The anti-objectification protest outside the Miss University London beauty pageant finals on Tuesday was the sort of event you really only see in arthouse films set to a soaring indie soundtrack. A samba band joined us, and the whole thing turned into a glorious street party, with people from the area coming in to dance and stamp and join in. With chants that sounded like we'd practiced with the musicians for hours. The police were called in to disperse us, and the frigid-looking princes and princesses waiting for entry to the club were terribly peeved, which was fantastic, because winding up boring hipsters is amongst the more wholesome of my private passions.
The full report is here, on Counterfire, with videos of us all dancing and screaming and acting like the sort of idiots who don't understand that the market loves misogyny and there's nothing you can do about it. The idiot you can hear shouting in the first video is me, and the words I'm yelling are: That's not what empowerment looks like - This is what empowerment looks like!
When the Miss World pageant came to London in 1970, second-wave feminists were there, trying to resist the deliberate commercial alienation of women from our own bodies. Forty years later, feminists are still here, we're still organising, and we're still angry that brilliant young women with everything ahead of them are routinely duped by corporate whorebags into letting themselves be weighed like pieces of meat and judged in their swimsuits in the name of perky fun and money for the middle-man. The placards are new, but the injustice is the same. The difference is that this year, we had men standing alongside us, refusing to have their sexuality poached and sold back to them, resisting this antique symbol of the objectification industries' assault on their sisters' self-esteem.
My favourite part was when a couple of the attending hipsters stood behind us and loudly enumerated which of us they would and wouldn't consider putting their dicks into, and called us all 'ugly'. Funnily enough, I always get called ugly when I misbehave. Some things never change.
Showing posts with label body image. Show all posts
Showing posts with label body image. Show all posts
Thursday, 18 March 2010
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Speech on Body Image for International Women's Day.
I'm still up, so it's still International Women's day. Here's the speech I made at today's launch of the Real Women campaign in Portcullis house, alongside Susie Orbach, which was more than a little intimidating. The campaign aims to bring together people who are working on body image, beauty fashion and feminism into a broader political movement, and has specific policy objectives like kitemarking of heavily airbrushed images in advertising. I wrote this speech in about half an hour, but it came from the heart more than many things that I've had more time to think about.
Hope you enjoy - and Happy International Women's Day.
* * *
I understand that I've been invited here to speak to you today because of my experiences with anorexia nervosa when I was younger, and because of my ongoing struggle with Body Dysmorphic Disorder. And I welcome that sentiment - too much contemporary policymaking, even good feminist policymaking, talks about young women and to young women without listening to young women.
So, I could talk to you about the deep pain of stuggling to feed oneself. I could talk to you about the years and years I spent fighting the condition, the battle to overcome the cues that even very intelligent young women pick up from parents, peers and the overculture about how young women ought to look and behave. I could tell you about the deep gouges I had to physically slice into my personal paradigm to persuade myself, against every message I was recieving, that it was okay to take up space, that it was okay to have physical and personal flaws, that the actual weight of my humanity as a woman was not repulsive or aberrant, that I did not have to starve myself and punish myself in order to be acceptable. I could tell you how I almost died, how I jeopardised my future and my education, how I broke my family's heart and set an incredibly bad example for my two younger sisters. And I could tell you how a culture that assaults us at every turn with images of impossibly thin, impossibly perfect, impossibly white, impossibly beautiful women made that process of recovery harder and more painful at every turn.
But I don't want to talk about that to the exclusion of all else. You all know, because you've read melodramatic personal stories in the papers, about how anorexia, bulima and other eating disorders work, about the hurt they cause to young women, their families and friends. Much of the rhetoric around eating disorders and hyper-sexualisation seems to patronise or even fetishise young women as impossibly vain, helpless victims who can't even look at one picture of a stick-thin model without rushing to the nearest bog to vomit up their breakfast. It's not that simple, and sensationalisting the victims of this sick culture of airbrushed femininity risks watering down the real message. Focusing on our victimhood risks turning the focus away from where our political energies should be directed - at the narrow coffin of corporate womanhood and the way it inveigles itself into every aspect of our society, at the unassailable market logic of brutal, homogenised, white, heterosexual femininity pushed by as a political obstacle rather than as a fact of life.
