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Embodied Only At The End Of The Rainbow

Sun, 2007-12-16 13:10 — figleaf


Photo by Flickr user Walt K. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Calico of Dominatrix Next Door, answering a self-posed question about what insults her, says issues around body image frost her. They frost a lot of us, actually, but Calico doesn’t just say it, she explains it.

There’s a reason so many people hate their photos: appearance is only an aspect of our interactions, and not always the most attractive.  Clients reliably tell me I look better in person than in my retouched, professionally done photos. Why? I’ve just walked into the room, that’s why; I have a heartbeat, I have two legs, and I am available for sale. If you must offer us advice on attractiveness, instruct us to be personable, to be charismatic, to develop our skills.  Don’t say “don’t be fucking fat”.

You are not a better woman if you are hungry and don’t eat.  You are not a better woman if you set the alarm half an hour earlier to paint your naked face.  Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”.

I know what some of you are thinking, too, is that I signed up for this game the day I became a sex worker. I disagree. I signed up to sell sex, which is something I do, not to strive to be sex. The idea that one embodies sex without having it is just a little bit fucked up.

And ultimately this game is futile, this game of being thin and pretty and perfect.  If you ever achieve the fantasy — and with enough denial and pain and money, it might be done — the ideal could change in an instant. When you measure your physical worth to someone else’s arbitrary standard, there is no way to win.

She says it here.

I also wanted to really call out where she said “The idea that one embodies sex without having it is just a little bit fucked up.” When I talk about the Beauty Myth and how men have a corresponding Worthiness Myth, that’s what I mean! Just as we indoctrinate men to strive so mightily to provide that they/we never come home, so we also indoctrinate women so thoroughly to believe men won’t even see them unless they’re starved, then scraped bare, then repainted that some of them/you are afraid to be seen by your partners after a night of roaringly good sex. The real thresholds for being sexy, being a good provider, being a man or a woman, are surprisingly easy to meet. However to embody sexiness, or worthiness, or manliness, or femininity is a fools errand for all the reasons Calico lays out but mainly because those things are the end of a rainbow, a product of the viewer’s eye and the sun — with rainbows, therefore, as with worthiness or beauty or femininity or the rest there’s nothing to embody!

Anyway, all in all a nice, thought-provoking post.

Sun, 2007-12-16 15:45 — 1815 (not verified) #permalink

Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”.

Indeed. One of the things that bothers me most about the Beauty Myth is that male attractiveness is more or less effortless—a short-haired man looks basically the same rolling out of bed as he does on a date or in a film.

Whereas female attractiveness is nothing but work—as “stars without their makeup!” articles love to remind us, the most famously beautiful women in the world aren’t even good enough until every flaw has been painstakingly painted over. If Jessica Alba without her makeup looks kinda homely, and I’m no Jessica Alba at my best, then when I roll out of bed I must look like some sort of two-legged warthog.

I appreciate that I have the option to use makeup, it’s fun and I do have a little vanity, but I want to use it to make myself pretty. Not to stop myself from being ugly.

And when I don’t need pretty, when I’m going out not for sex but for academic or professional or political work, I shouldn’t be obligated to spend half an hour making myself look fuckable anyway.

Especially since side b, what men say over and over that never seems to register with people caught up in the beauty myth, is that *we don’t care” and “we don’t notice” and “we love you anyway.” Sure, there are limits to everything, like if someone wears makeup so often she has a racoon tan when it comes off (people I knew back in the South? Definitely!) But even that’s an artifact. What really really matters to most of us is that you’re healthy and happy. Just like the way you stress out when we think we’ve got to work ourselves to death to be attractive (not looks but “providing”) when, again, as long as we’re not a net financial drain you mostly want us healthy and happy too. So it’s as much each of us crawling off our respective ledges as one side needing to “talk sense” to the other. :-) Thank you, Holly. —fl]

Sun, 2007-12-16 18:52 — 1815 (not verified) #permalink

I have seen many images of men and women – art, photographs, video – which I find very beautiful (but usually not those which look too perfect to be real, however). But this does not, in any way, make me desire to have sex with the person in the image. Why? Partly because it’s usually presented as more of an ideal than an actual person. And partly because I can easily find things beautiful and not be interested in them that way – for example, I don’t desire to copulate with flowers.

And celebrities – well, a lot of them are rather attractive (and some of the female ones would seem even more so if they’d go a bit lighter on the makeup, since I’m not a fan of the “perfectly flawless” look – what are they, robots?), but I’ve never actually met any of them. I don’t know anything about them other than a likely artificial image propped up by the media and the extreme things some of them do to puncture that image. Perhaps it is so for some people, but I don’t find that very interesting, sexually or otherwise.

Just adding my own perspective to the point that for many (and likely most) people, a real person who is actually there is usually much sexier than any image.

[That’s sort of what I mean about rainbows (or I could have picked mirages which are also optic/aspect events rather than real artifacts.) When you operate certain optical phenomena on certain people, plus rub stuff made out of plants and clays and other pigments on them, then the resulting images meet philosophical ideals of beauty. But as with all ideals they’re not real. That’s all well and good. Really! What’s not so hot is mistaking aspects of people (e.g. etherial beauty under certain light, through certain lenses, with certain rubbed-on pigments) with attributes of people (e.g. made not of celestial ether but of fallable but warm and wonderful flesh.) Thanks, Nightfall. —fl]

Mon, 2007-12-17 05:05 — 1815 (not verified) #permalink

I think I’ve incorporated my thoughts on this into a new post over at my own blog, entitled “owning your sexuality”.

I think it’s expressed by this passage:

“I use the phrase “own one’s sexuality” not merely to indicate possession and control, as though a person’s sexuality is something apart from and other than their true self (a classic example of this is the archetype of the woman who uses her sexiness to control others), but to recognise, acknowledge and accept it as a part of one’s intrinsic self. Once that much is done, I think the expression of this ownership is effortless and unconscious, and radiates throughout a person’s appearance. Someone who owns his or her sexuality in this deeper sense appears sexy without any effort, without any adornments, because it is not artificially kept separate.”

That is, to be sexy isn’t about surface “beauty” or conforming to a certain standard thereof. And I think perhaps (in this sense, at least) it is possible to “embody sex without having it”, but also that it is impossible to do that with physical effort and physical appearance, it comes from (for want of a better word) the soul. And that, I think, is part of what underlies men’s tendency to say those things, “I don’t notice”, “I don’t care”, “I love you anyway”.

[Well, and it’s also about the difference between thresholds and absolutes — only certain extreme fetishists really have to have a partner get up early to put on makeup or he can’t look at her (as I think the singer Prince was like that with, um, Carmine Electra?) But way, way more people seem to think that’s what their partner would want, and so… up they go. Same with men who think (as I once did) that if we just stay late enough at work earning money then all kinds of women will fall all over us. We can think that all we want, but a “if a little is good then a lot must be better” mentality can take us right out. Thanks, SDE. —fl]

Tue, 2007-12-18 20:53 — 1815 (not verified) #permalink

Thanks, Figleaf!

[You bet, Calico. —fl]

Wed, 2007-12-19 08:41 — 1815 (not verified) #permalink

I’m consistently impressed by how simple and easily you seem to be able to explain these issues that are, for most other people including myself at times, very difficult to grasp full sight of. Thanks for that.

Taking this concept to a personal level is hard and, at times, painful, but very, very important. I’ve tried to do this for myself in a post called “How an outdated view of masculinity ignores the needs of all men.”

[I saw that, May. It’s a good post. Thanks! —fl]

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