feminish

Sometimes a photograph just grabs me, like this one. I can’t remember when I first saw it, but its stark, respectful honesty has stuck in my mind:

Lauren, 23, bleaches her stained outfit backstage
at Little Darlings, where she is an exotic dancer
Las Vegas, Nevada

I have now discovered that it was by photographer and film-maker Lauren Greenfield whose latest work is the documentary Thin and its accompanying book. Greenfield went inside a Florida treatment centre to tell the stories of four women who are struggling to eat. Although the stories are deeply sad, and although the treatments don’t seem (to me) to touch the real essence of these women’s suffering, the tone of Greenfield’s film is stark and respectful, just like the photo above. Women are having a hard time in this 21st Century world, and we’re lucky to have Greenfield’s gaze on us.

Here is a powerful preview to Thin:

Lauren Greenfield is probably best known for her documenting of ‘girl culture’ in America. You can see her awesome “Girl Culture photoessay” for Time magazine and other remarkable Girl Culture photographs published on her website.

I slinked off into retreat last Friday, down at a medieval priory west of London. The stone floors were cold and the gothic arches reassuringly old. Time slowed and I played with acorns.

The priory is empty of nuns. They have died, as humans do, and have not been replaced. The last two survivors are seeing out their dusk in the almshouse wing. But the energy of the female spiritual life is still there: bells in just the right place; carriage clocks with fairy-like rings; and a total absence of dust - as though the stones remember the centuries of unrelenting female labour dispelling it.

I noticed two framed tablets hanging in one of the narrow red-and-black tiled corridors. Yellowing paper squares had been pasted one-by-one into the frame, each bearing testament to the death and life of one of the sisters. Where monks might have carved stone slabs or wooden plaques, the modest sisters here had a bit of paper and glue. Spaces have been left at the end for those yet-to-die; there’s sign of tipexing and re-gluing. I immediately thought of the immense old-style library type-writered catalogue books, which end up extending to impractical numbers of weighty, frayed volumes (now it’s all just stored in zeros and ones to be flung at us through LED screens at the tap of a finger).

Here was one entry in the frame:

CECILIA
OF THE TRANSFIGURATION

ELEVENTH AND LAST MOTHER

ORDER II

12 FEBRUARY 2004 AGED 89 YEARS

IN RELIGION 64 YEARS

There was also “Hope of the Precious Blood” (9th Mother) and “Priscilla Lydia, Foundress and First Mother”, who died in 1876.

Powerful words.

These women didn’t seem so very far away after all.

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.

I’m back in London town where the clothes are bright, the jeans are tight and pumps are all the rage.

If women’s clothes in the Big Smoke are all about girls bums, in the Big (French) Calm clothes are all about waists - either slinking them in soft silks or marqueeing-over them with rough cotton French Mama floral smock pinnies.

These French Mama floral aprons are a strange phenomenon. A lot of women wear them a lot of the time and a lot of shops sell a lot of variants. At first I thought ‘ah! they have a lot in the shops because no-one buys them’. After several months of patient observation I can now confidently assert that the opposite is the case: the shops have a lot because everybody buys them. Our neighbour, who takes her little rubbish bag out to the bins in the square at the same time every morning, and who has been known to polish her windows more than once a month, has never been spotted apron-naked. I had to wear an apron like that when I worked in a factory canteen frying burgers and selling bags o’ tatties. But I am struggling to think of any situation in which it would occur to me to be a good idea to wear one in my spare time.

They are a kind of housewife’s uniform - a way of saying: Woman At Work. A way to see work in the home as real work, distinct from the rest of life; a way to give that work a formality and uniform. It’s also a practical, cheap way to protect normal clothes. Clothes need protection from cooking oil, and leaking bin bags and bleach. But because women never seem to take these aprons off, it’s hard to see when they are ever their non-apron selves, when they’re the woman who’s not busy keeping house. The apron brigade seem to be full-time identifying themselves with just one ideal: Respectable Hard-Working Housewife Keeping A Good Home. That’s why they wear the aprons up the hill to market; that’s why they wear them to the supermarket. It’s a statement: my waist is irrelevant, and so is even the simplest respect for beauty - but let it be known I can sure as hell dust!

