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Fishnet Awareness By Ghia Vitale QuailBellMagazine.com Ah, fishnets. In my modest opinion, no other garment compares to fishnets and their instantly beautifying powers. Unfortunately, ignorance causes people to deem them immodest, maybe even moreso than short skirts, V-necks, and the ever-so-controversial yoga pants. Much like yoga pants, I never understood why fishnets have not become fully normalized. Society still considers fishnets risqué despite the visual proof that they abide by the fashion police’s sanctions to cover up my body. And let’s face it: Fishnets cover up more than they reveal, so what’s the big deal? Somehow, the mere presence of fishnet stockings makes any outfit more sultry.
That line of thinking is exactly the reason why I can’t wear fishnets anywhere I damn please and it pisses me off that their appeal is exactly why they’re stigmatized. If Paris were heaven, I’d thank it for sending fishnet stockings to America in 1908, even though the women who wore them get charged with indecent exposure. My native country obviously wasn’t hip to the epic greatness of fishnet stockings because the kinds of ladies who perform at Moulin Rouge wore them. Fishnets were made to be sexy and unlike France at the time, America was still quite uncomfortable with nearly any public acknowledgment of sex. Even today, the stockings remain heavily associated with the sex worker archetype in America's cultural imagination. Perhaps the first people to dream up wearing fish netting were the Grimm Brothers. They authored “The Clever Peasant’s Daughter," a story about how a peasant’s daughter outwitted a king into marriage. The king told the girl's peasant father that he would agree to marry her if she returned “neither clothed nor naked, neither riding nor driving, neither on the road nor off the road.” It was supposed to be a test of the girl's cleverness. Thus, she disrobed and wrapped herself in a fish net while making sure that her big toe always touched the ground. After tying the fish net to the tail of the rent-an-ass’s help she enlisted, the ass dragged her to the king. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Ravished by Ravishly.com!Oh, Quail Bell(e)s—you know you're always the first to learn about our latest delights. Right now The Quail Bell Crew is crushing hard on Ravishly.com, our newest sister publication. You've probably already noticed some healthy content cross-pollination with several of their pieces appearing here on the ol' QB and a few of ours appearing over yonder, too. Earlier this summer, I emailed Katie Tandy, Ravishly's whip-smart editor-in-chief about the budding publication. Did I say budding? More like mushrooming. But enough about what I have to say about Ravishly. Why not have Ms. Tandy spin the yarn? Here's what she has to say about the website with a violet fox for its logo: Smart and pretty, Katie Tandy herself. Give Quail Bell Magazine readers a sense of Ravishly's riveting history. What was your role in the website's early days?
Truthfully, Ravishly has evolved quite a bit over the past six months. At the time I was working as a freelance arts and culture journalist, doing some local reporting for the East Bay Express and SF Weekly in addition working as a content marketer for a supercool software start-up, Sparkcentral. When Sparkcentral (then TwitSpark, ha!) first started, I was with these three guys in a small sweaty room and watched the company grow into a 15-person juggernaut with a huge office beside Union Square in San Francisco. I became totally smitten with the start-up world; it truly feels like this neo manifestation of the American dream. Amazing ideas get to be actualized instead of languishing inside a notebook somewhere. Anyway, about seven months ago, I answered a rather nebulous Craigslist ad (as many of our core members did) that was searching for writers and editors to help found a brand new website dedicated to women. After months of wrestling with different models, names and honing our team of writers, we finally launched Ravishly this past February. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
An Evolution on Film Earlier this year, I sat down to watch Richard Linklater's Before trilogy and found it to be one of the best series of films I had ever seen. Part of why I love the series so much is that it's an achievement in its scope alone. This was a series of films made nine years apart that brought back the same people and managed to make each film better than the last. It made me want to look more into Linklater's work, especially if it promised something experimental. That's when I learned he was going to release a film this year that took 12 years to make.
