So I saw Jessica Alba’s Campari Calender shots. And wow. They are gorgeous photos and she looks stunning.
The next day I saw a similar shot on a mag, and I was looking at her tiny frame and the impressive cleavage and it just wasn’t adding up. But I was only half paying attention and just figured it was the corset-like top, some ‘padding’ and some artful arrangement. I pondered how thin her arms were, how smooth and flawless, then thought of my own arms then went home to get drunk (no, not really I went home to ponder how much it would cost to get someone to whittle away at my body with a carving knife until an acceptably petite and lithe form emerged…again not really but you get my point).
Anyway this morning I see that Campari have photoshopped the shit out of the photos. Someone’s released the before and after shots. Now this is no ’stars without makeup’ thing, she looks stunning in both shots. It’s just that in the prior shots she looks like a young and impossibly beautiful woman, like a woman with a beautiful face who has the whole celebrity entourage that it takes to achieve a body like that – the chef, the trainer, the wardrobe person,the makeup artist, the lifestyle of never allowing herself the ’sin’ of eating what a man does, the hours of exercise a day.
Then they’ve taken these shots of this young woman in the designer clothes with the best makeup artistry money can buy, with the lighting carefully designed….and they’ve STILL carved away the curves of her hips, slimmed her down, trimmed her arms, erased ‘blemishes’, and given her bazoonkas twice the size (sidenote, I as a female feminist get to ironically deploy the word bazoonkas, men, you do not…deal with that).
What am I getting at here? Well ok…women walk around all day assaulted by images of ‘women’ (dieting models who exercise so much they are permanently grumpy) who THEN are airbrushed such that not even the MODELS have bodies like that.Each image reproaches us for not looking like that, for having lives with demands rather than sacrificing all in the time consuming quest for BeautyTM.
We listen to our lovers/male friends/coworkers, and various aquaintances salivate over Jessica Alba et al and we absorb the message…you’ll never win, you’re no Jessica Alba, your body is a pisspoor substitute for the unattainable dream of The Woman Who Looks Like That. Except for the fact that even she doesn’t. Our images of her are STILL tweaked and toned, slimmed and trimmed, consumed, regurgitated and pasted back together to resemble not Jessica Alba (and certainly not Women) but a fucking caricature of femininity, a body so unattainable that even The Most Beautiful don’t have it.
And that is the ideal we hold out to women and men. This is what women ’should’ strive to look like, and this is what men ’should’ desire to have.
This is what girls and boys absorb before they’re old enough to communicate it. This is what they grow into.
And this is what makes aging bullshit difficult. Here I lay on my sick day in my very sassy new red cotton pajamas, and I bemoan that my body is so…like a body and not like an airbrushed mannequin. My body has aches and pains. It gets hungry. It gets sick. It gets tired. You can see its veins. It has curves and is squishy. It is full of desires and dreams. It carries me through days at work, nights of study, it is a body of a woman. A whole woman, aged 32. It is a body that carries its history, of childbirth, of trauma, of stresses and anxiety. It is a body that loves and gives.
But it is a body that absorbs that it is seen as irrelevant, fading, invisible, incomparable with those glorified images of ‘women’ because they’ve removed any evidence that those bodies *are* women. You never see a vein, a blemish, a hair, a stretchmark, an actual fucking curve caused by a real waist rather than a computerised gradient.
What is left for women? When they realise that even if they gave up careers and dreams, lives and commitments and put their energies full time into diet, exercise and beauty regimes that they would never achieve the look of Jessica Alba since it’s all still digitally ‘improved’? (And since they know they don’t look like her to start off with). What becomes of their bodies? Their desires? Their ability to *be* or *feel* desired? How do you opt out of this system of demands placed on women?
I whinged to my son that I felt I had the options of spending hours and lots of money on ‘getting ready’ to leave the house, choosing the right clothes, doing the hair just so, putting on makeup and jewellery etc…or saying fuck it. But saying fuck it saves me time and allows me to get on with life, but it means that I feel all the more accutely the invisibility of myself and the constant array of lithe young bodies dressed to the nines. But even dressed up I know the truth of the ways in which our comparitive bodies are seen.
What do you do when you’re getting older and beauty is focussed exclusively on youth and thinness? What do you do when desire is constructed around the female body as object? And yours is not looking like the ‘idealised object’? Where is your place in the world? When you start to realise that your youthful beauty got you more attention and praise than any amalgamation of your wit, love, intelligence, fire, passion, creativity and ferocity? When the world says ‘no thanks’ to women with talents that don’t revolve around ‘hot bodies’ and skimpy clothing?
What is left for us?
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Sure, I can see that Rebekka.