Imagine if it were young men whose plasticised, airbrushed, blandly sexual images you saw everywhere around you, imagine if it were young men who were starving themselves, sicknening themselves, neglecting their futures and their studies, paying doctors to butcher their bodies, bleaching their skin to make themselves resemble the relentless consensus of white, hetoronormative corporate gender fascism. Imagine if it were young men who understood that in order to get and keep a job they had to starve and bleach and punish themselves into a sick image of perfection, to literally shrink every aspect of their personhood, imagine if it were men who the market were complicit in erasing. We would be filling the streets in protest. There would be speeches in the House of Commons every day until change came. We would have to acknowledge that this is an issue of political urgency, and not a secret, private shame.
This campaign to get advertisers to label airbrushing is of vital importance. As a socialist I instinctively distrust the politics of symbolism, but this campaign does more than just send a message - it creates a precedent that attacks on women's personhood are political, that body image and beauty fascism are political, and attempts to erase real women and our real lives are something that Westminster should be addressing. When the deputy leader of the party in government is ridiculed for her quite normal appearance in the press, when she is insulted by being nominated for the 'rear of the year' campaign, sending a message that even powerful women can be contextualised and dismissed within a framework of patriarchal sexual and physical judgement, it's time for women in politics to take a stand. It's time for women and men with seniority and influence to take a stand on behalf of the selfhood of the next generation of leaders, politicians, entrepreneurs, homemakers, mothers, athletes and artists. It's time to take a stand, and it starts right here, with a campaign to tell advertisers and others with financial clout that there are things that matter more than money.
Fighting the sick, damaging influence of the corporate imagining of womanhood on the lives of real women might seem like an impossible task. When I've talked about this campaign over the past few weeks, I've been met by a resigned cynicism - you'll never get advertisers to stop selling products off the back of this endless parade of diseased, plastic woman-meat, it would be nice if you could, but you can't fight the market. The autonomous logic of misogynist capitalism can only be resisted at a personal, private level, and if individual girls can't resist it, that means we're not strong enough. I say: bollocks to that. For three reasons.
The first is that we are living in a society which is beginning to analyse the unstoppable logic of free-market identity politics for the first time. Particularly for young people, the recession has allowed us to dare to imagine that the market can't solve all our problems, that it can and should be questioned, that something isn't great just because people are prepared to pay for it.
The second is that there is a new energy for feminist activity. Women are beginning to remember that our failure to have it all and be it all is not a private shame but a political statement- we are beginning to wake up and feel the weight of our chains, some old, some new, and imagine lines of resistance.
And the third reason is quite simple. This is International Women's Day. One hundred years ago, when the first International Women's Day took place, the socialists who convened the conference could not imagine a world where women would be allowed to vote and to participate at all levels of the economy, a world where women would not be the property of their husbands, where we would be able, in most civilised places in the world, to access abortion, contraception and sexual healthcare. Women have won incredible victories in the past century against impossible odds, and today of all days we should remember that those victories are possible. Today of all days we should honour the memories and achievements of our radical foremothers by remembering that it's okay to dream big, that it's okay to demand change that smaller, more frightened people wouldn't even dare to envision, because it's been done before and we can do it again.
That energy of feminist politics, inspired by the example of courageous women from previous decades, is what gave me the courage to recover from anorexia. Choosing to say fuck everything I'd been told about how good little girls should be, choosing to start to live again at the point of collapse, is the hardest thing I will ever have to do in my life, far harder than the small task of changing the world. The energy of feminist politics reminds us that women are powerful, that we are vital, that our political concerns have relevance at the highest levels of government, and that if we stay brave, and stay clever, and remember how far we have come, there's nothing we can't do.
