Duplicity

Something is bothering me. It's a sticky summer's day and I'm hot. Aching feet, tired limbs and a headache fizzling in my head. I continue walking down Bond Street, laden with bags and surrounded by  everyone. They're all looking at me, "Why are they looking at me"?

The mirror's there but I ignore it. I sit down and take off my shoes. I'm so tired. Hunger encompasses me.

"Here Vanessa comes, strutting as usual. Look at her shoes, just look at them! Expensive, of course. She looks so good, I wish I could look like her. Don't you Laurie? I mean if I looked like her, if I could be her,  if I could only know what it was like to be in her body, even if it was just for a second. Everybody would look at me, really see me. They would think I was beautiful! They'd stare, there eyes would trace my shadows. There'd be whispering, ogling, calling, appreciation. It would be fantastic!".

"It looks fantastic, really stunning. You just have to get it, I just can't imagine you without it! The cut looks great on you, it fits your body so well. I love the colours, they pop and complement you. I know it's expensive, but you just have to buy it. I mean it would be wrong of you not to get it. Why are you not sure? Don't you want to look stunning? You know how important it is that you always look good, right? It's more important than anything else".

Vanessa's new dress is beautiful. The colour makes her stand out, accentuating her beauty. The frill at the bottom rises elegantly up and down ever step she makes. Up and down, like a gentle wave.

It's beautiful but expensive. I can't afford to keep buying clothes, but I must. It's soft on my skin, but I can't banish from my mind all those children working in sweatshops day after day to make clothes like mine. I am torn. People stare and idolise me but they don't know me. My pain, my anguish, my hunger, my frailty and my ugliness are all ignored. People only know my beauty, but they have no idea of the pain that it has caused.

If people could see my ugly inner self just once, they would understand and I would be free. If I could only remove the facade I would be free. I'd be outlandish, honest and happy.

The one concurrent theme throughout all the texts that we have studied is that of women's spirit and individuality being suppressed in some way.

In works like Sweat, A Jury Of Her Peers and Jasmine the female protagonists were suppressed by society. The main characters were instrumental to the texts because they all at some point revealed there true spirit and character. All these characters are duplicitous to a certain extent. In Sweat, Delia Jones plays the slavish, compliant housewife for much of the story. We are shown a false facade of her true self and it is only at the end, when she lets her husband slowly die that we see the stronger, more sinister side of Delia truly emerge. Similarly in A Jury of Her Peers, Minnie Foster was seemingly happy before she went and killed her husband. No one saw Minnie Foster's pain and loneliness or predicted her emotional deterioration until she killed him. Jasmine is akin to Minnie Foster in the sense that she always seemed to be struggling to abide by what society told her she could do. In all of these texts the reader is given the privilege of being able to see both the normal mundane side and the erratic darker sides of these women.

The Beauty Myth and The Vagina Monologues differ in the sense that they discuss women's suppression by advertising, media and by cosmetics not by tradition. Both these books reveal the problems that women face and analyse how they are made to feel insecure. They highlight how the suffrage of women is a lucrative business by for example revealing that "The cosmetic industry in the United States grosses over $300 million every year" (232, The Beauty Myth).

The Vagina Monologues in particular presents ways for women to free their real selves and escape from society's burden. By imploring women to acknowledge their vaginas, Eve Ensler teaches women to appreciate themselves as human beings and to love their bodies.

Vanessa wants to escape beauty's grasp but feels that she can't. Because people only really see her beauty, it has become the majority of her identity. She therefore cannot escape the entrapment of beauty because she is so reliant on it. Thus as with all the other characters in the works that we have read, we see a duplicity about her. She is beautiful on the outside but haunted on the inside. She yearns forlornly to be what beauty stops her from being. And so instead she just wanders down Bond street, becoming more and more psychotic and begins to show her "Schizophrenic" (230, The Beauty Myth) tendencies.

Relative Interviews: My Grandmother

We were asked to interview one of our older female relations to find out what their experience was of growing up in their generation.

My granny was born in Rhodesia (Africa) in the 1920's. She describes her mother as being one who ran the house, but because of all the servants at her disposal, worked more as a supervisor than actually hands on.

