On gender representation and photography

When I went to my brother's place, I spent the first few hours hanging out at the beach with him and his family, along with another family who were the parents of my niece's friend from daycare. Now the kid and the dad were nice enough, but the mom, oh god. The amount of sexism that came from that woman's mouth was just amazing. "He's climbing so much! He's such a typical boy." (and just regular stupidity too. "Yeah, good luck getting him to listen, he's a Capricorn." No, you're a shitty parent.) Hanging around with my brother and his wife, who naturally raise their girl as a child, rather than a stereotypical gender representation. Even when she was an infant and people would ask "What is it?" (as in "Is it a boy or a girl?") they'd typically answer "It's a human child", which I've gotta say is the best way of dealing with stuff like that that I know of. Anyway, I was sitting there at the beach trying really hard to not let my jaw drop at some of the things this mom would say, and not opening my mouth for fear that rude things might come out of it. I really can't stand when people don't think about the example they're setting through attitude though. It upsets me.

Max called me yesterday to hang out with him and O, and while I kinda wasn't feeling it, I agreed to go with them to Fotografiska, a photography museum here in Stockholm, to check out some exhibitions and hang out. It's one of few museums in Stockholm that's open on non-fucked up times (i.e. doesn't close at like five in the afternoon, like all the other museums who don't understand how the world works), probably because it's a privately run establishment and relies on being profitable and thus can't tell people it's their fault they can't go see anything cultural if they have jobs.

I was surprised to find that both O and Max hardly talked about architecture at all (apart from some comments on the building itself, nothing about school), and that we could just hang out, looking at the exhibitions and just generally hanging out in what we joked about being a very adult and sophisticated way. The Motohiko Odani exhibition was moving albeit strange, my favourites being the Phantom Limb series and the Dead Man Sleeping video installations, and the Helmut Newton exhibition left me both interested and with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. O said that Helmut Newton was responsible for starting the craze for sexualized advertising, and while I thought that a lot of his pieces were really good, I couldn't quite shake the feeling that it not everything there showed women as actual beings rather than sexual objects. Then again, there were a lot of times where I'd thing "Goddamn, I want that on my wall" when walking through the exhibition space. It's hard to strike a balance sometimes. 

Anyways, the whole thing ended up being a lot more fun than I expected, and while I was dreading that I wouldn't feel good meeting Max because I was afraid he'd make me think too much about school which would end up making me unhappy, but I realized that I'd missed him, missed hanging out in our little clique, and I had a really good time.

Speaking of having good times, G's been in a really good mood all day, which is sweet. He just came over and gave me a bowl of chips for no better reason than that he was in a good mood today. On the other hand, I think I pissed Sand off. Turns out she's leaving for Porto on Sunday for a vacation to check stuff out before she moves there for her exchange year, and she wanted to hang out today. I was studying the TEFL thing, so I didn't get her text about having dinner together, and now she's probably annoyed and angry about that. I'm figuring it's one of her last days and we've been having some issues lately, so I figure that I should make an effort to make sure we're on good terms before she leaves. We're friends after all, even though we're different, so sometimes you just have to do shit you don't really feel like I guess. Part of the deal.