied to a social-media game.  There are quizzes to take and House points to earn, and there are some little side games, like potion-brewing and spellcasting.  However, the actual game bits tend to be buggy and unresponsive, partly because the servers clearly weren't ready when early registration was first opened and partly because, well, it's in beta.  But ... there's nowhere to give specific feedback.  There's a generalized feedback form that asks you to give a one-to-four rating of how it works, how it looks, and "how you're liking Pottermore so far," but no way to say "When you try to make the Herbicide Potion, the worm mucus isn't clickable; you just pick up the Valerian if you try."  Which you'd think would be the important thing about doing a beta run.  It's starting to feel like all they really wanted was a demographic survey.

The ... I don't even know what to call it, because it's not a game or an ebook or anything really ... Pottermore is unquestionably beautiful.  Each chapter of the book has two or three corresponding "moments" you can access through the ... here we go again ... through Pottermore, and each "moment" has a multi-layered artwork.  Chapter thirteen, the one with Norbert the dragon in it, is absolutely breathtaking. 

And yet there's nothing to do.  You get to collect books and objects throughout the scenes (though in the really lovely chapter, there's not a damn thing to pick up ... and you still end up having to look), but there's no competitive aspect -- it doesn't really penalize you for not finding the jellybeans on the train -- and there's no reward for finding everything.  A few things, when you click on them, will unlock interesting extra information that's been written for the ... for Pottermore.  For instance, there's an entire biography of Professor McGonagall that you pick up over the course of the story, a few paragraphs for every chapter in which she appears.  This is quite worthwhile for people who enjoy the series.  There's not a lot of information -- there's a lot less than the advertising suggested there would be -- but it's worth playing through for it.

Yet the social-media aspect of the ... thing ... seems to imply that it was imagined that people would sink time and effort into Pottermore.  Would return daily to try to earn House points.  But the part that was hyped, the companion to the books, takes less than a day to "play" or "read" or "work" through per book.  And here's the rub -- the books open one at a time.

At this point, the only thing I'm returning daily to do is to check whether the next book has opened up.  Sometimes I try to make a potion, but the timing on this requires you to either find 90 minutes of stuff to do in Pottermore (difficult) or set a real-world timer (I'm resisting the nerdiness).  As of the end of August, it was still only the first book.  With overall opening slated for October, I'm not sure how they're planning to beta later book-companions at this point -- there's just no time. 

The material shows a lot of promise, but Pottermore can't decide what it is.  This cripples the game because it cannot meet the expectations raised by marketing, weakens the storytelling because the different aspects seem to have been developed at the expense of one another, and distracts from the companion information because the reader is treacherously wondering, "This is all?"

Pottermore could have been a great advance either in interactive reading, or in book-related gaming, but it tried to be both and therefore is neither.  It tried to be something new so hard that it isn't anything.  It has potential as a stepping stone, and it's still worth playing/reading/social media-ing/whatever, but don't expect your mind to be blown.

It's my birthday and I'll talk about buttons if I want to

Yes, in fact it is.  My age is a palindrome for the first time in eleven years!  And until midnight M and I are only 8 years apart!

The buttons from the necklace I posted last week came from the single best deal I've ever gotten on vintage buttons.  Here's another made from buttons from the same lot:

 
Available here.

It was at a yard sale, and the guy selling them had sorted them into jars by color and clearly knew they were of value, but some jars had a horrifically foul-smelling mold in them, so he gave me a price cut on all of them if I was willing to clean them myself.  It turned out that only one jar had the mold, and the smell in the others was merely the natural consequence of putting lots and lots of Lucite in an airtight glass jar for a couple of months (Lucite stinks a little; it contains some kind of acid whose name escapes me at the moment).  I scrubbed them all with toothbrushes and buried them all in coffee grounds, and only ended up losing the one jar; the rest smell just fine, and there wasn't a single junk button.  All primo vintage stock.

Consequently, I can afford to do a special offer on stuff from that lot.  So here it is.  Buy two items, at least one containing buttons (look here), and get 20% off on the lower-priced item when you check out with the code "Lucite always kinda smells if you seal it in a glass jar for a month."  Spelling doesn't count.  Add the code to the Note to Seller when you buy and I'll give you the discount within 24 hours through PayPal.  Offer lasts until11:59 PM on September 30.

