Day Fourteen: Arts & Entertainment
I wasn't expecting to write this essay, and when I sat down to do so all I could think about was that when I was a little girl, I wanted to be an actress. No, scratch that. I wanted to be a star, with my name in lights. I wanted to be a different person every night and to have people love every single one of them.
I loved it. I loved being on stage, I loved the spotlight and the compliments in equal measure.
Before I wanted to be a movie star, I wanted to be a writer. I filled endless notebooks with carefully chaptered stories about girls and their (enormous) families. I wrote about magic and mysteries. When I came back to wanting to be a writer in junior high, I filled still more notebooks with character sketches, world building, ideas about girls saving the world and falling in love. I wanted to let all of those universes inside of me out to play.
I loved it. I loved the thrill of creation, of seeing new worlds and people come to life.
When I was a little girl, I drew all the time. My mother sill has shoeboxes full of 3x5 notecards that each sport a carefully drawn girl that I'd dreamed up. I would draw the same girls over and over, in different dresses or poses, sometimes with their extraordinarily fat cats or dogs with floppy ears. In high school, I discovered a talent and love for both watercolor and pointillism - I had a real eye for shadows and translucent washes of light.
I loved it. I loved the way that I could take a sheet of white paper and fill it with color, making my world more vivid with every passing second.
How many little girls have dreams like I did, do you think? Dreams of art, music, dance, drama. How may little girls want to grow up to write books? How many of them ultimately are shot down and forced to give up on their dreams?
I had no idea where I was going with this thread until I ran across a startling statistic in my psychology text book. It stated that in 1997, nearly 77% of all people accessing the internet were male. However, in 2001 studies started projecting that women would begin to access the web in far greater numbers - one study projected 60% of all internet users would be women - by the year 2005.
This text book went on to note that the Web has provided women with places where alternate visions of what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a girl can flourish. It talks about web comics written by women, about online activism with women steering the ship, it mentions that women form bonds with other women in this brave new world.
I write notes in my text book - the one on this page reads, in bright read ink, "Gee, ya think?!"
Beyond providing women with a place to thrive and grow in their relationships with other women, the internet provides us with a place to say "fuck the haters" and engage in artistic dreams that we might otherwise never achieve. It lets us write endless numbers of stories, post boggling amounts of artwork in a wide variety of mediums, upload vids cut together of music and images we find inspiring.
I realized - this, this is what 14 Valentines is about for me. It's a celebration of women connecting with women, of fledgling activism, of sharing our art, and of appreciating the works of other women. It's about us and how we make our own fun, to quote one of our favorite fictional women.
I don't know about you, but I think that's a pretty awesome convergence of ideas.
It's kind of a tradition around here to link to the VDay website during 14 Valentines, and today seems a really appropriate time to do that. After all, VDay is a social (and social justice) movement that grew out of the Vagina Monologues - an artistic celebration of womanhood. There will be thousands of VDay celebrations around the world today, thousands of women celebrating themselves and their sisters. I'm deeply proud to have been one of them, and I'm deeply grateful to all of you who have celebrated with me.
Here's to you, and here's to 14Valentines. Thank you for participating. ♥