Boyhood is a fairly simple film in plot. The film follows Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from first grade to college, covering various scenes of his life. His parents (Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke) are divorced, and he and his sister (Lorelei Linklater) are constantly shuffled around Texas and forced to adapt to new situations. Over the course of the film, the viewer watches Mason change and become a lot more defined as a person, even if it's hard to accept some of the changes that come his way. The reason Boyhood took 12 years to make was because of Linklater's approach to telling the story. Rather than film the movie over several weeks and age the characters with makeup or multiple actors, he simply filmed new scenes every year from 2002 to 2014. As a result, the actors in the film age over the course of 166 minutes. With the two children, it's very noticeable, but it's also subtly done with the parents. We're watching these people naturally age so that when we see how they change over the course of the movie, we can see how their physical growth relates to their personal growth. Now, having lived through the same 12 year period Mason does, there were plenty of moments where I was like “Oh, I remember that,” or “That was so me back then.” Mason watches Dragonball Z, his sister sings “Oops, I Did it Again,” a girl later sings a song from High School Musical, there's talk about the NSA, and so on. Throughout the viewing, it felt easy to attach my ego to the setting. Being slightly older than Mason would be at the time, I could recount being exposed to such culture and having to go through my developmental stages while the Iraq war and the Obama years occurred. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Down the Drain By Sarah Schwister QuailBellMagazine.com The number of people attending college has surged in the past four decades, increasing 32 percent in ten years alone. However, the ideal of the perfect college experience has changed. People are not longer going with the goal of becoming well-rounded citizens of the world. They attend college for pre-professional majors such as business, nursing, and accounting.
What does this change mean? Clearly it means a change in what people are studying. There has been a steady decline in the number of humanities majors across the United States, going from 30 percent to 16 percent of all majors from 1970 to 2003, with the number of business majors jumping from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent. Why the change? Students feel that majoring in business will ensure a job, especially during a recession. To save money, many schools are downsizing their less popular departments. At many campuses, this includes the English department. Combine those statistics with this: The upcoming generation is reading less. Teenagers would rather text than read books or even magazines because there's convenience and instant gratification in texting. Combine this shift in going to college as a means of earning job training with the tendency to drop books for Instagram (even the word “instant” is in its word base), and you have the extinction of the traditional English department. The concept of media and communications is booming, and there is the idea that they will take over the English Literature field. Why would people want to read a book for 12 hours when they can watch a 1.5 hour movie for the same story? The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Mundane Money Matters Matter It was a Thursday afternoon at an upscale Dunkin' Donuts in Northern Virginia. Bright and mod, the place looked more like a yuppie coffee shop for tech start-up masterminds than a hangout for cartoon cops. But I didn't have my laptop and I wasn't meeting with an angel investor. My fiancé and I were meeting with a financial planner. At this very romantic stage in our seven-year relationship, we were about to discuss 529s for our hypothetical children and retirement plans we'd need in four decades. (Naturally, I was drinking a large Dunkaccino to prepare for this adult affair. It was Dunkalicious.)
My fiancé and I arrived early, making nervous small talk while we waited. Neither one of could believe what grownups we were. Statistically, we should be cursing ourselves for going to art school and being un- or underemployed. We should be broke. We should be working at this Dunkin' Donuts—if we were lucky. But even in college, we tried to be entrepreneurial. Today we pinch our pennies until they blush and we hoard most of our money. I don't know what his excuse is, but my heritage accounts for my frugality. The Scots are notoriously cheap and Central Americans are notoriously poor. I don't even buy clothes anymore. I just wait for my sisters to tire of theirs. Of course, just because you're great at not spending money doesn't mean you're great at managing your savings and investments and thinking about long-term dealios. I learned of the planner because an old classmate had started working with him. She saw on Facebook that I was getting married and asked if I'd be interested in a free consultation. I couldn't say I was interested, but I knew it had to be done. After all, we've all read over and over that money is the leading cause of divorce in this country. Couples disagree over how it should be spent or saved or invested and resent each other for it. Maybe it would be simpler if we could all have a household system of piggy banks, coin jars, and mattress-stuffing, and the stock market didn't exist, but our country's greater financial system isn't built like that. