feminish

Let’s say I wanted to seduce someone.

And let’s say, for the sake of argument, that said ’someone’ was a guy.

I would probably have a shower before I went out to meet him, and I may or may not shave my legs. I might wear make-up, and perhaps spray some perfume, or essential oil - and, more likely than not, some deodorant. I’d also probably spend a long time choosing what to wear. Heels, perhaps, or maybe flats. Earrings? Possibly. And, depending on my current curves, I might emphasise my waist or hide it; I might accentuate my breasts or rein them in. I’d certainly take a lot of care over my bottom.

In the moment when I meet him - at his doorstep, in a bar, outside the tube station - I would want him to experience attraction towards me. This wouldn’t (I’d like to think) necessarily require a cleavage, skirt, or heels - or even make-up or perfume. But, during the course of the evening, I would want my body to be clothed - or exposed - in such a way, that I could allure his attraction, play with it and incite it. I’d be expressing myself and communicating with him through my chosen appearance.

Let’s take another night out. This time, I might be in a committed relationship, and enjoying going out with girlfriends - say, to a School Disco club night. I might be wearing a short skirt and high boots; a tight white shirt and a tie saying ’sexy’. My hair’s perhaps in pigtails, and my eyes thick with the black kohl pencil I’ve kept since I was 13. I might wear these clothes as a frivolous tongue-in-cheek celebration of mock youthfulness, connecting in sisterly companionship with my friends who are all doing it too. For some reason it’s fun - even if I’m not sure why.

In this School Disco scenario if, say, my bottom was pinched, or slapped or squeezed by a bloke, I would be angry. I would in all likelihood turn round and punch him, even if he’d turned away and all I could thud was his shoulder. I am communicating something with my clothes; but I do not want him to assume that my skirt or boots or kohl eyeliner give him right of enjoyment over my buttocks.

I realise that I’m asking a lot of men. I want a (known) guy to read incitement into my clothes in one situation, but strangers to disregard it in another. Is this unfair?

Is it unfair to wear a short skirt if I don’t want to pull? Is it misleading to not wear baggy clothes? Misleading to not cover my legs, or breasts? Misleading to not wear a veil, as one Australian Sheik seemed to think last week? (Picked up by Philobiblon)

I don’t believe that male and female human beings exist wholly independently of one another. I don’t believe that wearing whatever I want should have absolutely no impact on the behaviour of the other sex, as though I exist in utter isolation from men, their gaze, their confusions, their desires and their vulnerabilities. In fact, I know that my power to allure depends precisely (though not only) on my power to send signals in my clothes.

I accept that signals can be misread; it happens all the time in all types of human interactions. I accept that I am responsible for my actions, in thought, word and deed - including those that mislead others. But I am not responsible for the final fact of others being misled. People, if you like, participate in misleading themselves.

An unveiled woman; a cleavaged, short-skirted, drunk or high-heeled lipsticked woman is not like ‘uncovered meat’ that’s fair game for ‘cats to come and eat’. A woman can send the wrong signals, or men can read the wrong signals, but this is a fact of daily life and a fact of all human communications - and of course we can talk; we can explain ourselves, we can ask each other questions, and quite quickly my words can say more, much more, than my flesh or cloth.

I want to be able to communicate clearly through the ways I choose to cover my body; and I aspire to get better and better at sending honest signals. But I also claim the freedom (should I wish to exercise it) to play games and tricks on people’s perceptions in the ways I choose to cover my body.

I want the law to protect my clothing freedoms. I want the law to accept that, for example, a cleavage in one situation communicates something different from a cleavage in another situation; and that the cleavage is utterly irrelevant to the question of my consent for a man to touch me.

I realise this is a lot to ask. But I don’t believe it is too much.

So, I’d like to follow the cue of Jess over at the F-word, in her post ‘Only rapists can prevent rape’, and repeat this advice to men:

If a woman is drunk, don’t rape her.
If a woman is walking alone at night, don’t rape her.
If a woman is drugged and unconscious, don’t rape her.
If a woman is wearing a short skirt, don’t rape her.
If a woman is jogging in a park at 5 am, don’t rape her.
If a woman looks like your ex-girlfriend you’re still hung up on, don’t rape her.
If a woman is asleep in her bed, don’t rape her.
If a woman is asleep in your bed, don’t rape her.
If a woman is doing her laundry, don’t rape her.
If a woman is in a coma, don’t rape her.
If a woman changes her mind in the middle of or about a particular activity, don’t rape her.
If a woman has repeatedly refused a certain activity, don’t rape her.
If a woman is not yet a woman, but a child, don’t rape her.
If your girlfriend or wife is not in the mood, don’t rape her.
If your step-daughter is watching TV, don’t rape her.
If you break into a house and find a woman there, don’t rape her.
If your friend thinks it’s okay to rape someone, tell him it’s not, and that he’s not your friend.
If your “friend” tells you he raped someone, report him to the police.
If your frat-brother or another guy at the party tells you there’s an unconscious woman upstairs and it’s your turn, don’t rape her, call the police and tell the guy he’s a rapist.
Tell your sons, god-sons, nephews, grandsons, sons of friends it’s not okay to rape someone.
Don’t tell your women friends how to be safe and avoid rape.
Don’t imply that she could have avoided it if she’d only done/not done x.
Don’t imply that it’s in any way her fault.
Don’t let silence imply agreement when someone tells you he “got some” with the drunk girl.
Don’t perpetuate a culture that tells you that you have no control over or responsibility for your actions. You can, too, help yourself.

The U.S. Army is, it seems, issuing families of soldiers serving overseas with life-size cardboard cut-outs of their loved ones.

I was struck by the words of Kay Judkins (quoted in the Boston Globe) whose husband, Jim, is a minesweeper mechanic in Afghanistan, talking about the place the cut-out has in her family:

“He sits at the head of the table. Yes, he does.”

I immediately had visions of comparable female-soldier households, with the 2-D Flat Mommy serving the real-life-daddy his dinner as he continued to sit patiently at the head of the table… while in reality the soldier wife was out shooting bullets and ducking grenades in Iraq.

And I noticed the NY Times’ revealing choice of title for their article When Soldiers Go to War, Flat Daddies Hold Their Place at Home, and wondered precisely why the headline wouldn’t quite work as “Flat Mommies Hold Their Place at Home”.

But I immediately realised that it’s not funny at all, and I felt quite sad. On the one hand there are men and women risking life and limb so they can suppress, kill, maim or capture other people (or whatever it is they do); on the other there’s a life-size cardboard photo that a child puts next to him on a swing. It seems very odd.

Admittedly, the whole business did begin fairly simply: a wife wanted a real-size photo of her husband so her young infant could more easily make the connection between the two-dimensional photo and the nice man called ‘Daddy’ who, every now and again, showed up and stayed for a while. But for those like Kay Judkins who are putting him at the head of the table, the practice seems to have been taken to a whole other level. It’s no longer just about teaching a child to recognise an image; it’s quite a deep denial of the costs and losses and pains of War.

I try to be here in my body as often as I can.

I remember my feet, and let them sink into the floor under my desk. I feel my bottom where it meets the chair, and my elbows on the desk. And I notice my forehead sinking towards this screen, and reel it in.

The Patterner sat well this morning. His breath furled and unfurled, he said. Like a long, soft banner into the wind. (Or like a chameleon’s tongue, I said. Or like one of those plastic party horns, I might have added, but didn’t.)

Sometimes my breath is steady, falling into my lungs and breezing out again gently. Sometimes it bathes me like water lapping in and out of the shore. Other times it gets caught, taut around my chest, like apron strings in the washing machine.

Which is what happened yesterday, when I read this:
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I’m not quite sure how I missed this Daily Mail corker from a fornight ago:

“We’re in the middle of a Menaissance… Years of feminism, which insists on the absolute interchangeability of the traditional roles of man and woman, are giving way to a reassertion of the male attribute of machismo… The metrosexual, that urbanised, sensitive, emotionally and physically androgynous model of 21st-century manhood, is dead.

And there’s more - U.S. feminists are (apparently) “bearing torches and pitchforks” hunting down Yale’s Harvey Mansfield; meanwhile Brits (God Help Them) are worshipping “cry-baby Beck-ham, hairless, smothered in costly unguents, neurotically self-aware”; and the U.K. taxation and redistributive structures have (I kid you not) “served to stamp out that key element of manliness - self-betterment and provision for those they are responsible for”.

The article epitomises everything that’s wonky with the Mail’s gender cosmology…

Go read: A question of manliness | the Daily Mail

Or, if you’d like to stay calm and happy this morning, try the Observer, or the Washington Post. And Bookdrunk over at Rhetorically Speaking has a great analysis of the whole article.

