don't the trees look like crucified bees
Jan. 19th, 2010 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbLet's begin with an anecdote.
There's a set of billboards in Pearse St. station. Most of them are boring fare: film adverts; a quote (out of context) from the New Testament advertising an evangelical bible study course that's been there for at least a year; coffee; Guinness; Lucozade.
Monday there was a new one. Kellogg's Special K cereal. A woman, head not in the frame, in a red shirt and blue jeans. Her arse was the most prominent part of the frame, as it is in the image at the bottom of the page here. Caption: "Love Your Jeans." Very male-gaze, somewhat creepily sexualised.
See, you'd think I'd be in their advertising demographic. I'm female, I eat cereal, and if it had been a frame of a woman doing something active, with the caption "Love Your Body," I might have even found the ad appealing.
But no. Jeans are not something you wear because they're comfy and they keep you from being naked in inappropriate places. They're - obviously - something female-identified persons only wear so they can appeal to persons who might find them sexually attractive.
And that ad's pretty mild as fucked-up objectification goes.
Another anecdote. There're banks of televisions in the gym. Mostly they play sports, which is inoffensive in a gym, or music vids. The music vids almost uniformly contain scantily-clad skinny young women gyrating in clichéd, sexualised ways. In many cases, it may as well be pornography, and it's clearly not intended for a female audience.
The fetishisation of female sexual availability in those videos is disturbing, mainly because it's clearly not the female performer enjoying her own body for the hell of it. "Performer" is the operative word: it's a performance, one which reduces the women involved to objects in a fantasy.
It's tiresome, and tiring, and of a piece with larger cultural dynamics concerning femaleness.
I haven't mentioned - or maybe I have - that my self-image is rather seriously screwed up in somewhat complex ways. Leaving aside for the moment body-image issues, let me mention the performance of femaleness.
I can't do it.
Let me be as clear as I can. I'm female, and quite happy to have come that way. I have a body I'm usually quite happy with, since I can convince it to climb walls and run a brisk mile or two. While I might be five to eight kilos over a good fighting weight (ninety-five kilos at the last weigh-in, and I'm pretty sure my healthy fighting weight is somewhere between eighty-five and ninety, what with being five foot eight and a bit and having all this shoulder from climbing) I'm not really all that worried about it. I'll fix that when the days get longer and I have a little less stress on my hands. Okay, so I loathe my breasts, but they get in the way of doing shit. I even like boys, although that's not a component part of femaleness except in the narrow minds of bigots.
But I cannot perform femaleness. Any of the performances of femininity - wearing make-up, skirts, long hair, jewellery beyond, perhaps, a necklace on a very rare occasion: the shaving of legs, the wearing of clothes which emphasis the femaleness of one's body - I can't, physically, bring myself to do them.
In my head, the personal performance of femininity has become too closely confused with the acceptance of the "object" position. (This does not apply to other people. I am aware that this is my weird quirk.)
When I have the - rare - opportunity to choose clothing for other than purely utilitarian purposes, I have noticed that I choose clothing which is as close to gender-neutral as I can find. Or "mannish," to use my grandmother's word. (Leaving aside the fact that about the only shirts that fit across the shoulder are men's large: women can have breasts, but not shoulders, apparently.) This has on occasion led to amusing exchanges with persons of middle age in public toilets, where I am informed that this is the "ladies' room."
I've grown rather weary of needing to defend my femaleness in the absence of the socially-mandated performance thereof. Said performance makes me feel ill to even contemplate. And yet it has been made clear to me in countless niggling ways that if one is (physically insofar as the physical markers go) female and does not present as unambiguously so, one will run into countless smaller and larger difficulties. Which I have so far been largely insulated from because I've been living in the bubble-world of university undergraduate life, and here everyone is weird to some degree.
And I'm not, either personally or in any analysis of wider cultural cues, able to disentangle the performance of "femininity" from the "object" position. I'm not an object, but if I start presenting myself in ways which are objectified - and, in fact, dehumanised - in media and culture, then I must accept than some people will use this as an excuse to see me as an object, and be thus complicit in my own objectification.
(Okay, so some people are never going to see other people as anything other than objects. We call them sociopaths. And CEOs. Screw them.)
It's, you know, one of those insoluble dilemma thingies. Here in my head? I think things will always be a little screwed up.
I'd enjoy these little dilemmas a lot more if they only existed in the abstract.
There's a set of billboards in Pearse St. station. Most of them are boring fare: film adverts; a quote (out of context) from the New Testament advertising an evangelical bible study course that's been there for at least a year; coffee; Guinness; Lucozade.
Monday there was a new one. Kellogg's Special K cereal. A woman, head not in the frame, in a red shirt and blue jeans. Her arse was the most prominent part of the frame, as it is in the image at the bottom of the page here. Caption: "Love Your Jeans." Very male-gaze, somewhat creepily sexualised.