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Oodles and Oodles of Come-ons I am a 20-something heterosexual man who spent one day as a hot 20-something bisexual woman on OkCupid. Give me my Pulitzer. Don't let this man fool you. He and I went on to have a great conversation. I'm actually extremely charmed and would consider meeting up with him. I will state affirmatively now: I am not writing this article to condemn any gender. Generalizing is stupid. I wish to analyze this experience and perhaps expose some truth in the matter about modern dating, online or off, and how much sex plays a factor. I believe that it is more likely for a person to seek out sexual conquests than love. And love, at the heart of it all, is about friendship. It is not uncommon for a romantic pair to start off as friends, then friends with benefits, and then finally lovers. This OkCupid experience has left me wondering...Is it even about love anymore? Yes, it is, but sex can bring immediate gratification, especially with apps like Tindr. Love takes a long fucking time, and often ends badly. Nobody likes to have a bad time. And after all:
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Writer Is Living Proof That Body Positivity Matters By Kate Hickey QuailBellMagazine.com Editor's Note: The following is a direct response to writer Carolyn Hall's Thought Catalog piece, "6 Things I Don't Understand About the Fat Acceptance Movement." Read that piece first, please. Danke. First, a little information about how your personal information is worthless. The fact that you admit to only recently finding the Body Positivity movement tells me that you haven’t done much reading about it and are still very much ingrained with the notion that fatness as a lived experience is bad. You also seem to blame the Internet for people trying to not hate themselves. Along with this, you say you fluctuate between a size 6 and a size 10, but that means absolutely nothing to anybody because 1) sizing of women’s clothes in this country is meaningless and arbitrary and 2) you could be six feet tall and underweight for all I know. Finally, I will explain to you things about this movement that you don’t understand, and hopefully at the end of reading this, you will be less of a judgmental person. (P.S. Your need to set up your article with biographical information points out that you want us, the readers, to remember that you’re just a person with some thoughts, and you don’t want any of the backlash you rightfully deserve for writing an article which boils down to “fat people are gross and should lose some weight.” You want us to humanize you while you go right ahead and dehumanize the fatties. Not cool.) 1. America is not accepting of fatness. You pointed out yourself that fat people are bullied, harassed, and negatively stereotyped for existing. That is not acceptance. Just because McDonalds is a successful company doesn’t mean that fatness is something that we, as a culture, find acceptable. Claiming that the United States has embraced fatness, or “tolerates” fat people and in the same sentence stating that people react negatively to fat people existing tells me that you actually already know that fatness somewhere deep down in the bottomless pit you call a soul is not acceptable in America. 2. Body positivity does include health, which you’d know if you had done some actual research before writing your shitty article. You also do not understand that health and weight are not the same. Skinny is not necessarily healthy. Fat is not necessarily healthy. But unfortunately for you, we aren’t talking about physical health most of the time when we talk about body positivity and fat acceptance. We’re talking about mental health and self esteem. Fat people don’t hate themselves because they sit around and eat; they hate themselves because society tells them they’re ugly, hideous, worthless, and unlovable because they are fat. So, what you seem to logically argue, is that we should continue to tell these people that they are worthless unless they lose some weight? Hmm. That really sounds like a great strategy to get obese people up and at ‘em! Or, perhaps we could say something a little less…douchey. We could say, “You are a person, and therefore you have inherent worth.” We could remind them that there are people who love them, and not “despite” the fact that they are fat. They just love them. We could encourage fat people to make decisions that will make them happy and healthy, rather than just healthy. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
My First Time By Sara Maldonado QuailBellMagazine.com I remember the first moment I truly felt like a woman. It wasn’t in the embrace of my first lover nor was it having my first legal drink or even the first time that I shaved…um…down there. But rather, it was a random Sunday afternoon. It was raining outside, I was kind of bored and watching TV with Boyfriend Volume 3, Edition 2.