Thank you.
*****
You're not really allowed to say 'Socialist' in the House of Commons, but other than that the speech went down fairly well. I'll be talking more about this campaign as it progresses. Exciting times are ahead :)
Hope you enjoy - and Happy International Women's Day.
* * *
I understand that I've been invited here to speak to you today because of my experiences with anorexia nervosa when I was younger, and because of my ongoing struggle with Body Dysmorphic Disorder. And I welcome that sentiment - too much contemporary policymaking, even good feminist policymaking, talks about young women and to young women without listening to young women.
So, I could talk to you about the deep pain of stuggling to feed oneself. I could talk to you about the years and years I spent fighting the condition, the battle to overcome the cues that even very intelligent young women pick up from parents, peers and the overculture about how young women ought to look and behave. I could tell you about the deep gouges I had to physically slice into my personal paradigm to persuade myself, against every message I was recieving, that it was okay to take up space, that it was okay to have physical and personal flaws, that the actual weight of my humanity as a woman was not repulsive or aberrant, that I did not have to starve myself and punish myself in order to be acceptable. I could tell you how I almost died, how I jeopardised my future and my education, how I broke my family's heart and set an incredibly bad example for my two younger sisters. And I could tell you how a culture that assaults us at every turn with images of impossibly thin, impossibly perfect, impossibly white, impossibly beautiful women made that process of recovery harder and more painful at every turn.
But I don't want to talk about that to the exclusion of all else. You all know, because you've read melodramatic personal stories in the papers, about how anorexia, bulima and other eating disorders work, about the hurt they cause to young women, their families and friends. Much of the rhetoric around eating disorders and hyper-sexualisation seems to patronise or even fetishise young women as impossibly vain, helpless victims who can't even look at one picture of a stick-thin model without rushing to the nearest bog to vomit up their breakfast. It's not that simple, and sensationalisting the victims of this sick culture of airbrushed femininity risks watering down the real message. Focusing on our victimhood risks turning the focus away from where our political energies should be directed - at the narrow coffin of corporate womanhood and the way it inveigles itself into every aspect of our society, at the unassailable market logic of brutal, homogenised, white, heterosexual femininity pushed by as a political obstacle rather than as a fact of life.
Imagine if it were young men whose plasticised, airbrushed, blandly sexual images you saw everywhere around you, imagine if it were young men who were starving themselves, sicknening themselves, neglecting their futures and their studies, paying doctors to butcher their bodies, bleaching their skin to make themselves resemble the relentless consensus of white, hetoronormative corporate gender fascism. Imagine if it were young men who understood that in order to get and keep a job they had to starve and bleach and punish themselves into a sick image of perfection, to literally shrink every aspect of their personhood, imagine if it were men who the market were complicit in erasing. We would be filling the streets in protest. There would be speeches in the House of Commons every day until change came. We would have to acknowledge that this is an issue of political urgency, and not a secret, private shame.
This campaign to get advertisers to label airbrushing is of vital importance. As a socialist I instinctively distrust the politics of symbolism, but this campaign does more than just send a message - it creates a precedent that attacks on women's personhood are political, that body image and beauty fascism are political, and attempts to erase real women and our real lives are something that Westminster should be addressing. When the deputy leader of the party in government is ridiculed for her quite normal appearance in the press, when she is insulted by being nominated for the 'rear of the year' campaign, sending a message that even powerful women can be contextualised and dismissed within a framework of patriarchal sexual and physical judgement, it's time for women in politics to take a stand. It's time for women and men with seniority and influence to take a stand on behalf of the selfhood of the next generation of leaders, politicians, entrepreneurs, homemakers, mothers, athletes and artists. It's time to take a stand, and it starts right here, with a campaign to tell advertisers and others with financial clout that there are things that matter more than money.