My granny lived in a very rural part of Rhodesia; she lived and worked on a coffee plantation that her family owned. From the age of 5 to 14 she attended an all girls boarding school in Rhodesia. She has fond memories and describes how she loved being able to do lots of different things in her free time. However the one thing that she really wanted to do but couldn't was see boys.

Because of her rural upbringing she was able to have a lot more freedom than if she had lived in somewhere like London. She had even more freedom because her father often worked away from home and her mother was too busy to always keep tabs on her. The only thing was that as an upper class lady she wasn't really meant to interact with the 'natives' or get a job. Such things were frowned upon.

However she still had a lot of freedom. She left school at 16 and took typing and bookkeeping courses while also studying domestic science. But by the time she was 17 she was dreaming of joining the British army. In the end she had to compromise with her parents, joining the South African army instead of the British army because her parents thought it was safer.

She left the army when she was 20 and moved to England in the hopes of becoming a doctor. She rejected offers from Oxford and other universities, choosing study biology and botany at Reading university because it was closer to Cambridge which was where her boyfriend was studying.

She got engaged for the first time in 1933 but in the end she chose another man, getting engaged for the second time in 1950.

She worked as a bacteriologist. It would have been difficult for her to have gotten the job because of her gender had it not been for her accumen and the vacuum of male workers after the war.

It was apparently very unusual to be married and working like she was.


One of the things that resonated for me was that even though my grandmother seemed to have relative freedom to do what she wanted she is adamant that the girls of today have much more freedom than she ever had.

I was also struck by how successful my mother's academic and working career had been. The first question that I really want to ask is how common it was for a woman to be accepted to Oxford at that time. Secondly I would love to know and how great an extent did the war aid her in securing good jobs.

Why Love Your Vagina?

Loving your vagina is a fundamental part of being a woman. If you don't love such a central, important part of your body you are bound to lack confidence and be insecure.

Eve Ensler explained that one of the main reasons why women don't appreciate their vagina, and therefore themselves is because of what they have been taught by society. From a very early age girls are gradually being told that they are subordinate to men. One of the first steps to make someone comply is by making them feel insufficient or uncomfortable about their own body by making the  'vagina' taboo. Ensler aptly explores this in her chapter titled "I was twelve. My mother slapped me" (35, TVM).

This chapter is full of examples of mothers refusing to properly educate or explain the fantastic importance of vaginas and periods to their daughters. It's as though the female gender self impose this censorship and suffrage upon themselves. One such example of mother censorship in this chapter is when a young girl asked her mother what a period was and her mother replied by saying "It's punctuation.. You put it at the end of a sentence" (35, TVM).

Such censorship is shocking. For mothers not to educate their daughters about periods, instead letting them learn the hard way, just because vaginas are taboo is wrong.

But of even greater concern is genital mutilation, or female circumcision which still occurs in several countries and affects over 80 to 100 million women. This is several steps above making vaginas taboo, this is actively trying to destroy them. "About 2 million youngsters a year can expect the knife-or the razor or glass shard - to cut their clitoris or remove it all together, (and) to have part or all of the labia... sewn together with catgut or thorns"(67, TVM). This is clearly a female rights issue since this simply doesn't happen to men. It's disgusting, it's vile and it's illogical. After all it would stop women from having sex and having male offspring.

Vagina Monologues: A Guy's Perspective

It's been a while since my last post and I apologise! I have just been too busy reading a trio of books all under the genre of Women's Literature.

The Vagina Monologues was enlightening to say the least. It was contentious, humorous and stomach turning all at the same time. Eve Ensler didn't hold back and I know everything to do with vaginas. As a book for  a high school class it was a daring but ultimately successful choice.

The apprehension that we had as a class before reading The Vagina Monologues was aptly summed up in the Ensler's first sentence, "I bet you're worried" (3, TVG). The theme of the book was worrying and intimidating for some but not for me. I'm proud to say this because it shows that progression has happened. Some of the reasons why Eve Ensler felt compelled to write this book have already dissolved in more liberal societies such as mine.