We began discussing post-graduate employment and plans. His eyes lit up as he spoke about previous internships and his summer employment experience. He talked about his sparkling GPA and the courses that he’d taken, the professors he knew, the people he had talked to. He laid out his plans. Both the Five and Ten Year ones. He knew his path would lead to the ever fabled land of Success. That was when my womanhood cherry popped. It wasn’t the fact that I knew that he was being much too enthusiastic considering the alarming rate at which the Millennial set was being underemployed or even yet, unemployed. It wasn’t that I knew that there was a flaw in his Five or Ten Year ones because I really wasn’t sure. It was just the simple fact that I knew that I didn’t know. “I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.” According to Plato’s “Apology,” Socrates believed that the wisest man was the man that knew that he did not know anything. Oddly enough, this is the most important teaching that I have taken with me from my short stint of Catholic education. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Monsters At The Foot Of My Bed The reasons why I've been so successful in influencing people's beliefs about faeries include my knowledge, personal experiences, and evidence of other witness accounts, as well as coincidences too uncanny to be sheer coincidence. The encounter I'm about to address has to do with Kappas, a type of nature spirit that highly acknowledged by Shintoism. When I first started "intentionally" practicing witchcraft, I had many of the magical mishaps that most budding occultists experience, including the accidental summoning of malevolent beings or entities I hadn't intended to draw forth. I learned how to perform successful banishments this way and a lot about spirits in general, but since I had just began to work with faeries, I often attracted something more peculiar than a vagrant human spirit. At the time, my reading material was mostly confined to the realm of Celtic Paganism, folklore, and folk magic. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
3 Fashion Trends Seriously Hazardous to Health From Spanx, to stilettos to plastic surgery, women of the modern age are clearly more-than-willing to endure some pain to keep up with current trends and pursue our societal dream of perpetual youth.
But there are some fashion crazes of the past that can legitimately toss their hat in the ring of bodily-injury—and sometimes death. We all know about corsets and foot-binding, but here we’ve got three lesser-known beauty blasts from the past sure to make you grateful to live in the here and now. Decorative Tooth Rot Sugar may be the opiate of the masses today, but in the Elizabethan era this white magic was both rare and pricey. That means only the rich could access its sweet charms . . . and its resulting tooth decay. Oral hygiene, like regular hygiene, left much to be desired in those days—resulting in decidedly greying smiles among the elite. But because it’s a universal trait of human nature to laud the trends of the rich and famous, aristocratic rotting teeth became en vogue, temporarily spawning a fad among commoners to fake bacteria-filled smiles by masking their teeth with black powder. Mmm. So much for pearly whites. Happily, as sugar became more ubiquitous and toothaches grew old, the trend ceased to be chic—though gingivitis still hung around. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
We are miraculous, twigs and non-twigs alike. I'm a size 3. Poor me right? I can fit into cute outfits, look “acceptable” in a bikini, and I don't know...do "skinny girl things" that only we skinny girls know about, things that keep us skinny and, no, you're not invited! I learned to value my skinny figure growing up, especially when people would say, “I hate you Courtney, you're so skinny.” Clearly I had something other less skinny girls wanted to have. But why did they want it? Probably because, like me, their favorite Disney movies growing up all had beautiful thin princesses who always won their princes. Maybe because our Barbies all came with tiny little matching outfits for their tiny little waists. Maybe because our favorite singers and actresses were all tall and thin creatures like the ones in every ad ever made. Our perception of what is beautiful clearly comes from our society relentlessly conditioning this into us from an early age. There is no disputing that.