See, you'd think I'd be in their advertising demographic. I'm female, I eat cereal, and if it had been a frame of a woman doing something active, with the caption "Love Your Body," I might have even found the ad appealing.
But no. Jeans are not something you wear because they're comfy and they keep you from being naked in inappropriate places. They're - obviously - something female-identified persons only wear so they can appeal to persons who might find them sexually attractive.
And that ad's pretty mild as fucked-up objectification goes.
Another anecdote. There're banks of televisions in the gym. Mostly they play sports, which is inoffensive in a gym, or music vids. The music vids almost uniformly contain scantily-clad skinny young women gyrating in clichéd, sexualised ways. In many cases, it may as well be pornography, and it's clearly not intended for a female audience.
The fetishisation of female sexual availability in those videos is disturbing, mainly because it's clearly not the female performer enjoying her own body for the hell of it. "Performer" is the operative word: it's a performance, one which reduces the women involved to objects in a fantasy.
It's tiresome, and tiring, and of a piece with larger cultural dynamics concerning femaleness.
I haven't mentioned - or maybe I have - that my self-image is rather seriously screwed up in somewhat complex ways. Leaving aside for the moment body-image issues, let me mention the performance of femaleness.
I can't do it.
Let me be as clear as I can. I'm female, and quite happy to have come that way. I have a body I'm usually quite happy with, since I can convince it to climb walls and run a brisk mile or two. While I might be five to eight kilos over a good fighting weight (ninety-five kilos at the last weigh-in, and I'm pretty sure my healthy fighting weight is somewhere between eighty-five and ninety, what with being five foot eight and a bit and having all this shoulder from climbing) I'm not really all that worried about it. I'll fix that when the days get longer and I have a little less stress on my hands. Okay, so I loathe my breasts, but they get in the way of doing shit. I even like boys, although that's not a component part of femaleness except in the narrow minds of bigots.
But I cannot perform femaleness. Any of the performances of femininity - wearing make-up, skirts, long hair, jewellery beyond, perhaps, a necklace on a very rare occasion: the shaving of legs, the wearing of clothes which emphasis the femaleness of one's body - I can't, physically, bring myself to do them.
In my head, the personal performance of femininity has become too closely confused with the acceptance of the "object" position. (This does not apply to other people. I am aware that this is my weird quirk.)
When I have the - rare - opportunity to choose clothing for other than purely utilitarian purposes, I have noticed that I choose clothing which is as close to gender-neutral as I can find. Or "mannish," to use my grandmother's word. (Leaving aside the fact that about the only shirts that fit across the shoulder are men's large: women can have breasts, but not shoulders, apparently.) This has on occasion led to amusing exchanges with persons of middle age in public toilets, where I am informed that this is the "ladies' room."
I've grown rather weary of needing to defend my femaleness in the absence of the socially-mandated performance thereof. Said performance makes me feel ill to even contemplate. And yet it has been made clear to me in countless niggling ways that if one is (physically insofar as the physical markers go) female and does not present as unambiguously so, one will run into countless smaller and larger difficulties. Which I have so far been largely insulated from because I've been living in the bubble-world of university undergraduate life, and here everyone is weird to some degree.
And I'm not, either personally or in any analysis of wider cultural cues, able to disentangle the performance of "femininity" from the "object" position. I'm not an object, but if I start presenting myself in ways which are objectified - and, in fact, dehumanised - in media and culture, then I must accept than some people will use this as an excuse to see me as an object, and be thus complicit in my own objectification.
(Okay, so some people are never going to see other people as anything other than objects. We call them sociopaths. And CEOs. Screw them.)
It's, you know, one of those insoluble dilemma thingies. Here in my head? I think things will always be a little screwed up.
I'd enjoy these little dilemmas a lot more if they only existed in the abstract.
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-20 05:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-20 06:22 am (UTC)As for gender 'requirements' I have been known to wear make up and wear dresses, rarely. Never for society but for myself. Eyeliner because it brings out my eyes and I see that as a positive thing if I'm trying to attract someone but then again I am perfectly happy not to wear any make-up 99.9 per cent of the time and generally only do so on a whim. Dresses because they are a different form of clothes that I don't wear often so they hold a novel facination for me though they do illicit amusing and saddening reactions of how "beautiful I look" despite me possessing the same attibutes outside of a dress. In the end it comes down to accepted forms of vanity. I wear mens boxers, a vanity in gay culture and style but not acceptable in the majority of mainstream society, baggy jeans or genderless clothes. I wear clothes that are nearly exclusively from female stores as they are the ones that fit me, I wear plain non gender obvious clothing and my runners are unisex. I am firmly a women and I see my energy as a strong feminine force but I have been accused of masculinity for not being mainstream. I believe that it is impossible for me to be manly as I am a woman, I feel like a woman, I like women, I feel like a women yet despite my obvious gender due to my sexuality, rock climbing, martial arts and my ability to work with my hands and fix manual problems I am 'boyish', I am a 'tomboy'. No I am fucking not. I am Jenn. This is what I wear, this is how I thinks, This is what I like to do. I may not share that with the majority of women but trust me when I say that there is nothing boyish about me.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-20 09:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-20 11:35 am (UTC)Although my physical shape is unambiguously female, I completely fail at girly. Somewhere inside me there's a yearning voice that whispers "wear dresses! heels! handbags! stockings! nail varnish!" When I do, the voice says, "good girl". But a girly get-up feels so alien and uncomfortable that I can't sustain it for more than one day every three months or so; for the rest of the time, it's jeans, trainers and t-shirts. The voice inside doesn't like this.
