Dear Clementine: Issue #1

Stitching humanity back together

📝 Before We Begin

Hello lovers! Welcome to the very first drop of the new rebrand of Dear Clementine (which is really just me but with more structure.)

I’m so sorry. I’d intended to publish this on Thursday, but my child’s school had a student free day that I had, predictably, forgotten about. Friday was ANZAC Day, so I spent writing time white knuckling it through the loudest play centres you’ve ever imagined.

I’ve been finishing this off while listening to the sound of sewing machines and scissors. My friend Amanda has been making coats out of repurposed vintage woolen blankets and selling them to raise money for Palestinian families in Gaza. She’s incredible - not a single coin is kept for profit or even costs, and she’s been plugging away by herself for months with her total donations so far reaching almost $10,000.

I can’t sew, but I can bring people together. With Amanda’s blessing, I put the word out for other people distressed by Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians to join forces and supercharge her production line. It’s been wonderful to spend these two days listening to conversations, observing skills I wish I had and meeting new people allied in the fight against terrorism.

Something I’ve especially loved is hearing women talk about their sewing machines, many of them inherited from mothers, grandmothers and even a great grandmother. Some of you may know I’m a practicing witch, and I’m very interested in the energy of ordinary things. I consider sewing machines to be extremely magical objects, and the lineage of inherited energy is just one part of this. A sewing machine’s only job is to create, which is magical enough. But the hands that propel its creation are often connected ancestrally, and infused by the energy of that love. An inherited sewing machine will have created beloved items, precious gowns, children’s clothes and blankets. It will have mended more things than you could count, each salvaged item made more precious by the love that’s gone into preserving it. The humble sewing machine, which is so often dismissed as being merely a tool of domesticity or the unimpressive interest of femininity, is one of the most astute and powerful witnesses that we have to record humanity’s remarkable capacity for love.

In these dark times, when all of our worst traits and most heinous characteristics are on display, it’s worth remembering that we are so wonderfully capable of loving. Every hand held, every kiss given, every broken heart mended and every discarded object salvaged is another stitch that holds us all together.

Let’s get into this!

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🧠 The Deep Dive: Prime Suspects and Sacrificial Virgins

“That’s what I love about high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” - Dazed and Confused

A few days ago, the above image popped on on one of my social media feeds. I have zero thoughts on Robert Irwin and I generally don’t find half naked thirst trap photos of men all that interesting. Although I missed the reveal of his ad campaign for Bonds underwear, I do remember feeling slightly embarrassed seeing women old enough to be his mother tiptoeing around the horniness they claimed to be feeling. Perhaps that’s hypocritical of me, given I just shared a photo of a young Pope Francis with the caption, “sorry to be a completely basic bitch, but hello.”

AND I’D DO IT AGAIN

However, I wanted to offer some thoughts on the second part of that post - specifically, the reminder that men in our culture at large will not only pursue extremely young women and call it rational (after all, why wouldn’t they be attracted to us when we’re in our prime?) but have at times participated in grotesque countdown clocks to mark their exit from childhood and into ‘barely legal’ status.

People of my generation and slightly younger or older will remember how demoralising it was to come of age in the early 2000s. Young women and girls in 2025 have their own raft of vile misogyny to deal with (much of it worse and more extreme, to be honest) but the years between 2001 and roughly 2013 were a real wasteland in terms of gender politics. Very few of us were willing to call ourselves a feminist publicly OR privately (”I’m not a feminist, I love men!”), and we were slowly suffocating beneath a capitalist driven raunch culture and a celebration of the tiniest bodies you’ve ever seen (which sadly seems to be coming back).

Early 2000s raunch culture reframed blatant sexual objectification and the economically powerful male gaze as emblems of ‘female empowerment’, while refusing agency or autonomy to the women expected to gyrate enthusiastically beneath its spotlight. This wasn’t sex positivity or even freedom of sexual expression, because women were not only expected to surrender control to the male executives and consumers benefiting from their bodies but also to shut up and take their punishment when they dared to claim authority for themselves. Think of the furore that erupted when a 15 year old Miley Cyrus appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair, photographed by Annie Leibowitz and draped in a satin sheet.

