true that human beings make sense of the world by exercising judgment and grouping human beings together by characteristic, but that doesn’t mean it’s ideal or helps contribute to a better, more inclusive world. Fashion has a long way to go before it is democratised. It’d be great if fat people could wear amazing clothes, shit it’d be a good start if my husband could find a collared business shirt that fit his neck! While some fashion industry participants might be ignorant of barriers to involvement, I know a lot of the decisions leading to othering are financial too. I think we need to talk about that, as a community of human beings that are required by social convention to be clothed, because if we’re going to have standards just so human beings on the fringe can be looked down on – that’s pretty horrific and unjust. By blogging about the problematic parts I hope to contribute to a wider discussion of the issues, because I see democratisation as a pretty nice goal – but it’s certainly not happening right now just because a couple of bloggers sat in the front row of a runway show.
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Saturday, July 31, 2010
Often, when I
see frocks with manifold pleats, ruffles, and ornaments, fitting so beautifully on beautiful bodies, I think they will not remain that way for long, instead they will develop wrinkles that cannot be ironed out, thick, unremovable dust will settle in the adornments, and no girl will want to appear so dismal and ridiculous as to slip into the same, precious frock early in the morning and take it off at night.
Still, I see girls who are certainly beautiful and display many attractive muscles and small bones and taut skin and masses of fine hair, and yet they sport that same natural masquerade day after day, always propping that same face on the same palms and letting their mirrors reflect it.
It is only on some nights, when they come home late from a party, that the frock looks frayed in the mirror, puffy, dusty, already seen by everyone and scarcely to be worn again.
Still, I see girls who are certainly beautiful and display many attractive muscles and small bones and taut skin and masses of fine hair, and yet they sport that same natural masquerade day after day, always propping that same face on the same palms and letting their mirrors reflect it.
It is only on some nights, when they come home late from a party, that the frock looks frayed in the mirror, puffy, dusty, already seen by everyone and scarcely to be worn again.
Often I believed
that this is what I was truly most afraid of: Ikea as major milestone marker. College, first home, babies. But maybe more accurately, more honestly, I was afraid of the milestones themselves as much as I was of the the area rugs and PAX wardrobes that went with them.
here
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For men and
women alike, casual misogyny is the climate and context of all their interactions. It is unconcealed and automatic. It affects the way women are received, portrayed and considered as colleagues, friends, workers, mothers, artists, thinkers, public figures and victims of male violence and discrimination. Apart from outright slander, jibes, names and insults there is: talking down a woman's work, interrupting her, teasing her, mocking her, talking over her, patronising her, sighing or rolling one's eyes when she talks, invading her personal space. The misogynists' approach to women can be summed up thus: sneer, leer, exploit, ignore.
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WHAT?!?! Of COURSE
you wanna show your missing teeth! What a beautiful, memorable prize, to have a dance recital photo that shows off this singular time in a child’s life, when her front teeth are missing and she can make all kinds of noises and faces and do things to her food she’ll never be able to do again! What a TREAT to have a photo of a kid in all her laughing glory, tooth gap and all!
here
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Thursday, July 29, 2010
She watched her
getting out of the cab from where she sat in a coffee shop across the street. She liked being early, but she liked arriving late. So when she found herself at the restaurant twelve minutes before they were supposed to meet, she stepped across the street, ordered a tea, and waited, watching out the window.
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Wednesday, July 28, 2010
She had spent
too long being beautiful to now notice what exactly the extra fifty pounds on her bones created of her body, or to think that they should make her feel, somehow, tamed. Unlike her mother who gained the weight before her and exhausted herself in attempts to lose it; who hid them under XXL shirts and shapeless dresses; who pointed them out while hiding them away by discussing her latest diets; who promoted the myth that she was now less of a catch than she was forty pounds and twenty years ago. Unlike her mother, she holds her weight like a prize-fighter, believing they were pounds well-earned in a life of satisfaction and fulfillment.
here
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and if your
brand of feminism does not embrace and push to the forefront the critiques of itself, then i have no interest in your brand or your movement. actually i dont have an interest in brands at all. and if your movement isnt aligned with crunk feminists, and rasta feminists, with the zapatista women’s critique of feminsm, with palestinian women dressed in hijab with a fist in the air, with little girls who walk through war zones to get to school whether on the streets of washington, dc or the streets of goma, drc (democratic republic of congo) then i want nothing to do with your movement. cause those women dont bother to ask me why i am not a feminist. they just call me ‘mama’.