Fighting the sick, damaging influence of the corporate imagining of womanhood on the lives of real women might seem like an impossible task. When I've talked about this campaign over the past few weeks, I've been met by a resigned cynicism - you'll never get advertisers to stop selling products off the back of this endless parade of diseased, plastic woman-meat, it would be nice if you could, but you can't fight the market. The autonomous logic of misogynist capitalism can only be resisted at a personal, private level, and if individual girls can't resist it, that means we're not strong enough. I say: bollocks to that. For three reasons.
The first is that we are living in a society which is beginning to analyse the unstoppable logic of free-market identity politics for the first time. Particularly for young people, the recession has allowed us to dare to imagine that the market can't solve all our problems, that it can and should be questioned, that something isn't great just because people are prepared to pay for it.
The second is that there is a new energy for feminist activity. Women are beginning to remember that our failure to have it all and be it all is not a private shame but a political statement- we are beginning to wake up and feel the weight of our chains, some old, some new, and imagine lines of resistance.
And the third reason is quite simple. This is International Women's Day. One hundred years ago, when the first International Women's Day took place, the socialists who convened the conference could not imagine a world where women would be allowed to vote and to participate at all levels of the economy, a world where women would not be the property of their husbands, where we would be able, in most civilised places in the world, to access abortion, contraception and sexual healthcare. Women have won incredible victories in the past century against impossible odds, and today of all days we should remember that those victories are possible. Today of all days we should honour the memories and achievements of our radical foremothers by remembering that it's okay to dream big, that it's okay to demand change that smaller, more frightened people wouldn't even dare to envision, because it's been done before and we can do it again.
That energy of feminist politics, inspired by the example of courageous women from previous decades, is what gave me the courage to recover from anorexia. Choosing to say fuck everything I'd been told about how good little girls should be, choosing to start to live again at the point of collapse, is the hardest thing I will ever have to do in my life, far harder than the small task of changing the world. The energy of feminist politics reminds us that women are powerful, that we are vital, that our political concerns have relevance at the highest levels of government, and that if we stay brave, and stay clever, and remember how far we have come, there's nothing we can't do.
Thank you.
*****
You're not really allowed to say 'Socialist' in the House of Commons, but other than that the speech went down fairly well. I'll be talking more about this campaign as it progresses. Exciting times are ahead :)
Wednesday, 10 June 2009
Perfect slaves?
There's been a rash of horrible articles recently, along with some great ones, about dieting, body image, self-harm and eating disorders. I can't look away from this stuff, especially not when I'm physically ill and my own body is just not behaving. Five years after I was hospitalised for anorexia as a 17-year-old, I still have to keep an eye on the way I'm eating: when my appetite goes, as it has now as a result of the deathflu, I can't just sip milkshakes and grumble like a normal overgrown student; instead, I have to battle it out between the little voice which wants to take the opportunity to avoid food for a few days, to lose some of that hated flab from my hips and tummy, and the other voice that doesn't trust me to eat properly on any day. On days like these, forcing a sandwich that I can't taste into my gland-swollen face, the whole tricky business of actually giving a damn about myself is hard enough already without being bombarded on all sides by images of thinnness, 'beauty' and trauma.I've written about this many times before. This article at The F Word in 2007 and this article for the Guardian in March this year explain just what depresses me so much about the constant saturation of news and comment about women's weight and body image in the information market over the past few years, particularly its pretence at 'concern' for our 'wellbeing'. Come off it. If mainstream media outlets really wanted us to feel better about ourselves they would commission fewer young female journalists to starve themselves as part of 'professional investigations into the mindset of thin'. Liz Jones' latest Daily Fail offering is as horrendous as it is heartbreaking, and makes me want to throw up in so many more ways than one.
I've just been watching Meera Syal's documentary about self-harm, in which she asks, amongst other things, why Asian women in particular are so very high-acheiving and yet so desperately unhappy - being the group statistically most likely both to graduate with high honours and to deliberately hurt their bodies. And now I can't stop thinking, about femininity, perfectionism, and what it is to be young and a woman today.