Treasury Wednesday: I'd shank a kitten for a slice

Until a couple of years ago, I never actually liked watermelon, so it was always canteloupe and honeydew I got at summer gatherings. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that canteloupes don't exist in America. Technically, they're muskmelons. We just call them canteloupe. Actual canteloupes are only available in Europe and Australia -- where I think they're called rock melons or rockfruit.

Funny old world.

There are some neat, weird things in this treasury, really different and cool. A beautiful collection of Etsy's real best, not Etsy's bestsellers.

'Muskmelon Pleasures' by Scribblegoat

Music and food-inspired designs, in rich melon oranges. What could be better?

Bailey Woodland Whi... baileybowls $19.00	Gallop, Canter, Fox... WildLifePrints $20.00	Upcycled Linen Cant... thehighfiberco $27.00	Acoustic Guitar Per... fionadesigns $20.00
Buy 3 get 4th FREE-... songsparrow $	she heard music eve... corid $20.00	Traditional Turkish... Kitty016 $16.90	Wood Fired Bottle a... earthfired $50.00
ballet russe BalletArt $18.00	Cute Pincushions f... BelleCoccinell... $33.00	Goldfish Cracker Ne... BitOfSugar $12.00	Marble Coaster (Mus... j2studios $9.00
Creamsicle Melon Mu... KarinLorenc $20.00	Sweet Slices an Ori... ArtByTemple $165.00	Citrus - Fine Art p... honeytree $30.00	Cantaloupe Bowl-Set... vegetabowls $72.00

Treasury tool by Red Row Studio.

Instant Vintage

Available here.

What is it about this color combination that screams "vintage"?

I mean, naturally the color of the large plastic/resin buttons is very vintage -- I generally refer to that shade as "60's peachy pink," though from a quick consultation of that ever-handy resource, Wikipedia's list of colors by shade, I suppose technically it's coral.  (Random side note -- I'm that weird genetic anomaly, a colorblind female, so I can't actually distinguish a strong orange from a true red.  I have to ask M for a judgment of harmony if I'm designing in reds or greens, and it's made putting together the Mixed Media Packs for Ballet Llama something of an adventure.)

Anyway.  It's not the muted coral hue I'm referring to, but the combination of it with black.  Pink with black always looks either vintage awesome or modern tweeny "rock star" bleh to me, but this is a particular combination that M and some of my coworkers reacted to in the same manner.  Maybe it's the blue-black jet hue of the blacks that's doing it; that's also a very vintage-feeling color.

This, incidentally, is also one where I bit the bullet and included a photo on black, which may or may not have actually been a good idea:


But it looked too bizarre with black at the edges and white in the middle, and this gives a truer idea of the variation among the buttons, so this was the only way to make the contrast work.

In general, these aren't great photos. I'll need to rework the cropping, I think, and try for a deeper focus.

But hey, check out those great 1960s flapper-style rose beads!

Two Musings

Available here.

1.) Somewhere, there is an earring civilization.  Venerable sterling elders with French hooks advise plastic clip-ons on how to raise their feather-and-kidney-wire young to be good and productive earring citizens.  Their mythology always seems to center around the quest to find one's soulmate, becoming a perfectly matched pair -- er, couple.

2.) I was reading an out-of-date travel magazine the other day while I waited for the laundry quarters to be spent, and there was an article about the memory triggers of smell.  This is something I often tell students about their papers -- scent is the single strongest memory trigger, you can tell me about how Grandma's house at Christmas looked for three pages, but if you add three lines at strategic intervals about how it smelled, you've doubled the narrative's force.  It's inspiring in that maddening way -- if only you could make jewelry of a smell.

I'll never forget the first time I stepped out of the airport in Charlotte.  The smell of the South is like nothing else, and describing it is as hard as putting into words that waxy, fleshy sheen of a salad-plate-sized magnolia blossom, or finding the perfect metaphor for the sound a cicada makes.  Think of clean water, freshly cut grass, and an assortment of fine cigars pristine, fragrant and unsmoked in their cedar box.