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Which takes me
back to me and my lady friend. She set very firm boundaries with me, and in a way I’m forever grateful that she did, because it gave me a very practical class in the fictitiousness of implied consent. I couldn’t assume consent for anything. What’s shocking is that such a situation seemed unusual. That such a situation isn’t normal, and commonplace. Or that such a situation even today is still better understood by two women–even one who took as roundabout a path to womanhood as I did.
here
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Saturday, July 24, 2010
Finally, I was
led into a room on the opposite side of the original mirror, where a young, somewhat morose looking, man sat in the same seat I had 20 minutes earlier. The actress who I’d been hanging out with entered the room, and my minute of horror began to unfold.
here
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Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
So should we
abandon our search for the "real" differences between the sexes? Yes. There is almost nothing we do with our brains that is hard-wired: every skill, attribute, and personality trait is moulded by experience. At no time are children's brains more malleable than in early life - the time when parents are so eager to learn the baby's sex, project it to others and unconsciously express stereotyped impressions of their child.
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And one of
the disarming ironies of fat acceptance is that, once you step outside the panopticon of self-loathing and cease obsessing about your body and the ways it deviates from an impossible ideal, you become much more aware of the mechanics of what makes you feel satisfied, invigorated, and inspired and your choices – about food, physical activity, and personal presentation – reflect your needs and your identity. More than that, in accepting your body as it is, you help to create a culture that respects and values the diversity of all bodies, a culture that, to return to Allison, “refuses lying myths and easy moralities,” that sees people as “human, flawed and extraordinary.” Back when I was punishing my body with four-hour workouts and styrofoam food that filled me with little else than despair, I never felt any sort of triumph or control over myself or my life, or deep engagement with the world around me. All my time and energy was spent buying into a loser’s game with a moving set of goal posts because – surprise! – capitalist diet culture is in the business of manufacturing failure, a self-sustaining economy of never-ending problems with impermanent purchasable solutions in the form of magic herbs, vibrating hot pants and “fixing” creams. It was only when I shut out the racket of diet discourse and refused to subject myself to an unforgiving beauty politic – reclaiming my body as my own – that I felt I had any agency, and valued it in others.
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The colorblind language
of the bill exemplifies neoracist legal and cultural formations that enables multiculturalism not only to exist alongside racism but to collude with it. Consider, for example, that French Prime Minister François Fillon has argued that the ban would save Muslims from wearers who would “hijack Islam.” And of course President Nicolas Sarkozy has insisted (rather hollowly) that the bill is really against the “enslavement and debasement” of women – which are contrary to French principles of equality. Colorblind racism ignores the history and ongoing fact of racism by resting its logic on a surrogate issue, or what Etienne Balibar calls in his essay “Is There a Neo-Racism?” a “secondary elaboration”, like immigration, national security, human rights, etc. The objectives of neoracist policies are not discriminatory, we are told. Their purpose is to expand and secure freedom, liberty, and democracy. The implication then is that Muslim women (or Latino immigrants or Arab Americans or Muslim Americans, and so on) are culturally rather than biologically (that would be the old racism) contrary to freedom, liberty, and democracy. They are antiliberal, antidemocratic figures who embody threats to the modern state and all the freedoms attached to it. So their containment is not a question of racism or state dominance but of freedom and civilization.
here
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Sunday, July 18, 2010
Night owls are
smarter than other people, and now we may know why. The modern world contains many features our slow-to-evolve brains still find unfamiliar—cars, TVs, hot dogs on a stick. But the world has always thrown new stuff at us, and brighter humans may adapt more ably.
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Saturday, July 17, 2010
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
And so when
I hear, tights are not pants, or you should wear pantyhose to court, or I wouldn’t wear X cut of a shirt because it doesn’t look good on me, I think, who made these rules? Why are we following them? Why do we passively subscribe to an aesthetic system that requires us to daily fulfill the twin obligations of being “respectful” by not doing anything out of the ordinary and looking as thin and “feminine” as we can muster? I want fashion to be less about making other people comfortable, and more about personal expression and art. There is too much hierarchy. It is too top-down, from a murky top with too many leaders with too many conflicting messages.
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Tuesday, July 13, 2010
A feminist — like
yours truly — might have something to say to this, something hearty and empowering and prescriptive: Stand up for yourself, lady! Make that boy do some time in the trenches! DTMFA, whatever that means! (I actually know what it means.) (I’m just irritated that it has so many more syllables than “dump him.”) (And people say it anyway.) Failing that, make a visit to Le Land de Babe! But the fundamental sadness of the statement sticks, and matters, and rings true. For this particular feminist, anyway. As does Colette’s statement that she possessed “a genuine mental hermaphroditism that burdens certain highly complex human beings.” Colette always had a dedication to the art of high femme — the dresses, the makeup, the feminine graces. She also had a survivor’s instinct, a taste for self-promotion and purely mercenary activity, and a rough, blunt insight that contradicted everything she’d been told about what a lady was supposed to be.
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<3 Sady
here
<3 Sady
Sunday, July 11, 2010
I spent all
day yesterday researching the Design Piracy Prohibition Act, a bill that would extend copyright protection to fashion design and levy significant penalties against those found in violation. (The 2006 proposal never made it out of committee but in April 2009, the bill was reintroduced, revised, and I believe it’s still pending.)
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