Perfectionism just doesn't cover it. Most women I know who are around my age are, to some extent, perfectionists. Why would we not be? We're told from the word dot that perfection is the only thing we can and should expect from ourselves, and that if we don't have the perfect body, the perfect face, the perfect hairdo, perfect exam results, a perfect job, a perfect boyfriend, perfect clothes, perfect friends and the perfect family - heaven forfend that we're gay, disAbled, tall, short, overweight, less than bright, non-white, poor or in any way average - then we've failed, utterly and totally failed, and we are worthless as human beings and as women. Furthermore, we are reminded at every stage that we are in constant competition with every other young man and woman in our peer group for a finite set of life's prizes. Perfectionism is no longer an infrequent personality trait: it is an universal standard for living.
Me, I'm susceptible. I'm frightened of failure; more frightened of personal and professional failure than I can possibly explain or even understand. Part of this is because I've already had, for my own twisted understanding of the term, to accept failure on a physical level: I chose to recover from anorexia, and to live, and in order to be functional I now need to eat. I weigh almost nine stone; I have fat on my upper arms and the beginnings of cellulite on my bottom; I have d-cup breasts, which I despise, and a tummy which no amount of sit-ups will flatten. People tell me that's not failure: but look around. Look at the news; look at any magazine or billboard you care to glance at. Thin is part of our lexicon for modern living. I'm not, and will never again be, thin: I have failed as a person, on one level at least.
If you think that's stupid, you're right. If you think that that's a trivial and appalling thing for someone as clever and as lucky as me to waste time worrying about, then you're right. But I'm not unusual in being subsceptible to perfectionism and control-freakery: I just happen, in the past, to have been dangerously more successful at it than most. Actually, this is something that most young women understand. The will to push yourself and the impetus to damage yourself are very close cousins, and they are deeply, politically enmeshed in the culture we have created for ourselves.
Poor Liz Jones. What's so upsetting is that she knows perfectly well what her own illness means, for her and for so many other women, anorexic, bulimic, dieting or merely obsessing over the size of their thighs like good little consumers:
Making us think about what we ate today and what we will eat tomorrow is a great way of ensuring women don’t have the energy to succeed. We don’t need ‘gender pay audits’ – to be announced tomorrow in the Equalities Bill – to find out why on earth women are paid less than men. (Liz Jones, Daily Mail, April 2009)
Young women today are brought up knowing exactly how much they stand to lose every second of every day; we are raised in panic and competition; no wonder we attempt to violently and cruelly control our messy selves, to inch ourselves into small, safe worlds of pain.
Yes, it's fucking political. I'm sorry, but it's fucking political, and it IS relevant, and it is urgent. I'm not just talking here about girls like me who are crazy enough to take the hurt and the horror right the way down. I'm talking about everyone: we all, to some extent, have to fight the urge to hurt ourselves, to work ourselves into the ground, to force ourselves towards perfection. Right now I've been an invalid for almost three days and I'm practically clawing at my bedroom walls with worry at the work I haven't done, the bits of my house I haven't cleaned, the inches I might be putting on that seem somehow to symbolise all the rest of it, all of that awful wanting, needing, longing. How sweet it would be to never be hungry again: never to have to hunger for life, for love, for achievement, for happiness, for the hundred little daily human longings that are too brief and too quickly grieved to even be named.
My whole life, all I've ever wanted has been for someone to tell me that I'm fine just the way I am. By the time people started saying it, it was already much too late: and besides, didn't every advert, every exam score, every magazine and tv show and book and film and friend and teacher prove them wrong? Nothing about us, as young women, is 'fine just the way it is'. Nothing about us can just be let be, to grow naturally and imperfectly into its whole self.