Yeah.  Like that.

The garden in mid-June: Coleus, native asters, thrift and liatris and rue.

Treasury Wednesday: Geek Cred

I'll admit it; I make an awful lot of Tolkien-inspired treasuries. You may now commence mockery.

This one ended up very "vampy" but was actually inspired by "Of Maeglin and the Fall of Gondolin." This is ... not a popular character, partly because he's drawn in broad and incestuous strokes, and once the crawlers have a chance to pick this post up I'm really tempted to see where this post falls in Google search results for the name.

Amusing and illustrative anecdote here follows: I got in a bit of trouble with one of the major online Tolkien communities when I was about thirteen, because the point of the story is that the title character is an unwise merger of the two great elfy-awesome bloodlines (back in the mythical past; the distinctions are not terribly relevant by the time of the Lord of the Rings films, but the echoes of it are still visible to the discerning eye). Now, The Silmarillion says very specifically that the character is white-skinned. In so many words. However, since his father is referred to as "the Dark Elf," and since I read the tale as being partly a story of biracial issues -- I had chosen in my little fan creation to deal with biraciality in the visible manner which would be most recognizable to the twenty-first-century American reader: to depict him as darker-skinned than the first cousin he was lusting after and basically went all Wuthering Heights on everybody.

Needless to say (to anyone who is familiar with the majority of Tolkien scholars), this did not go over well.

Tl;dr; Chelsea is really damn weird.

Anyway.

Treasury.

'For You I'd Burn the Length and Breadth of Sky' by tangopig

Blood red and black. Passion turning from love to violence. Title from a song by Vienna Teng, inspiration from The Silmarillion.

Tudor Half-Tester B... CalicoJewels $70.00	Sterling Silver Rad... marlinlowedesi... $250.00	Blood Red & Black F... SideshowByTheS... $15.00	Photograph Gothic R... henatayeb $12.00
Suede Leather Wrap ... spiffingjewelr... $18.00	Velvet Covered Meta... FungiForge $1500.00	35% OFF SALE - Here... Raceytay $22.75	Love Hurts- Anti Va... dhandf $13.00
Tragedy King Lear b... JezebelCharms $40.00	Red Blood Celtic kn... RoadToGrinnell $2.75	Kellinda Rose and B... dreamsbymachin... $37.00	Weathered 8 x 10 impulseART $16.00
Tiny Red Leather Bo... AwakenJournali... $24.00	SALE Small Unwelcom... eelizabeth $35.00	35% OFF SALE - A fi... Raceytay $9.75	Medieval style cott... silverstah $55.00

Treasury tool is sponsored by Lazzia.com A/B image testing.

Steampunk Skills

In my heart, I still really prefer a steampunk that is a lot more "punk" than "steam."


Available here.

I don't think that things need to be dripping in gears (or octopi) to be steampunk.  The "purist" view is that it's not steampunk unless it's functional; I'm not sure I ascribe to that either.  I like the William Morris standpoint on the technology vs. aesthetic thing: "Have nothing in your homes that you do not know to be useful or feel to be beautiful."  To me, it naturally follows that either is good but both is best.

Nor is steampunk just a "look" to me, though there's definitely some level of know-it-when-I-see-it going on here with the clothing and accessories.  As an iteration of punk, it's a mindset and an aesthetic.

Primarily, the mindset is characterized by the oft-calligraphied Japanese phrase "onkochishin": "Honor the past to create the new."  It's a looking backwards to solve the evils of now and recreate the present; it's looking at the world and saying, "You know?  We don't have to break this to remake it.  We can have science and responsibility and wonder.  They can become the same thing again.  We can save the world by changing our ways, not by eschewing them."

(Please allow me a moment to be a Lord of the Rings fanatic: "He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of reason," Gandalf advised us.  And while Papa Tolkien is no doubt revolving in his grave to have me say it:  That applies to the technological lifestyle too.  We don't have to destroy either the ways of the past or the ways of now to understand them, nor to improve them.)