Yes, I know beauty standards are bullshit. Yes, I know that magazine constructions of beauty are impossible even for the Jessica Albas of the world. Yes, I know that my body issues and periodic self-hate are subjective, influenced by mood and circumstance, and I know I have a partner and a family who think I’m gorgeous and perfect and don’t need to change. I still feel the pressure to be something I can never be. I still feel shit about my looks. And then I feel shit about kowtowing to patriarchal beauty standards which I fully understand are instituted to hold me back.
Fine and others, this is what it’s about. (Still enjoy the ageing invisibility, though – but not immune to the feeling shit about ones’ looks thing!)
It isn’t what it’s all about to me, Helen.
I’ll just quote PC back at 56, because I think it sums up how I think about this.
“Which is why I maintain that some personal responsibility for resistance must be taken, and I’m not saying that FP doesn’t, only reacting to the angry claims being made that in the face of sociocultural stuff like this we can’t help how we feel. We can. And we should.”
And this from FP:
it’s about refusing the logic of ‘harden the f*ck up’, and saying ‘Oh no, the problem here is not *me* and my lack of ‘hardness’, it’s the ways we do things, it’s society, it’s bigger than me, it’s institutionalised, political and powerful.
This should be on a plaque somewhere, because that “harden the f88k up” / “get out of the kitchen” (which is generally code for back to the kitchen) is so ubiquitous over all discussions between feminists and their opponents everywhere.
Fine, look at the quote above and PC’s quote, they are not mutually exclusive. I do fight against this thing every day but at the same time I don’t kid myself that “it” has gone away.
In the interests of averting another telling-off following this, my last comment at this blog, I’ll let Alison Light’s London Review of Books commentary on Three Guineas (21 March 2002) do my talking for me, in defence of the logic of harden the fuck up, in the face of oppression and worse, or of what Light calls ‘a different kind of inner discipline’:
I would say that is the very reverse of harden the fuck up which, similar to what Helen has said, I see as an attempt to redefine a structural and political problem as a matter of individual choice and our “conflicting desires” as evidence of individual failure. Looking at those conflicting desires at the personal and the structural level seems to me to be what FP was doing in her piece. I still have those desires and I think that if anyone has gone beyond them and no longer struggles that is very admirable but “harden the fuck up” is not a very detailed guide book on how to get there.
At the risk of being repetitive, different kinds of resistance are more accessible depending on class and other forms of privilege. How often are we giving up what we can well afford and may in fact have other reasons for disavowing? I am not trying to suggest that all resistance is useless but I think it is worthwhile asking the question. Nor do I think that the only political acts are one’s that make us uncomfortable, for a woman to follow her own desires without reference to other’s expectations is itself a radical act but only if she is doing the work of disentangling what is hers and what has been imposed upon her. Isn’t that one of the things considered in FP’s post? I am far from done sorting out what is mine and what is an expectation that I have assimilated and any chance to reconsider that in company with women who are at different stages in that journey is very welcome to me.
Off topic: One form of privilege that we don’t often discuss in isolation, as it is usually connected to the politics of childrearing (which is interesting in itself) is that of being partnered. Society still treats a woman unencumbered by a man as a kind of toxic free radical, a destabilizing and pernicious influence. Just being partnered eases one’s way in a manner that can be hard to pin down and only becomes really obvious again when you suddenly alone. I suppose that a solo woman is seen as having an uncomfortable degree of power (sexual but also other forms of power, it being somewhat more difficult to live solo that in partnership) and partnering is seen as a neutralising of that power.
I really hope you change your mind about commenting, Laura.
Ouch one apostrophe fail and one lapse into Vogon.
As a newcomer to this blog, I have found the discussion here of one of the most all-pervading issues to affect women in western society fascinating and interesting. I really enjoy reading different ideas about how women may best combat the body-image problem.
A good argument between eloquent proponents of differing viewpoints is the sign of a really useful blog. I have found both sides of this particular argument quite convincing at different points along this thread. I still don’t know whether “I blame the patriarchy” is more helpful than “harden the fuck up” or vice versa, but it’s been a thought-provoking few days.
Anyway, if this is laura’s last comment here, that’s a shame, as I find discussions between people with differing viewpoints more engaging and informative than discussions between those who agree about everything.
Su, what a wonderful metaphor! (single woman = toxic free radical, according to society). And every hiker lapses into Vogon on occasion. Have another sip on your gargle-blaster and it should pass.
It is indeed off the topic of this thread, but I am fascinated by different women’s experiences of being single compared to being partnered. I personally felt that the whole of society backed off when I finally got a boyfriend in my mid-20s. Before boyfriend everyone seemed to assume my life was utterly messy and un-sorted and constantly instructed me about what I should and shouldn’t be doing, and after boyfriend people suddenly stopped giving me advice about what I should do with my life, as if just by being partnered my life was no longer a work in progress. And I don’t just mean advice about “how to get a man”, I mean every aspect of my life: career, hobbies and interests etc. Was I suddenly a grown-up? Or did I now have a parent/guardian again who would make important decisions for me? I certainly never felt that society considered me powerful in any way when I was single. Quite the contrary. The power of subversion is perhaps rarely felt by the subverter herself.
