As a bit of a segue from my link to Eye on Big Brother’s last post, I was thinking a bit about Bianca and her body image issues, something I’ve discussed before. At one stage during Big Brother 2008, the narrative centred on Bianca’s breasts – her worries about her own body shape, her ambivalence about breast reduction surgery, and her displacement of her own troubled embodiment into criticism of Brigette and Rebecca and the other surgically enhanced FHM wannabes the show loved to cast over the last few years. She also had a bit of an awareness of how the womens’ bodies on the show functioned as signifiers of potential celebrity, and as objects to be scrutinised and traded among the men on the show – and implicitly the male viewers, though she didn’t really thematise this as such. Partly what was going on here was her own self-image and character work as “the smart chick”, but it’s also, when you reflect on it, I think, a classic example of how “society” is conceived in popular culture. I mentioned Rebecca Wilson’s comments on all the boob talk:
I think it was on the very first Big Brother Big Mouth this year that Rebecca Wilson asked whether it was normal for teenage and twenty-something women to talk so much about their breasts. She said that she couldn’t recall such discussions occurring when she was in her twenties.
Now, the way in which both Wilson and Bianca (and the other housemates) talked about body image and cosmetic surgery tended to be framed in part as a critique of some reified “society” – not unlike the tirades about consumerism that circulate in our consumerist postmodern culture – but also as an individual problem. And for Bianca it was a real problem. The more I think about this episode the more I think it actually goes a long way to demonstrating C. Wright Mills’ classic sociological insight about how structural problems are experienced as individual moral dilemmas, and not seen for what they are. As I’m suggesting, that doesn’t make the body politics of being an adolescent girl in Australia any easier. But I thought it was worth linking – in this context – to an excellent review of Flinders Uni sociologist Anthony Elliott’s book Making the Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming our Lives at the Global Sociology Blog. It’s worth reading in its entirety, because Elliott has teased out the causes and inter-relations of how body image and the desire to consume cosmetic surgery is linked closely to broader social, economic and cultural trends. Go read!
Update: This thread also spawned posts by tigtog at Hoyden and Feral Sparrowhawk at Rapturous Thinking.
She looks a cuddly girl…mmm..
Seriously, am well-aware why women consider reductions rather than having to spend the rest of their lives rucksacking or wheel-barrowing around mammary excess- even your average half brained bloke onlooker can see that this must become heavy work after a while.
As for the rest of Kim’s usual constructive comments with their undelying plea for understanding ,
will beg off now, except to to say am consideringthem further, because have wasted too much time trying to figure out behaviours which to me seem stupid,self-defeating and even arrogant.
After all this is a world where scarce resources for millions of genuinely ill, sick and starving people are denied as part of what seems to be little more than a process or strategy of reality denial( or abnegating emphasis, if you like ). Yes, you can include four wheel drive obstentation, gym memberships etc; other forms of conspicuous consumption unrelated to gender except as to wider or immanent origins of current society and culture.
I remember Sacha, possibly the same Sacha who used to participate in Darlene’s blog, talking more along the lines of class rather then gender strategy ( a dichotomy? ) for collective bourgeois alibiing to ensure one’s own slice of the cake, in Tig Tog’s feminism one-o-one, a comment incidently curiously overlooked as material for a conversation by Tig Tog.
Also, have in mind an allusive comment once from Emma Tom, one of a tiny handful of useful journos at GovGaz, talking in terms of Bataille and Economies of Excess ( access, if you die in the third world!).
But enough, others know better and can only look forward to a prospective education concerning these issues.
I meant to say this on the previous Bianca thread in relation to Rebecca Wilson’s comment. My gf’s a 20-something woman, and sometimes it seems that she and her friends talk about nothing but their breasts. Mind you, sometimes it seems they do nothing but talk, full stop.
*So says the 32yo male usually found in the kitchen eavesdropping while cooking*
It could be that the BB housemates and audiences are generally too low down on the food-chain to discuss anything else. I realize sexual subjects are of course part of the lowest common denominator factor but I wondered in the days when I had a TV whether these people had any idea how dopey and undignified they actually are.
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The sex talk on BB is the sartorial equivelant of someone eating spaghetti at a restaurant, with their fingers.
Adrien wrote:
Garbage. There are endless numbers of french tittie films on SBS which are acceptable fare for those higher on the food-chain. Same subject, different packaging. The only difference being you can pretend to be art-house-sophisticated instead of base and sensual. But it isn’t really.
Just watching that Stepford advertising show on ABC, with Will Wotsisname and the advertising honchos and hucksters trying to avoid letting the various cats out of the bag as far as advertising is concerned.
Jane Caro is talking about advertisers “selling female insecurity”, as to these billions of dollars of junk fobbed off as beauty aids and cosmetics.
Some one else is talking about the persuasian box of tricks, in this case the appropriate “word modifier” at a given space in a certain kind of ad, that seem to indicate so strongly a fair access to what we would call a close blueprint of the human working mind. So what buttons are pushed, when was the receptivity to these stimuli implanted and does behaviour modification that actually jeopardises the targets of advertising, in this case women, actually create residual conditioned behaviours that damage these people in other facets of later life?
Are yesterdays barbie dolls and todays party girls tomorrow’s lushes and harridans? And how does such a prospective process involve interplay of life processes, basic socialisation and enculturation and further to this, interventions by sophisticated advertisers?
Can we talk of a form of, for all intents and purposes, assault, that would lead to criminal charges and law suits if conducted in cruder form, as with a pub brawl or police hiding?
I know “post” criticism prefers to address audience complicity and its little”transgressions” more than previous teh left theories, but that relies on the concept of the conscious self-reliant individual free of any subsonscious mechanism and its manipulation toomuch,doesn’t it?
Are we totally sure, as to what constitutes “the mind” and reality itself, for that matter? Are (post) modern theorists so sure there is no potential for manipulation. No basis at all to neo- Freudian or Jungian analyses, for example..?
Adrien and David, the point I’m not sure you’ve grasped is that the discussions in question were about body image and cosmetic surgery.
What Kim said. Breasts and “titties”, Adrien and David, are not always ’sexual subjects’. For women, and I do believe it is women’s conversation that is at issue here, they’re not even usually sexual subjects.
Shocking, I know, but there it is.
Oh Noes! Must remember to avoid the chick only threads, can only ever be wrong in them.
So body image only occasionally has something to do with sexuality? Ok, right. So why the hell is my girlfriend always wasting her breath telling me that guys like chicks with big boobs and I’d like her more *groan* if she had bigger ones? Shits me to tears, but she won’t hear or believe otherwise. And yes, she often raises the subject of “cosmetic” surgery – at least two of her girlfriends have implants and she says, with only the slightest hint of satire, “They only get attention cos of their tits and I’d be so much hotter than them if I had them (implants).”
I’m with DR on this one on “chick” threads. And so, to lower the tone, I’m going to borrow from Bill Oddie:
Tits, tits, tits, tits,
Everybody loves tits.
I’m not sure lowering the tone is all that helpful, Youie! And I’m not saying that this is a “chicks only” thread, just asking people to read what’s written in context and discuss things appropriately. I can see how Adrien could have got the impression that the boob discussions on BB were in the context of “sex talk” – though only with a bit of a stretch and only if he hadn’t really got the point of the post. I was seeking to correct that misimpression. And, yes, as I said in the post, there is a link between body image, objectification, and the sexualisation of the body.
If anyone finds all this too difficult to understand, please let me know, and I’ll try to clarify further.
By ‘everybody’, Youie, I take it the well-named Bill Oddie meant ‘men’, and that was my point.
Breasts are objects of desire to most blokes, and to women who fancy other women. To the rest of us, they are a source of constant worry, either because (1) they are large, weighty objects necessitating expensively engineered bras and will give us shocking back and neck problems by the time we’re 40, (2) because the world is full of blokes who think it’s acceptable to comment audibly on (if not actually grab) the breasts of anyone who happens to be passing, (3) because we have good reason to fear either failing to breastfeed our children with them successfully or getting cancer in them, or (4) because we think they are ‘too small’ and we have not yet thought through the logic of this enough to realise that if a bloke’s attitude to you depends on the size of your breasts then the smart thing to do is get away from him as quickly as possible.
And if your main aim in life is ‘getting attention’, then you are not a woman at all. You are a child.
Quoted from the book review:
It’s basically impossible to disassociate the discussion of breast surgery and sexuality. And Rebecca Wilson might be right in saying she didn’t discuss breasts as a 20 year old, but I’ll bet she discussed whether some clothing or other “flattered her figure” which is a polite way of discussing your breasts (and other bits) appearance. Have a look at the profiles of those undergoing surgery and what they are having done sometime – it’s all about appearance for sexual purposes. Whether it’s a facelift or the rather more overt breast operations (lifts, reductions, enhancements) or the incredibly bizarre labioplasty. It’s not that we don’t understand Kim, it’s that we think it’s important not to mistake the comments as “breasts are always about sex”. They aren’t, but a hell of a lot of the time, they are.
“It’s basically impossible to disassociate the discussion of breast surgery and sexuality.”
I agree to the extent that it is difficult to dissociate a discussion of any aspect of the body from sexuality. The same could be said of any discussion of personhood. But recognising the two can’t be totally dissociated doesn’t mean they can’t be distinguished analytically, and I would suggest that women, in particular, do this all the time. Also, not all discussion of sexuality is supposed to be arousing to spectators. Some of it is mundane, analytical, or takes the sexual dimension of a particular topic as a fact to be considered or put aside like any other.
There seems to be the belief that the larger the breasts the more sexually attractive the woman. This is not the case with Bianca. Her breasts are large to the point of grotesqueness. She should have them reduced for the sake of her own health. A secondary benefit for her would be an increase in sexual attractiveness.
Actually, he was talking about string rather than tits, which is why I said I was borrowing from him. A vain attempt to put a catchy Goodies song in the head of those who recognised it. Seemed funny at the time…
Heh! Sorry — my popular-culture reference field is pretty broad but obvs not broad enough.
I think the comments thread here has highlighted one of the major comprehension breakdowns between (most) men and (most) women in our society.
I think most men think that questions of body image and attractiveness are purely about sex. Possibly because they pretty much are for us. If I could hang a magic distorting lens around my neck which made me look more attractive to potential partners and less attractive to men, lesbians, women I wasn’t interested in, family members etc I wouldn’t hesitate. I doubt most men would, and we assume the same goes for straight women – that their body images are about appealing to men.
Then every now and then we come across one of those studies that says that most young women would prefer to be thin than have a fantastic sex life and our brains crash. Personally I just don’t get it. Assuming you’re not so fat there are serious health issues, why the hell would you want to be thin other than to have a good sex life?
The difference between myself and Youie or David Rubie is that I know there’s something I’m not getting, although I don’t quite understand what it is.
We must, we must, we must increase the quality of our gendered discourse.
Are you saying I don’t know what I’m not getting (an unknown unknown) or that I know I’m not getting something but I do understand what it is? Christ, now you’ve confused me… Or did I confuse myself?
Whatever. To take the isolated example of my gf: last night she said that I just didn’t know how hard it was for her and other women to find a balance between being appealing to men without being too appealing, while simultaneously not getting evil looks from other women for just existing. (Hey, life’s tough, she’s a stunner. Can I say that, or am I reducing her to a masculinist abstraction?) She worries about the size of her breasts (I don’t, they’re very nice thanks); I’m conscious of my greying, thinning hair. But I couldn’t give a shit whether another bloke has nicer hair than I do. Them’s the breaks, whaddaya do, throw another prawn etc…
Telling her to “just be yourself” – which is my male solution – doesn’t cut the mustard with her. She’s still competing with other women out there – she thinks it, and from what I can tell, nearly all of her friends think the same way: it’s competition among women. Men will look at women; women criticise women.
“She worries about the size of her breasts (I don’t, they’re very nice thanks); I’m conscious of my greying, thinning hair. But I couldn’t give a shit whether another bloke has nicer hair than I do. Them’s the breaks, whaddaya do, throw another prawn etc…”
That’s all very well (and minus the thinning pate a decent precis of my situation to boot) but I think the question is where these things come from.
And I don’t see that you’ve tried to address that, or acknowledged that each gender’s attitudes may be influencing the other’s.
“but I think the question is where these things come from.”
Esse est percipi.
(hat tip: Bishop Berkeley)
translation: To be, is to be perceived.
I was making a general comment about BB not about Bianca in particular. I shot my TV and haven’t seen BB since 2005. As I understand it the non-sexual interpretation of Bianca’s cosmetic speculations might be more about personal comfort than aesthetics. Most breast augmentations I’d wager are about physical appearance. Personally I don’t find the Pamela Anderson thing so appealing and having had a couple friends who’ve been thru that thing (and auffered) I’d rather you didn’t.
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Okay. Do I get a smiley badge now?
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BB is mostly sex talk, sexual innuendo – of the most assinine and infantile kind. They select people specifically for their stupidity.
Shocking, I know, but there it is.
Thanks Mum. I didn’t realize that, mired as I am in the loungeroom stew of me and my footy mates who spend all of our lives watching really awful pornography and footy and eating hamburgers and footy and whistling at women and footy and ….
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Oh wait. I’m nothing like that at all.
Actually I’m both art-house sophisticated and base and sexual. It’s entirely possible y’know.
Nice try, Kim. I would have enjoyed a serious discussion of the post too. But I think all hope of having one would depend on a total ban on the word ‘breasts’ and all of its synonyms from the discussion. I’m thinking of that Monty Python sketch about the furniture shop where they all have to get into the fishpond and sing ‘Jerusalem’ every time anyone says ‘mattress’.
Heh! Maybe that’s the way to go, Dr Cat!
I think what the boys are missing here is that what’s very depressing for women when considering questions of body image (where the sexualisation of the body and its objectification are at issue, but where we’re actually trying to put that in question) is for blokes to suddenly start talking about “tits” and “sex”. Sigh.
Yes we’re all so immature, what can you do?
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What exactly would this discussion consist of. So far the commentary seems to be that ‘yes guys dig boobs but they’re a pain in the arse’. Okay.
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Are we to discuss the increasing tendency in our society to require physical perfection? Well it isn’t really a requirement is it? It’s a sales tool. We are shown pictures of impossibly beautiful people, feel hideous by comparison and seek all sorts of means to address this.
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This is applying to men too. However it’s still clear that there are double standards and that women are still the main targets. Jessica Valenti’s book re double standards lists several axiomatic sexist riffs in ours society. Somewhere there she says that altho’ men are subjected to pressure about body image it’s a pressure to adopt what is seen as optional improvements. Men aren’t required to get their chests waxed. Similarly male actors can be fat, female actors are required to be third and so forth.
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And it’s known that marketers target babies now. So the media is programming lttle girls with the beauty myth. Little boys? Men can buy cosmetics too.
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To what extent is this a problem (I think subliminal advertsing to children is nasty) and to what extent is it a benefit. After all breast reduction surgery can assist in releiving those back problems PC mentions.
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Izzat better?
I think, Adrien, what I’m interested in is discussion of the underlying factors causing all this which is why I linked to the review of the Elliott book. I don’t want to intervene too much in the discussion. I’m interested in what others think. It seems to me significant that it’s linked to far more than commonly thought, which is again what I was saying in the post.
Kim wrote:
Shorter Kim: I’m uninterested in any opinion that doesn’t fit my preconceived notions.
If you’re depressed about the state of women and their dismal opinions of their own bodies, you might start by addressing the inevitable issue that first comes up rather than dismissing it in some futile attempt to generate the “perfect” discussion. It is inevitably the elephant in the room.
Any society that decides the whiteness of ones cornhole is of any import is in serious trouble in my opinion. Not because men are obsessed with sex, but that women think we are.
No, you’re refusing to read my comment. But I guess in talking about how women feel about the sorts of leap of logic that go from breasts to sex in the flick of an eye, that’s dismissable as “irrational” or “emotive” or something. Note also that any attempt to steer discussion on a thread like this isn’t seen as moderation and accepted as such as it would be on many other threads, but perceived (inevitably by men) as an attempt to constrain or shut down discussion. In point of fact, with respect, it’s actually an attempt to open up a space for discussion that allows women to have a voice.
But now I suppose I have to defend that, rather than discussing.
Have a think about the logic of the way this discussion works – it’s an extremely familiar pattern on a “chick thrad”. And a very depressing one for me.
Err, please read the post.