Or, if you want to feel good about being a feminist and feel confident that the whole Menaissance thing is twaddle, read Martha Nussbaum’s fantastic review of Harvey Mansfield’s book Manliness, which kicked this whole thing off. (Thanks to Alas, a blog for the link.)

This is from today’s Times of London. [Thanks for the pointer, Sasha]

A SENIOR lawyer stunned a courtroom [in Wellington, New Zealand] when he walked in wearing a woman’s skirt, patterned blouse, lace stockings and carrying a handbag. He asked the judge to call him Ms Alice.

Bob Moodie, 67, a 6ft 4in former police officer and law lecturer — and once a noted rugby player — told the High Court in Wellington that he had decided to wear women’s clothing because he no longer wished to be a part of what he called the male ethos in New Zealand, including that existing in the judiciary.

Great, I thought. A bit of boundary-breaking in dusty corners of the establishment can only ever be a good thing. But what a shame the (male) journalist is playing this article for laughs - I hope this lawyer is straight.

…He said that he was heterosexual but had always had a strong female gender bias and preferred women’s clothes….

Awesome - his message is directed at heterosexual masculinity. Why did the journalist feel the need to say ‘he was heterosexual but…’ Agh! The power of the heterosexual challenge is undercut. But the fact he’s straight explains why the journalist is front-loading the comedy, deflecting Moodie’s challenge and instead laying it on thick with descriptions of him as ‘balding, mustachioed’ - the kind of body/hair/clothing analysis that court journalists normally only reserve for women.

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I just happened across this pure genius from Matt@DailyTelegraph.

Like I said last week, perhaps Zidane’s Mum can take care of herself.

feminish » Zidane: “Je ne regrette rien…. I am a Man”
feminish » Her honour for your Cup

… and if you still think the Zidane/mother/insult/headbutt thing is interesting, Stuart Jeffries has written about it for the Guardian: The mother of all insults: Why is it that the worst insults in the world are always about your mum?

At Paris Gare du Nord yesterday, I saw in The Times that Zidane’s broken his silence: Materazzi slandered his Mum and his Sister. I thought, Phew! last Sunday’s post wasn’t way off the mark. But it was when I read Zidane’s exact words explaining the headbut that I leapt up and down in the tabac, fluttering the paper at whoever would hear me (a drunk young man who needed some cash):

“The words he said concerned my mother and sister. I heard them once, then twice, and the third time I couldn’t control myself. I am a man and some words are harder to hear than actions. I would have rather been knocked down than hear that.”

“I am a Man”. Soon the French will forget how close they were to winning the World Cup - and they will remember their suave and chiselled captain on Canal+ defining his manhood, guarding his status as hero. “I am a Man”. Not only was Zidane saying that he wasn’t an idiot to have lost control, but that his headbutt somehow proved his masculinity, his heroic, manly power to defend ‘his’ women’s honour: any decent man would have done the same.

It’d be nice to think that had his Mum gathered what was going on with the headbutt, she’d have been back at home watching the telly and thinking ‘Yeah, give him one in my name.’ But I wonder if she wouldn’t just think: ‘I can take care of myself thank you very much Zizou; Materazzi should just wash out his mouth with soap. Don’t worry about me, just get on with it and win the darn Cup.’

France, 10-something p.m….

I’d begun to think the World Cup, with all its macho aggressive drinking prostituting big-money big-ego competitiveness, was a bit tedious from a feminish point of view, when (while enjoying tonight’s game)…

“Quoi? Qu’est ce qu’il se passe? Quoi? Quoi? … ”
“Pas ca!”
“Oh non! oh non! oh non!”
“Qu’est ce que ta fait, Zizou? Qu’est ce que ta fait?”

Quelle horreur!

Devastation in just another room in just another village in France tonight. The shock was galling (pun ’scused). How he, how that? As the commentators kept saying - the whole point is what happened before the head-butt? What on earth could have warranted that? Words - and probably about his mother, I idly half-jokingly mused.

In fact it seems (at least for the moment) that I wasn’t wrong. The word on the French street (which hasn’t yet made it onto the Wires) is that Marco Materazzi slandered Zidane’s mother and, in his last match of a stunning career, in the World Cup Final, with his team a hair’s breadth from victory, with hundreds of millions world-over watching his every tango with the ball, the cool-as-cool hero of La France lost his presence of mind and unleashed his fury - with unfathomably huge consequences.