One thing that I found particularly interesting was that Eve Ensler kept restating the point that many women did not really seem to value or acknowledge their vagina. Right at the beginning of the book Ensler comments on how women sometimes "go weeks, months, sometimes years without looking at it (their vagina)" (4, TVM). Ensler cites a businesswoman who imply explained that "she was too busy; she didn't have the time" (4, TVM). This shocked me. How can someone not see their genitalia or be barely aware of it it??

Eve Ensler went on to explain the multiple reasons for what I call 'this phenomena'. I had never absorbed the fact that it takes effort and time for women to see their vagina. For men it's a doddle, but women "it's not so easy to even see your vagina" (4, TVM). For women to see their vagina they need at the very least to have a free-standing mirror, perfect lighting, a bit of luck and to be able to contort their body to the right angle for viewing.

Another reason was aptly portrayed by an one old Jewish woman Ensler interviewed in Queens. When Ensler asked her when she had last looked at her vagina, the woman responded by saying, "Down there? I haven't been down there since 1953. No, it had nothing to do with Eisenhower" (25, TVM). What this woman goes on to say reveals that another reason why women don't acknowledge their vaginas is because they are ashamed and embarrassed about them.  This women, like many was embarrassed  both by the appearance and odour of her vagina. She was embarrassed to even say the word 'vagina'.

This story and Eve Ensler's description of how she has felt compelled to set up workshops to get women to acknowledge and be proud of their vaginas reveals a dichotomy of how men and women view their sexual organs.

I went to a boy's school for much of my academic life and for years our banter followed three main themes. Football, girls and our genitals. Now of course I am exaggerating, but penis talk is popular with men of all ages and when asked we will proudly declare 6, 7 or 8 inches depending on the day of the week.

This, what I see as healthy pubescent talk doesn't seem to occur to anywhere near the same degree with women. I think talking and looking at your is healthy and doctors seem to agree with me. In one of my upcoming posts I would like to analyse the reasons why some women refuse to acknowledge their bodies.

Ugliness is Now a Disease!

I would like to share, what I have learnt from my reading of the Violence chapter in The Beauty Myth.

The cosmetic industry it seems, is extending its reach by "manipulating ideas of health and sickness" (220, TBM). The notions of what is healthy and what is diseased change frequently, and "are often subjective judgements that society makes for its own purposes" (220, TBM).

The businesses and people who profit from The Beauty Myth, such as the cosmetic industry, try to "reclassify aspects of healthy femaleness into grotesque abnormality" (222, TBM). Any normal and therefore healthy woman, are now being reclassified as being "sick and ugly women" (223, TBM). The reason why industries such as the cosmetic industry have spent huge resources on advertising in order to redefine what is healthy and what is not is because they make money out of women's insecurities.

If a woman feels fine about her physical appearance she will have no desire to spend money on improving it. This is why cosmetic industry is "taking the feminist redefinition of health as beauty and perverting it into a notion of "beauty" as health" (224, TBM).

So even if you are the fittest, healthiest women around you will still be seen as diseased if you are not beautiful.

You don't have to look far to find evidence of ugliness being seen as a disease. Surveys have shown that, "Women are not cutting their breasts open for individual men, by and large, but so they can experience their own sexuality... they are doing this "for themselves" (247, TBM). Of those who were married their partners "categorically deny" they encouraged the operation" (247, TBM). This proves that women aren't compelled to have cosmetic surgery by men, but instead by desire to meet the media's version of femininity.

Cosmetic surgeons who profit hugely from this false femininity by agreeing to do completely unnecessary operations, are going against the very first line of The Hippocratic Oath of doctors, "First, do no harm" (236, TBM). Cosmetic doctors are not proper doctors since "doctors respect the healthy body and invade the diseased only as a last resort (whereas) cosmetic surgeons call healthy bodies sick in order to invade them" (238, TBM).

Public Enemy No.1: Advertising

Having recently watched Killing Us Softly 4 by Jeane Kilbourne, I am even more convinced that the majority of what is stated in the Beauty Myth is true.

While advertising may be the bane of our existence, we must unfortunately remember that it is a core, irreplaceable part of capitalism. Personally I think capitalism is a good thing, but advertising is one of the most irksome things about it.