The steampunk culture looks to the past and incorporates it in order to celebrate it  -- which is almost universal; the only reason it's settled on neo-Victorian is because that's where/when our society's cultural memory says, "This is when science and beauty and romance and heroism and practicality could all be realistic concepts at the same time."  It's really not about a particular time period.  It's about recreating the useful and the beautiful in one another's image to create a world that both looks and works well.

This isn't to say there isn't harsh, gritty steampunk alongside the elegant gleam.  The wisdom of the culture lies not in its settings but in its meanings -- in what it takes as its heroes.

Consequently, while I can't mod my technology and I don't drive a steam-powered hovercraft, these are the things I consider my "steampunk skills":

Sometimes I think about ...

... how terrible it must have been to be Mary Cassatt.

"Hey, Mary," the other Impressionists might have said to her, "we're off to the Folies-Bergere.  All of us.  Except you.  Enjoy keeping your ankles hidden alone all evening."

I detect much less rage in her work than it feels like there should be ...

I wonder about Christina Rossetti too, as the major female Pre-Raphaelite Brother (a number which, incidentally, also sort of included Emily Dickinson -- and if anyone is interested to read about that I shall make M do a guest post, it's fascinating stuff).  Also incidentally, did you know there were four Rossettis?  Dante Gabriel, Christina, and then William Michael and Maria Francesca -- William Rossetti was a historian and Maria Francesca was an Anglican nun, translator and literary critic.  It kind of sucked to be any member of the Rossetti family except for Dante Gabriel -- their mother was John Polidori's sister but no one knows about that, the two other siblings get almost no attention even on Wikipedia, and then there's Christina.  "Have a nice night, Sis; the rest of the Pre-Raphaelites are going carousing after the meeting.  Without you.  Enjoy minding the wallaby."

At least in her case I can imagine her hand vibrating with fury as she dedicated Goblin Market.

Disappointments and Blessings

I ventured back into the Etsy Forums the other day.

This was a mistake.

See, I had this flash of inspiration: Since the entire function of the Etsy Forums is to self-promote to other sellers (which I have always found to be a losing game, but others disagree), I would go along to the "Critiques" section and, using my Scribblegoat account but not rudely or blatantly advertising, offer free, helpful professional advice to the legions of people asking the community to critique their shops/descriptions.  This would, with professional propriety and helpfulness, put the name of my business before those who were already seeking similar services.  I hasten to assure my sighing readers: From my experience of the forums, this seemed a genuinely excellent plan.

Problem number one was immediately apparent: Recently (to judge from the complaint threads still fresh and full of vim), the Critiques and Promotions sections were phased out.

However, people were still posting the questions, just under "Site Help."  I proceeded with my plan.  Then I realized that a significant number of the threads were starting with "Five Ways to Make Sales," "Ten Ways to Improve Photographs," "How My Dog's Shop Made 18 Sales in Its First Month," etc.  Cool!  I made one linking to my word-choice series.

Half an hour later, I checked back.  14 comments!  I was thrilled.

And then I read them.

A couple of polite thanks, made me feel great.  Then these:

"I noticed you're really new here, do you have another shop somewhere where you've sold a lot of things based on your descriptions? Otherwise, I'm not sure how useful I would consider this information."
 "Honestly I don't think people totally read the descriptions. It has been my experience that I'm answering questions that were answered in my descriptions."
 "Please don't start threads made to bring attention to your blog. Offering suggestions on how to help make one's business successful is awesome, but please share most of that content here when you're doing so to prevent us from viewing the thread as a promotional one."

These don't seem as bad on the second read, but at the time, they were a slap in the face.  The first made me angry.  The articles themselves and every single element in my Scribblegoat shop -- including the descriptions themselves -- make it very obvious that I'm both a qualified writer and an experienced seller under the TangoPig account; this person didn't actually look at anything.  They apparently took the barest of glances solely so they could tell me my hours of work were useless information, and I didn't know what I was doing.  (Also?  Comma splice.  Yes, I'm petty.)  The second one is more dismissive than I would be willing to be, but actually makes me laugh, since it is proved by the one above it.

And the last one is from an Etsy moderator and locked the thread.