Before I read your entry, I've never wondered what this voice was; where this yearning to conform to the outward standards of femininity was coming from. I don't think I want to be an object. And yet.
I'll go away and think some more, and thanks for writing this.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-20 12:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-20 01:03 pm (UTC)But for me, it's so inextricably bound up with the "object" position that I'm incapable of disentangling almost any aspect of it from poisonous cultural narratives.
(So I thought I'd tell elljay all about it. Because I sure as hell don't have sword of Damocles to cut through the knot, if I can mix my mythological references. :P )
no subject
Date: 2010-01-20 09:37 pm (UTC)Yes, but the frustrating thing is, as someone who does like "girly" things, that society making feminity performative often ruins the fun for me. Which is why I totally empathize with what you are saying, despite half my work clothes consisting of girly skirts.
In a lot of ways, I was such as super girly girly when I was little. (see: icon of me, circa 4 yo, playing with a truck, sporting braids and a pastel striped shirt with puffy sleaves) I was totally the girl who begged her mom to let her wear frilly dresses to school* and my "first day of school" outfit almost always consisted of a dress or a skirt.
But then I hit puberty. early. and over the next couple of years everything changed. having pretty clothes became a competition. or, well, much more of one. a competition that acne riddled, glasses wearing, not svelte me could never compete in. and it wasn't enough to wear pretty things that I liked, I was supposed to wear the right pretty things. and it wasn't for me, it was...well, I was never quite sure who it was for. although I was pretty certain it was the same people who didn't think science was for girls. and on top of all this, it didn't matter what I wore, my already C/D/DD cup breasts marked me as "girl" and resulted in rude comments from passing cars.
so, I did a compete 180 and by high school was wearing the most boyish clothes I could manage to get into, considering my figure. including actually attempting to shop in the boys section of department stores. (didn't work out well, turns out most guys don't have breasts, so the shirts never fit right)
and it wasn't until I'd been at my all-women's college for a while that I began to relax back into the idea that sometimes "girly' stuff is fun to wear. but it's still a very different experience from when I was younger. and usually not in a good way.
*until I realized that cartwheels and long frilly dresses do not mix well. Cartwheels are sooooooo much more important and fun than frilly dresses.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-20 09:49 pm (UTC)I think I probably have more to say than that, but I'm just in from climbing and thus have no brain left.
I think the way in which women are encouraged to compete in the performance of femininity - in the markers of the "object" class (I think that might be an accurate description, even if the things which demarcate the object class would be in themselves harmless and are in fact subvertable) - is incredibly damaging.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-20 11:14 pm (UTC)Also, not all of the stuff that marks me as "female" counts as performing properly. For example, my size breasts on my size frame and with my weight read more as "fat while female" than "feminine" and that's always the case no matter my weight (until I reach the very lowest of my personal healthy weight). So sometimes just being me and not feeling ashamed enough of my body to hide it feels subversive. But that's only when I'm feeling super good about myself, and that's both rare and easily toppled.
My usual way of getting around all this though, is to focus my "girly" efforts on the stuff most people don't see. Like the pink, yellow, and green depression era glass that I use as soap dishes in my bathroom. Needless to say, I can't ever get away from society's gender expectations - it's inside me, after all - but it's easier to just have fun and not worry what other people will think when I'm at home doing crafty stuff or decorating. It's much harder when I'm in public and the focus is on my appearance.
(what was that thing Virginia Woolf said about a room of one's own?)
no subject
Date: 2010-01-20 11:28 pm (UTC)and obviously, by "focusing my "girly" efforts" I meant not that I feel compelled to "be a girl." Rather, that I focus my creative energy on stuff most people won't see, because much of my creative efforts would read as "girly" if people did see them.
the phrasing being, of course, sarcastic.
Mostly.
Except in the sense that I still feel compelled to hide being female/feminine in public (to the extent that I can) in order to be taken seriously, and this sometimes results in a pent up desire to engage in "girly" activities, which I indulge in at home.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-21 10:04 am (UTC)*blames the patriarchy*
(Really, all I have to add is Word.)