I was on yesterday’s The Morning Shift on WBEZ to discuss Kelly Rowland, Rihanna, Chris Brown, and domestic violence, particularly in the black community. Here’s the article that inspired the chat. Our callers were surprisingly tame. My friend Sarah said I sounded like a “phone-sex operator” in the first few minutes. This is what happens when I don’t have caffeine. Listen above.
“When a Fire Starts to Burn” by Disclosure
Perfect sampling. I love knowing that the boys of Disclosure only discovered different dance-music genres recently and how each new single is an experiment in what they’ve found and loved.
If you’re not following Journos of Color, you should. The site aims to “highlight work from writers and journalists of color.” Many thanks to them for mentioning my latest post for WBEZ.
(via journosofcolor)
WBEZ || May 11, 2013
Nightlife culture, sexual assault, and safety on the dance floor.
A man on twitter is trying to discredit my experiences and my friends’ experiences of sexual assault on the dance floor because, “dance music has more veterans that go out for music every weekend. For other top 40 places it’s mainly about sex.” He also said, “Of course but if you are used to grinding chances are creeps will look for someone to grind.” I don’t quite know what he means, but it certainly sounds like he’s blaming the victims here. It’s funny how people think the world works like that.
This is a list of things that have happened to me while out dancing: cornered without a way to escape, roofied, ass grabbed, breasts grabbed, kissed on neck, breasts & lips, hands underneath my shirt, hands DOWN MY PANTS, hands IN MY PANTIES. This is a list of where these things have happened: aliveOne, Smart Bar, Primary, Beauty Bar, Berlin, Empty Bottle, Lincoln Hall. These are all music-oriented places. Not Top 40 environments. Not “meat markets” as he said. This does not mean that we can not and should not go out. I am against this as it further polices my experiences. What I think both men AND women should do is listen when both men AND women talk about their experiences of assault. What is important to remember is that an insidious culture of violence and rape allows even spaces we deem “safe” to be potential dangers. It is not right and it is not fair. But we must recognize this so we can help CHANGE the culture and these environments as best as we can.
I’m only going to post up to five in each category because I am a neurotic that subscribes to tons of feeds. I also organize all of my feeds in subfolders for easy access.
Art Stuff:
Chicago Stuff: I’m assuming you’re not from Chicago, but if you are, I read the Chicago Reader, Chicagoist, and DNAinfo.
Culture Stuff:
Fashion and Beauty Stuff:
Food Stuff:
Literature Stuff:
Music Stuff:
News Stuff:
To say I’ve figured out how to manage freelancing while juggling a 9 to 5 would be a lie. In the beginning, it was very easy, but as I’ve ramped up my efforts, it’s been more difficult to find some sort of balance that also ensures I’m not dying of exhaustion.
I think having a day job – a relatively steady 40 hours/week day job, *knocks on wood* – gives an emerging writer certain advantages. A lot of friends have asked me why I don’t freelance fulltime and besides the fact that I need the insurance for more serious medical reasons, I like having the freedom to decide what I want to write and when to write it. Having a day job is a privilege for certain types of writers, if you can handle it. I know a lot of people who studied journalism or want to be fiction writers, but have lost interest in it the longer they’ve worked their day jobs whether it was because of exhaustion or the growing separation between what they say they want and what they actually need.
When I arrived at my current company, I felt a major disconnect. I began writing for Gapers Block for free. Writing for free was a luxury that most emerging writers without a day job can not afford. However, because I could afford that luxury, I felt free to experiment on subject matter and writing style. In the beginning, that is how I managed the 9-5 with the hopeful writing career: by doing for myself because I could.
The amount of writing I do now has increased significantly. For the most part, I try to do a couple of things:
Inspired by a recent post from Alesia and my own recent experiences out at Primary, Smart Bar, and Beauty Bar, I wrote the below essay for WBEZ on nightlife culture and sexual assault in public places.
(via wbez)
(Flickr/Randy Kennedy)
“All Night Long”
by Britt Julious
“I feel so stupid,” a friend began a couple of weeks ago. “This is not as bad as what you’ve gone through.”
Something happened and so we were discussing nightclubs, their safety (or lack thereof) and whether or not our reactions are justified. Her comment was not the first I heard of its kind. I had said a variation of it myself a few times. I began to rationalize the experience. Not only could the situation be worse, but the situation was not a situation at all. The situation was nothing. The situation was everything as it had always been.
I remember a conversation I had with my roommate from my sophomore year of college and a then-close friend.
“Well,” my roommate began, “Girls are kind of putting themselves in those situations by going out anyway.” I was confused how a woman of all people could say something like this. She was not joking. “What’s the issue?” she asked. Our friendship never recovered.
Last December, the music blog Little White Earbuds wrote a post titled “How Not to Treat Women in Nightclubs.” I read it after a night out at Primary for Sovereign, an eclectic monthly event featuring future bass, post-dubstep, and progressive techno. During the evening, I was cornered on the dance floor, forced to dance with a man I did not know. Earlier that year, rather than say “Hello,” a man came up to me and grabbed my bottom, hard. It was so pronounced a gesture, so aggressive, so callous, that I could not let it go. I yelled to make my presence known not just to him but to the other people in the room.