David Rubie:
Utter bullshit as far as my breast reduction went. All about quality of life. I had constant chronic pain in my neck and upper spine, gradually exacerbating over several years, due to the weight of my breasts. When I had my reduction surgery, that pain immediately disappeared.
I also think most women have surgery for reasons of increasing their social confidence (maybe to get a better job) rather than sex per se. The idea of being more attractive to sexual partners is more of a bonus than the primary goal, for the people I know who’ve had work done.
tigtog, it’s an interesting anecdote but it hardly matches the sheer number of breast enhancement operations being undertaken. I’m sure a certain percentage of those are about sorting out issues after breast cancer for example, but the vast majority are not.
Labioplasty? Thinking that a lopsided labia is a hideous deformity requiring surgical intervention? Butt implants? Whole body lifts?
Why do women hate themselves so much they undertake these things? I’m sure there’s a certain amount of pressure from sexual partners, but that can’t be the whole story.
I can understand facial surgery, or botox or whatever as being about social confidence, but (aside from reductions and cancer related operations) most of the plastic surgery actively marketed to an eager crowd of women could easily be replaced with the old remedies of smoking, corsets, padded bras and turning the lights out.
This is surgery we’re talking about, not hidden under clothes. It’s meant to be displayed naked.
I know Kim is frustrated at the idea that we can’t talk about breasts like handbags (and that somehow the linked article connects fashion accessories and the instant gratification society that has embraced surgery) but I honestly don’t think that conversation is even possible given the sheer weight of numbers of women turning to sexually related surgery to address their body image issues.
If you’ve never seen “Doctor 90210″ on the TV, I recommend it. Not so much for butcher like surgery the doctors to do perfectly adequate lady parts, but for the sheer detachment those women have about their bodies. As if it’s a product that needs a shiny new logo to be saleable again. I really don’t think it’s about men, it’s about a fundamental misunderstanding that surgery seeking women have about men.
I wouldn’t have expressed it as harshly as David Rubie but tend to agree as to “adaptability”, since I think this is what he eventually means. Is this the missing point you feel some of us are missing, Kim- the inability of people in modern society to adapt or adjust any more. Not just women, either- look at the problems many blokes have as to marriages breaking up, for example.
Everything is a a quick fix rather than a meaningful attempt to engage with reality, let alone adversity. Must admit am finding it difficult myself to quite get what Kim at 24 is saying either- part of this “mutual incomprehension” thing mentioned in another post ( no, not necessarily “mystification”; we are trying sincerely to understand.).
On the basis of the photo alone ( loath bb ) I would have not Bianca’s body was “grotesque” at all btw, as Silkworm perhaps insensitively opined.
Rather, rather gorgeous.
But I understand what those familiar with the practical or workaday problems of a generous figure are getting at. Tig Tog et al, are quite correct in suggesting a medical issue, perhaps in the absence of a sensitive enough partner to make a voluptuous figure a worthwhile investment in compensating and supportive (no pun) ways.
Paul W, no amount of sensitive partnering is going to fix a girl’s spine after it has been pulled out of shape by the weight of her breasts. No amount of sensitive partnering is going to alleviate the psychological effects of having had obscenities regularly screamed at one in adolescence by total strangers twice and three times one’s age out of trucks. No amount of sensitive partnering will make it suddenly, miraculously possible to run for the bus without knocking yourself unconscious. (Dolly Parton: “Joggin’? Honey, Ah cain’t go joggin’. Ah’d black out both mah eyes.”) I think one of the things the various women here are finding it hard to get across is there are many ways ( and no, of course, not all ways, and nobody here has been arguing that) in which, for women, their breasts have got nothing to do with men.
Some men here are obviously finding that really hard to accept. Or even to imagine.
What’s this?
A half hearted attempt at what seems suspiciously close to a flaming of sensible folk who would dare mock the narcism of the middle classes or their conspicuos consumption?
“….their breasts have got nothing to do with men.”
Nah, s’pose not.
We should not even question the money wasted on them, or other parts of a “private” ( incorporated? ) body, in the way of implants, mutiliations etc. Let’s bear in mind in two previous posts I recognised the right of women for corrective surgery for reductions for health reasons, btw!
We should no more question this form of squander than we should question Cheney supporters bank rolling Cheney to waste a trillion doing direct murder in Iraq. We should not even think to question the Catholic church’s squandering of a quarter of a billion on a propaganda stunt; after all its THEIR money, and who cares if there’s a corruption of a theology intended by its creator as public property, btw
And we should NEVER question the Middle Classes collectively wasting of billions on equally unnecessary surgery, let alone all the other vulgar forms of conspicuous consumption, for neurotic, narcicistic or self indulgent reasons. The thought that billions of REAL women and other people with AS MUCH right to the earth’s resources in common, for REAL reasons, seek but are are denied access to them, should not even cross our minds.
No, we must defer, instead, to the foregrounding the typically bourgeois notion of body as “property”, even if that means suspending our contemplations of what should comprise global human health access.
But ’scuse those of us invited to comment on a public site, when solicited for our responses TO such squander, particularly when we dare come to an alternative conclusion concerning the notion in question’s ethical content. We should have just offered unquestioning applause of a childish, unconscious recession into self indulgence, let alone offered an expression of sympathy for those REAL people denied on its behalf.
Paul, you seem to be extrapolating an awful lot of extra baggage from PC pointing out that your proffered panacea of “sensitive partnering” to make a large-breasted woman forgo surgery for a condition that causes chronic pain is condescending crap, and that there are indeed many ways that women view their breasts that have nothing to do with men. I also don’t see where PC is defending the conspicuous consumption aspects of cosmetic surgery -it’s possible to have a negative view of both the cosmetic surgery industry and of your comments in this thread.
If you don’t want to get challenged for writing condescending crap, then don’t write it.
Looking good, looking “sexy” even, is not all about women doing it for the menz, or about actual sex. Indeed, as many other men say, many/most of you certainly don’t demand that women surgically alter their bodies. The problem is that this disconnect gets framed as women being confused about what men really want (the silly dears) – do you guys really think that women don’t understand that the actual men who like them personally don’t really want them to go under the knife? More condescending crap.
From the book review that Kim urged everybody to go and read:
The celebrity culture has made a certain youthful look socially desirable (verging on mandatory), and if one doesn’t attempt to look sexy in middle and even old age one is denigrated for letting oneself go, no matter whether one wants to attract the opposite sex or not. Women over 25 know this well: if one don’t groom oneself to look at least a little “sexy” then one will be ignored entirely by most men in a room, even in a workplace situation, even when one is the team-leader. That’s not a very good way to get a further promotion, even if one wouldn’t want to shag one of those male co-workers for a million bucks. (This mandatory youthfulness is starting to hit men now, too).
It would be really nice if we could lift the focus above alleged purely sexual insecurities and look instead at the social insecurities that Kim emphasised in the post.
Hammer, meet nail. Well said tigtog.
I wonder to what extent the rise of cosmetic surgery can be read alongside more recent attitudes to physical fitness – and also ‘thinness’ (fitness/thinness may be gendered inflections of the same thing – and thinness is closely related to cosmetic surgery). It seems the two (cosmetic surgery and fitness) are complementary in a sense, although the consumption of fitness has been with us a little longer perhaps, because it has origins in modern disciplinary regimes. It’s also harder to successfully transform fitness into a commodity, though it seems that fitness works in a similar way in terms of consumer ‘restlessness’ – ie “provokes the very anxiety it seems to quell” by highlighting, and to an extent creating, the inadequacies of bodies that are produced by the ordinary conditions of contemporary life.
Pavlov’s Cat wrote:
She’s her own worst enemy. Nothing forced her to have the surgery that makes that problem. Dolly is a pretty smart cookie, she’s seemingly aware of the nature of her own bodies commodification (“Backwoods Barbie” for example) but making jokes about a disability you forced on yourself is pretty stupid.
I hadn’t watched much of BB this year, so had to go looking for pictures of Bianca. She’s 10Kg overweight at least on a pretty small frame, sorting that out might go some way to fixing potential back problems.
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I thought Dolly Parton’s original boobs were large. She’s had plenty of surgical nips and tucks (and lifts) but that’s her natural size.
It’s a bit hard to tell tigtog, what Dolly originally looked like. When she was on the Porter Wagoner show in the sixties she didn’t look that big, but a lot of what was going on was trussed together with a Dagmar like 1950’s torpedo bra so who really knows. Here’s a youtube of her singing back then – not as big as she is now, and definitely in no danger of putting her own eyes out.
Contrast and compare to recent Parkinson footage: Zowie!!. Self inflicted disability, by her own admission done for the consumption of men.
Ur 2 r both rite, her boobs are naturally large AND she’s had implants!
http://www.dollymania.net/faq.html#013
David, one’s breasts get bigger as one gets older. The skin stretches and loosens, like every other part of the body. I think this would be even truer for those of us with very full breasts to begin with.
I think it’s strange that on the one hand you’ve said (at 31, for instance) that you think women undergo these procedures because of a mistaken idea that men want them to look different, but on the other, you said Bianca is at least 10kg overweight. I don’t agree that she is, but that’s neither here nor there.
Maybe you meant she’s overweight for health reasons rather than for appealing to men reasons – if so then why is it plausible that a woman would diet for ‘health’ but not that she’d have a breast reduction for health?
And the point of the Dolly Parton example is?
Going back to tigtog’s comment at 25:
And the other bit of the post that seems to have been overlooked is the discussion of the complexity of motivation, and how professed motivations can demonstrate the individual problematisation of a broader social/cultural pattern. That’s why Bianca, as the post suggests, is a good example of this sort of dialectic, because she comes close to articulating it, but falls at the last hurdle, and because the celebrity context is foregrounded in the BB environment. But it should be clear, I’d have thought, and particularly given the points made in the book review, that an individual concession or justification that “she wants to attract the menz” is hardly a knock down argument to demonstrate “it’s all about teh sex”. There’s such a thing as “the sociology of accounts” where you can observe social patterns shaping expectations, norms and individual behaviour through the excuses, stories, rationalisations individuals offer for doing something which is now “expected” by “society”. It’s a very naive way of proceeding to take such statements at face value, although – in this context – it’s unsurprising that it’s done precisely because it reinforces gendered ways of thinking. And more broadly, anyone who can’t see that a lot of the comments on this thread reflect those gendered structures of feeling really does have their head in the sand.
The Dolly line was used not ‘for’ or ‘against’ her, her boobs and her surgical activities generally, but merely to lighten the tone (hah) and to illustrate the nature of the problem I was describing, ie running for the bus, an activity in which a “supportive partner” could help only by running along in front of one, backwards, pulling a wheelbarrow.
Crossed with Laura. My comment was in response to David’s.
I don’t think Bianca is overweight either, incidentally.
Thanks, Dr Cat – what I was really trying to get at was how the Dolly Parton example was then subsequently taken up – I think to reinforce the claim that cosmetic surgery is about teh sex and it’s some sort of response to some putatively false belief that attractiveness to men is the determinant of female body shaping.
Laura wrote:
That’s exactly what I meant Laura. If she lost the weight, she might also lose the necessity of having a breast reduction. I would think it worth a try simply for health reasons alone. I won’t provide a link due to the obnoxious comments related to the site where the footage is, but there is shower footage of the poor kid trying to wash in a t-shirt. Pretty clearly, losing some weight would help her a lot.
That’s a gorgeous video you linked to by the way. Dolly’s dress is a classic bust minimiser style too. It’s no accident that maternity dresses have (or, used to have, and are beginning agian to have) big white sailor-type collars.
This discussion reminds me a lot of the Bill Henson debate. There, there was a similar suggestion that the condition and appearance of a person’s body, and how he or she chooses to present it and manipulate it, is overwhelmingly a sexual matter. What about other sorts of aesthetic considerations?
I can’t be the only person whose thoughts about how I’d like my body to look have much more to do with dress and style than with looking sexy.
Precisely, so was I. Our comments crossed, however appropriately placed mine may have ended up being in the sequence!
Serendipity!
Mark wrote:
In my opinion that analysis is completely backwards. It’s modern “gendered ways of thinking” that are disguising the rather more simple motivations behind body modification and body politics generally. Your own comment stating you didn’t think Bianca was overweight is a classic example: in polite company we are restricted in expressing negative comment against women as in the past it was a manifestation of male expectations. It doesn’t have to be. It might be, but that doesn’t mean it is.
I doubt Bianca is 10 kg overweight. Large breasts tend not to photograph well under clothes, making their owners look much heavier than they actually are.
Trying to minimise back pain associated with breast size by losing weight can often backfire. As Laura pointed out, breasts get bigger over time and the skin stretches and loosens. This process is exacerbated by significant weight loss, and you can often find yourself going from, say, a 14F to a 8GG (in other words, your breasts become even larger in proportion to the rest of your body).
On a slightly different note, attempts at ’sensitive partnering’ are often anything but – and actually mirror the kind of objectifying-male-gaze and female-self-hatred that are variously proposed as the main drivers for cosmetic surgery. While most fellas seem to get that expressing a disinclination for small breasts is a bit old-hat and not likely to go down well with teh wimmin, they’ll happily describe large breasts as ‘grotesque’ (as in one comment above), perhaps on the naive assumption that this ‘evens things up’ for the relatively flat-chested, or is somehow pro-feminist…
Would it be better if women who preen and mangle their bodies were just after more sex? There’s a case to be made.
If men believe (as I think they broadly do) that women who place a lot of emphasis on their physical display are after sex, but they’re really after self-worth, acceptance, security, attention, love, whatever… then Houston, we have a problem. I can’t believe for the life of me that:
a) Women aren’t aware that most men think they dress up to look sexually attractive
b) Men aren’t aware that women are usually doing so for other reasons
It’s a bummer that so many women who do realise a) just blame that on men. Us poor bastards have only evolved a little since finding sex by going out clubbing meant something a little different. Sexual selection by appearance isn’t exactly a rarity in nature. Is it a bad thing?
As far as b) goes, it just beggars belief. Men know that when they pretty up, it could just as well be to impress people, intimidate people, feel confident that others think well of you, fit in, stand out, or make any number of statements about themselves. Why can’t women be doing this too – yes, even if it means cutting and stuffing and stretching their flesh and bones. It can’t be so simple as men just wanting to see and fuck can it?
Pav, I loved the line about the supportive partner helping a large-busted woman run for the bus backwards with a wheelbarrow! Dolly Parton’s joke reflected real life for many women with naturally large breasts, no matter how she came by hers.
*snort*
*cackle*
FDB wrote:
FDB – there is a big difference between public displays involving clothing and surgery. As I stated above, enhancement surgery is a rather drastic step intended to be viewed naked. If the intention was to simply enhance ones appearance for social reasons, it’s much easier to buy a WonderBra or those revolting rubber chicken fillet things that are stuffed into bras.
Facial surgery or rhinplasty or whatever is a different thing.
Right, because there’s nothing uncomfortable or inconvenient about doing that for the rest of your life instead of having surgery and convalescing for a few weeks instead.
tigtog wrote:
Seriously? You equate the potential problems with invasive surgery for enhancement with 30 seconds worth of farting about in the morning?
I suppose “convenience culture” makes these demands of us, but I think compulsory viewing of cosmetic surgery practices should be shown to teenagers just so they realise that “a few weeks of convalescing” may well turn into a lifetime of horror (silicon implants anyone?)
I’m not talking about my own personal calculus, I’m talking about one particular rational weighing up of options. I’m well aware of the risks of surgery, which is why it took me painful years of lugging around my H-cup burden to finally go ahead with my reduction. But not all women are me.
The only way you can think that wearing either a wonder-bra or rubber bra inserts is “30 seconds worth of farting about in the morning” is that you’ve never worn them. Any strenuous movement requires a subsequent adjustment. What about going on a beach holiday? Out clubbing for the night in a strappy frock? Going to the gym?
Surgical enhancement is NOT just about being seen naked. You are simply wrong on this.
David – do you want to talk about breast enhancement, breast reduction, why girls who you think are too fat should go on diets, or all three? I think the issues are very different in each instance and aside from the general comments about surgery that Kim laid out in her post, I don’t think there can be any umbrella arguments made about them.
A very good book about all this is “Skintight: an anatomy of cosmetic surgery” by Meredith Jones (a Sydneysider and my sister-in-law) http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalog/product.aspx?isbn=184520669X
“FDB – there is a big difference between public displays involving clothing and surgery”
DR my brother. I don’t want to push you any further out on a limb, but a matter of degree does not a meaningful distinction make.