Actually, this topic does intersect with the thread topic. I always assumed that once a woman was married/long-term partnered, the pressure to be bizarrely thin would drop away if one’s partner was openly disdaining of such pressures. But I know women whose partners are completely happy with their bodies as nature intended and these women are STILL obsessed with losing weight. What’s that about?
Because conforming to societal expectations of constant dieting and striving for thinness isn’t all about catching a man. Fat-hate is so, so, so much bigger than “no one will ever love you”.
When you introduced the topic, I immediately started thinking of the other side: het-partnered fat women who are content with their bodies, and whose partners are, still get flak or are looked at with suspicion and disdain – and so do/are their partners, for loving a fat woman.
Laura, that quote is great. What’s interesting to me is that I don’t think it contradicts what FP was saying; after all, Virginia Woolf herself selected aspects of her cultural world to challenge, and others to abide by (to be hideously basic, e.g., she married). What FP is testifying to (along with Su, in her great comment above) is the extreme ambivalence involved in any political action: we are complex, fragmented and multi-faceted people, which can easily lead to the desire to be pretty even as one knows how that desire is produced and how it functions socially. Both FP and Su are also observing the tendency to be able to experience this ambivalence as both radically individual (which as Theriomorph pointed out in her awesomely awesome of awesomeness post, situates it as non-political) and a failure to be ‘properly’ feminist. Feminism, at various times and in various places, has tended to function (or be experienced as functioning) normatively, requiring women to feel a particular way in order to be properly feminist (this, I would suggest, is the result of larger social logics which situate almost everyone as never-quite-adequate, which feminism cannot help but participate in).
In the end, we all do negotiate with the social world; we can’t not. It seems that you, Laura, have been extremely successful in creating routines, habits and an entire style of life that sustains you as a feminist woman. This is great, and no one would deny that. But this does not indicate a failure on the part of others who have different sensitivities, experiences, routines, habits, styles of life (and it’s important to note, I think, that different forms of feminism will situate different aspects of the cultural milieu as oppressive or problematic, without this being a problem with the feminism, or the feminist). The distinction between the particular and the universal is useful to an extent, but it also doesn’t capture the extent to which the two are imbricated: it’s pretty clear from the response here that FP is not alone in her experience, but even if she were, why does this necessarily mean that her experience is not bound up with larger social structures? There is a tendency in political movements generally to avoid complexity in order to present a united and singular front. But this precludes an articulation of the complexities of experience, and as a result, tends to situate those political desires as an ‘ought’ not only for the world generally (as in, the world ought not to be misogynist), but for those who live in it, including the activist. I personally think that we need to work at legitimising an alternative and more complex model of political action which can engage with the experiences of those for whom it is undertaken (as well as those who are (often constitutively) excluded from it, a labour at which many feminists continue to work). To me, the model of political action which requires a singular and united front participates in the conservative politics it is so often working against (which is not to say that this is never a useful position to take, as often this is most efficacious; but we can attempt to challenge this, especially within the ranks, as it were). I am indeed sorry that you feel you can no longer comment here, Laura, and hope that you will reconsider this decision.
And Lauredhel, the point about het, partnered, fat women is a really good one, I think. The logics which sustain women’s sense of being inadequate are so so complex, and that’s a great example. When I teach this stuff, I often have students who claim that the media is to blame (conveniently, the media is a faceless mass, of course, whilst individual media people are never really to blame for ‘giving the public what they want’). I’d never deny that the media participates in it, but sheesh, it’s a tad more complicated than that!
Hi all – I just backed away from the blog this weekend after the conflicts in this thread. I do feel rather wounded that some of my comments have been read so vastly opposite to my intent, and that people who’ve read me regularly could feel that I was criticising their practices in general rather than some specific communications made in this thread.
Like WP, I don’t find that Laura’s Woolf quote contradicts either FP or myself: Woolf’s strategy of “passivity” avoided direct conflict but it didn’t avoid the message, it was personal civil disobedience that challenged the system insidiously. Pacificism is defiance, not avoidance.
Despite this disagreement over what is largely semantics (but semantics are important in activism) I have great respect and affection for Laura as a blogger and commentor. I hope she does come back to comment here again.
To avoid thread derailment I’ve put my somewhat tangetial thoughts here: http://rapturousthinking.blogspot.com/2008/12/on-beauty.html
You may notice that I appear to be a man, this is biologically true but I STILL have acne at 31, STILL have the same barrel for a torso that gained me tourture throughout school, and STILL feel bad about it
Thank thank thank you for this wonderful post, FP. I’ve felt this for years and I’ve never seen it expressed like this before.
I was infuriated by Fine’s “get over it” response, but mighty impressed by the responses it gave rise to from you, Laurelhed and Tigtog and QoT and others.
Thanks again.
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