If I’m ever caught wearing one, I give the Internet Gods permission to nuke this site.

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.

“No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted”
…runs the tagline to cosmetic company Dove’s latest dramatic video ad in their ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’.

I found it oddly moving. Even stunning eyes can be sad.



[Hat tips to Jess at the magnificent f-word and to Maxy-Max]

Ever idly wondered what a woman might have been writing in her diary on this day in, say - 1920?

I just found Harvard’s Open Collections website, where they publish primary-source documents from their collections - 7,500 pages of manuscripts, 3,500 books and pamphlets and 1,200 photographs. If you go to the diaries page you can see women’s journals opened at today’s date (updated daily).

I read what was written on this day by a farmer in 1887 ( “…rained quite a shower after dinner”), a schoolteacher in 1906 ( “…took a bath. Mended.”), a secretary in 1914 ( “…stayed in bed and fooled until 8.30″) and an actress in 1920 ( “…we saw Cohan’s opening - “meanest man in the world”).

Vicarious and addictive.

Technorati tags: women’s history, historical documents, women, diaries, history

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:
Read the rest of this entry »

This is an excerpt from Anne C. Klein Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists and the Art of Self (1995), p.51

Tibetan language itself is hierarchical, particularly as spoken in centres of power like Lhasa. Most nouns and verbs have honorific forms, usually entirely different in sound and spelling from the non-honorific forms, and these must be used whenever one addresses someone socially, economically or spiritually superior to oneself.

The most widely used word for woman (skyes dman) literally means “low born” and is also the non-honorific word for “wife”. A man might use this term to refer to his own wife, or he might call her chung ma, literally, “little woman”. But he would always use an honorific for the wife of someone of rank greater than his. Other terms are less explicitly offensive. Women are known as those not to be put out (bud med) because a woman is not to be left outside the house at night. Another less common phrase is lus phra ma, “female of slight body”. Other synonyms, also relatively rare in ordinary speech, are gnas byed, “maker of a dwelling” or “maker of stability”; mi mo, “a female person”; and mtshams ldan ma, perhaps a pun, which can be understood either as “one who has a boundary” or “one who has an intermediate space”. Other epithets include ‘dzin ma, “female grasper”, and lan bu can bcas, “one who has long plaits [of hair]”. These terms fall into two main groups, those associated with a womans more ‘essential’ physical characteristics, and others with her community or family position.

I ended last week’s fast the evening of the second day.

Those first two days I felt drawn-out and a little bit wonky. Time passed slowly, droolingly and lethargically. I felt empty; spare.

I stopped happily and gently, enjoying the savouriness of a bouillon soup.

In fact, it was kind of the cosmos to arrange the early-finish, because first thing the next morning we received a phonecall from the Patterner’s grandmother up the hill:

“I am dying”

We flew out of the front door and into the car in, I warrant, no more than 15 seconds. There are now some small roadworks in the village, so we even had the chance to blow a red light.

The doctor and ambulance seemed to take an age; time steadied and thickened. With one hundred percent concentration we stayed with her, following our breath and helping her to follow hers. When fear came up in myself I had to immediately take care to dissolve it - and to call on every last drop of my resources of meditation to be present, calmly present, so that she could be present too. We could tell that only if she was calm and not-fearing could her Heart and Will make it.

The women came - Paulette, Anne-Marie. Soon she was swaddled in wool blankets, soft towels and crisp linen; the sweet-smelling feminine trousseau. We comforted and coddled her away from the abyss as Anne-Marie brushed her hair: That’s better. You can’t go to the hospital without a quick brush.

Within a few hours and after a few more alarms she was there, on a wheeled bed in the corridor, shaken and exhausted but returned. Her particular shade of grey was, we remarked, still somewhat better than the grey-whites of certain barely-bodied-humans swooshing past, each chased by their own urgent, white-coated entourage. At one point her blood began to rise up, rich and red, through the drip-tube.

“That’s a good red,” I said. “Just like a British Letterbox.” (”I’m surprised they make it in France”, I might have added, but didn’t.)

She smiled a weak but willing smile, and the Patterner and I fell into humming chorales as we waited for Radiology.