Laura wrote:
Laura, I have to disagree. Why else would a show called “How to look good naked” even exist?
tigtog wrote:
Explain labioplasty or cornhole bleaching then.
Way to shift the goalposts away from Wonderbras and rubber chicken fillet thingys.
I meant to link to the comment where you specifically equated breast enhancement with getting naked for sex – #58.
Oh my goodness yes. I too demand a sociological explanation of anal bleaching made exclusively using football analogies.
I’ll start off: “Well Gus, it’s a game of two halves”.
Ha, ha, ha, I might have guessed.
And Tig Tog in the van…
So this is what has become of the once-principled teh Left, stood shoulder to shoulder with our less-blessed and suffering global proletarian sisters and brothers. Down with reification and commodity fetishism; mass carnage and suffering, just plain neglect and worst of all capricious wastage of precious resources, just to drive the despairing Greater Auschwitz message home to the filthy captive billions.
We’ll look after the “essentials” first, THEN worry about the “luxuries” once the level playing field is up and all is finally right for the greivously suffering; when there is no more in authenticity, false consciousness, denialism, sadism and neurotic fetishism manipulated by the fascist genocidal forces that are the real problem, that some folk are so eager to be complicitous with.
Not.
Even Mirandas Devine, Cheney and HoWARd are better thsn some of this lot. At least they are overt in their fascism.
Right. Fighting arguments that present women as uniquely vacuous and complicit with regard to a culture that commodifies the human body is just the same as being the fascist vanguard of consumerism.
Gotcha.
“Well Gus, it’s a game of two halves”
…and in between, you sit on the bleachers and take what the coach dishes out.
tigtog wrote:
Why is it shifting the goalposts? If there are clear alternatives to breast enhancement that work in the context of “social reasons”, why take that explanation at face value?
Nobody pretends the other two procedures are for anything but sexually related matters, but for some reason in this thread breasts are special and never to be considered in that light? Just because you say so?
Some statistics to ponder from 2007 in the US
- breast enhancement running 2:1 against breast reduction.
- liposuction a close second.
- women undergoing procedures at the rate of 10:1 to men.
Ten women for every man (and the mens procedures are overwhelmingly for fat related operations).
There’s a war on for womens bodies, and women are waging it on themselves.
It’s shifting the goalposts because the operations you named are unusual and rather extreme operations David. You know that. I see that Botox injections are by far the commonest kind of cosmetic procedure done in the US, according to your link. There’s no way that can be construed as equivalent to pornifying your bottom.
I also think that breast reduction and breast enlargement are totally different procedures and while enlargement probably does come about for sexual-aesthetic reasons, I don’t agree at all that reduction does, but you have said at #64 that you think it’s all the same thing, so that’s that as far as I’m concerned.
No idea what Paul Walter’s trying to say, but he sounds cross.
“There’s a war on for womens bodies, and women are waging it on themselves.”
Maybe, but surely the question is why?
Nobody said ‘never’. Several of us have been at pains to say ’sometimes’. But then, it’s very clear from this thread so far that some of the men here are not bothering to read the women’s comments properly. And in the meantime, again, women’s breasts may be exclusively ’sexual’ for men but they are not exclusively so for women, and women fiddle with them surgically for reasons that have to do with health, comfort, clothing and social/professional success AS WELL AS WITH SEX. Unlike the demented and potentially painful and dangerous fiddling with places where the sun never shines, surgical changes to one’s breasts are visible whether one is clothed or nekkid.
No, because Tigtog has them and you don’t. Imagine the outraged squealing, if there were a dick-related thread and the women turned up instructing the blokes on how to think about them and treat them, and what they signify.
And, naturally, men saying loftily in public fora that some total stranger called Bianca is (*gasp*) 10 kg “overweight” and her breasts are “grotesque” has absolutely nothing to do with it.
And then you ask why women hate themselves.
Spare me.
And as eight out of nine cosmetic surgeons are men (see pg 41 of http://www.amazon.com/Dubious-Equalities-Embodied-Differences-Explorations/dp/0742514218), I’m not even sure that’s an accurate way of putting things David.
Bianca showed taste in not appearing in Zoo because she is interested in entering politics. Strange thing though, Bianca didn’t mind going into the Combi with Ben. Ben showed what a nice boy he is too, in not doing what he didn’t want to. There would be no doubt that Bianca would be immensely popular though, as she has natural assets. I admire her choice not to make money by being sleazy.
“Imagine the outraged squealing, if there were a dick-related thread and the women turned up instructing the blokes on how to think about them and treat them, and what they signify.”
Well let’s have at it! Just don’t try to tell me mine signifies anything but sex, or at a stretch (BAM!) the ability to piss standing up.
That’s really the problem for a lot of blokes PC. We know what bits of our bodies are for what purpose, and assume the same about women. The bits of our bodies that are about sex are so obviously and only about sex that their display outside of pornography, medicine or art is inherently taboo. In public or social settings in other words.
So we ask of women who want to enhance the display of their breasts “how is that not meant to be sexual?”. It’s not a stupid question.
I know you are, but what am I?
Pavlov’s Cat wrote:
I didn’t say they were grotesque, that was somebody else (and I’m accused of not reading the comments: pshaw!). I said she was overweight. Yes, that’s judgmental but geez I’ve been fat and it’s just not that hard to get rid of.
And yes I still wonder why (say) 300,000 women in the US in 2007 decided their breasts were inadequate for whatever reason that couldn’t be overcome with a bit of strategic padding. Strappy dress? Having the right “look” at the gym? Yet these women are simultaneously and definitely not vacuous as per tigtog?
Laura – those 10:1 male surgeons operating on 10:1 voluntary female patients. They aren’t just grabbing them off the street.
Here’s another anecdote from last night. The gf wants to get a personal trainer now. Why? It’s summer in the north so all the celebs are in their bikinis. That’s her explanation. Do you really think I can even be bothered getting into a discussion with her about the subject if that’s her rationale?
Now, it might be that we can discuss these matters in great earnest on a blog, but in real life – “reality” – it’s a conversation I now walk away from. I know from cold, hard experience, that there’s little to nothing I can say that will change her thought process. She doesn’t want me to change it; she doesn’t seem to want to change it herself. It’s not worth the fight anymore – and I’ve been fighting for the past three years to encourage better self-acceptance on her part.
And no, things aren’t great at home at the moment either. Thanks for asking. I think she’s just too young for me…
No, I didn’t say it was. Apart from anything else, the point you’re making there is very specifically about breast enlargement, not other kinds of surgery. But when you call this ’sexual’ you can only be talking about the sexual pleasure of men. Because breast surgery never enhances sexual pleasure for women; it often decreases it and sometimes destroys it.
I think you’ll find that women’s reasons for breast enlargement surgery are as often social as sexual (to do with insecurity, feeling undervalued and so on), and when they are sexual it’s at second hand; they’re about causing men’s sexual attraction and pleasure.
And I didn’t say you did; I said “men”. So the accusation stands, and pshaw back atcha.
David said: “Laura – those 10:1 male surgeons operating on 10:1 voluntary female patients. They aren’t just grabbing them off the street.” No, of course not, but once we begin talking about choosing to have surgery done on you by another person, perhaps being upsold at times on one’s original desires, we’re far away from your original rather glib claim that women are doing it all to themselves without any help & encouragement from men.
FDB: “Well let’s have at it! Just don’t try to tell me mine signifies anything but sex, or at a stretch (BAM!) the ability to piss standing up.”
Well, men do piss through their penises don’t they? Even this organ has more than one function.
And as you said yourself, it’s an organ that’s kept out of sight most of the time. If the man I’m talking to in a normal everyday context lacks the usual appendages http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMEJeZBoreg he’ll have to say so, or take of his pants, before I can know about it. This makes it not comparable with breasts which, as others have carefully explained, can be seen, if only in outline, through normal clothes, and are used for feeding babies.
Pavlov’s cat wrote:
Double pshaw!
If I announced publically that I was going to have surgery on my bag to stop the boys from old-age induced low hanging, wouldn’t you be questioning my motives? After all, whose going to see them unless I start wearing trousers like Barry Gibb used to (at approx 17 seconds you’ll see what I mean)? Wouldn’t you kindly suggest I switch from boxers to tighty whiteys and perhaps find more appropriate clothing?
And Laura, the whole baby feeding function is severely compromised by enhancement surgery, and if you follow the stats through, most of the women having enhancement surgery are 35-50 and are done feeding babies.
David I do know that. I mentioned breastfeeding in response to the claim different people keep making here, in different ways, that breasts are primarily sex organs in much the same way that penises (supposedly) are.
And in reply to your hypothetical scrotum surgery annoncement, no, I wouldn’t presume to make it my business what you should or shouldn’t do there.
Geez David, I’ve completely forgotten what your original point was amid all these bodily parts, assuming that there was one. Point that is.
“But when you call this ’sexual’ you can only be talking about the sexual pleasure of men.”
Can I just? FYI, when I say ’sexual’, I don’t only mean ‘of or pertaining to the sensory experience of sexual congress’. What we do to secure or procure a partner is also sexuality in action. Probably a much more important part of it for the purpose of this discussion (or so I thought). Breast enhancement is surely an attempt to appeal to men’s sexual appetits, but just as surely this is because women want to have that appeal, at least partly for their own sexual reasons.
On a related point, breasts on display are an outward sign of sexual maturity and mothering potential. That would still IMHO be sexual display even if no sexual pleasure could be had from them.
Laura – I *think* you’ve missed my point. I’m not sure I can put it any more clearly, but here goes nothing…
If a man deliberately displays or tries to enhance the appearance of his sexual apparatus, it is ALWAYS about sex and wanting to be having more of it or have it with more partners or what have you.
If a woman deliberately displays or tries to enhance the appearance of her sexual apparatus, it is sometimes, to some extent, apparently about something else.
Hence the problems men generally have in understanding.
Penises are for embarrassing their owners, the sexual function is a minor side effect. Adolescent and riding the bus? Better have your schoolbag handy for putting on your lap. Twenty something and at the beach? Better get in the cold surf pretty quick if the wind is blowing the wrong way. Thirty something and trying to make babies? Better have some handy salve for the inevitable chafing. Forty something and and kids in the house? Forget walking around naked in the mornings, forever, thanks mr morning glory. Fifty something and empty nesting? Fuggin thing will apparently quit working which is something to look forward too. You ladies just *don’t understand* the trouble we have.
Tell me, what is “breasts on display”? Is it when their outline can be seen through a skivvy like Bianca’s got on?
FDB: “Laura – I *think* you’ve missed my point. I’m not sure I can put it any more clearly, but here goes nothing…”
No, no, I understood you. I don’t agree with your premises, that’s all. You are persisting in describing the simple fact of having breasts as “displaying” them.
I’ve already said what I think about breast enlargement operations. They are a different kettle of fish to reductions, which is what the post was about and what some people here thought Bianca ought not to have.
Poor ol Davie Rubie. Never vacuous here, eh mate? Or is that more along the lines of sociopathic, Laura?
Well that’s true David, which is why a sense of humour is an essential requirement for a partner to have IMHO.
FDB, no, you’re not going to properly understand what any of the women on this thread are saying until you can, somehow, don’t ask me how, stop assuming that just because men think of women’s breasts exclusively as “sexual apparatus”, women also must think of them that way. Because most of us Just. Do. Not.
I think the fundamental mutual incomprehension in this thread is to do with the fact that most men have an androcentric world view and mistake it for a universal one (which of course is part of the definition of an androcentric world view), while women understand the androcentric world view but do not share it. Especially not when it’s focused on us.
My girlfriend nearly without fail addresses her breasts wholly in relation to sexual “function”, except if she’s simply saying they hurt. Just cos you say it’s so, PC, don’t mean it is.
That wrinkly thing which hangs out grandfather’s underpants should, or should not be mentioned?
Or that useless bit of skin on the end of a man’s penis?
Paul Walter @ 93, I don’t know what you’re trying to say. Could you say it again less enigmatically perhaps.
Youie, why don’t you give your girlfriend the URL here and let her talk for herself….
Come Monday, when she’s back at work (not online at home), I will, Laura. And don’t go thinking I’m misrepresenting anything. I don’t need to.
And adieu to you till then.
For a start we’re very well aware that women can still have sex if they have no breasts, and can still reproduce as well. Neither of these are the same for men’s penises.
Knowing that breasts are rather fundamental to men’s sexual attraction to us is an entirely different kettle of fish, especially when women’s social status is generally tied up with men’s fuckability ratings of them. Not even wealth and power can give a plain or ugly woman the same social cachet as a beautiful model receives for her looks alone. Look at the scorn poured on Christina Onassis for not being sexy enough, that led in the end to her death because she punished her body so much trying to “fix” herself. How much of her dieting and surgeries was about being sexually attractive qua sex, and how much was simply about stopping the scorn?
When the day comes that women can know that there are not huge numbers of men out there making pig noises about them if they are carrying a little extra weight, or making dog noises if they are not wearing full glamour makeup, or bag-over-the-head jokes, or what-a-desperate-slut jokes about women using Wonderbras and bra inserts – when women know that the men they work with are not making these jokes among themselves, that the male managers on whom their promotions depend are not making these jokes among themselves, when the day comes that most men actually stop the homosocial ritual remarks that heap scorn upon women just going about their daily lives, trying to earn a living, who have the temerity to exist in the world without offering them the free titillation to which they feel entitled, then – THEN – the argument that breast enhancements are just about sex might have a leg to stand on.
And for the men here who are not scorners, when it’s not about you then it’s not about you. You can’t deny that women cannot avoid being confronted with male scorn from some corners for not living up to the aesthetic standard, even if it’s the mild scorn of being studiously ignored.
Laura: “Paul walter@94 I dont understand what you are trying to say”.
Well Laura, sit down put on your thinking cap and reread.If that post doesnt work for you try the others.
Amsure even youi willworkiot out in the end.
Same with PC, who thinks that the only world view is the womens point of view(eg her own}.
Okay, my reading of this thread goes like this:
Both the feminist perspective and the countervailing perspectives offered here have constative and performative dimensions. It seems that there is a drift in the countervailing (androcentric, for want of a better word) position from a constative position (ie in our culture, sexuality is indissociable from any discussion of certain parts of the body) to a performative one (where a compulsory sexualisation of certain body parts is performed). In the feminist position, there are also constative and performative dimensions. On the one hand, women’s experience is being offered as a partial ‘false’ in response to the assertion that sexuality is indissociable from certain parts of the body. On the other, feminists are trying to stake a claim to a critical space where the body can be distinct from the narrower senses of the sexual. This is the performative dimension of the feminist position.
Part of the difficulty here is that, I don’t think the various androcentric statements are being made in full awareness that there is a performative dimension to such statements. Hence the lamentation over what women are doing to themselves goes hand in hand with the enactment of the very conditions under which women do such things.
Yep, and Goddess forfend that women might have a bit more of an insight than blokes into what it’s like to be a woman. Or something.
The way these threads tend to work is something like this:
1. Feminist woman posts on body image issues;
2. Within about three comments, man says “I don’t know what you mean by objectification” or “boys just like looking at girls, it’s natural, boys are highly sexed” or “it’s about teh sex”;
3. Women point out that there are definitions of words used and provide helpful links;
4. Links ignored, repetition of “it’s natural”, “it’s just about teh sex” etc.;
5. Women get frustrated;
6. Men claim that women are trying to stifle debate, insist on their own views, blah, blah;
7. Thread thoroughly derailed.
Repeat ad infinitum.
The missing link in all this is:
(a) empathy;
(b) imagination;
(c) listening;
(d) all of the above.
You tell me.
Spot on, Klaus!
(e) humour.
Oh, and I forget personal abuse, as exemplified by Paul Walter at 93. I await someone coming along to say:
Or John Greenfield doing his bad Judith Butler pastiche.
This is going nowhere fast.
Okay: a breast, a penis, and an isosceles triangle walk into a bar, and the bartender says…
.. the bartender says “Just tell me what you want to drink because it’s time to breastfeed my toddler now”.
xx
Hmm, no more comments, a whole hour later? Maybe Leigh is right.
This is a pretty interesting thread, if a slightly nutty one, partly b/c it’s getting people to reference and use their own backgrounds in ways that highlight the sheer range and variety of human experiences. Which probably goes to show something or other, not sure what.