I acknowledge that Etsy has a right to keep content primarily on the site itself; I'm good with this.  But this does require, for the sake of the most basic standards of professionalism, that they either A.) have a posted rule about it in the FAQs, or B.) follow the damn links to see where they actually go -- because it's blindingly obvious from a click that that's not my blog.

It's not a big deal, and I know this, but it depressed me for the rest of the day.  And yet -- that's also how I feel pretty much every time I visit the forums.  It's this great groaning chorus of "Etsy sucks because of this," "And also because of this," "My customers are awful," "I'm ahead of the rat race, let me condescend to the fellow rats," "I'm the only honest seller here," "The rules were formulated to make life hard for me," and on and on and on and on ...

Yet -- even though the Etsy venture isn't going where I hoped, even though people have been cruel and dismissive about my extensive qualifications and generally made me feel like shit -- I do this for a living.  I work in a great writing center where there's tons of support, I make pretty good money and learn interesting things.  Even if I'm not freelancing it yet, I get to do this as a job.  And the job isn't just editing other people's work, it's also doing my own -- I spend a couple of hours writing descriptions and blog posts every week, and my Etsy shop pays for itself now, though I know I'm still years from making back the startup supply costs.

Furthermore, I say "not freelancing yet" -- but I'm not sure what criteria I'm giving myself, because as of now?  I've had three commissions, totalling a pretty respectable wage for a weekend off.

So I have much for which to be grateful, and with that in mind -- the slap in the face from trying to engage with the Etsy community?  Small fry.

"Asian Inspired" and its moral implications, or, Why Orientalism is Bad, Kids

So I just realized that my setup in this photo makes it look like the charms are sliding over a cliff to their certain doom.



That's okay; it sold last November.  Anyhow.

It occasionally troubles me to create Asian-inspired designs.  However, the following things always and without fail suggest Asia to me:

• peonies/ranunculus/large floral patterns
• cloisonne
• fish
• jade
• strong black/red, blue/red, or black/green color palettes

The problem?  Anthropological training has made me a little overly sensitive to cultural appropriation.  Mind you, this doesn't trouble me nearly as much as "tribal."  And yet ... who decides that something looks Asian?  Is it okay for me to use the term "Asian-inspired" when I in fact mean, "This, to me, resembles Western culture's idea of the motifs of Asia"?




The thing is -- I took Art History with a global emphasis and Artists in Traditional China in school -- the latter in seminar under Cheng-chi Hsü, one of the world's foremost experts on Chinese painters and their relationships with art connoisseurs.  I spent that class reading the UCR library's entire extensive section about Yangzhou courtesans so I could roleplay a courtesan novelist for the final project.  And this was after I abandoned, as beyond me without the ability to read Chinese script, a paper about the transgressive gender presentation of the painter-poet.  I am as educated on the matter of Asian art as most amateurs can claim to be.  Why do I always have this guilty feeling when I'm as qualified as most Westerners to identify Asian motifs?

 But that requires me to think of myself as a Westerner, which is a problem in and of itself, and it goes back to that old linguistic problem of the Orient and the Occident.


Available here.

Basically, the word "Oriental" means "from somewhere else."  It means, basically, "Them."  "Those people."  "The others."  To refer to someone as an Oriental is literally to say "the person who is deeply unlike me."  (This is why, in the Age of Steam, North Africans and Gypsies were called "orientals," though the term is usually specific to the continent of Asia today).

To call oneself a Westerner or Occidental assumes a geographical position; it says, "Of course this is the West and that the East.  Anyone who matters is standing right here, where it's true."


So true, Mr. Munroe.  So true.

So for the moment, I continue to soothe my conscience by using the terms "Asian" and "tribal," but being specific in descriptions ("motifs taken from Chinese scrolls," "suggested by the shapes of West African hunting trophies") and tagging with "asian inspired" and "tribal inspired."  The butterfly necklace up above is called "Papillon Orientaliste" -- the Orientalist butterfly, not the Oriental -- because I am trying to suggest an item created with elements that construct a reflection of a worldview of "the exotic" (there's an unwieldy construction), not that there actually is an Other to refer to by this term.

Possibly this is still morally corrupt, but it keeps me feeling honest, and I still think that's important.