I make tea obsessively and drink it compulsively. Along with the cigarettes, it's the one little addiction I allow myself: imperfection, creeping in round the edges, staining my teeth, soiling my health and reminding me how gloriously unfinished and fragile and wild we are as humans. Perfection as anathema is awfully hard to hang onto, especially for women. I might still be a little feverish. But I'm trying my hardest to reject perfection. Not just to accept that I can't have it: to actively reject it, to refuse it, to stand and say that I will not serve. I refuse to serve a vanishing feminine mythos that keeps us all, one way or another, in chains. So I will: I will refuse to serve. Ask me how many calories there are in a mars bar and you can bet your life I'll pretend not to know.
I've just been watching Meera Syal's documentary about self-harm, in which she asks, amongst other things, why Asian women in particular are so very high-acheiving and yet so desperately unhappy - being the group statistically most likely both to graduate with high honours and to deliberately hurt their bodies. And now I can't stop thinking, about femininity, perfectionism, and what it is to be young and a woman today.
Perfectionism just doesn't cover it. Most women I know who are around my age are, to some extent, perfectionists. Why would we not be? We're told from the word dot that perfection is the only thing we can and should expect from ourselves, and that if we don't have the perfect body, the perfect face, the perfect hairdo, perfect exam results, a perfect job, a perfect boyfriend, perfect clothes, perfect friends and the perfect family - heaven forfend that we're gay, disAbled, tall, short, overweight, less than bright, non-white, poor or in any way average - then we've failed, utterly and totally failed, and we are worthless as human beings and as women. Furthermore, we are reminded at every stage that we are in constant competition with every other young man and woman in our peer group for a finite set of life's prizes. Perfectionism is no longer an infrequent personality trait: it is an universal standard for living.
Me, I'm susceptible. I'm frightened of failure; more frightened of personal and professional failure than I can possibly explain or even understand. Part of this is because I've already had, for my own twisted understanding of the term, to accept failure on a physical level: I chose to recover from anorexia, and to live, and in order to be functional I now need to eat. I weigh almost nine stone; I have fat on my upper arms and the beginnings of cellulite on my bottom; I have d-cup breasts, which I despise, and a tummy which no amount of sit-ups will flatten. People tell me that's not failure: but look around. Look at the news; look at any magazine or billboard you care to glance at. Thin is part of our lexicon for modern living. I'm not, and will never again be, thin: I have failed as a person, on one level at least.
If you think that's stupid, you're right. If you think that that's a trivial and appalling thing for someone as clever and as lucky as me to waste time worrying about, then you're right. But I'm not unusual in being subsceptible to perfectionism and control-freakery: I just happen, in the past, to have been dangerously more successful at it than most. Actually, this is something that most young women understand. The will to push yourself and the impetus to damage yourself are very close cousins, and they are deeply, politically enmeshed in the culture we have created for ourselves.
Poor Liz Jones. What's so upsetting is that she knows perfectly well what her own illness means, for her and for so many other women, anorexic, bulimic, dieting or merely obsessing over the size of their thighs like good little consumers:
Making us think about what we ate today and what we will eat tomorrow is a great way of ensuring women don’t have the energy to succeed. We don’t need ‘gender pay audits’ – to be announced tomorrow in the Equalities Bill – to find out why on earth women are paid less than men. (Liz Jones, Daily Mail, April 2009)
Young women today are brought up knowing exactly how much they stand to lose every second of every day; we are raised in panic and competition; no wonder we attempt to violently and cruelly control our messy selves, to inch ourselves into small, safe worlds of pain.
Yes, it's fucking political. I'm sorry, but it's fucking political, and it IS relevant, and it is urgent. I'm not just talking here about girls like me who are crazy enough to take the hurt and the horror right the way down. I'm talking about everyone: we all, to some extent, have to fight the urge to hurt ourselves, to work ourselves into the ground, to force ourselves towards perfection. Right now I've been an invalid for almost three days and I'm practically clawing at my bedroom walls with worry at the work I haven't done, the bits of my house I haven't cleaned, the inches I might be putting on that seem somehow to symbolise all the rest of it, all of that awful wanting, needing, longing. How sweet it would be to never be hungry again: never to have to hunger for life, for love, for achievement, for happiness, for the hundred little daily human longings that are too brief and too quickly grieved to even be named.