Was glad to see the insight offered by PC, tigtog, (& maybe some others?) that just because a chap sees a body part in a given way, it doesn’t mean that the owner of said body part views it in the same terms.
Just as a thought experiment (since I don’t really have a dog in this fight), to see if it re-starts the discussion, you could consider that that insight above could be expanded and used to view gender relations in all sorts of ways, in both directions. You could use it for example as a critique of Kim’s comment at #104.
In one way, I took it (that is, PC’s/tigtog’s idea) as a sort of sideways admission that women and men simply have different ways of being in the world, and so it’s not surprising that they view things differently, esp. things like trademark body parts. There’s only two genders, and there aren’t any others, and so their respective wiring plausibly accounts for a lot of human experience, in an Occam’s razor-y sort of way.
It seems more likely to me that human experience is the sum of [male perceptions] plus [female perceptions] taken as a whole, with the understanding that there aren’t going to be any further kinds of gender wiring (by which I mean that there aren’t a third, fourth, and fifth sex, not meaning to exclude outliers like gay sexuality or unusual birth configurations). In other words, that’s in opposition to the view (which I sometimes pick up as an assumption in feminist writing, regardless of whether it’s intentional) that there is or could be a gender-neutral “universal” ground of human experience, which has been (unequally) colonized in different places by the two genders. I don’t think that’s true.
The point being, if women think men are mistaken about their view of breasts because men don’t have them, well, it could be productive to apply that insight to all sorts of questions, and in both directions.
Anyway, a penis, a breast, and Barack Obama are all in a lifeboat, when suddenly it springs a leak…
Zoe — heh!
.
Youie, just because that’s all she says to you, it doesn’t mean that’s all she says. Perhaps she thinks that’s all you want to hear.
Only if your typing improves.
Laura, if I understand Paul Walter correctly he was referring back to his spray at #34, where he is (as he has done before, and I suspect not only at LP) ticking off, judging and condemning as superficial hypocrites the people here for having the absolute God-damned gall to be talking about something other than what he thinks they ought to be talking about (ie what are to him the incredibly boring and trivial subjects of women’s bodies, sex and capitalism), instead of bemoaning the state of the workers, the poor, Iraq, the Third World etc etc, and furthermore the fact that we are not doing so makes us all right-wing if not actually fascists. Bemoaning the state of the workers, the poor, Iraq, the Third World etc etc on a blog is, as we all know, both useful and virtuous, unlike what we’re all doing here.
Paul Walter – whatever issue you have with me, or imagine that you have with me, it’s a YP not an MP, so you needn’t bother telling me about it again.
jpz it’s a bit ambitious to pick up some discussion like this, where we can’t even get to a consensus that if a woman doesn’t want to be burdened with over large breasts her whole life she’s perfectly right to have them surgically reduced, and try to extrapolate it to some cosmically applicable insight into everything. But good luck with that. ps gender isn’t ‘wired’
PC that’s just patronising hehe
Actually Leigh, I found it a very clear and helpful explanation and didn’t feel patronised in the least.
I’m not going to try to contribute meaningfully here, cos I’m drunk now. But because I’m drunk, I needed to check where I was in the discussion. So I read back and found this:
“Breast enhancement is surely an attempt to appeal to men’s sexual appetits”
I shit youse not.
Nitpicking on jpz’s otherwise largely excellent comment:
Whoa. Gender does not necessarily equate directly to sexual dimorphism, and in any case there’s a minority but not therefore insignificant proportion of intersex individuals. Once you add genderqueer and transgender folk into the mix, it gets even more complicated.
Also, Laura #114:
Nothing but net.
I’m coming in rather late to this, but let me just put in my 2 denarii worth.
This whole thread has been plagued from the outset by judgmentalism. The likes of David Rubie and Youie basically highjacked the discussion with their condemnation of women’s choices. Why do those silly girls waste money on boob implants, even though us (nice) guys aren’t actually asking them to?
Well, from my quasi-libertarian viewpoint, I don’t criticise or judge anyone for having plastic surgery. Have breasts reduced to deal with pain and discomfort? Fine. Have breasts enlarged to feel sexier? That’s fine too. Do whatever you want, folks.
Why do we feel anyone’s consumption preferences are intrinsically better or worse than anyone else’s? Is a rich dude buying a Porsche, or me buying a Battlestar Galactica DVD, a better or more acceptable choice than a woman buying implants? I don’t think so.
If we put aside the judgmentalism and condemnation, we could have an interesting empirical discussion of the changing sociology of body modification, which I presume is what Kim originally wanted.
Oh, and Paul Walter, you’re highjacking the thread worse than anyone, albeit in a way that’s so demented as to be quite entertaining. “Drive the despairing Greater Auschwitz message home to the filthy captive billions” … well done sir, you surpass even the most ludicrous Tim Blair parody of left-wing opinion.
tigtog — what I mean is, sexual reproduction among higher primates on planet Earth requires exactly two separate genders or sexes: not one, not eight, not fifty. That physical biological distinction has a bearing on how we experience the world, to say nothing of how we experience ourselves. If we were lizard-men, or mole-people, or fishes, or winged creatures, then those facts would have a bearing as well, yes?
laura — ‘ey, ‘attsamatta? You no a-like-a the lifeboat a-jokes-a?
You know, you are such a DIShonest lot; you are.
EVERY post I’ve sent concerning breast reductions from #1 onward, has indicated I understand and applaud legitimate medical treatment for a legitimate medical condition.
But no.
You lot will INSIST that I’ve said the opposite.
Then when I get irritated at being wilfully misrepresented and reject the other dishonest tactics employed by Laura, Pavlovs whatever, Tig Tog and Kim to divert attention away from my criticisms of middle-class narcissism and its affect on denying scarce resources for people who REALLY need medical treatment, it’s ME that’s harped at, on the flimsiest of excuses; “abuse”.
ANYTHING to avoid facing up.
But others will eventually realise the thread is only about gender as alibi for selfishness, and more importantly, a simple issue of equity of access to scarce medical resources.
And it doesn’t matter what spoiling tactics are used, people see this sort of issue for what it is and nothing to do with the naughty patriarchy denying women their right to their vanity, self mutilation and denial of reality, except when that denies genuinely ill people access to treatment.
eg, places like Dili and Manila, where they COULD use medical facilities for REAL health issues, for REAL people.
Thats if its not censored first as usually happens. Sorry if what I say is unpalatable, that’s just reality…
1. I do belive FDB’s arguments got better after he got pissed.
2. JPZ if those jokes are anything like your faux Italian accent one, they must be bad.
3. Watch out: When Paul Walter starts typing in caps, he has crossed a time stream on a pegleg and turned into an Irate Queen. Wait, this sounds like a good story…
False dichotomy, PW. Do you think the surgeons who carry out cosmetic surgery would all instantly jet off to Dili or Manila if people stopped having breast enhancements done?
Actually, some of them would, Paulus. Plastic surgeons do a lot of reconstructive work, and many of them donate their labour in developing countries.
That said, Paul Walter, your comments here make you look like a twerp and I think you need a cuddle.
Ayup. I know one of these dudes — he does this in his ‘holidays’, which he co-ordinates with school holidays to take his kids with him so they can travel and be with him and give his wife a break and see what sort of lives people lead in the developing world.
Heh!
Yep!
jpz, while I get where you’re coming from, you’re still equating gender with sex as a direct correlation. There’s a large body of opinion that humans just aren’t that simple: sex is biology, gender is sociology. One is far more malleable than the other.
At the risk of reigniting a thread of doom, being branded a blokedy bloke de bloke, and after some reflection, I’m still left with this question:
Why, if a legitimate, easy and cheap alternative to surgery for women who don’t like or have problems with their breasts (weight loss and wonderbras respectively) do women continue to choose surgery (other than in extreme cases or for cancer related issues)?
My contention stands that the primary purpose of enhancement surgery (and sometimes reduction surgery) is primarily for the purpose of naked display of breasts. This has been weakly refuted (it’s just SOOOOOOO inconvenient) but not substantively.
What is the point of attacking the motives of my contention that Bianca could lose 10kg and possibly avoid surgery? Don’t make me post the video.
Fat blokes are getting their moobs chopped off at record rates according to the 2007 US statistics, posted above, surely a massive number of those men could simply have hit the pavement like the rest of us have to. Why women are so special in this regard is a mystery, closely guarded.
Depends how you define “can still have sex”, tigtog, from what I’ve read.
Though maybe that’s a diversion, so I won’t expand.
And just by the by, I just read this para from Naomi Wolf at In A Strange Land:
http://inastrangeland.wordpress.com/2008/07/25/friday-feminist-naomi-wolf/
Because a number of women have explained to you that your “easy and cheap alternatives” aren’t as easy as you imagine, nor as cheap. As for how easy it is just to lose weight, well, I’m not even going to bother. but it’s also been pointed out to you that even if it is that easy to lose weight, often it doesn’t get lost from the breasts, proportionally at least.
Basically your premise is: surgery expensive, painful and difficult. Other options are better. Why are these stupid women choosing a stupid option?!?!?!111?
You may want to ask yourself why it never occurred to you that your assessment of the ease and affordability was in error, and that maybe it’s not just that you’re smarter than all those women who had plastic surgery.
The first person I ever knew who had a breast reduction was an elite athlete at school (missed the 1976 Olympic Swim Squad by a gnat’s whisker, and was also a gymnast). An excessively high level of body fat in general was not at issue.
Curiosity piqued, I went and watched the shower video. Being BB-naive, I was taken aback by the relentless, low-level cruelty of the whole set-up more than anything, but that’s by-the-by. Bianca’s not skinny, but I still don’t think she’s 10 kg overweight by any medical standard. Braless large breasts under a wet t-shirt will hang down and give their owner a slightly pregnant look, making their owner look considerably heavier overall. She doesn’t look much different to how I would in a similar get-up – and as a taller-than-average person who weighs barely eight stone, weight loss is clearly not an option for me.
Those who can pick up a three-pack of serviceable jocks from K-Mart any given Sunday may not appreciate, as others have put it, that “easy and cheap alternatives” are neither easy nor cheap. At the risk of veering into frivolous ‘women’s issues’ territory
, I simply cannot buy a correctly fitting bra in even in a city as large as Melbourne. For years I’ve made do with too-small cups and too-loose straps, until last week when my ’supportive partner’ and I flew up to Cairns to visit a specialist lingerie shop tucked away in its sprawling, Florida-esque northern suburbs. Figuring this would be my only chance for a while, we bought half a dozen bras in my size (which up until then I had assumed simply didn’t exist). $700 and two return airfares later I’m now trussed up properly – fun, yes, but easy and cheap, no, and no guarantee against the likelihood of ongoing back and neck pain.
Australian feminist and Doctor Who author Kate Orman talks about the accepting big boobs vs breast reduction issue here – http://kateorman.livejournal.com/546557.html
“you’re still equating gender with sex as a direct correlation. There’s a large body of opinion that humans just aren’t that simple: sex is biology, gender is sociology. One is far more malleable than the other.”
tigtog — not to worry this thing to shreds (esp. since it’s OT), but you seem to think I’m making a binary distinction between these things, whereas of course they’re more like parts of a web, or building blocks of a structure. “Simple” is not the same thing as “basic”. Structures have foundations, or bases. Gender may be (at least in part) sociology as you say; but sociology/social systems are ways of ordering humans, and humans are put together (or ordered) a certain way (and thus, not another way); and part of what they are put together out of includes “sex”.
Where you might choose to travel to on a system of roads and highways is “malleable”; whether you have a car or a pair of rollerskates is a more fundamental concern, and affects what choices you can make. To parse words more finely, it’s not a “simplistic” concern, it’s a “basic” one. These things are not the same.
I don’t know how to do the trackback thing, but I’ve discussed this thread here. http://rapturousthinking.blogspot.com/2008/07/not-getting-it.html
Marta, the writer at your link is talking about women being pressured to have surgery they don;t want and nobody here (or any reasonable person anywhere) would say that was a good idea. I also think the difference between a DD (which is the upper end of average now) and a GG cup is not trivial.
If anyone’s got a copy of A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession handy, reread the passage where Beatrice Nest thinks about her breasts.
[probably should put on record for those fortunate to have not heard them before, the two questions in my earlier comment refer to common Australian jokes from many years ago. That wrinkly thing which hangs out grandfather's underpants is of course grandmother. And the useless bit of skin on the end of a man's penis, lest it be surgically construed, as answer: "a man".]
Seems there are two levels at play in threads like this. One being the thoughtful, or at least, certainly, genuine, input. The other being the triggered response. Each in their own right is valuable; but one level threatens to cloud the other. At times too these two levels occur in the one comment.
j_p_z, as you say, this is OT, and much of what you say is indeed basic. However, your model of “only two genders” quite obviously fails to adequately account for the lived experiences of those with intersex/transsexual/transgender histories except as pathologies, a view which should be challenged IMO.
Wow. Emma at #134. You flew to Cairns to find a bra that fits? Fuck. That’s really impressive.
(Serious).
Dr P-Cat:
Ayup is Turkish for shame. Its about the worst thing you can say to a Turk.
Wow, that’s a useful thing to know, and there I was using it as Beverley Hillbillyspeak for yes, as I occasionally do in conversation. Never again, though.
“your model of “only two genders” quite obviously fails to adequately account for the lived experiences of those with intersex/transsexual/transgender histories except as pathologies”
Examples which are merely outliers needn’t be seen as pathologies, you’re putting words in my mouth. “Pathology” is a clinical description, and at no point have I used it or claimed to be competent to use it. An outlier is simply an outlier, whatever else it may turn out to be; and as they say, “unusual cases make bad law,” though they can of course be intellectually useful in other regards. I just wasn’t talking about individuals, but about humans as a certain biological type, separate and distinct from say bats or amoebae.
Consider the original proposition, which went something like: “Women don’t think about their own breasts in the same way that men are inclined to think about women’s breasts.” Womens and mens opinions on the subject needn’t be unanimous for it at least to be an intelligible statement (its truth can be argued about). In the same way, the fact that there exist transgendered persons who also have views about breasts, will not simply vaporize the thing as a proposition which can at least be understood and discussed. If we take your view to the extreme, we have to start saying that simply because there are exceptions to a category, there are really no such things as “women” and “men,” which is patently absurd, which in turn should set one a-thinking.
The existence of William Faulkner’s prose does not show that there is no such thing as normative English grammar. It’s not a particularly profound or original point, but it’s a mistake that seems to get made practically every other day, which is the only reason I’m still chewing on this very small issue like a dog on a slipper.
No, j_p_z, in this case the limits of the dichotomy expose the rules on which the dichotomy is unreflectively based, and put those rules – and the dichotomisation – into question.
Mark, I think in this case you’re mistaken, but this is all a tempest in a teapot, so it would take too long to argue why. Instead, time for a joke on the subject. (Have people here read that interesting book “The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time”? This is from that book.)
An economist, a logician, and a mathematician are on a train going through Scotland. They look out the window and see a white cow. The economist says, “Hey, look at that. All the cows in Scotland are white!” The logician says, “No: there are cows in Scotland, and at least one is white.” The mathematician says, “No: there is at least one cow in Scotland, and the part of it facing us seems to be white in this light.”
Now of course the mathematician is the most correct; but making all decisions on those strict terms would be very slow going, so we use different kinds of categories for different situations. We could even add a fourth person (a “theorist” perhaps?) to say, “No: there’s just some sort of creature out there. And what do you mean by a ‘cow,’ anyway? Besides, ‘Scotland’ is just a fake geopolitical construct, used to oppress immigrants.”
Hurrumph, j_p_z. Instead of ‘economist’ in that little joke, couldn’t you substitute some lesser class of human being, who are proven to be both innumerate and illogical, such as ‘politician’ or ‘lawyer’ or ’sociologist’?
Economics these days is virtually a branch of applied maths anyway.
And as for Scotland being fake, the late Hugh Trevor-Roper had something interesting to say about that …
http://www.nysun.com/arts/hugh-trevor-ropers-the-invention-of-scotland/82417/
Yeah, everyone picks on economists. Or at least a statistically significant number of people in the snide gag producing population subset tend to prefer “economists” over other professions to provide cheap laughs at the right price.
Paulus, you’ve obviously never met the sorts of sociologists who inhabit UQ and similar departments. Chi squared is their middle name.
In other news, here’s an interesting article by Robert Jensen, all of which I’d recommend reading, but this excerpt seems most apt for this thread:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/jensen080708.html
Uncanny.
Isn’t it?
