eros, logos

Thursday, January 15, 2009

body

It's a more or less familiar point now that culture is written on the body. It's especially been so for women, that the body has been and continues to be a mechanism for social control. I do not mean only in the sense I have written about before when discussing my abortion and my assault by my gynecologist: control of fertility.

I refer rather to the ways in which cultural norms are inscribed onto women's bodies, in clothing and the body itself . De Beauvoir writes of the objectifying gaze, of woman as Other. And so we are: the female body exists as an object of attention, regardless of what we wish, and in a peculiar way. It is a sort of gaze that turns us into Object, and not subjects in our own right, this invasive, penetrating, gaze.

I remember when I began to be conscious of myself as Object and Other. I was around 12; this is probably around when most women begin to receive that sort of attention. It brings with it a certain kind of nakedness or vulnerability. I don't mean only that you are looked at in such a way as if you were naked all the time, but that's part of it. It's as if overnight one becomes aware that one exists in the gaze of others, and purely as a physical thing. It's wearying. It is also frightening. Not just the obvious things,--the flashers, the men on public transport that lean into you and grope you, the cars that stop or slow down in the street when you walk, the complete strangers on the street who say things to you. All those things are frightening, and especially so when you are 12 and first receiving them. But what is truly frightening, and annihilating, is the realisation that they are a universal experience--this is happening not only to you, but to virtually all women, all who meet a certain low standard of "attractiveness" (and it is low: being a teenager and/or having breasts and hips is virtually sufficient to guarantee these sorts of male attention).

Those overt acts though are only the most obvious reminders of this inescapable and exhausting awareness that one comes to have all the time: the awareness that you are forever being seen, without being seen.

You suddenly discover a power you have, but it is one which corrupts because it alienates. It alienates you from the self as Subject, this constant awareness that one is seen first and always as beautiful or desirable sexual Object.

It's surely no coincidence that it is right around this age when we start to see a perceptible decline in women's performance in math and science. It's as if we are told to make a choice, body or mind, beauty or brains but not both, never both...and never, never, never too much of either. That would be too much of a threat, you see.

This is probably the grain of truth behind the fat is a feminist issue camp. Yes, we should all love our bodies, in all their variety; and the current cult of anorexic thinness is about more than the fear or loathing of mature womanhood, those hips capable of bearing children, those breasts capable of nurturing them. One can also view anorexia as the manifestation of a literal desire to take up less space in the world. It is both subversive and highly conformative. Pathology as protest, it is as if the anorectic says, I will take your ideas of womanhood, of self-denial, of restraint, and I will excel at them. Is this what you want from Women? Here it is, take it.

But it is not truly liberating to either slavishly embrace or fiercely reject the notions of beauty that are dictated to us. Reacting against them and embracing the opposite is to be just as controlled by them as the woman who hates waxing, pedicures,-- all the physical maitenance of the self as Object--- but performs it dutifully anyway. Worse, the condemnation among some 'feminists' of women who are beautiful--the assertion that having breast implants, for example, somehow makes someone less of a feminist--is exactly the old story of female competition, now dressed up as ideology.

This sort of feminism exactly replicates what they accuse the 'patriarchy' of: judging the value of a woman--in this case, her political commitments--based entirely on her appearance. Object and not Subject, again: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

I reject these ways of thinking. I reject the pressures that tell us to have tits but not brains, or brains and no tits. I reject the pressures that tell me that to have my brains taken seriously I can't also look female. Yes, you will look at my tits; but I won't hide them for all that, anymore than I would ever hide my brains. I love them both, you see, and my sort of feminism tells me that I must reject the false dichotomy that demands I be one or the other, body or mind but not both. In fact my sort of feminism tells me I must be both: I need to hit you with everything I am, and by doing so I force you to acknowledge all of me....and even if you can't, I still win, because I've neither denied nor suppressed any part of me.

I assert women's right to be both, and to own both: beauty and brains, body and mind, sex and sensibility, embodied spirit, and ensouled body. Too much? I say, too bad.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own.

Labels: body, deBeauvoir, dichotomies, feminism, Object