The immense force to revenge his Mum’s honour overwhelmed Zizou’s guard, and That, as they say, was That.

Thing is, Bet he wouldn’t've done it if Materazzi slandered his Dad.

Why not? Why did Materazzi’s bear baiting hit the spot? Why was it this that unspun the king of cool? What is the whole Mother’s Honour thing, anyway - and can it be a good thing? …. For me there’s a bit of a whiff of the Oath of the Horatii about it (what with us being in France and all that): men swearing to sacrifice everything (even their lives) for the honour and protection of a feminised ideal (La France, La Libertie), for women, and almost over them.

Housework bothers me. But not because it is of itself bothersome - I’ve had some of the calmest moments of my life holding a broom, feeling my body sway backwards and forwards, settling into the unendingness of it… knowing millions of people world-over are, in the same moment, sweeping their mud-floors, their front door-step, their kitchen lino. In those moments I’ve noticed the pointlessness of it (”this dust will sure-as-anything be here again next week”; “gees, how many thousands of hours have my ancestors spent just sweeping - and what have they got to show for it? Where are they all now? Dead!” etc.). And somehow by touching this endless pointlessness of it through time and space, it’s actually become quite soothing to do it: “I do this because it is part of surviving. And I survive in the same way my ancestors survived, and my fellow-humans survive. I do this so I can live in a clear space. So I can respect these three rooms where I live, so they can help me to be happy, and so I don’t cringe at dust when I put my feet on the wooden tongue-and-groove slats every morning. I wouldn’t want to pay someone to do this for me because it’s one of my few chances (chopping wood/ carrying water not forthcoming at the minute) to engage in the fundamental work of staying alive - and connect to my basic human condition.”

No, housework bothers me because girls do it and guys (more often than not) don’t (Beloved Patterner excluded).

When I was younger, the boys got the wood in and we girls tidied up. They made their beds, sure, but it was the two daughters who ‘put the wash in’ and helped fold socks in front of Blind Date on a Saturday night. I remember being strangely confused that my little bro had to be shown how to use the washing machine age 16 - how on earth had he got away with not knowing?

But it’s not his fault - it’s just how the cookie’s been crumbling for, well, a few hundred generations.

And the recipe for this particular girls-tidy/boys-carry crumbly cookie is complicated. It’s about society’s gender roles, it’s about women-at-home, it’s (perhaps) about psychological predispositions to multi-tasking, and it’s about our particular home-drilling by Mum. It’s about what we read and think; and what, as children, what was said to us - and read to us. And this is all changing.

I remember once, in a dusty corner of the University Library desperately avoiding finals revision, I fell into flicking through yellowing periodicals around me - and found a feminist children’s story in Signs magazine. I read it all and it was great: Girl has adventures home-alone; Mum gets in late at night; Girl clears up naughty mess quickly, but she’s not caught because Mum’s still snogging the current boyfriend in the car. I thought, Wow! If only I’d had that as a child: Beatrix Potter, Hans Christian Anderson (and Ronald Dahl for a bit of a shake-up) don’t exactly a liberated woman make.

This all came to me today because I’d heard that the Famous Five books have been revised so that the boys do some housework. My first reaction was, Fantastic! My second was, What does the Daily Mail think?

Row faster, George! The PC meddlers are chasing us!
Neither the Famous Five nor the Secret Seven are any longer permitted to pursue their adventures without hindrance from the PC zealots. Julian and Dick are now required to do the housework with the girls. Already, Mary and Jill of the Adventurous Four have been ‘updated’ to Pippa and Zoe. It can only be a matter of time before the stop-at-home, cake-baking mummies of Blyton’s fiction will be sent out to work in shipyards as crane drivers while the daddies have to relinquish their City jobs and become house-husbands.

The logic is priceless Mail:
1. Boy picks up broom
ergo
2. Mother must drive a shipyard crane
ergo
3. World order has collapsed and palpable madness undermines All That’s Good.
ergo
4. Boys mustn’t sweep.

You gotta laugh, if only because things have already changed. The cookie’s crumbling differently because the dough mix ain’t the same, and the Daily Mail doesn’t matter (that much - though it matters a darn sight more than it should).

So Thank God I’m an 80’s child not a 50’s housewife… and that twentysomething blokes don’t think us twentysomething girls are crazy for insisting on ‘taking it in turns’ (though I have a niggling feeling that my twentysomething bloke was read feminist children’s books as a child).