Kim wrote:
Well, I read it, but it doesn’t explain tigtog’s paranoid rant at 100, spilling into a spittle flecked 101, and it doesn’t explain why Anna Winter at 132 thinks I think all women are stupid. Is it really necessary to put words in my mouth instead of having a good old argument?
Then I go over to feral sparrowhawks intelligent and well considered piece and find tigtog et. al. responding in a considered and intelligent manner they were unable to offer the posters here.
I’m done for chick threads when the chicks can’t even bother to be polite.
Tigtog doesn’t appear anywhere on that thread. F*cking chicks, they all look the same.
Y`all sound the same PC. Like I wrote days ago this thread is going nowhere fast.
PC – your browser has a nifty little search button (Edit, Find…), search for tigtog to make it easier as finding things in a long thread on LP is a little difficult.
David, I was referring to Feral Sparrowhawk’s post.
Leigh, if you think we all sound the same then perhaps you’re not reading very carefully. If the thread doesn’t interest you, there’s a very simple solution.
Bugger PC, I just wish tigtog had done that when it was you. I liked your response a lot, perhaps you’d be kind enough to repost it here.
I’ve belatedly added links in the post to tigtog at Hoyden and Feral’s post.
And I think that the quality and on-topic-ness of the discussions there compared to here might have more to do with some of what Robert Jensen had to say in my comment at 148 than “teh wimminz are rude”.
Kim, teh wimminz are not rude everywhere, but they were certainly having a fair crack at it in this thread. What would you say if you poked your nose into a blokedy bloke de bloke thread like (say) a Robert Merkel Defense Orgy, only to be told you had no place being there, your opinions were of no import, you don’t understand the subject matter, you don’t understand the topic of discussion and most importantly, you don’t have testicles so do not understand righteous war toy raptitude? Furthermore, anything you post in the thread will be twisted in bizarre caricature intended to close down discussion?
PC I have read this thread very carefully.
David, I’m not particularly interested in getting into a meta-discussion so I’ll refer you back to my comments at 104 and 148.
I will observe, though, that a thread about defence procurement is not actually about testicles and men’s bodies whereas this one is about breasts and women’s bodies.
You did it again!
Whatevs, dude.
Regarding my alleged “paranoid rant” and “bizarre caricature” (I’ll cop to 1 out of 4 – the “rant”), I’ll note that it doesn’t appear to matter how often a feminist carefully qualifies a statement with the word SOME in front of the word MEN, there are those who will read it as a spray against ALL blokes.
I was speaking from direct observation, having spent more years than I care to admit being one of those women who was “one of the boys”, priding myself on keeping up with the macho competitive crowd. I’ve heard it all, and laughed along with it, because I was “a good sport” with “a sense of humour” who could take a “joke” (and make one, too).
I grew out of being that good sport who cheered along the contempt contests (and it wasn’t just sexist contempt either). I now socialise with a kinder class of people, and at least half the blokes who also “went along with it” back then have also grown out of it and become part of that kinder class of people (and quite a few blokes always held themselves apart from it, and good on them).
Unfortunately, the rest of the macho competitive crowd are still doing the same old thing, and our society rewards the macho competitive crowd by mentoring them to become the majority of our captains of finance and industry, mandarins of the public service and the guys who get the nod for preselection for our parliamentary electorates. The macho competitive crowd are the ones who generally set the tone of our social hierarchies, and part of that tone is a continued contempt for any woman who doesn’t meet the ogling standards to which they feel entitled, expressed as both overt scorn and covert marginalisation.
It is horribly simplistic to point at women having plastic surgery as purely being insecure about their individual sexual relationships in a society where plastic surgery also vastly improves their odds of avoiding scorn and marginalisation from the hierarchies which determine their employment and other social prospects.
Note also the way the “logic” works in some of these comments:
(1) Dolly Parton had breast reduction surgery;
(2) She said it was to look sexier;
(3) Therefore ALL women who have breast reduction surgery must be doing it to look sexier.
Oh please Kim, that’s not even close.
(1) Dolly Parton had enhancement surgery.
(2) She said it was to look sexier.
(3) Some women have surgery for that purpose.
It’s just a little counterfactual against the claims that women couldn’t possibly have any sexual reason for surgery on their breasts because breasts just aren’t sexual in the way men think they are.
Ok, David, obviously I wasn’t reading carefully enough.
Would you care to comment on the logical slippage involved in the assertion that some women have augmentation surgery for the stated reason of “looking sexier” and the inference from this is the only or most important cause?
You might care to consider what “looking sexier” might mean. Hint: not all about teh sex.
I’d also suggest that the way you’ve framed your last comment is a construction of your own making.
“I do believe FDB’s arguments got better after he got pissed.”
Harrumph!
Yes, I’m sure after the point where I stopped making any, things got easier for those who so wanted me to be saying something I wasn’t. I honestly feel like some of the lasses here don’t really want a male perspective on any of this. Or at least they want it to be either “yes, you’re right” or a variant on the attitudes they’re pre-equipped to refute.
We have, I think, genuine problems with understanding each other here, and inasmuch as those misunderstandings are worth ironing out, there’s a lot to be gained from holding off with the ‘gotchas’ till you’re sure you know where someone’s actually coming from.
Not in the context of that argument Kim, but the other assertion I made was that surgery (rather than other methods which I argued were easier, but which was disputed) has a component of teh sex0r. Everyone vehemently disagreed, but I don’t think it’s that simple, given the increasing number of men (who are always just after teh sex0r or something) who are also undergoing cosmetic surgery. If you read my comments, I framed it as an open question, not an assertion. But like you said, whatevs.
David:
I (and as far as I can remember every other female contributor to this thread) have used the words ’sometimes’, ‘not always’,'not exclusively’ over and over again all the way through this thread. You are arguing against an absolute case that nobody, as far as I can remember, has put.
However, breasts are indeed not sexual in the way that men think they are. At least not to (most) women. But there is clearly no point in telling you this. If five or six blokes all told me the same things about testicles (not guns; I hope for your own sake that you don’t really believe breasts are analogous to guns in any context at all), and what they were telling me was contradictory to everything I had ever believed, I wouldn’t think OMG THESE MEN ARE ALL AWFUL AND WRONG, I would think Hmmm, I have learned something new about testicles and I’ve been wrong all this time. Then I would blush and, as it were, withdraw.
Feral Sparrowhawk’s post was, as you rightly say, intelligent and well considered. It was also courteous, and showed (1) a frankness about being more interested in the sexual aspect of breasts than their other aspects, (2) a genuine curiosity and interest in what actual women had to actually say about their own actual bodies, and (3) a willingness to believe them when they said it. I was merely responding to all of that in kind.
Your own first contribution to this thread, on the other hand, was to tell someone else they were talking ‘garbage’, and in terms of tone and content you have continued as you began. Your accusations of paranoia, aggression, ranting, not reading other people’s comments carefully etc etc look like pure projection to me, sorry.
Kim & Tigtog:
1) David wants to believe that women have their boobs done because it makes them teh sexxay and look good naked.
2) He wants to believe this rooly badly.
3) We should let him. Life is short.
Well, Dr Cat, I note my agreement with David on the “whatevs” aspect of our interchange.
But FDB, it’s not that we don’t want it. It’s more that we don’t need it, because we are overwhelmed by the ‘male perspective’ every day. That’s what a patriarchal culture is. Women have been being bombarded by the ‘male perspective’ from every side since we first trotted off with our mums to the David Jones Bra Dept Fitting Rooms to get ourselves on the outside of a white cotton 32A. The ‘male perspective’ on breasts saturates public space at every turn. Including this thread.
What you say here strikes me as true in reverse. It looks an awful lot more to me like the men on this thread don’t really want a female perspective on this and want us to say ‘Yes, you’re right’ to them.
To paraphrase Dorothy L. Sayers, breasts are not independent objects but are usually attached to a woman of some sort. Strangely, said woman is probably better placed than a man to describe her own experience of what it’s like to have them.
FDB, I thought most of your comments were spot on, and trying to find a middle ground between widely divergent worldviews. I’m sorry that I didn’t make a point of saying that at the time.
*Nods*
#89 in particular. I just thought the drunk ones were funnier, especially ‘Nothing but net.’
Ah, Pav and Kim posted while I was composing that (short though it is) and now it looks like I might be contradicting them above.
I’m not – FDB, I both appreciated your earlier contributions and felt blindsided by the way things suddenly became combative towards the end. I’m still not quite sure where that came from, even reading back.
Pav, thank you. I agree with everything you say.
From here: Breast enhancement survey
(yes, it’s a crappy cosmetic surgery industry site, but finding any credible research on the topic is very difficult).
So no, it’s not just my opinion, it’s also the opinion of the women undergoing the procedure. And yes, it does confirm that “self esteem” is important in womens decisions to undergo procedures. It doesn’t delve into the complexities of what underpins womens self esteem issues. It does, however, suggest to me that partner pressure may well be a bigger factor than anyone is willing to acknowledge, least of all the surgeons.
“(yes, it’s a crappy cosmetic surgery industry site, but finding any credible research on the topic is very difficult)”
True, but you’ve decided to use hardly credible research conducted on 84 people instead, to prove whatever point it is that you’re trying to prove.
Maybe it’s just me, or maybe it’s the length of the thread, but I am genuinely at a loss to decipher what it is you’re getting at.
Surely it’s clear enough that the desire for cosmetic surgery is linked to social, economic and cultural changes, which I thought was the point of the post. If you are singling out ‘partner pressures’ as a cause, well surely these pressures themselves are a caused by broader social changes.
Thanks Tigtog, that’s basically what I’ve been trying to do.
PC:
The perspective of males trying to understand patriarchy, to grapple with it in the hope of identifying in themselves ways to avoid the traps, to sort out when they are being patriarchal versus merely being male… these are crucial perspectives I’d have thought. You won’t get them from introspection, and you won’t get them brickbatting dudes every time they say boobies are hawt. If you want a society fairer on women, as I do, it’s going to have to accommodate the simple fact that women have hanging off their chests in more or less plain view, things which men find sexually attractive.
With all due respect and deference, UR DOIN IT RONG!
Some of the men haven’t been treading too carefully coming in to what is clearly a discussion where women ‘have the floor’ as it were. [I really don't mean anything by that, just can't think of a better turn of phrase] But it’s easy for me (for example) to feel got at when my fairly careful and limited offerings are treated as fodder for gotchas and plainly skim-read.
adrian wrote:
Me too, other than offering a refutation of post 170 which suggests that I’m the only person on the planet making a connection between breast enhancement surgery and sex.
Okay I’ll stop sulking now.
Where’s Youie’s girlfriend I wonder? He said he was giving her the link to this thread today.
Well, that explains a lot. I am reminded of the time my friend H drew me a diagram of her diaphragm and …
Oh, never mind.
Inside. I meant inside.
Hey FDB I was joshing too. But you should drink and post more often. It was very funny.
FDB, I assure you I read your comments very carefully and thought about them while I was doing the housework on Friday afternoon, not just while I was sitting here at my desk.
I’m sorry I got a little testy with you – it’s a very mild case of something like the narcissicism of minor differences http://forum.erraticwisdom.com/viewtopic.php?pid=2862 – there’s no point wasting energy on wondering how some people came to think like they apparently do, but your comments are plainly reasonable so the relatively small points of dissent appear proportionately larger.
I am saying this very mildly and not angling for a gotcha or whatever.
I don’t accept your idea (at 89) that breasts are sexual apparatus comparable with penises. (if growing breasts is a sign of sexual maturity, then what about armpit hair?) Further to that, I can’t tell what you meant (in the same comment) where you wrote about deliberately displaying / enhancing breasts and what that connoted – do you only mean breast enlargement surgery? or also everyday stuff like wearing pretty necklaces, low necked and fitted tops etc?
If you just mean surgical enlargement, I think you are right and what you present as a man’s interpretation of that is probably right. (although I still wonder why we’re talking about enlargement, when the original topic was reduction, and they’re just not the same [though David appears to think so]) It wasn’t quite clear to me from your comment whether you meant this or not. (And in my turn to get meta I did ask you, back at 91, to clarify that, and you didn’t.)
But if you also include wearing fitted tops as a choice men will interpret as ‘deliberate display’, then I want to call you on that. Mainly because I actually don’t believe that most men are so unimaginative that they can’t grasp, at least in principle, the many reasons other than straight-out sexual advertising, that women dress in a style that doesn’t suppress the signs of femininity.
It might be helpful to consider these distinctions in terms of primary sex characteristics (those things directly connected with reproduction, namely vaginas, uteruses, ovaries, penises and testicles) and secondary sex characteristics, namely breasts, body hair and its distribution, voice pitch and so on. I’d link to the Wiki on the subject, but the illustrative naked lady there has a completely shaved pubic area and I refuse to collude (by linking to it) in the notion that this is the norm.
And to think that when Kim posted on this topic a while back there was very little response!
Pav, there’s criticism of the pictures in the talk page – perhaps it’s difficult to find a replacement picture with pubic hair that can be used with wiki’s licensing requirements. Might see what I can find.
She’s got the link, Laura; but it’s hers to do with as she pleases. I wouldn’t dare to presume to tell her she has to read it or comment…
The problem with the survey linked to at 176 goes beyond a small n – the sample is not even that, because there’s been no sampling. Not to mention the framing of the questions. It’s only got any worth as data in terms of the light it throws on the marketing practices of the cosmetic surgery industry.
Ironically, this semester I’m teaching a qualitative methods class whose theme for data collection and analysis is body image. It’s been selected by me and my co-coordinator in part because it’s such a complex issue that it lends itself far more to intensive (qualitative) rather than extensive (sampling a population through surveys) methods. And the obvious informants for questions about women’s body images are … women.
“your comments are plainly reasonable so the relatively small points of dissent appear proportionately larger.”
Okay, now I think I understand better. It’s a shame, but in fraught topic areas people (okay, I) often need some little validating remarks before we go zeroing in on points of difference. In which spirit I here fess up to my own tendency to do the opposite, and just weigh in wherever I disagree (or can find something ‘amusing’ to say).
PC:
“It might be helpful to consider these distinctions in terms of primary sex characteristics (those things directly connected with reproduction, namely vaginas, uteruses, ovaries, penises and testicles) and secondary sex characteristics, namely breasts, body hair and its distribution, voice pitch and so on.”
That is indeed a pivotal distinction, but I think much of the above illustrates how it breaks down w/r/t breasts. Some thoughts, in no particular order:
1) We are wired for sexual selection – to find things attractive in potential mates. Some of these are your primary characteristics, some secondary, sone simply not part of physical gender at all.
2) The bosomal zone is a locus of sexual pleasure – mental, aesthetic and physical – for both men and women (just as body hair or its lack, the sound of someone’s voice, physical strength can be). I hope I no longer need to add that that’s not all there is to said zone or that everyone finds it so, but there you go. On the other side of the ledger, I have shared intimacy with a lass who could not attain release without attention paid there, and another who could get by with nothing else, at a pinch.
*a-boom-tish!*
3) I think we’ve been bogged down in talking too much about 1 and 2. The meatier matter is why such aspects of a woman’s physical sexuality come to so dominate her self-image and her treatment in society. To look at this, teh wimmins might as well (for the sake of argument) say “okay, breasts are just about sex. So what? Why is it that mine need be perfectly formed, 19 years old and of a certain heft in order to get respect or regard outside the bedroom, when the 50% of blokes with an under average sized or misshapen cock can get away with it?” Surely a huge part of this is unavoidable visibility, but that can’t be all. Incidentally I think all this applies to hips, buttocks and thighs equally.
Q: How do you make 500g of fat attractive?
A: Put a nipple on it.
There. I guess that undoes anything helpful I might have contributed.
Not hassling you, FDB, as you are a dear, but why the need for jokes on a thread like this? In my experience (IE, THIS IS A QUALIFIED STATEMENT)men don’t find jokes about their bits funny at all.
A dick walks into a bar …
The bouncer says
“No sleeves, no service”.
A dick walks into the bar.
“I’ll have a Corona with a wedge of lemon please”
“But you’re circumsised!”
“So?”
“We only allow complete dickheads to order Corona with a wedge of lemon”
Insert drink of choice.
I see that qualification was unnecessary.
A dick walks into the bar.
The bartender says “if you want a bag of nuts, you’ll have to buy them here”.
