Is ‘Chick’ Chic or Retrograde?

In the Swinging Sixties, that magic era of Carnaby Street, Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, free love and the Pill, horny young chaps in stovepipes and mop tops flitted around getting it on with as many cool chicks as they could manage to lure back to their groovy pads. Things got so bad that the chicks went out and created Second Wave Feminism.
 

Of course, everything’s changed now, right? In some twenty-something inner city circles the chick is now the female equivalent of the hipster. She’s easygoing yet focused, joining her brothers in her preference for flannelette shirts featuring obscure band names, fixed-gear bicycles and Pabst beer. She’s got tats, is constantly instagramming and probably spends most of her work day in a coffee roastery, hunched over her laptop.

A distinct yet overlapping demographic – savvy professional women heading micro and small businesses – have embraced ‘chick’ as a marketing tool. The internet is littered with SEO chicks, PR and marketing chicks, legal chicks (as opposed to legal eagles I guess) – even a chicken chick.

And now that older women are claiming their goddess-given right to flaunt their booty at any age, they’re refusing to relinquish the word once the first flush of youth fades. If a chick is hip, contemporary and down-to-earth, who says you can’t be a chick at fifty? At sixty? Why stop there?

Yet whole groups of people would rather guzzle toilet paper than use the word. My seventeen-year-old nephew, when quizzed, mumbled that if one of his male friends used it he sounded – this is my translation of what he actually said – fake, pretentious and trying too hard. My forty-something sister, an English coordinator at a secondary girls’ school, simply shook her head and shuddered when I mentioned the word.

Perhaps this is because the nasty version of chick is always lurking around the interwebs, like the class bully who crashes your birthday party, hits on your boyfriend then trashes your house. The ‘hot chick’ is a woman’s body with the humanity sucked out like air from a balloon. She’s the bad girl in the madonna/whore dynamic of patriarchy, the pin-up girl of retrosexism, a twenty-first century version of the compliant, vacantly smiling sixties chick – just add porn and stir.

You can be repurposed into a ‘hot chick’ online whether or not your pose was deliberately sexy. Type ‘hot chicks’ into Google and you’ll get everything from everyday situations that have been lovingly pornified, eg ‘hot chicks picking up dog shit’ and ‘hot chicks in nerd panties’ to mainstream porn. There are even ‘hot chicks’ next to fixie bikes, which is truly depressing.

The gender politics of ‘chick’ echo in the continuing feminist rage against the term ‘chick lit’ for the way it denigrates women’s literary contribution. The idea of Wuthering Heights being labelled chick lit is horrifying, and there were howls of derision across the internet when Sylvia Plath’s acidic novel The Bell Jar got a disastrous ‘chick lit’ makeover for the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. ‘Chick flick’ is just as suspect, according to Gloria Steinem.

If ‘chick’ somehow survived the feminist revolution, ‘bird’ is one of its casualties. It’s now redolent of sad late middle-aged men with comb-overs who never got the memo that the era of sideburns and sleazy feel-ups at the photocopier was over for good, or the acres of female flesh that romped through Alvin Purple and The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.

Other terms for women derived from the animal world hang on for dear life despite themselves. In 2012 Grahame Morris was forced to apologise to Leigh Sales for calling her a cow after she interviewed him on radio.

What about ‘bitch’? How did this word not only get through to the keeper, but manage to widen its remit? Used to be a bitch was spiteful and overly competitive; now thanks to rap culture you can be someone’s bitch even if you’re mild as a lamb, or just hanging around trying to look cool, as in (’cos you know, I’m so up with these things) ‘Yo! wassup bitches?’ A male friend once congratulated me on being his ‘publicity bitch’ at an event where he was selling his books. He was just trying to express how great I was but I felt deflated.

Even ‘girl’ has the power to offend in some contexts, particularly when male sports commentators use it to describe female athletes who would slaughter them in seconds in any competition. In March 2014, the BBC edited out the word girl in some footage where the male reporter said he couldn’t believe he’d been beaten at judo by a nineteen-year-old girl – who happened to be a Commonwealth Games judo champion.