At the time, Cyrus was a major cash cow for Disney. A 2010 piece for Business Insider revealed that Cyrus’ tenure as Hannah Montana had delivered a $1billion profit to Disney - but like Britney Spears before her, the financial value of Cyrus to Daddy Disney was contingent on keeping her hovering for as long as possible on the precipice of womanhood. These virgin sacrifices were always meant to embody to the public a sense of being almost ripe but not quite there yet - and so consequently (and necessarily) also completely ignorant to the impact their burgeoning sexuality could have on older, experienced men equipped with the knowledge of how to deftly handle them. They could be sexualised for profit by any number of corporate entities, just so long as they never made the mistake of acknowledging they were aware of the power they had, or scandalously assuming the authority to wield it themselves. Miley Cyrus draped in a sheet on the cover of Vanity Fair didn’t just break the rules - it broke the fourth wall, forcing an audience who had up until that point been comfortable with sacrificing virgins on the alter of capitalism and vice to finally meet her unmasked gaze.

Of course, no one responded well to having the abyss stare back. Cyrus (and remember, she was only 15) was forced to apologise for what was labelled a “near-nude pic” by the tabloid press, and she wrote: “I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic,’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed. I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about.” Meanwhile, Disney issued a statement claiming their golden girl had been "deliberately manipulated a 15 year old girl to sell magazines".

Because remember, the only people allowed to sexualise a teenage girl are the men making money off of her.

But Disney had form. Just a year prior to Cyrus being forced to wear the scarlet letter of public shame, Vanessa Hudgens was punished similarly. Hudgens had starred in the massively successful High School Musical and was in talks to be signed to the sequels when a private photograph of her in was stolen and leaked over the internet. She was 18 at the time, but legal adulthood has never stopped culture from treating women like children (or vice versa). Hudgens issued an embarrassed statement apologising to her fans for ‘letting them down’, and was presumably commanded to by the same genre of executive Disney authority that would, almost two decades later, fly across America to chastise 23 year old Rachel Zeigler for daring to tweet “Free Palestine” while promoting the live action release of Snow White.

Perhaps the most profitable of Disney’s virgin sacrifices was Britney Spears, whose rise and fall has been meticulously scrutinised by the press, the public and the judiciary since the moment she was first instructed to pull on a school uniform and sing “Hit me baby, one more time”. A former child star member of the Mickey Mouse Club, Spears was offered up as the quintessential virgin to a public ravenous for young female flesh. Doe eyed, cutesy boo in pigtails and Catholic schoolgirl skirt, the teenage Spears was a record company’s wet dream - literally. In the year 2000, news reports circulated of an anonymous businessman offering over $7.5 million to “claim” the pop star’s virginity, a proposition she labelled “disgusting”.

The first Britney cover for Rolling Stone*, released in 1999 when she was 17.

Whether such an offer existed at all or was just the brainwave of a record label and/or management team determined to remind the public that their Fantasy girl was still pristine and untouched by man is still unclear. Despite injecting sex into every aspect of her being, from the way she was dressed to the dances she performed and the lyrics she sang (”Oh baby, don’t you wanna dance up on me? Leave behind my name and age”), Spears was instructed by her management to act as if sex itself was an intimidating, foreign concept for her - something she was intent on waiting to experience with (and gift to) her future husband, who everyone eagerly assumed would be Justin Timberlake. When the couple split up in 2002, Spears Inc. continued to eke what they could out of the potential of her virginity - that is, until Timberlake saw the opportunity to sacrifice the virgin himself. Appearing on a radio show, Timberlake responded to the question of whether or not he’d slept with Spears by saying, “I did it. I'm dirty. I'm in so much damn trouble, man. I'm going to get calls from my mother!"

That Timberlake experienced no backlash at all from his revelation is unsurprising in the misogynist culture we live in. Men fuck up in every single way, and women are fucked accordingly. Just two years later, while performing at the Superbowl half-time show with Janet Jackson, Timberlake would once again benefit from the double standards that absolve men time and time again while holding women accountable for their actions. Just three years and incomprehensible intrusions into her personal life later, Spears (now a mother of two) was photographed in the midst of a mental breakdown and sacrificed once again - this time, as the deranged woman driven mad by her own proclivities and lack of self control.

You see? the punishers have always whispered. This is what happens to women who lose their innocence. This is what happens when they start letting men actually fuck them.