While I agree that it is perhaps a smidgin inappropriate (for gender-comparable ‘dick walks into a bar’ lines, as per Zoe above), I think FDB’s joke requires some unpacking.
For a start, the butt (sorry, we’re at a stage where no noun, verb or adjective can be presumed to be innocent) of this joke is actually men, or so it seems to me: it makes fun both of (SOME) men’s fat-chicks horror and of the absurdity and superficiality of (SOME) men’s attitudes to women’s bodies.
What’s more, it seems to indicate that the nipple is what’s really going on here: the money shot, as it were. And here I am reminded of something I once read by the Melbourne Jungian psychotherapist Peter O’Connor, who said that the reason men were fixated by breasts was that — I think I’ve got this right — ‘They’re basically looking for a feed.’
“His dick walked into a bar, your worship”,
Said the constable,
“And then he fell down the station stairs”.
Straight up PC.
That’s precisely how I meant it, although I doubt that’s how it was meant when I heard it. So no worries that some thunk it was merely crass (NTTAWRT).
It was called to mind by a conversation I sat near once, where two of my female friends were drunkenly revealing more than they might about their sex lives. Along the lines of:
“I can put on my sexiest clothes, do my hair all nice like, show interest in his interests, give him a massage, special candlelit dinner… the only reliable way to get it when I need it is to flop ‘em out. Works a charm every time. What is it with guys and tits?”
Or slurred words to that effect.
Oh and PC, para 3 – spot on. Some fellows like a large target, others need only the bullseye with a little padding.
It would also astonish me if there were no connection with breastfeeding. For all Freud’s pseudoscience, oral fixation is a necessary part of development, and clearly a near-universal fixation to one degree or another. I wonder what drives are at play in fellatio. Maybe not so far removed?
Well, men have nipples too.
Speak for yerself old bean. I’m gonna have to differ from you on both counts there.
Um, no.
Glad to see the discussion’s moved on to the plane of the very highbrow.
So, going back to David’s comment at 158, no humourless masculinists are going to object if I make multiple testicular jokes on defence procurement threads?
Only if you get on the red phone to SAC, Kim.
I’ll just check my shoes to see if they contain a red phone, Liamista:
*Swoon*
Looking forward to it.
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I’m sorry btw but I’ve got to say that I find it hard to take Naomi Wolf seriously after her ’sexual harassment’ claims against Harold Bloom. Reeks of silly little girl to me.
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No I am not attempting to derail the thread.
Whatevs, dude. We’re talking about hawt shoes now.
Reminds me of a Hollywood producer who remarked that he knew that women were taking over the studios ’cause now he had to know all about shoes.
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Nice shoe btw, I’m very happy fashion’s getting a lot less pear-shaped. One of my favourite indulgences of my male gaze is the Winter elegance you get. I thought it was gone forever.
Laura,#138
“…Women being pressured to have surgery they don’t want (need))…”.
Well, one of you finally, if subconsciously, let the pavlovian cat (or conditioned dog in this case) out of the bag. And lip collagen and botox; etc,etc..?
You’d have thought those who claim to be feminists would have opposed the commodification of women, but no; NEVER in this thread!
Not since Leslie Cannold’s stupid article in an Age op ed a year ago; rebutted skillfully by a philosophy academic in that paper’s letters pages shortly after on the basis of “inauthenticity”, has a single so-called feminist stood up to do anything but endorse this puerile form of commodity capitalist neurotic consumerism; cosmetic surgery.
Dupes. You hare nothing to lose but your psychological chains.
Kim wrote:
It can only improve them (the defense procurement threads that is).
IHT review of Alex Kuczynskis’ “Beauty Junkies”:
“Beauty Junkies”
So Paul Walter, the butchery that is modern plastic surgery is definitely on feminists radar, but for some reason dismissed as a “womens choice” issue or considered unimportant for some reason. I find it puzzling.
I wonder if those shoes are from the current season. Camper, red, t-bar, low heel. The Perfect Storm.
Yep!
I think they are, Laura. I got the piccie from an online shoe shop. Based in the US, and tragically, like Campers themselves, they don’t ship online orders to Australia:
http://www.onlineshoes.com/landing.asp?type=brand&brandid=155
*Ahem*
So, for those of you interested in my girlfriend’s response to this thread (Hi, Laura!) when I asked her about it last night, this is what she said. “I just scrolled for your comments.”
But what did you think about what was being said?
“I don’t have time (and) I don’t fucking care.”
And no, she wasn’t angry, just not interested. Analyse that.
I’ll have a look in the Camper shop next time I’m in the city. It’s sale time, in theory at least.
Sorry to interrupt the shoes, but I’m an having one last go, although if it actually works we might need a new thread as this one has got so long.
But how can feminists substantively discuss the many appalling issues around the Surgical Enhancement Industrial Complex adequately with those suggesting that the solution to women wanting plastic surgery is best addressed primarily as a matter of women “understanding what men actually want” in their individual romantic relationships? That idea is so far out of the loop on how the oppressive beauty standards in society as a whole scorn and marginalise women who don’t comply (i.e. show overt signs of the effort they expend but still make it look “effortless” and “natural”)that there was simply no point for us in moving on.
Proposition: We’ll never get rid of the Surgical Enhancement Industrial Complex in an environment where most women are expected to wear heels, hosiery, nail polish and makeup as conditions of employment (which basically means that most women are expected to do the same just to walk out the door). Discuss.
The temptation to click my heels together three times would be too great I suspect.
I’ll discuss. I have to disagree that most women are expected to comply with the heels, hosiery, make-up, nail polish look. There are probably some industries where this is true. But I don’t believe this extends to most. For instance; public service jobs, most small business jobs, most large business jobs, most law jobs, teaching, academia, medicine, nursing, health care in general, child care, arts, recreation, animal care.
There’s probably an expectation of a narrow range of grooming in a few ‘high acheiving’ jobs in business, law, high end retail, but I think your proposition isn’t accurate. One of the things I like to do on the morning peak hour train is observe how many women are wearing heels and it’s a very low proportion.
I agree that the expectation of that whole package is not so high in Australia as it is in Europe, or in NYC or LA (our plastic surgery rates are lower too, I believe). I’m not sure that a low incidence of heels on public transport is necessarily a valid cue to how many of them are expected to wear them at work however – whenever I’ve been in such a workplace I always kept my heels in my desk cupboard and wore flatties to commute. I can’t have been the only one.
I’d agree that my public transport survey isn’t at all scientific. But I did just quickly nick out at lunch time to do some shopping and didn’t see any women who conformed to the whole package. A couple of pairs of heels, not much make-up, trousers, jeans, skirts with opaque tights. Checked in at my hairdressers (very flash and high-end). Yes, all the hairdressers were wearing make-up, but there wasn’t one pair of heels, as they’re much too smart to wreck their backs.
Again, not a scientific survey, but a long way from your proposition.
I regularly do business in Europe and I’m aware that I need to dress bit flasher there, but I’d still never wear heels and make-up only extends to lipstick and mascara. It’s the 30 second makeover. I’d also say that the men dress more formally in Europe as well. It’s just less casual than Australia.
Laura, you left out shiny! How shiny they are!
Perhaps I’ve read too many rants from women in New York about the compulsory workplace grooming, and am putting too much emphasis on the specifics of their complaints. Perhaps they strike me so strongly because I’m a flatties and no makeup type unless it’s a party, so it’s very much THE HORROR as far as I am concerned.
However, I put forward as a tangential example of the same sort of attitude the phenomenal popularity of those “stars without makeup” editions of celebwatch magazines and the schadenfreudish relish they display in listing those women’s revealed imperfections. It’s all of a piece with an environment that is continually telling women that to be au naturel is gauche at best, and at worst actively disgusting.
Judging for ‘Sex and the City’, (if one can) then the standards of dress in NYC do seem way too high. Like you tigtog, I’m a flatties and no-make up gal, except for parties.
I think the joy over the ‘Stars Without Make-up” may be more about giving women reassurance that these perfect icons of desire look just like them. That it really is all smoke and mirrors, or in their case Photoshop, personal trainers, stylists, soft lighting and dare I say, cosmetic surgery. In fact, it maybe quite a positive thing in which women see how bullshit-ish the ‘beauty myth’ really is. Of course, it’s wrong that women have to be reassured in such a way. I suspect, in any case, women read those images in a variety of ways. Some may be sucked in and others aren’t. I maybe being optimistic, but there you go.
tigtog:
I’d be overjoyed if my assertion was wrong about breast enhancement surgery tigtog, but given the paucity of actual evidence of the motivation of breast enhancers, I’m more than happy to concede that there are plenty of other factors at play and the naked appearance for sex is a minority of them.
However, the external manifestations of the beauty complex and of the expectations of womens appearance in workplaces to me seem very different to the rather more drastic manifestations like surgery. At least one of the crappy industry sites mentions the average length of time of considering surgery is “around three years” – somewhat different to the average lifetime of an outfit. Unless, of course, those seeking surgical intervention no longer see themselves in their own bodies in a twist on that body dysmorphic issue behind anorexia and bulimia. That “Beauty Junkie” book characterises botox and restylane as the “gateway drugs” of a culture of body modification which was something interesting I hadn’t thought of before, although if you read enough of the marketing material restylane comes across as being “lipstick, but better”.
But I don’t understand why feminists would consider the industry to be outside discussion or beyond reforming. After all, lipstick, hosiery and high heels all predate the cosmetic surgery industry, making it a relatively recent (and disturbing) phenomenon.
David Rubie, I’ve come to this discussion late, but I don’t think any feminist here has said that the cosmetic surgery industry is beyond discussion or reformation. I think that the disagreement has been about whether cosmetic surgery is solely about ’sex’, or whether there’s other factors entering into it as well.
That’s it, Fine.
…or about whether all those other factors are themselves founded on sex, as I’ve been trying to argue amongst other things.
Is this going ’round in circles?
I think about the occasions when I make the special effort to dress up. Hair, dress, heels, bit of jewellery and why I do it. It is hard to separate motivations for an action, but I know I’ll dress up for occasions when there’s not a hope or expectation of sex being on the agenda. It maybe be a party at which everyone is an old friend, it maybe some sort of industry do. It’s nice on those occasions to receive compliments and admiring glances. But most of the time they’ll come from other women in a spirit of camaraderie. I’ll even wear my prettiest underwear on such occasions, even though no-one is going to see it. Sex is intertwined in there, but it’s not everything. This is what seems difficult to understand.
I once met a botox salesman at a party. I teasingly got him to give his opinion on my middle-aged face. He thought I was in pretty good condition, but there was one wrinkle he could do something about. It felt like taking the car to the panel-beaters. The phrase he used was ‘freshen up’. It was more like he was suggesting that the botox would be a quicky and easy replacement for nice relaxing holiday, rather than something that would improve my sexual attractiveness markedly.
Fine wrote:
I think that’s true for everybody. What I struggle to understand is breast enhancement surgery being equated with dressing up. I think that’s about as simply as I can put it. I can see botox and restylane in that light because your face is on show to the world all the time. The rest of our bits, not so much.
and yes, it’s going around in circles but what the hell, if it hits 300 comments maybe somebody can dig up some decent research.
No, Tig Tog, 215. Sense of proportion. Applying make up is not the same thing as having your body or face mutilated, whether “for men” or not.
Is it butchery? I know there are horror stories where plastic surgery (particularly breast enlargement surgery) has complications but is it necessarily butchery. Is there an assumption that modifying the body is morally wrong here? One of the reasons that plastic surgery might be a a more common talking point these days is that it’s more widely available then it used to be.
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And is it sexist? More men are having cosmetic surgery. Is it commodification of persons or the commodification of services allowing persons to modify themselves?
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This may be the tip of the iceberg. In future we may be able to modify ourselves at the molecular-genetic level. Is having your appearance altered so that you look like a Vulcan wrong? I can see it happening.
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And if this is wrong how is it different from piercings or tatoos?
Ok this post is really heartening. No really. As I read it, women are deficient.
Deficient if they:
a)get plastic surgery – you must look good naturally. Diet, exercise and support will do it.
b) they dont try to look young and sexy years after they should give it away; they should get surgery; after all, in this day and age everybody does it
c) are young but dont try to fit the sexy mould; they could get surgery
d) are excoriated as unnatural for getting surgery; natural is best, like say Elle Macpherson, the natural supermodel (who has had surgery – hey but thats ok, its ‘natural’ looking)
d)when they dont get that men dont want them to change; men love them as they are; men who in the same breath actively support a culture which deifies youth and sexual allure and impossible standards of beauty. Stupid deficient women, how could they misunderstand? Just cause they are bombarded by a culture which invites them to modernise and update and take years off their face and body if only they will…
e)if they dont understand when they are told, that if they get surgery its not about them at all, that it must be about getting sex – with men no less, that it must be about increasing sex with men. Because women are uncritical reflections of their male counterparts, after all.
f) if they dont get that there are starving masses who are missing out on surgery because they are taking it from them, those damned barbie dolls and party girls tomorrow’s lushes and harridans (wtf? – I never understand this pirate queen very much really – except I note that he never misses an opportunity to throw in some mysoginist terms every chance he gets)
These are the impossible offerings of consumerist patriarchal culture with its unatainable standards of beauty, standards which shift and change depending on which rung of the ladder women might get to in pursuit of beauty. Dont be fooled by the ‘natural’ discourse as articulated up and down this post. It is as much an impossible standard which lets women know just how deficient they are, (be natural but dont be ugly, dont be overweight, go on a diet, dont be stupid, why have plastic surgery, you harridan, neurotic arent ya, its all about sex – its all about me – isnt it? isnt it?) as are the nip and tuck promises of a culture which offers them round like lollies, but also paradoxically suggests that women are deficient for taking them up.
And they say there is no patriarchy. And they say this is the post feminist era. Yeah. Right. I see the freedom. Its right in front of me. Its called “Total Effects”, its about 150ml and fights the seven signs of ageing.
Yep it’s all the men’s fault innit. After all they keep pushing all those images in the beauty magazines, they force women to buy them and to read them, women are categorically prohibited from the news magazines section in Borders and…
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Oh wait. They aren’t.
Yep. Every morning the goon squads come around and force women out of their homes down to the shopping mall and tell them what to buy.
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Oh wait. They don’t.
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What utter nonsense.
Either you talk about teh hawt shoes, Adrien, or your reading assignment is the Beauty Myth!
Interesting this consumerist patriacrhal culture where women have a monopoly on the top jobs in culture magazines, cosmetics companies and many fashion houses. They seem intelligent and independant, they seem like they’re doing what they want to but somewhere in the background James Packer’s henchmen await with sniper rifles trained on their heads.
/
Sneaky isn’t it.
And Casey… Word!
Ok, back to shoes, Adrien.
In other news, here’s something interesting:
http://www.feministing.com/archives/009980.html
Its quite curious Adrien, how you drip with vective every time someone posts on the workings of the patriarchy. You are entitled to your view of course, but please refrain from the personal attacks and denigrations towards me. Your continued devaluations on each and every comment I make are not welcome. I have tried to ignore you, but you seem to make it your business continue in this way. You seem to take issue with my perspective on things with boring monotony. Thats fine, but you have made your opinions on my thoughts quite obvious after all these months. There is no need to continue, unless you wish to risk looking obsessive and fragile. You could have a productive conversation by arguing to the detail, but given you choose to start with sarcasm and devaluation each and every time, it makes quite a few people I know of here, myself included, dislike your manner and the way in which you choose to approach the subject. You do yourself no favours, you just look shrill and silly. When it comes to me, if you cannot respond to my posts without emotion and vective, without attack and sarcasm, please do not respond at all.
I didn’t make any personal attack on you Casey. I said your post was nonsense.
There’s a difference.
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I find it very hard to believe that I respond to every thing you write. And your lectures on emotive invective are amusing in the light of #231. Is that a model of the cold light of reason? Or is emotive invective desirable when said in support of whatever orthodoxy there might be? I’m sorry I simply think this mode of thought, this attitude, the Agit-Prop stance is the sort of thing that belongs in totalitarian circles and no, I do not like it. Nothing personal.
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I don’t drip with vective every time someone posts on the ‘workings of the patriarchy’. The patriarchy – political rule over women by men – doesn’t exist in this country. It’s the height of simple-mindedness to blame ‘The Patriarchy” for all of life’s unpleasantries. To see in every cultural phenomena the workings of some all-encompassing Control Machine which simply does not exist. The beauty magazines, the fashion industry and all the rest – I am very sorry – but women run it, women fund it. Please don’t blame men. How can we be responsible?