We say that capitalism allows us to be free and prosper as individuals. But this simply isn't true! Capitalism creates divides between people. It categorises and stereotypes people as being rich and poor. Capitalism relies on the existence of poor people because everything is seen as commodities in capitalist economies. Poor people are less valuable as commodities and are easily exploited for the benefit of the rich.

The socio-economic stand of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat still exists today just as it did when Karl Marx wrote his Communist Manifesto in 1848. But what has happened is that as media's reach extended, the socio-economic stand has in part transformed into a socio-gender reality instead.

Throughout history, "women are shown either to receive less than men, or to get nothing at all. That is still true" (49, The Beauty Myth). Everywhere we look, women are poorer than men. A study in 1984 showed that, "women still earned an average of only .. 64 percent of .. (what) men working full time earned" (49, The Beauty Myth). This is largely because of gender stereotypes that have been reinforced by  the advertising industry.

According to a documentary called Miss Representation, "the average American teenager consumes ten and a half hours of media (in affect advertising) every day" (Miss Representation). Advertising has never has such a wide spread of influence. It's a fact that we cannot escape it in our daily lives and that it is impossible not to be influenced by it.

Advertising reinforces two gender stereotypes in particular. That men should aspire for brawn and that women should yearn for beauty. Brawn simply means that men should be strong, fit and domineering. Be confident enough to be noticed when they enter a room.

Beauty on the other hand means to be attractive. Women aspire first to be physically attractive and secondly to be socially attractive. What stands as being physically and socially attractive is ambiguous, as it is set by the media and changes periodically.

The key difference between brawn for men and beauty for women is that brawn is achievable, while beauty is something that you are born with and is only something that the minority have. Women, rather than men become insecure because advertising tells them that they must be beautiful in order to be feminine.

Women therefore feel compelled to buy overpriced cosmetics as a substitute for their lack of natural beauty. This is where advertising and the media begin to make their money.

Beauty has been monetised by the media and by capitalism. While this is wrong, it is necessary. Advertising needs capitalism just as much as capitalism needs advertising to function. Until we find a better economic model, I'm afraid we're stuck with capitalism.

Mass Steralisation in Uzbekistan

Link to the BBC radio report.

Last week a BBC report has revealed that women's reproductive organs have become "the new target of one of the most repressive regimes on earth" (Forced Sterilisation in Uzbekistan). Uzbekistan's plan to counter their population growth is to sterilise women without their permission. Most shocking is that "a woman can be sterilised without knowing that she has been sterilised" (Doctors in Uzbekistan).

Natalie Anteleva explained how this was possible. For "most women, the procedure is done after they give birth" (Doctors in Uzbekistan). This is particularly the case with women having caesarean sections, since the women are already heavily anaesthetised, unaware of what is happening and unable to stop anything that is being done to them. This is how women can be sterilised without ever realising.

According to Natalie's sources, doctors "are given quotas each month for how many women they need to sterilise" ranging "from one... to eight women a week" (Doctors in Uzbekistan). This is not something happening to a minority of women. It is affecting the vast majority, thousands of women are becoming victims. Some of Natalie's sources claim that over 80% of women in labour are having caesarean sections, many unnecessarily. Doctors really do seem to use caesarean sections as a way of sterilising women.

One particularly chilling story is of a young woman called Nigora who,  "is among many for whom forced sterilisation is a reality. She had an emergency C-section. A day later she was told she had been sterilised. On the same day, her newborn died" (Secretly Sterilising Women).

Several women during the report mentioned how they struggled to understand why their government took such drastic and costly measures to prevent population growth. They asked why the government couldn't try much cheaper methods methods like education campaigns which many believe would be just as effective.

The underlying answer seems to be that this totalitarian Uzbekistan government wants full control over their citizens, especially the women. The men, while possibly having their freedoms restricted are not exposed to the same sort of invasive treatment. The mass violation of women's bodies shows that the government fails to recognise that women own their own bodies. The government believes that they can sterilise women without permission, disregarding the terrible side effects that may occur.