Now let me just say this skinny thing is not by choice on my part. I don't starve myself. I come from a long line of twigs. One of my Aunts was actually nicknamed “Twiggy." It's genetics, and just like everyone, baby, I was born this way. Thankfully for those women out there with curves, the more voluptuous body types are more and more celebrated nowadays. My most favorite women in my life are of all shapes and sizes and they own their figures proudly. As they should. So now, “I hate you Courtney, you're so skinny” has at times turned into, “Real women have curves, thank you very much!” Fine. I mean, technically if I have a female reproductive system I'm pretty sure I'm a woman for realz, but I digress... Only within the last few years have I been able to detach myself from my obsession with my thin appearance and get to know and appreciate the whole package. For all of my life my biggest attribute (being slim and fit), was also my biggest flaw because I let it define me, because I thought it had to. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Fifty Shades of What the Hell Oh, Fifty Shades of Grey. Where to even start? I got conned into reading this book by a girlfriend of mine who insisted it was a steamy read that I wouldn’t want to put down. WRONG. This book is not only terribly written (which really took me out of the story mindset), it was also really hard to suspend disbelief that these kinds of situations would actually happen to a person, let alone a clumsy virgin at, like, 25 or something. Not that being a virgin is a bad thing. This fact just added to the overall what-the-hell factor of Fifty Shades. Now, this girlfriend lent me the entire trilogy. And I read the first one in a sort of quickness. I can finish the entire Hunger Games trilogy in a day, so I figure I’m a pretty fast reader. However, it took me several days to read the first book, and when I finally picked up the second one [WHICH IS EVEN WORSE], I had to put it down for a week or four in the middle because it was just so terrible. I couldn’t make myself read the third one. It would've been too shitty of an experience. I Wiki’d the plot, and I didn’t miss much, just saved myself some horrible writing and pregnancy sex. Ignoring the obviously abusive and unbalanced relationship hiding in BDSM clothing, the sex isn’t even that hot. I know Anastasia is a virgin so everything is new and interesting, but sex on your period and Ben-Wa balls is not all that exciting. The sex in the second book doesn’t get much better. Moving on to the movie trailer. First things first: These people aren’t even hot! I was expecting some sexy goodness, and these people are plain faced ho-hums! I feel like I am being robbed from fantasy fodder. A boring brunette and a boring brunette, neither of which I recognize. I know several people dropped out because of how bad the script was [SURPRISE!], so they must have really been scraping the bottom of the barrel. Can we talk about the rating? Seriously—R? A book that is literally porn gets an R? What is the point of even going to see it if there’s only going to be clenching butts, awkward movie L-shaped sheets, and no dicks. This girl will hopefully have some nice boobs and the guy will be all muscle-y, I assume, in order to balance the complete lack of sex in a movie that’s all about sex. I promise ya, you did not read this book for the great love story, and you’re not going to the movie for some lovely romance that will have you swooning in the aisles. The hottest thing about this movie trailer is Beyoncé crooning in the background with her slowed down "Crazy in Love" remix. That was what made my blood tingle when watching the trailer. Super-duper hot and a super-duper a song for boning. Ready for the soundtrack to come out just for that one song. All the above being said, I will go see this movie. Not on Valentine’s Day—God, that would be depressing—but some other time with some girlfriends and maybe sneak in a flask to spike my giant soda to make this boring R movie with its boring faced actors a bit more interesting and make the horrid abusive undertones less repugnant. #Real #FiftyShadesOfGrey #50Shades #StupidBooks #StupidMovies #Sex #Porn #NotReallyLove #Unromantic #BadPlots Visit our shop and subscribe. Sponsor us. Submit and become a contributor. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Electra Heart, or How I Learned to Love Marina Recently, I was challenged to write some poetry for a 'zine I learned about. The editor asked the writers to select verses from songs by Lana Del Rey and write poems inspired by them. The poems could be reinterpretations of a line or grow into larger poems based on the topics commonly found in Lana Del Rey songs, such as Americana, youth, addiction, and so on. I thought I could do this easily. I got into Lana's music last year, and there were songs I liked of hers that I thought would be good sources for lyrics.
So I had my lyrics, I had my themes, and I had my nerve to start writing. Unfortunately, I found that I wasn't as inspired as I had hoped I would be by her lyrics. I figured writing a poem about them would feel a lot more natural. Lana sings about subjects that interest me, and her style appeals to me, too. However, when I scanned my iPod, it occurred to me why I wasn't enjoying Lana Del Rey as much: because I had found someone better. I started listening to Marina and the Diamonds earlier this year after getting a few recommendations from friends. I was drawn to the British singer, particularly through her album Electra Heart. The music of Marina Diamandis tackles a few of the subjects Lana tackles, from the price of fame to womanhood to sexuality and more. I liked a lot of what I heard from Marina and started to listen to more of her songs. Around the point I tried to write poems for the Lana 'zine, I had also been listening to Marina more often. Because of a weird issue with my iPod, I've had to make playlists of certain artists just to hear all the songs from one person. Marina was one of those people, so I often used the car ride to and from work to listen to all the Marina songs I had. When I looked over my playlists, I realized I had playlists for artists like Nina Simone and Florence and the Machine but Lana wasn't one of them—even though I have more Lana songs on my iPod than other artists. |
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