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The logic is not there. On the one hand the nefarious male gaze is responsible for all your insecurities, on the other women’s dress, their cosmetic surgeries, their shoes have nothing to do with us. Doubleplusgood doublethink refs absolutely innane. Please. You don’t like my harsh assessment of your ‘reasoning’ then deploy some reasoning. Relying on the canonical status of ’subversive’ utilizations of fanciful notions about sub-conscious fears and the like doesn’t cut. It’s not because you’re being discriminated against. It’s because you’re being treated by the same standards as everyone else.
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You wanna see what patriarchy looks like? This is patriarchy. And no I don’t like it. I’ve lived in it.
As I said, you choose to respond to my comments with sarcasm and emotion each time. That is not welcome. Please stop doing it.
Kim #236
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Yeah I read about that yesterday. It reminded me of some photos taken of Kate Winslett years ago that were digitally enhanced to stretch her out and give her the dimensions of a runway model. They were yuck. This is where the problems lies IMHO. It’s in the tendency of commercial enterprises to standardize everything.
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Cultural Industries are built on a contradiction. On the one hand you’ve got the innovations and legendary cantankerous nature of artists and the like. On the other you have the need to standardize product for a mass market. The result is that rules are instilled to curb creativity and to make everything, and everyone look the same.
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There’s also the Aryan Nazi aspect of the mentality of marketing dickheads. I don’t mean that literally but they often regard their ‘creatives’ as (unfortunately) necessary freaks and see the world in terms of some kind of postmodern Norman Rockwell conformity. In that world all women are skinny with huge breasts.
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There’s never a realization that not all of us find that look particularly beautiful or interesting. The mentality extends beyond the representation of women. I’m reminded of the Disney suits who wanted Johnny Depp to ‘cut the faggy stuff’ filming the first Pirates of the Caribbean. Unfortunately capitalism has a way of promoting bad taste and the Rule of the Bland.
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That said women cop it and cop to it. That’s why LA’s so full of Pamela Anderson clones. Three cheers for Hiera not playing the game. Maybe the suits might wonder sometime why she’s a star and all the Baywatch types are working in restaurants. Probably not tho’.
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Great picture btw. Brilliant outfit on a very foxy lassie. Why anyone would want to digitally alter her is beyond me.
Adrien, it might be helpful if someone has a perception that you’re being overly snide that you try to take that into account – tone is important in these things and it shouldn’t cost you anything to moderate it if it causes problems for others. We really do want to encourage participation, and I think everyone has a role to play in thinking about how their comments might impact on other commenters, particularly if it’s drawn to their attention. Thanks!
Adrien wrote:
Watch “Dr 90210″ or any video involving liposuction. If they did it at Gitmo, it would have been shut down within days.
I dunno. The proportions are roughly 10:1 female to male having major cosmetic surgical procedures, and while the overall numbers are increasing, the proportions don’t vary. The numbers could very well be skewed simply by the sheer numbers of breast enhancements being done (at least those without a cancer component).
Yes indeed, good going, Casey. Great stuff.
I went out too hard too early in this race, myself, and am now too exhausted to even try to sit down and do a full-on point-by-point like that. However, speaking of the magazines and what they are telling whom about what is a desirable commodity, I am not too knackered to copy out someone else’s list. Because I am interested in men’s experience of men’s things that I have not experienced, and am keen to hear what men think is about sex and what is not, I bought a copy of FHM today when I saw on the cover: ‘10 SLY NEW WAYS TO SEX UP YOUR GIRLFRIEND’. Because, you see, I am actually interested in what men are thinking, and will believe them when they tell me, no matter how much I hate it. Now read on …
Amusingly, the article uses the metaphor of a made-over girlfriend as a software upgrade (how original is that?) and is entitled Girlfriend 2.0. Got that? She is, or will be, a desirable new consumer product. Now then, here are the ten ways, each heading with a few little explanatory paragraphs which I will spare you.
1.01 Get her to cook more
Yes, you heard me, that’s the one at the top of the list.
1.02 Have more adventurous sex
Hint: the word ‘anal’ appears three times in this one. Is it naff to suggest that all you boys who are obsess with f*cking women’s arseholes might just be a bit confused and it’s easily remedied with a bit of object adjustment?
1.03 Make her more ladylike
I kid you not, that is what it says. It seems to be mainly about leaving the toilet door open when she’s using it. It’s okay for blokes to do this, of course. Oh wait, look at
1.04 Make her less ladylike
Here I refer you to the underlying gist of Casey’s comment at #231, which is that we are being told ‘You can’t win, hahahahahaha.’
1.05 Stop her being clingy
Because, of course, you don’t want her, really. See 1.02.
1.06 Urgent makeover
‘Urgent’ here apparently means ‘has pubic hair, is not wearing mascara, and does not have blindingly white American teeth.’
1.07 Make her lose weight
Because all women are too fat. But not off her breasts, of course.
1.08 Make her pay her way
I quote: ‘Is she splashing out on amazing lingerie for you?’
1.09 Have more sex
By now whoever wrote this unmitigated shit is really desperate. He has resorted to quoting a ‘former Buddhist monk’ (yes, and I’m the reincarnation of Mae West) on the subject of meditation and massage. He also misuses the word ‘disinterested’; no surprises there.
1.10 Make her dress sexier
Yes, now his grammar has collapsed as well. He recommends a ‘tri-blend halter romper from American Apparel’, a garment that can be seen here and what a truly tasteful and elegant bit of gear it is.
So there you have it, dudes, that is how to upgrade your girlfriend. And girls, what a relief, there’s no need to work on your actual personality or behaviour at all: no mention of being generous, funny, warm-hearted or good company. Just whack on your tri-blend halter romper and give him a blowjob (no clinging, mind, and careful with those dazzling teeth) while you’re cooking the steaks and drinking the wine you paid for. And remember to be ladylike.
Dr Cat, you will get your reward in heaven (or in your next incarnation if you’re of a continuingly Buddhist persuasion unlike the monk) for these ethnographic adventures into ewwwwwwwwwwww-dom!
Okay Kim – point taken. I have read The Beauty Myth btw.
David –
So the profile of consumption is heavily biased toward women. Okay. That doesn’t mean it’s sexist in the way I mean it. Doesn’t mean it’s not either. There’s different consumption patterns based on sex, race, sexuality, income, education level etc. Discrimination doesn’t necessarily come into it.
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I’m not saying however that there isn’t a sexist pressure on women viz body image. I think there is. But discussions like these are more useful imho when you don’t assume too much and when you don’t attach a moral prefix to issues. After all: is it wrong to change oneself?
Um okay. Men who think don’t usually buy FHM tho’.
Thanks, Adrien.
By the way, wrt to your point about women being in senior roles in editing, beauty marketing etc, you might wish to consider how they get burned and discarded so often – check out the turnover in the editors of women’s mags – and the funny thing is that there’s the same sort of age effect going on here that you get with female newsreaders and tv journos. They’re treated as artefacts of the sexxayy culture and required to perform that in their embodiment as well as in their story selection, etc. etc.
Pavlov’s Cat wrote:
Well, that was entertaining, but how many men participating at LP have ever actually read FHM (even at the barber or a mates house) let alone paid cash money for it? Is it now OK to easily determine your personal preferences by buying Dolly? ‘Cause if it’s schoolyard level rhetoric you want to descend to, that’s the place to get it.
And women who think don’t usually have breast enhancement surgery.
What you’re missing, David, here, is that Dolly, Girlfriend and all the rest are the “how to do being feminine” bibles for teenage girls (and now all the tweeny mags play the same role for younger girls) in a way that FHM etc. aren’t for boys – because being “masculine” is the default it’s more lightly policed (though it is policed) in terms of socialisation. Being “feminine” is such an intensely difficult and in many ways artificial thing to pull off it requires a lot of learning and reinforcement, and big social sanctioning. Which is called teh patriarchy btw.
Adrien wrote:
Your body changes all by itself as you get older, there’s no moral component to the process whatsoever. What’s immoral to me is the idea that the slice’n'dice merchants have coopted the idea of “exercising choice” as being an aspect of hating your own appearance. It’s much easier as a man to slob around in paint covered trackie daks and a beer gut without having washed or shaved for a couple of days than a woman, but I’d much prefer that was choice available rather than some sort of “minimum standard” of public appearance. But apparently since those attitudes are so ingrained and so hard to change, surgery is an acceptable feminist alternative. If that’s the case, the movement is doomed to work in an ever shrinking circle of expectations rather than expanding the possibilities which I naively thought was the point.
Thanks, Kim. It didn’t occur to me that I’d need to spell out that point, nor the point that teh wimminz are not the only ones having their values reinforced by popular magazines, nor the point that ‘the men at LP’ do not constitute the patriarchy, nor yet that I was making a point about the culture and its values, by which we are surrounded and constructed even if we do not, as individuals, share them.
The patriarchy: you’re standing in it.
Allow me to act as peacemaker. It’s clear from reading through this thread that most of the men commenting here are insensitive meatheads totally incapable of any empathy with anyone who doesn’t own and operate the same set of genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics while most of the women commenting here are shrill hypersensitive termagants looking for something, anything with which to take offense.
There, I trust I’ve now united y’all.
PS:They don’t call ‘em the opposite sex for nothing y’know.
Fuckery! I left out the punchline.
“I’m a uniter, not a divider”
- George W. Bush.
Yes great posts from Adrien (…all women are skinny with huge breasts…Pamela Anderson clones.”). More “home town” umpiring from Kim favouring her pet, and Gruselda living in dread of conventional couples having satisfactory love-lifes.
Why are you so affeared of couples including the woman, enjoying good sex, P’s cat?
“…no need to work on your real personality or behaviour…”.
Why, yes exactly; what myself and others have been saying all along!
What need a personality or character once you get your botox, plastic tits and collagen lips, as you and your buddies seem to continue to advocate, despite all the protesting from others as to commodification, contributing to this thread.
Sheesh, so many righties on a supposed lefty thread.
Yep!
That’s the thing about dominant culture – people who occupy the privileged position in it have no reason to question its assumptions. Unless they try really hard to! But most of the time it’s just “what is” so they can’t see it, and challenging it appears incomprehensible. And there’s a lot of resistance to analysing how it works.
Hence the invocation of what’s “natural” in a lot of these discussions – it’s actually deeply ironic.
Kim, re: Dolly vs. FHM.
I grew up with Dolly in the eighties and I’m very much aware of the policing aspect, but haven’t read much of FHM at all. The other “Mens Interest” magazines however do a thorough job of the policing of masculinity (even in innocuous stuff like “Classic and Sportscar” – overtly a magazine about old cars, but filled with blokedy bloke de bloke places they went, stuff they did, why some cars are chick cars etc). When Dolly made it’s reappearance in my house this week thanks to daughter number one hitting that age, it was something of a relief to see the staff were still writing the “Dear Dolly Doctor” letters.
At least John Greenfield is (unintentionally) funny when he’s blathering like this.
Paul Walter, you’re carrying on like a pork chop.
David at 256, note that Dolly etc. are policing the one singular mode of acceptable femininity – pretty, interested in boys, sexed up, etc. while FHM, etc. cater for one among the several acceptable varieties of masculinity that are offered to boys and young men.
Ha, ha. Witty Kim…
Why don’t you argue on the issues instead of resorting to personal snideness, for the lack of the capacity for a meaningful response?
Geez, Louise. I have been arguing on the issues. You’ll forgive me if I responded in (comparatively mild) kind to one of your several totally ad hominem – make that ad feminam – sprays. Provocation, sadly, can affect the judgement of the best-intentioned of us. If you want to demonstrate that you’re arguing in good faith, perhaps you’ll avoid dubbing other commenters with patronising nicknames, claiming that anyone who doesn’t agree with you is some sort of right winger, and ridiculously distorting people’s arguments.
No, no, I’m all for good sex, not to mention enjoyment. Hooray for good sex and enjoyment.
I think you may be projecting. So to speak.
Let me add two more cheers for good sex and enjoyment.
“Why don’t you argue on the issues instead of resorting to personal snideness,”
Well that was a snide comment about a witty observation on the issue in question.
Actually what the hell is the issue in question now? Returning to the original post that started this thread, it appears to me that Kim’s original point about the blokes who are the cultural/media gatekeepers, unable to take their eyes off tits, literally, metaphorically, conceptually, contextually, intellectually and tactically marketingwise, are not helping a new generation of women feel comfortable about their bodies. And that Bianca’s Big Brother experience should be forced into frame to illustrate this point.
To help this thread back on track I proffer the following observations.
I like tits. Hooked up with one for my first breakfast ever on this planet. They feel lovely (in fact I’m wearing a pair of falsies as I type this.) They make a wonderful cushion when you have to rest your overheated, depressed or horny head. And they are an essential element in defining the unique aesthetic elements of the female figure.
However I strongly believe the owner and operator of the fatty mammary glands in question should enjoy ultimate control over how she wishes to manage them. Including surgically adjusting them for comfort or glory. You sport ‘em, it’s your call.
Or to put in another way, how many blokes here would feel comfortable with a prevailing culture where media and peer group pressure drove you to inject air into your scrotum, shave it daily and flaunt it in expensive yet flimsy clothing, only to have chicks pass carefree judgment on your exposed testicles out of hand with a cack-handed pun?
“Yup, they’re balls but not bearing anything”
“Smoldering Brett’s a Capricorn studying to be a sports coach. We’d just be happy to play volleyball with his sac.”
“Grapes! More like raisins!”
“Oh look, and it comes with a banana.A seedless fruit.”
“Nice testicles, shame about the personality.”
“Balls? More like goosebumps.”
“Ummh! I’d rip his trousers off and dry shave his bollocks.”
“Don’t go there girlfriend. They’re small, hairy and quite empty.”
In glossy major circulation magazines and on MSM broadcast, day in and day out.
PS: I can afford to wax confident here as I have testicles the size of tennis balls. Unfortunately they’re the same colour.
PPS: And as I’ve pointed out here before, always take the women’s side in such arguments. It generally improves your chances of getting laid. Just make sure your scrotum is cleaned, waxed and cologned first.
*sigh*
It should have read
“..drove you to inject air into your scrotum to make it more impressive,…”
I feel like a right tit here.
Interesting reports this morning about how the Geneva round of trade talks has collapsed over demands the wealthy countries make on on underdeveloped countries.
Go to “Oxfam” site for more info. To this extent will we go in pursuit of our neurotic, out of touch with reality, consumer fetishism.
At the risk of weighing in and getting flamed by someone, everyone …
People have modified their appearance since … from whenever they were before people.
Preening, display, accentuating differences, accentuating the extremes of sexual dimorphism have always been with us, and to a degree our fellow animals.
I don’t want to go all socio-biological determinist over this, because humans have culture in spades which for other animals is much more limited. But what this first suggests is that any call for being natural is itself culturally prescribed.
And given our access to technology, whatever discussions are had in this forum or in others, body mods will become more technologically-based, continuing to move from decoration to modification.
Fur, coloured hair, pointed ears, shark’s fins (the ultimate punk accoutrement) will start appearing amongst fringe groups. Some of these may become mainstream fashion.
It would be hard to prove that this type of social change hasn’t always gone on, though now the pace outstrips anything that has gone before. Social status, mediated by gender identity, power-gender relationships, access to resources and so on.
There is no doubt that in the current cultural environment facing us in the affluent west is hypersexual in terms of how society is being affected. It permeates mass communication so that, for example, children are exposed to both its conscious and unconscious effects. This is having an impact on how adolescent sexuality is expressing itself and will continue in some form through to adulthood. In some ways, people are the same as they have ever been, in some ways totally different.
One hand these dynamics offer great freedom, on another they offer great harm.
I think it is harmful to take the age-old human psychologies of fear of the outsider, of group typing, of imposed social status – whether its imposed through a post-modern and hypersexual Disneyland on the one-hand or of a totally stratified society of proscribed power relationships on the other. One could argue that both are stratified, but one is more overt. Understanding how will take great subtlety.
This calls for a more mature society, a greater deal of tolerance than societies have developed in the past. A number of religious and philosophical traditions have tried to develop this in the past, and folk are trying to now – but outside of daily discourse, it seems.
If the debate is held within the confines of the hypersexual cultural environment we find ourselves in, it will never step out of it. I don’t think it’s possible to address that postively without taking a wider view, as suggested in the original post.