My whole life, all I've ever wanted has been for someone to tell me that I'm fine just the way I am. By the time people started saying it, it was already much too late: and besides, didn't every advert, every exam score, every magazine and tv show and book and film and friend and teacher prove them wrong? Nothing about us, as young women, is 'fine just the way it is'. Nothing about us can just be let be, to grow naturally and imperfectly into its whole self.
I make tea obsessively and drink it compulsively. Along with the cigarettes, it's the one little addiction I allow myself: imperfection, creeping in round the edges, staining my teeth, soiling my health and reminding me how gloriously unfinished and fragile and wild we are as humans. Perfection as anathema is awfully hard to hang onto, especially for women. I might still be a little feverish. But I'm trying my hardest to reject perfection. Not just to accept that I can't have it: to actively reject it, to refuse it, to stand and say that I will not serve. I refuse to serve a vanishing feminine mythos that keeps us all, one way or another, in chains. So I will: I will refuse to serve. Ask me how many calories there are in a mars bar and you can bet your life I'll pretend not to know.
Friday, 17 April 2009
Beauty and the bitch: radio appearance.
Attention train-wreck observers: I will be on BBC Radio Wales at 1.30 today, talking about beauty, body image, Britain's got talent, and why it's so disgusting that we're all congratulating ourselves so much over letting a less-than-attractive woman acheive something meaningful.
In the blue corner will be Sarah Burge, AKA Real Life Barbie, former playboy bunny and the woman with the world record for spending the most on cosmetic surgery. Other yet-to-be-confirmed guests include a former editor of FHM.
They're going to trouce me and I don't even care. This is going to be fun.
You can listen live here at 1.30; alternatively, it'll be at the same link on listen again.
In the blue corner will be Sarah Burge, AKA Real Life Barbie, former playboy bunny and the woman with the world record for spending the most on cosmetic surgery. Other yet-to-be-confirmed guests include a former editor of FHM.
They're going to trouce me and I don't even care. This is going to be fun.
You can listen live here at 1.30; alternatively, it'll be at the same link on listen again.
Friday, 1 August 2008
On Gaze
The point of being a woman who writes online is that nobody has to engage with you as a physical being. The point of having a blog is that it's a sphere of self-expression where your looks, whatever they are, don't come into it. You're not ogled as a pretty woman or dismissed as an unattractive one, you are free to be fully yourself, to have your ideas judged and digested on their own merit, whatever that merit may be. But today I've a visceral urge to talk about female beauty, and what it signifies, and I hope that in doing so I won't be betraying a sacred anti-physicality of feminist hyperspace by bringing my own experiences of beauty and lack of beauty into the picture.A few months ago, I was discussing the layout of the next article animatedly with my editor. He seemed unusually friendly and kept looking away from my face. When he turned away, I realised that I'd been leaning over the desk, pushing my breasts together, and had a lot of cleavage showing. Although I wasn't being terribly indecent, I was crashingly ashamed and humiliated. Suddenly, I wasn't a journalist with good ideas for the headline feature, I was an intern with a killer cleavage. I never asked for this. I despise the fact that I can't avoid presenting as sexual if I take any care over my appearance.
A recent study by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity found that 18% of women would rather give up 10 years of their lives than be obese, and up to 30% would rather be severely depressed and slender than fat and happy. The majority of women will clock up countless hours and sometimes spend money they can't afford in the name of 'grooming', and however many useless hours we put in, we already know we’ll never be good enough, not compared to the perfect airbrushed creatures gurning at us from a thousand posters, tv adverts, movies and magazine racks every day. We’re clever enough to have worked that one out for ourselves, but we do it anyway, because we’ve been raised in the certain knowledge that if we’re not pretty, we’re not worth anything.
