In Defense of the Hot Mess on The Blind Hem
It begins, I think, with my ongoing frustration that when we are presented with male characters (or personas, or even real persons) who are basically bad people with one redeeming quality (still sleeps with a teddy bear, is a brilliant filmmaker), we let that one redeeming quality, you know, redeem them, and are collectively charmed by their “fucked-up-ness”. But I have a really hard time coming up with similar female examples: all of the ones I can think of we have opted to either lambast or “concern-troll” instead. And we always need to redeem them. They always need to learn something or be rescued, which we all know is basically the opposite of how the world really works. Kids, I am a hot mess, and almost all of the women I admire and love and am fascinated by are also hot-fucking-messes — and I so rarely see that represented in a real, nuanced, and fascinating way. To simplify: I am eternally tearing my hair out over the fact that I desperately want more female antiheroes
words © Meg Clark / illustration © Katy Jones
I am so stoked Meg let us re-publish this spot-on, hell yes piece she wrote. She originally published it on her own blog on my birthday & it felt like a present. I can’t stop thinking about it.
