Chicks Doing Shit

- Caroline Criado-Perez

Illustrations for Chicks Doing Shit are all by the fabulous Sarah Watson of sarahwatsonarts.com; she tweets as @WonkyDogs_barks

Chicks Doing Shit is published every Thursday; latest Chicks Doing Shit here

***************************************

So what are Chicks Doing Shit? I feel the need to explain. Partly because I can’t make the website work the way I want (sob), so this page is having to change to being a fixed explanatory page. But also because certain Chicks close to me were perturbed, even a little disturbed by the title.

© http://www.sarahwatsonarts.com

And in a way, they should be. It was thought up by my boyfriend – so it has the patriarchy’s sticky mitts pasted all over it. It wasn’t actually thought up for this blog at all – in fact it was thought up long before the fated shower, Woman’s Hour, and Google cluster that ignited the fire in my belly that has ended up splurted all over these pages. In a non disgusting way, you understand.

No, originally, this charming little ditty referred to a Vermeer exhibition I was going to see with my mother (the original, and the best Chick Doing Shit). But while my mother is one hell of an aid worker, amazingly competent, brave and just generally hard-core, when she’s off-duty, she likes to give her mind a little rest. This involves being absolutely asinine with her computer. It also involves her not being too hot with the old memory. So I knew I was going to an exhibition in Cambridge, of Vermeer paintings, and it involved women sort of, you know, doing things. I explained the exhibition third-hand to my boyfriend, and he delivered his magical three-word analysis of my vague meanderings with my mother’s words. And so, a moniker was born. It was a beautiful moment.

Anyway, the Vermeer exhibition is relevant in another way, because not only was it literally about chicks doing shit, it was about Chicks Doing Shit. That is, it was about women who seem to be conforming to their gender norms, but in each painting there was a note of dissent. A sense of disquiet, of discomfort. It was an amazing exhibition.

Now, obviously, Vermeer’s women were living in a different time, so we give them a bit of lee-way on what counts as Doing Shit. On these pages we are a bit more adventurous though. We want to know about amazing women all over the world who are doing amazing things. Women who are brave. Women who are inspirational. Women who don’t take no for an answer and don’t stop. And we need our readers’ help. Here at WW HQ we know our fair share of CDS, but even we will eventually run out of women to profile – tbh, we’re actually a bit antisocial.

So we lay our gauntlet down – and we demand (nicely) that the online world deliver. Nominate the next Chick Doing Shit – email apoxonthepatriarchy at gmail dot com. We look forward to hearing from you!