Maybe words like chick are the same as the derogatory terms for any oppressed group – the group itself can use the word, but woe betide anyone else who does?

Or perhaps our nearest and dearest can fondly call us bitch, cow, girl or even Hornytits to their hearts’ content, yet the random in the street who yells it out at us cops a torrent of abuse.

But I can’t help thinking – why does the word woman sound so odd, so exotic, even sexualised? Is a woman still a mysterious, ethereal being who is unpredictable and perhaps a tiny bit evil?

And is ‘chick’ a sexist term, or should we embrace its changing uses – what do you think?

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The Return of the Muse: How Poetry Came Back to Me after Fifteen Years

Erato, Muse of Lyrical Poetry by Charles Meynier

I've been putting off writing my next blog entry – it was going to be about dancing in the lounge, a habit I've taken up this year, and I was reluctant to conjure images of myself cavorting around the room behind the closed venetians, arms flailing about, to the sound of 'Papa don't preach'. Now, thank the gods, I have something else to write about so you don't have to imagine that – instead you can picture me in a room full of drunkards, wannabes and has-beens, reading out my latest poetic gems on a bad microphone, legs shaking, head full of narcissistic enthusiasm.

After fifteen years lurking in the most obscure recesses of my unconscious, my muse has returned to the fold. And boy is she making up for lost time.

I wrote poetry in the 1990s, and even got a few of them published, but I never cracked the big journals. I was shadowed by the fact that a friend of mine was one of Australia's most significant poets. I followed her style religiously, as well as that of the poet I was writing my Masters thesis on, Frank O'Hara.

Then a few things happened. I met the love of my life, and spurned him. I studied editing and became a freelance editor. My brain became increasingly attuned to the nuances of prose, and I learned how to cut language short, to discipline and control long and waffly sentences. Somewhere along the way the tap of my poetry simply turned off. It was more or less gone. When I tried to write 'poetically' it came out as the most horribly strangled prose.

Now I look back at my earlier poetic 'career' and realise something very important. The immaturity that was a feature of my earlier life, and that I still battle, stymied my writing in ways I was completely unaware of. Already I am becoming a better poet than I was then, because I'm practising every single day and my mind is much more open to a wide range of influences.

Back then, the only poems that I ever finished were the ones that had tumbled out more or less whole, with only the need to edit – I did attend writing workshops and got great feedback from my poet friend, but I'm talking about fiddling around with something already more or less complete. There are many worthwhile ideas that come out as small fragments, or even different entities that you can combine. You have to morph these bits and pieces into poems by worrying at them, revisiting them like an anxious nurse, turning them over in your brain and letting your unconscious fill in the blanks. This is the kind of work I only did occasionally fifteen years ago. Who knows how many good ideas I threw away because they required digging, when all I knew how to do was pan for gold.

The other thing I didn't do then is read as obsessively and singlemindedly as I do now. Naturally when I was writing my thesis I read the higgledy-piggledy band of poets that influenced Frank O'Hara and that was certainly wide. And I was already familiar with the confessional poets – Plath and Lowell from school (who could forget Plath's 'Daddy' or lines of Lowell's like 'My mind's not right' ('Skunk hour') and 'Crows maunder on the petrified fairway' ('Waking in the blue')) and later Sexton. Yet I was a bit snobby and with some exceptions, poetry that wasn't surreal or postmodern enough didn't really interest me. Now I'm a happy mongrel and will read anything I think is any good.

I'm no poetic genius. That sounds if there was a possibility I could be but what I mean is I'm okay with that now. I'm okay with being one of the masses who has to slog away at something to get good at it, or just better. Perhaps that was another reason why my poetry stalled before stopping altogether – I didn't really understand how to apply myself, even though I read poetry a lot. I didn't know how to follow a thread of experience, or to trust my own perceptions. My poetry was shallow and playful because I couldn't express my own life, I couldn't be a witness to it.