I thought about this in relation to a post by Alesia, a Tumblr user. She mentioned the disparity between female performers and the experiences of women in hyper-aggressive electronic shows. If you are a fan of this genre of music, eventually you experience this aggression, this sense of not belonging for to belong is to not notice the aggression at all. It is just a symptom of place and not, as I’ve come to understand it now, the perpetuation of exclusivity, violence, and misogyny that runs through various other facets of contemporary culture.
The dance floor is a place where you can be alone in public. It is anonymous as most anonymous experiences fuel a freedom of disappearance. There is a freedom to the dance floor, but that freedom comes and goes. It is not permanence, especially if you are a woman. Eventually, something will pull you out of the reverie and joy.
Music is our most relatable art form because it translates so easily to our everyday lives. Music is rhythm. It is the heartbeat, the breathing in and out, the movements of life over death. That there are so many genres of music only speaks to its importance. We find in it a voice. The dance floor then is the amalgamation of our tastes and secret desires. It is anonymity, freedom, and music. What we lose in these physical violations – what I have lost in these physical violations – is this perfect storm of place and aural pleasure and circumstance.
What does it mean to be safe, to feel safe? I ask myself this again and again. I am not used to this question. I’ve spent years out and about. Nightlife culture is not new to me. These sort of interactions are not new. There is a break in a young woman’s adolescence. Eventually, she learns that her arms and breasts and legs are not her own, but rather the world’s to digest and manipulate and touch and criticize.
Who gets to own themselves? Not women, not even on the dance floor. Assault on the dance floor says that certain spaces are for certain people. To insert yourself into this world is to seek out whatever might come of it for not truly belonging. We normalize aggressiveness. Our eyes are unseeing receptacles of the dance floor. With age comes understanding and with understanding comes dominance. I have better connected with myself. What I seek now is to take back what is rightfully mine, my body. What I seek is to dominate a world that has dominated me.
New MIXICISMS for this week. Thus far, new works from Jacques Green and Natasha Kmeto (among others) have excited me immensely. Don’t forget to listen to last week’s mix.
Really loving this series of photographs from Carrie Schneider’s “Reading Women” series. Above:
More of the latter. I began this blog in December 2007. At the time, I was a junior in college working in my campus’ housing department. I started it because I wanted more outlets for my rampant thoughts and interests and curiosities and I wanted this space to be different than the blog of essays and Livejournal I already maintained. I wanted to talk about music and fashion and art and beauty and not do it with other people so much as do it for myself. In my head, this would be my ideal magazine: witty, enthusiastic, contemplative, and fun. I don’t know if I’ve accomplished this yet. This tumblr is constantly a work in progress. I’ve developed projects and let them go. I didn’t write very much in the beginning. Now I do it all the time, more confident in what I want to say as a writer (but not entirely confident. Does that ever happen?) What is the secret to a successful tumblr? I don’t know. I don’t think my tumblr is successful, not in the way I want it to be. I’ve had this for a long time. It has been the longest project I’ve ever worked on. It is, I think, because of that reality that I still keep going, adapting based on life circumstance and age and a desire to share in different ways.
I stayed at Four Tet’s DJ set at Smart Bar until the end last Thursday and Friday. It felt right and necessary. I can confidently say it was the best set I’ve heard at Smart Bar in my years of going there (there are not many years, but there is more than one).
The most perfect moment, I think: The lights were glowing. Faces were distinguishable. And the disco ball was spinning, the room illuminated and lovely.
Sylvester played. I thought about all of the times I’ve listened to Sylvester over a glass of red wine. His music is redemptive, but I like his more depressing moments, the “down disco” as I call it.
Great disco is more than just the joy. Through and through, it should be about the transcendence of the dance floor, of dance, of the body in motion. We dance when we are glad. We dance when the world feels like too much.
I spent the evening with friends and then I didn’t. I do not know if it would have been better with people I knew. It was more than who was there. It was about what was there, the perfect synchronicity of sound and bodies and lights. To experience it with strangers was maybe better because it showed how the moment was greater than the individual.
The crowd began to clap their hands and snap their fingers and I thought, “This is the film I’ve always felt deep in my soul, the one I’ve articulated through long walks home, the one I’ve recognized after long conversations with dear friends.” It is not a desire to live cinematically, but the acknowledgement that living cinematically is about a beginning, a middle, and an end. Life is not that precise. The older one gets, the more one recognizes that.
NOTED: In a report on a series of “flash mobs” downtown yesterday night, a police officer said, “Chicago is closed. Time to go home.” There are two kinds of flash mobs; the Chicago kind are never pleasant. Summer arrives and so too does the “terror.” Chicago and State becomes not just a train stop, but a means of confrontation, a clashing of the two cities. There is public Chicago and everywhere else, the parts of the city in which people live, but are rarely acknowledged. This of course is more than city structure. It is the further divide of a city of divisions. The “haves” and the “have nots” does not seem accurate enough. “Chicago is closed” he said, as if this part of the city is only open for a few, as if this part of the city is a store, a box, a secret that is locked away for those who are worthy of knowing it. Every year they ask, “Why do they do this? Cause trouble, cause noise, cause presence?” It seems like a subconscious occupation of space, a desire to swoop in fiercely, to stand out with righteous deviancy and angst. Occupy Chicago. They are “doing something.” It is not good or safe or pleasant or welcome, but it is something.
© Brittany Julious 2007 - 2013
