Dangerous Femininity

Andrej Pejic in Candy Magazine

Andrej Pejic – model du jour, darling of fashion designers. Isn’t he the final nail in the coffin, the proof of how not-so-far-at-all we’ve come? Proof of the Freudian, sub-conscious disgust we still collectively harbour for the female body. Thinly veiled as a fascination with androgyny, fashion designers – gay, straight, male and female alike - are all gushing wet for this sultry boy. Is it the allure of shock value, the pushing of boundaries? Quite the opposite. It’s so very safe. Nothing is more offensive to the fashion world than the boldness female body in its fierce sexuality and nothing more comforting than the unthreatening, regular angles of a sinewy, pigeon-chested boy body. Not even a man’s body. A boy’s. An attempt to mute female sensuality altogether. The final proof that in the collective sub conscious of our society, the ultimate female body is that of a boy.

Radical

I am the type of girl who is liable to worry her whole life away if she’s not careful. Old wounds, they still smart, and I think I let them stay that way. Picking at them so they never have a chance to heal. To allow the healing would be to let God get away with it. Clinging to my self-righteousness, shaking fists at the sky “Look what you have done to me. You let this happen”

They say anxiety is a sin, and don’t I know it. Ye of little faith and teeth that grind, if I had any idea how to surrender I would... But I know only the path of resistance. “No, I don’t accept this, No, this is not what I want, No, this is not good enough”. And it burns in my ears - “ingrate” -
If I make it to heaven, I will have been dragged, kicking and screaming. I have made it this hard. The poet, he knew...

“And most all of your sufferings
Are from believing
You know better than God”


And if I had been there in that desert, I'd have been the one stockpiling the manna. Consuming, gripping, striving, more, more, fists clenched, watching it spoil but unable to stop. Faith in grace made new every morning? I’d rather have insurance. And isn’t it true that we were made to crave, but I have been filling it up, filling and overfilling until I make myself sick. When all I really want is to be empty. Hollowed out and made empty, stretched open to receive the stillness and the eternal. And what a relief it would be, to be free of the unrelenting “me, me, me”

I don't care if it hurts
I want to have control
I want a perfect body
I want a perfect soul

And if I believe in a God (which I suspect I do) then he is nothing like your feeble attempts to describe him. Your idea of sin? That’s just people manipulating each other, attempts at controlling a society. He never said any of that. You invented it. He didn’t get a bunch of guys to write a book about Him. They made that stuff up, and you bought it. You can’t find Him by following someone else's creed. The religious bureaucrats - the ones who think they have a direct line to God - they're the worst blasphemers of all. He doesn’t give a fuck about your obedience or your achievements and thank fuck for that, because, Lord knows, I’m no good at either.

He is beyond, beyond, beyond. Beyond anything we can conceive of. He is drunk and wild as hell. And here's the secret - he loves the rebels better anyway. The outlaws and the bad girls and the wild ones. Loves them 'cause he is one He is grace. And it’s not about reaching for him, not about how much you can please him. It’s about how much grace you can let in. And therein lies the problem. Because it’s all so poetic in abstract terms, but what would it even look like to live it? To give up the striving and the resistance? Would you even get out of bed in the morning?


Like I said, if I knew how to surrender, I would.

these are a few of my favourite things.

islands.
salt and vinegar.
thunderstorms.
treehouses.
grizzly bears.
airports.
hammocks.
sandalwood.
irony.
department stores.
atlases.
bonfires.
caramel.
gardenias.
liquor bottles.
sheepskin.
drum solos.

“When I grow up, I too will go to faraway places and come home to live by the sea.”
“That is all very well, little Alice,” says my aunt, “but there is a third thing you must do.”
“What is that?” I ask.
“You must do something to make the world more beautiful.”

- Miss Rumphius, by Barbara Cooney

mouth wooed her

"Then I should like to ask you about it - about love and what it meant to you. Perhaps then your eyes will hold more than beauty, perhaps they will be stern and wise and they will answer: poverty has played so great a part in my life that it has choked love. Now I neither cry nor laugh. I have never been able to struggle for love, because the struggle for bread has consumed all my strength.'

- Walter Scheonstedt, The Girl from the River Barge

dinner party lists

everyone has one. this is mine

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Elsa Schiaparelli
Fred Hollows
Grace Abbott
Rudolf Nureyev
Sophia Loren
St. Augustine
Ryan Adams
Nagi Noda
Mark Twain
Eudora Welty
Max Ehrmann
Dash Snow
A.A Milne
Steve Earle
e.e cummings
Mary Kingsley

and that's that

come back 1987, all is forvigen