And I'm already harvesting the fruits of slog. I can see a noticeable improvement in quality, sometimes from one poem to the next. I can read poems I was writing weeks ago, days ago, and see clearly that they just don't come up to scratch. But it's also clear that it was necessary to write them to reach the current stage. Even more strange, some of my recent, relatively strong poems bear cadences from weaker poems from fifteen years ago. Experiments are never wasted, because their lessons are unconsciously applied to later work. What alchemy! What magic!

The trick now is to keep that inner life alive while also ensuring the outer life is whole. Keep up exercise. Keep going to Grow. Keep trying to get more work. I have to stay in the world.

My major challenge: time. No longer can I waste it, yet poetry needs time for the brain to simply waft with no object or aim.

As I read the work of poets that I didn't have the patience or attention span to stay with a few years ago, the importance of reading beyond poetry becomes evident. Poets devour history, biography, the classics; they refer constantly to myth.

Yet this doesn't mean intellectual snobbery. Quite the opposite. Every perception has the potential to contribute to a poem. Nothing is wasted, therefore the attention must be on everything. Poets are not vague, romantic idiots. They observe the world keenly, sharply, with an eye for the finest of details. They are, of all things, journalists! Just much more careful journos than those you will find on the pages of broadsheets like The Guardian, because they identify and note what too often remains invisible and unexpressed.

Which reminds me – that newspaper, whose online version fell last year on the parched Australian media landscape like a cooling shower, recently published a very nasty little article pooh-poohing a poem by the much-maligned young Twilight star Kristen Stewart.

Okay, so the title is terrible and the first paragraph not much chop but there are some great lines in the rest of it. Damn the Guardian for being so snobbish and a tad misogynistic into the bargain (how dare a vacuous female Hollywood star believe she could write something decent!). But us poets had the last laugh – the poem got a much fairer assessment from Professor Brian Kim Stefans of UCLA, and being compared to Bernadette Mayer and Antonin Artaud is no mean feat. I'll concur with the professor's encouraging line 'I say go for it Ms. Stewart'. 

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A Few of My Favourite Sayings

Some aspects of getting older are boringly predictable. You find yourself, like generations past, lamenting the language young people use – the poor grammar, the ridiculous sayings, the odd pronunciations. It puts things in perspective to realise that the Ancient Greeks had a similar complaint; the poet Hesiod, thought to have been active between 650 and 750 BC, railed about the ‘frivolous youth of today’.

I sound like on an old fuddy-duddy. Does anyone use that expression any more? As part of my editing work I recently watched a video of kids in a classroom reading out loud together the story of the billy goats Gruff. The wicked troll yells to the goats ‘Be off with you!’ I found myself pleased that the kids were being exposed to this quaint expression.

Anyway I was not going to spend this entry complaining. Except for one use of ‘like’ I hate and probably everyone my age does too: ‘like’ instead of ‘said’, as in:

She’s, like, ‘He’s not my boyfriend any more.’

And I’m like, ‘Since when?’

I don’t like ‘like’ in this context because it makes speech unnecessarily drawn out, clumsy and difficult.

Why not use ‘said’ or, if you want more immediacy, ‘she says’? Even, if you must, ‘she goes?’ Both trip off the tongue.

I had to get that out of my system. The main thing I want to talk about is sayings I actually, like, like. And interestingly, many of these come from the USA, so often decried for spreading  grammatical no-nos (‘lay’ instead of ‘lie’, not saying ‘of’ after ‘couple’, removing ‘-ed’ from participle adjectives like ‘old fashioned’ and ‘cliched’ so they become nouns, eg ‘a cliche piece of writing’, ‘an old-fashion girl’ – okay, no more complaining). (I hope my US blog readers will forgive this outburst, which I’ve needed to get out of my system for some time – there are many things about US English I prefer, eg ‘jail’ instead of ‘gaol’.)

So here’s my list of favourite sayings for your linguistic delectation:

Here’s the thing.

Why do I love this so much? It’s incredibly economical, not to mention understated. There’s also a bit of empathy in it.

It says, in only three words, ‘That’s all true, but there’s another factor that trumps all that, and I’m about to tell you what it is.’ It’s a polite yet unassuming signpost that prepares the listener for what comes next. What’s not to love? (This latter saying is something I’m not crazy about, but I don’t hate it either.)

