Kittens And Converse Signify A Weak Mind.

I usually post about films and pop culture and occasionally about the rad white water rafting I did on holiday, but I hardly ever post about my love of knitting and cake and rompers (or playsuits, or onesies for those of you confused by my terminology). Mostly because these things don't really inspire me to post all that much, and this is my blog so I will fill it with rants about shit 3D conversion and the overexposure of Eliza Dushku's rear in Dollhouse because that's what makes me reach for my keyboard. However, I do love those things. I like pink (you may have noticed that my blog is pink themed) and I like wearing Converse with skirts, and buying jewellery from Etsy.

Why am I telling you this? Because according to Julie Klausner this means I am failing the sisterhood.

Above - a kitten and a pair of Converse. Doesn't mean I want you to infantilise me.

In her blog post, Julie rails against women who are, according to her, increasingly acting like little girls. She thinks it's because we want men to think we're sweet and inoffensive, and that we're trying to live up to some weird needy babyish vision of the perfect woman.

Yep, I'd agree there's a definite trend for cutesy, girly stuff for women at the moment. Some of it I like and some of it I don't. I get upset when it's foisted on to children as the only choice for a little girl (see the recent Twitter campaign against Tesco's "zones" for boys and girls). For adults, however, it is a choice and should be respected as such.

Basically, fuck off telling me what I should and shouldn't like.

Fuck off with the "you only like this stuff because (insert reason) and women should like (insert item)". I like what I like. I don't live in a blinkered bubble where I think I make all my choices free from external pressure, and I appreciate that bloggers want to highlight what they consider to be a growing pressure on women to choose things that make them seem childish and inoffensive, but really, fuck off. You might think Etsy and Converse and rompers and knitting makes me a women playing at being a little girl. I think I find crafts soothing, even if I can't afford to buy in to the expensive luxury end of the knitting scene. You might think buying things from Etsy is childish, but I think I can't afford real, non-costume jewellery and so Etsy is a place to get something nice and not cheaply mass-produced from Topshit. You might think my Converse makes me a permanent tweenager, but I think they're comfier than high heels.

I would challenge the idea that most women who like this cutesy stuff don't also read things written before they were born (thanks, Julie, that's super patronising), or share a glass of wine with their friends. Perhaps I'm wrong, but so what? We're all different, and that's okay. This version of womanhood is just as fake and just as bullshit, and I hate that reading that blog post has made me feel the need to justify myself but saying that, hey, I also know how to rewire a plug and change a fuse, and I read Kafka for fun, and I drink wine with my friends.

I also think Julie's post confuses fluffy femininity with childishness (hence the clash of bunnies and baking with trainers and Xbox). To define these concepts by items of clothing and hobbies is ridiculous. None of these things are inherently childish or feminine, but how they are experienced can make them so, and different people will have different definitions of what isn't age-appropriate behaviour.

God, I even hate the term "age-appropriate" in this sense. It seems a little bit too much like "mutton dressed as lamb" and other woman-on-woman hate phrases.

Yes, it's frustrating when women put themselves in a position to be patronised and belittled and have their power leached away because they choose to be babied. It has nothing to do with how they choose to dress or spend their spare time. Hell, in my eyes one of the worst offenders in TV history was Carrie in Sex And The City, who used to love it when Big called her "kid" and patronised her, and she didn't dress like a little girl as far as I can remember. If you want to criticise this behaviour, then believe me I understand the urge, but perhaps don't be so short-sighted as to blame it on a woman's choice of outfit?

There's a  far more interesting look at the childish/feminine trend over here at the Ch!cktionary, which manages not to bash women who DO like things considered to be very feminine, whilst considering why women make these choices.

I should also add that despite the fact that I disagreed with Julie Klausner's post so much that I wrote my very own rant, I do want to read her book. Hey, just because I disagreed with her on this one thing!

My sporting beard

I decided that I need to do some fucking exercise, because sitting around in my pants drinking cans of Red Stripe and eating fried chicken whilst laughing about the good genes that mean I hardly ever put on weight was probably going to lead to an extremely ironic heart attack at the age of thirty five.

I picked running, because it's cheap, doesn't involve sweating in a basement with a bunch of other women, and also involves fresh air. And I like the idea of running, thanks to some very romantic Nike ads. To get me started I was going to need some basic equipment, since running in converse and skinny jeans probably wasn't going to be a good idea. I haven't bought trainers since I was thirteen and used to buy four quid pairs from ShoeFayre for PE class, so I asked my friend Gemma to help me.

This wasn't the only reason I asked Gemma to help me. Sports shops are mysterious and foreign to me. The walls are always hung with painful looking instruments of torture, the staff are always watching you expectantly and saying things like "did you want sweat slick technology?" and the customers are usually fully paid up members of the chav community, buying "fashion trainers", which I'm sure is a contradiction in terms. It's terrifying.

Even a simple pair of trainers, once you're past the fashion section, isn't as easy at it sounds. There were running, cross, and trail labelled trainers which all looked the fucking same. The ones I eventually bought had "shock absorb technology" which apparently was a good thing. They make my feet look like I've duct taped pillows to them, which is also exactly how they feel.

Gemma then also suggested that a sports bra might be a good idea, even for tits as titchy as mine. I decided she was right, mostly because my right boob tends to hurt in the area of my scar if I run up stairs too fast or something. I eventually found one that didn't smoosh my girls up towards my shoulders, or mould them into weird points, and myriad other bizarre options that were clearly designed by someone who had never actually seen a breast, and had only heard about them from vague description.

As the proud owner of a lot of unused sportwear, I'm hoping the shame of buying this stuff will spur me on to use it, to at least justify the amount of time today I spent being patronised by people wearing airtex polo shirts with absolutely no irony whatsoever.

I washed my shoe...

Wow, first post in the new blog! It has taken me ages to get to this point. It looked so nice and neat and clean all post-free, you know? Although I realised that it was also a bit useless waiting for an AMAZING and EPIC first post topic, since very rarely to things amazing and epic actually happen to me.

Instead, I thought I would share one of my most recent failures in life. I washed my shoe. My lovely, real leather, tan coloured brogue to be precise. I must have picked it up along with a mound of sheets I had just stripped off my bed and thrown it straight in the washing machine, where it enjoyed an extra spin cycle on 40 degrees before I discovered it crying and dishevelled inside a pillow case, wondering what it had done to make me hate it so.

I didn't cry. I'm very proud of this. It's only a shoe, after all. A beautiful, real leather, tan coloured brogue that I got from Topshop and was featured a week later in Heat magazine which made me feel all fashion-forward and stuff.

This is it now:The washed shoe is on the right, all shrivelled and dark and devoid of natural oils and suppleness and laces. On the left is the other one of the pair, the one that escaped the washing machine by virtue of being wedged firmly under my chest of drawers.

I'm now left with the dilemma of how to fix this problem. Clearly there is no helping the washed shoe. I borrowed some clear shoe polish from my flatmate and this appears to have made it marginally shinier. The colour has run a bit and leather is hard and the inside is manky, but at least it's shinier. I'm loathe to put the unscathed shoe in the washing machine to try and make them match, but secretly I like the shoe better darker and skankier. I can pretend it's vintage. I'm not just saying that to hide my inner shame at having washed a really nice shoe and totally ruined it.

Moral of this story is: put your shoes away rather than leaving them on the floor. Especially the nice ones. Or stop giving a shit about your shoes. You choose.