Facebook, the cussing blind oracle of the modern world, informs me that I'm statistically not unattractive, and we all know that facebook cannot lie. I was never one of those girls at school. In fact, I was the sort of teenager who sat up late popping her whiteheads and weeping whilst listening to Janis Ian on repeat . But suddenly I’m twenty-one, my skin has cleared up (thank you, the combined pill) and I find myself worthy of a certain amount of hassle on public transport. Lucky, lucky me. Suddenly instead of invisible, 'pretty' is what I am, before I'm a journalist or a reader or a sister or a lover or a friend.
And this is something that men can be forgiven for not understanding. Men have the option of not presenting as sexual, but women don't - particularly not conventionally attractive women, and particularly not in a professional environment. Whatever I'm wearing, wherever I'm going, I'm now a sexual being whether I want to be or not. Because of my curves, my tits, the body I was born in, people stare at me on the underground to and from work, and I can't do anything about it, even though it's an erasure of personhood that prickles on the skin. A close friend, who happens to be extremely empirically and personally beautiful, recently confided in me that
'Since I started having it horribly brought to my attention that I fit one of the standard images [of female beauty], and since I started to get really creeped out and threatened by it rather than just irritated, I've hard to work very hard at being comfortable with my own sexuality. I feel that those strangers' eyes steal it from me.'
There is no freedom, for the young women of my generation, to define beauty in the way we want it, particularly not in the working world where a reasonable level of conventional dressing is expected. This is a sexuality that's imposed rather than joyfully accepted. A sexuality that any ogling guy is implicitly invited to participate in, with no assumption that we enjoy being stared at. That's not the point. Living in a body that's conventionally sexy means that you are there for others' enjoyment, not your own edification and certainly not for your own pleasure. And the more I feel lightly, ocularly raped every time I get on public transport, the less I feel I want to engage with my own sexuality in private. When you're a pretty woman, it's easy to feel like your sexuality is not your own, like your body is not your own. It's taken from you, and then sold back to you, every day, by the eyes of a thousand strangers. It makes you feel alien within your own skin. It makes you dissasociate from what you're told is your own sexuality. Since I sharpened up for work and learned to walk in high heels, I don't 'feel' sexy. I just feel angry.
In addition to the objectification of women, the media commits another assault on the dignity of women. This assault is the dismemberment of women, and it has not received the attention it deserves. - Kaycey D. Greening, Capital University.
Don't, don't for one second give me that crap about men having it just as bad. Men have no idea how bad it gets. The worn old argument that society has standards for everyone, not just women, and gosh, it sucks for straight white men too is universally the first part of a syllogism used by bigots, misogynists and defenders of the status quo. Men do not have to make the same power choices that women have to make when they are young. Men do not find themselves defined by how perky their tits and ass are, how bright their eyes, how high their heels, how bouncy their hair, how small their waist. Men do not struggle to remember what their own sexuality actually is under all the viral marketing. Little boys know that they are more than a set of numbers. Little girls learn to forget it.
And don't, don't for a second hit me with well, women judge other women far more harshly than men, so it must all be fine - because there is such a thing as the morality of slaves. Yes, women also judge other women, and no, that doesn't make those judgements okay, but hell, if we're going to be slaves then at least we can be the best slaves, and maybe one day they'll be grateful, and talk to us like human beings, and maybe some day we or our daughters will be free. For examples of strong, powerful young women being reduced to physical, sexual beings, I need point no further than the Jessica Valenti Breast Controversy (say it ten times fast).
Why don't we change? Because we're persuaded that we have so much to lose. So we continue to pluck, shave, starve, bleach, shop, polish, powder and wax until we can feel the weariness in our bones and the more we lay them down for approval, the less we own our bodies, sexually and otherwise.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)