Moving right along ...

I have always loved this expression, ever since I first heard it said in first year uni by a friend of mine. Again, it’s very economical but with some very low-key humour in there. It basically says ‘What we’re talking about is a bit embarrassing so let’s drop the subject.’ But this ‘translation’ doesn’t begin to describe the essence of this phrase, which has a dramatic performative quality that is humorous but not so easy to deconstruct. I think of an overanxious teacher in front of a classroom of students with their ears wagging at some salacious reference, and the teacher saying brightly ‘moving right along, does anyone know how to  ...’ There’s a note of panic, of let’s-get-out-of-here-before-we-get-tripped-up, a hint of awkwardness in the face of dauntingly  sexual[?] overtones. But users of this phrase are not usually as embarrassed as the teacher; rather, they’re ironically performing the teacher role, implying ‘I may be in fact a little embarrassed at what I’ve just said but I will laugh at my own embarrassment.’ Despite the postmodern complexity, this expression manages to be fun and lighthearted.

The ego has landed.

This is a pun on the title of a bestselling book, The Eagle Has Landed, a war thriller by Jack Higgins. I’m like a child with some humorous sayings – no matter how many times I hear or say them, I still find them vaguely funny, and this is no exception. Applied to anyone with an inflated sense of self-worth, its humour lies in its applicability to that particular individual, so there’s a freshness to the saying each time. Most recently I found myself thinking it when watching a documentary about an English plastic surgeon, originally from Pakistan, who was returning there to do some altruistic cosmetic surgery on the faces of female victims of battery acid attacks. Much as I admired this man it was clear from the first frame that he was, as we say in the Antipodes, ‘up himself’ (a saying I’m also very fond of). As usual I found  it funny to pronounce ‘the ego has landed’ about this man, despite his kindness. The present tense of ‘has landed’ gives the expression a drama and immediacy that I really like.

You don’t care for that.

Ah, how I love this one. I first noticed it as something distinctively American in a memoir written by one of my favourite authors. It was in a piece of dialogue between the author and her very empathic psychiatrist. She is revelling in a heightened mood during a bipolar episode and doesn’t want to come down to Earth: he’s trying to convince her to take her mental health seriously. It’s old-fashioned and euphemistic – instead of saying ‘don’t like’ or the stronger ‘hate’ or ‘despise’ etc,  you say ‘don’t care for’.

Why is this euphemism attractive to me and not simply annoying? Because of the word ‘care’ perhaps? Or the fact that regardless of whom the subject of the sentence is, I, you or a third person, there’s a charmingly old-fashioned delicacy and politeness to it? It seems to want to spare the listener rather than, as in the case of ‘moving right along’, the speaker. It refers to a sensibility that can discriminate, and is discerning: what we do or don’t care for being what we like and dislike (or, I suppose, care about).

The young – always with us

I couldn’t find this on Google – apart from the more general ‘always with us’ – which upset me a bit because if I can’t find something on Google I tend to think I’ve made it up. For some reason I’ve always assumed that this old-fashioned expression is British. If that’s so, it expresses what is a cliche of various aspects of the traditional British sensibility – an acceptance of adversity combined with a difficulty in enjoying life.  There is a resigned tone to this saying, but also, importantly, a radical acceptance. I can almost see a middle-aged woman in a flowery hat and with one of those rectangular sixties handbags hanging off her arm sighing as she says it. It could be in response to just about anything – a child acting up, or a teenager being too boisterous or simply saying something funny or striking. It is not a complaint but an observation that has something of the long-suffering about it as well as a subtle sense of a close community, and one that is headed by its elders.

I have it.

Okay, so this expression may seem so incredibly inane that its inclusion is incomprehensible. Bear with me. This is a US saying; Australians say 'I've got it' instead. This is an ugly expression, hard on the ear. How infinitely more elegant is 'I have it'! Give me that any day. Once you've given it to me, I can say 'I have it'.

There are plenty of other expressions I’m vaguely fond of but none that tickle my fancy like these ones do. Readers are more than welcome to send in their favourite expressions, and to pick my grammar apart and highlight any errors!

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