Lydia Pettit - The Well, 2021

People giving JKR shit for Cho Chang will never not be annoying to me as an actual Chinese person. The thing about Chinese is that there is no perfect way to transliterate it into English, as the two languages are just too different from each other. And while there are more common romanization systems than others, ultimately it's up to the discretion of the individual person for how they want to transliterate Chinese into English. In the Chinese editions of HP, Cho's name is 张秋, which would most commonly be romanized as Zhang Qiu (East Asian names are written surname first, given name second). However, it's completely reasonable to assume that Cho's parents simply decided to romanize her name differently because they personally felt that Cho gets the pronunciation across better than Qiu. I've known plenty of Chinese people, and also people whose languages do not use the Latin alphabet in general, who spell their names in English differently from how the more standard transliterations would spell it, just because of their personal preference. If anything it's no different than Catherine vs. Katherine, so trying to use Cho as a gotcha against JKR is not only annoying and nit-picky, it's also just ignorant. Which I suppose goes for a lot of the criticism against her.

wow this is a great insight, thanks anon

This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.

A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.

Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic?  She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing.  But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great.  She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success.  So - what gives?

His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear.  Jeans, blazers, dresses - everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles.  He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses.  You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on.  Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered.  He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit.  That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.

I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way.  I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did. 

It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this.  But no one ever told me.  I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes.  No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.

I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed.  I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to.  No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to.  I guess I just didn’t know.  I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.

I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.

I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.

So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while.  But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not.  Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.

Lady M by Maria Kreyn at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London

Honestly similar experience here… I stopped shaving my legs maybe 2 months ago and it was weird and a bit unpleasant at first because the hair was kinda prickly when it was growing in, but it’s pretty much fully grown in now and it feels so soft!! I did used to like the feeling of freshly shaved legs against my bedsheets but I’ve kinda found a new obsession with being able to stroke my hands over my legs and feel the hair under my fingers, it makes me smile so big 😄 stopping shaving wasn’t nearly as scary as I thought it would be!

okay, a preface here that i know the point of not shaving is NOT because it's sexy. i hate those articles about how "not shaving is sooo sexy actually 🥺🥺🥺". i hate when people try to make a NATURAL BODY FEATURE that women choose not to get rid of sexual, even though it's just...natural. normal. it's not sexual, it's our normal bodies.

with that said...yall! i officially stopped shaving, and while my leg hair is growing back reallllly slowly, my armpit hair is like full bush right now. and it...is so cool. like im not being one of those people making armpit hair a sexual thing, but genuinely, i feel...the word "pretty" isn't correct, but i feel right. like i feel natural, and im not thinking about it, but then i catch my armpit in the mirror and i can't help but smile! i dont know, something about it feels so cool and right. it's like, "hell yeah, im a mammal and this is how i look, and i look awesome!" like, something about my body looking the way it naturally looks has me feeling more confident + pretty + hot, honestly.

point here is NOT that being natural is 😩like tooootally hot 🥺. the point is: having a natural body actually does make you feel better! not altering or changing your natural body feels really good! it's like something in my brain clicked and remembered that this is how i'm meant to look, and when i let myself look natural i look really really good.

the point is, you won't feel disgusting if you stop shaving. i kinda thought my choice to stop shaving would make me feel gross or uglier. but it's done the opposite! if you choose to stop shaving, you won't feel gross or weird or ugly. you'll feel like a natural normal woman, and-just like me-you might even feel prettier and more confident with your body hair!

I am sick of people sugar coating the education crisis of American Adults. It is killing us. It is killing the world. Being nice about the fact that half of adults would struggle to read harry potter is going end us up dead as a species.

I am sick of losers jumping in to defend adults who don’t read books. Adults who don’t seek out news. I don’t give a fuck about their feelings. I don’t give a fuck if this makes them feel embarrassed and ashamed. They should feel that.

The stupidity of adults are poisoning our children. They are not raising well rounded kids. This is the time to stop the drain before it’s too late.

men are like, nooo don’t recognize that you have similar struggles to all kinds of women, you’re so easy to manipulate when ur isolated aha

sometimes i wish i could tell other women that you can just stop removing your body hair and in many cases the consequences will be way less severe than u expect. you can go to the beach with all your leg hair intact and nobody will stop you or say a thing. you can stop waxing your upper lip and people won’t stare at it the way u might be bracing yourself for. you can quit plucking your brows and eventually they will grow back into themselves and no one will even notice. like for sure women are punished for not participating in beauty rituals but i also feel like so much of it is like The Panopticon sometimes where you just convince yourself that if u stop that kind of gendered upkeep everyone will be mad and stop talking to u forever when in reality you just keep existing and nothing remarkable happens. it’s not always easy but you can kind of just stop for real

who are you when you are not watching tv or movies? when you aren't playing video games or reading a book or fanfiction or listening to music or whatever other kind of media that you engage with? who are you when your mind isn't in another world or story, when you are forced to sit with yourself and the only experience you have is your own sensorial life? can you define yourself outside of what you consume? who is that person? do you like them? can you bear it? can you bear it?

Whats your unpopular radfem opinion?

Mine is that I do not get mad when radfems still wear makeup, especially if they’re cutting back on it heavily.

i want to shake many young women and say you can grow in private. and what i mean by that is that you don’t have to publicly self-flagellate when you don’t know something or when you say something a little insensitive or whatever else. you don’t have to report your Bad Thoughts and Ignorance to the crowd who waits to judge you. you do not have to pay penance. you do not have to issue public statements. nothing more is gained from burying yourself in shame than you could gain by thinking “oh i don’t know about this” and looking it up real quick, or thinking “hm, that wasn’t how i want to behave, i’ll do different next time” and then moving on with your life. no need to choke yourself with it.