Body modification: all sorts of reasons people do it. But when I point to MY sole experience with this and relate MY frustration that MY girlfriend is talking about cosmetic surgery “for HERself” in the context of appearing “more attractive” to OTHER people, I’M the one who cops a little bit of the shit that’s flown around here. And I don’t want her to do it! Ye gods…
But when I send my girlfriend the link; and when I report back her telling me that she “doesn’t have time and doesn’t fucking care” about this thread/topic – or perhaps the way it’s being discussed – there’s a stony silence. Why, I wonder. Is it because some of you cultural theorists can’t accept that YOUR beliefs can’t always explain the behaviour of OTHER people?
No, it’s because our mums always told us that if you can’t say something nice, then you shouldn’t say anything at all.
It would’ve made this thread a lot shorter if you had done that, wouldn’t it?
Got a proper answer, smartarse?
I am wondering which particular claims made on this thread that your story is supposed to refute, Youie. Could you list them and explain, because I’m struggling to arrive at the same conclusions from your situation.
Actually, that was a proper answer. It is, at least for me, the reason I’ve said nothing. You appear to be trawling for a public denunciation of your girlfriend, whom (I assume) none of us have never met or heard of and about whom we have only your comments to inform us, and you’re not going to get it from me.
Most of the discussion on this thread, even at its most rancorous, has managed to avoid open slagging of individual people who aren’t actually here to defend themselves. What happens between your gf and you is between your gf and you, Youie. None of my beeswax, I’m rather glad to say.
At first, Klaus, I wasn’t trying to refute anything. My first comment, and the second one on the thread was this:
At 9, I contradicted – without refuting – PC’s comment (not addressed directly to me) that:
My comment’s still there, so I won’t repeat it here. But my point was that in my recent experience my girlfriend’s references to breasts – hers and others’ – were made almost exclusively in relation to sexual matters – “Guys like big boobs”. Some of her friends have implants; this makes her feel inferior. I don’t like implants, and I don’t like her feeling inferior.
(I then lowered the tone, although this was done before things got too heated. It might’ve been my flippancy that started the descent, and if it was I apologise.)
Way later, one commentor thought she’d call my bluff by wondering aloud what my girlfriend would think (presumably) of what I’d written. So, once I had it, I posted my gf’s response. Given the fact that Laura was so interested to hear what that response might be, I was a little surprised to see a comment from her directly beneath mine (at 213) that talked about (what else!) shoes.
I’m sure it’s my fault somehow.
It seems that you are turning this into an ‘either/or’ situation when I don’t think those who disagreed with you about the importance of sex (in the narrow sense) to breast modification are saying that breasts absolutely are not about sex. My understanding is that their argument was that sex is only part of how women experience their breasts.
You pose your girlfriend’s experience – or what she communicates to you of it – as a counter to this assertion that women’s experience their breasts in ways that are not strictly about sex. I think it’s a fair enough observation to make from that evidence that perhaps SOME women may think about their breasts strictly in sexual terms (although it may be worth considering whether they would express this differently outside of male scrutiny). But this doesn’t support the idea that breasts are fundamentally experienced in this way by women in general. While it is possible to disrupt fundamental claims, in this area in particular – where, as Mark says, quantitative research has limited applicability – it is much more difficult to make fundamental claims, especially based on experience and anecdote.
If I understand the feminist use of women’s experience here, it is less about coming up with a universal account of what it is to experience women’s bodies as women, and more about challenging some of the attempts to assert what the ‘real’ explanation for particular behaviours is. Feminism is first and foremost a critical philosophy: it elevates experience to challenge assumptions, not to replace them with an alternative dogma. Your own use of experience (that of your girlfriend) seems to be about challenging this challenge. With respect, I don’t think such a challenge can be successful because it misunderstands the claims it is challenging.
IMHO we teach our children from a young age that it’s important not to be found wanting. In your girlfriend’s case Youie, I wonder if she is concerned that other people (men and women both) might judge her on the size, shape, perkiness etc of her breasts as compared to her friends. Not because she has any intention of sex with any of them, but because they might think less of her. In your twenties you can still remember how perky you were in your teens and now that gravity has started to take a hold you can feel out of place if your friends, through surgery assisted means, still have their teenage perkiness. Especially when you are surrounded with images of perfect (airbrushed) breasts in magazines, the media etc.
Precisely it. Thank you, Mindy.
Youie, don’t be offended love, it’s just that I’ve got a pretty fair picture by now of your version of what your elusive girlfriend thinks & says, and I got curious about hearing from her directly. So when you came back with more secondhand stuff I just wasn’t that interested.
Laura darl, I can’t do any better than that, other than perhaps giving you her email address so you can check the veracity of what I say.
I’m writing here for my benefit, not hers (at least, not directly), so it’s counterproductive for me to distort my/her situation if I’m going to get any meaningful responses.
Kim -
Yes. That’s a conversation. Both the treatment of women within an industry and of attitudes to women affecting their performance at work. Two books I’ve been reading come into that.
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The first is Julia Baird’s Media Tarts which shows pretty clearly that female politicians have to deal with all sorts of stuff male politicians never have to. This isn’t reducable to appearance altho’ that comes into it. One of the stand out anecdotes is from Baird’s experiences with Bronwyn Bishop.
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When first meeting her, the senator was awfully rude to Baird and dismissed the notion of women’s liberation or feminism as having anything of relevance to her parliamentary trajectory. This was at the beginning of Bishop’s time in the sun media-wise. I’ve encountered this before from high-achieving women who’re career individualists (and often right-wing). They resent the inference that they owe anything to what they see as a distant and abstract collective.
Of course the media turned on Bishop and so did her colleagues. At the end of this process she told Baird that, after all, feminism might have something to do with her after all.
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My assertions that ‘patriarchy’ is not an accurate description of our society are not the same thing as saying we live in a ‘post-feminist’ world. I’ve said this repeatedly. As someone I knew once-upon-a-time said: patriarchy’s not really the problem anymore, misogyny is. She was the star of Women’s Studies and’s since developed an impressive feminist resume.
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But as I’m a guy I’m just blind to the assumptions of a society which gives me certain priviledges. Yeah? No doubt as a man I don’t see a lot of what women put up with – I don’t. But it’s always a little irksome for me having to deal with the assumption that I’m speaking on behalf of male white corporate oppression when in fact I’m simply asking questions and thinking for myself.
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Women still get fucked over. But they’re no longer compelled to it. That makes it all the more complicated.
PS Kim – That rant about being misunderstood wasn’t directed at you personally. It just happens a lot.
Last in, best dressed?
You have absolutely no idea Paul. None, zip, nought….. ‘oh, the poor peoples in developing countries…. the humanity’.
The fact is if I wanted some really good rhinoplasty done, I’d be heading to Tehran. One of the nose job capitals of the world. A sack over my head and I still want a nose job – now that’s patriarchy old skool style. As for pesky labia and clitorises, I’m off to Burkina Faso one of the poorest nations on earth.
But don’t let your anti-western women ranting get in the way of facts… and extending your absurd arguments to their illogical conclusions, you should be sending thankyou cards to anorexics.
Now that that’s out of the way – assuming that all of the sane commentary above (you know who you are) is correct or rather part of a very big picture, and assuming biology isn’t changing that quickly and conversely society will only continue to be more saturated with manipulated images of said biology (boo!) and with now relative low-cost surgery options, which are also now ‘safer’ we can assume that cosmetic surgery is only going to become more and more prevalent. Therefore it seems rather important to be heavily scrutinising industry practice.
Firstly, I mean ‘safer’ in the sense that all surgical procedures have become much more routine and safe in the past couple of decades, notwithstanding the botch-up jobs you see in the tabloids, which leads me to my point, that is, I wonder if the sort of grotesque cosmetic surgery we see in the tabloids is due to the fact that it is overwhelmingly male cosmetic surgeons who are doing most of the work.
The few plastic surgery makeover shows I’ve watched, (and I’d watch more except I’m a bit sensitive to the facial skin incision thang) the male cosmetic surgeons on these shows are all very weird dudes. Like very.
But in one show, they had a NY late 20’s women aspirant stage actor who wasn’t getting the roles etc. and she basically liked what she looked like in a general way, except for a few small issues – which together conspired to make her ‘unattractive’ in a standard issue sense.
The male surgeons on the show – would have got hold of this women and said “you’re fugly, trust me and you’ll love it” – and she would have woken up looking like someone else or rather something else and possibly in less skilled hands with a botched job – otoh – in this episode they matched her (being arty and possibly smart enough not to be intimidated) with a female cosmetic surgeon who spoke to her in such a different way (this was not mentioned in the narration and it’s a reality TV show so who knows what really goes on ) but the upshot being she chose to have only a few procedures, basically the ones she wanted in the first place. She woke up looking like herself except with some minor changes.
She was the least ‘made over’ person in the show by miles! She didn’t have any drastic body lifts, or breast anything’s or chin implants etc and she was ‘a bit overweight and had flabby arms’ omigod! Whereas the other women on the same episode underwent a huge amount of procedures that the male surgeons had literally just pushed onto them in the most cruel and unprofessional fashion. Literally standing over these women holding a photo of them naked and with a big red texta saying “ we’ll get rid of that and cut that off, pull that up and chop that… eerww – just trust me.” And no doubt a lot of women do want to look like Barbie.
But from that v. small unreal window – I just wondered how many extra procedures and more extreme procedures are pushed onto very vulnerable, insecure women by unscrupulous or rather svengali-like surgeons, women who may have just wanted an opinion or advice or possibly something minor. And this is not to say that there ain’t predatory female operators nor sensitive, professionals males in the industry either.
I really don’t know what industry standards currently are, but maybe the Govt should be requiring the industry to fund an independent counselling service where clients are sent to talk through their choices as a matter of practice, and of course having long cooling off periods. I dont expect industry would like these sort of interventions, obviously, but considering that statistic (?) where women who undergo cosmetic surgery have 3 times the suicide rate, suggests this type of protection is more than required and makes you wonder what other stats there are out there.
And I’m sure both male & female surgeons who work in reconstructive surgery are very aware of how ‘unskilled’ many of these dudes are.
And lastly, breast reduction surgery should not even be lumped (sorry) in with cosmetic surgery – it just shouldn’t.
Sorry for typos as usual, the proof-reader/house cleaner is on holidays.
Err, dude, I didn’t want to over-analyse it. My reading of your “report back” was that your girlfriend – for whatever reason – and they could be legion – doesn’t care for blog threads. Lots of folks don’t. I don’t think it’s any sort of knock down argument.
Adrien at 279 – Julia Baird’s book is good value. But I’m not really getting how you segue from her story about Bishop to “we don’t live in a patriarchy”.
jo wrote:
Thread winner. Kim, send her the shoes.
They don’t deliver to Australia, David!!!!
De-feat?
Heh!
I didn’t get ‘we don’t live in a patriarchy’ from Media Tarts I got it from things in general. A patriarchy is a society in which men are dominant because the rules say they are. In a complex society this means the State and its laws. The Australians statutory authorities not only do not categorically disempower or oppress women they actually feature many laws and institutions designed to stop this, prevent it, change it.
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Australia is a society that is post-patriarchal in transition to something new. In my opinion.
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At least that’s how I read it. Where is the line drawn over which you step and ta-dah: no patriarchy? I don’t think my opinion is carved in stone by the gods but I honestly believe a society that features so many prohibitions against sexual discrimination cannot be called a patriarchy. Thus far the only retort has been that “we live in a patriarchy because I say so”. Is our society male dominated? Yes. Sexist? Yes. Potential to revert to patriarchy, possibly. But a patriarchy? No.
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This is more than a semantic argument. At the very least it must be acknowledged that women today have a lot more power than they did a hundred years ago. Legal, economic, political and the rest. I don’t see how useful it is to blame men for what are pretty clearly female dominated zones. No one forces women to get plastic surgery or buy fashion magazines or talk about their breasts. Women have education, spending power, positions of influence. When do they start becoming responsible for their actions?
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Is it possible that feminism being a principally left-wing movement suffers the errors of the Left generally? As in the need to organize around a nefarious, identifiable enemy? What irony that those most concerned with social change are the least able to acknowledge that anything has.
My belief that the patriarchy still exists has less to do with a left wing stance for the hell of it but rather in the existence of a number of detailed studies which appear with monotonous regularity.
Gender inequality exists, most visibly, in the disparity of equal wages. Maternity leave is difficult to get. Sexual harrassment in the workplace is prolific. The other victims of the patrarchy happen to be men in my books. Elizabeth Broderick, Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner is on the brink of releasing a comprehensive report which details these findings.
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2008/s2310439.htm
Sure there are laws in place. But why does that not impact on the invisible yet systemic discrimination in the work place. I want to stress that not only women suffer under this system but also men who are denied paternity leave for example. Men, who depart from their own hetero stereotype laid out for them are also judged deficient and are subject to the same sorts of strictures, erasures and othering reserved for women.
Its just not that clear cut to suggest that because the excesses of the patrarchy have been dealt with within the law, that partiarchal enactments do not manifest in other less overt ways.
Perhaps a basic definition of patrarchy might assist in delineating what it means to be in a patriarchal society.
based on Allan G. Johnson’s The Gender Knot):
http://gray.intrasun.tcnj.edu/Coming%20of%20Age/a_basic_definition_of_patriarchy.htm
Patriarchal social structures are:
1. Male dominated–which doesn’t mean that all men are powerful or all women are powerless–only that the most powerful roles in most sectors of society are held predominantly by men, and the least powerful roles are held predominantly by women
2. Organized around an obsession with control, with men elevated in the social structure because of their presumed ability to exert control (whether rationally or through violence or the threat of violence) and women devalued for their supposed lack of control–women are assumed to need men’s supervision, protection, or control
3. Male identified: aspects of society and personal attributes that are highly valued are associated with men, while devalued attributes and social activities are associated with women. There is a sense of threat to the social structure of patriarchies when these gendered associations are destabilized–and the response in patriarchy is to increase the level of control, often by exerting control over women (as well as groups who are devalued by virtue of race, ethnicity, sexuality, or class).
4. Male centered: It is taken for granted that the center of attention is the natural place for men and boys, and that women should occupy the margins. Public attention is focused on men. (To test this, take a look at any daily newspaper; what do you find on the front page about men? about women?)
who holds the most powerful positions in the business world. When it comes to sport, which gender gets prime tv viewing in their sport? Who are the machiavellian princes of the modern age? ie, who are the richest people on the top 10 list in oz. I cant think of one woman. Why is that? Are women really not as clever as men? Are they too ‘nice’ to be ruthless. Lets say they try to be ruthless? Dont they become hard nosed ball breaking bitches in the eyes of many.
What are the attributes which are valued to achieve top rung? ruthlessness, strenghth, determination, forecefulness.
What attributes are deficient? weakness, tears, passivity etc – all found in the female stereotype. God forbid women should step out of this stereotype,, even as it is downgraded by men – what if a woman does not cry – Im thinking of Lindy Chaimberlain whose departures from the hysterical mother performance landed her in jail.
In terms of violence, the stats bear out that women are most likely to be victims of violence at the hands, most often, of the men they know.
Now I am not young. I am a gen x-er who grew up when feminism was still a force to be reckoned with. In terms of the patriarchy increasing its control in response to a threat of change in gender relations – this was realised for me when I started hearing young women start their convos with a line “Im not a feminist but…”. When I asked why they would be averse to an identification with feminism, they started talking about feminazis, and hairy armpits. The lack of feminity. The terror of not being found attractive, the terror of being othered, being called a lesbian. I could go on abou the mainstreaming of the idea of being a lady/being a whore paradox to please your man but pavlov outlined that up thread.
The patriarchy still rules as far as I see. You can see it in Hilaly’s uncovered meat performance (the repression of women, the elision of sexuality) and in its western janus face opposite(the mainstreaming of the pornographic dream – the pole dancing acrobat in the bedroom, the anal bleaching phenomenon, the labiaplasty – the transformation of a subject into the pornographic object.
Now you say women choose. They are not without agency. This is true. But socialisation takes place early. Which leads to the main point of this post. What is culture impelling us to do. What is culture normalising as a means of staying ahead of the game, of being successfull. Waht sorts of interpellations take place in this discourse of youth and beauty – both for men and women.
I dont think its over. Its less phsycially brutal that say Afghanistan, but the psyhological deformations are formidable and agency in that instance, is much reduced.
pardon the spelling errors.
So far ahead in the distance that you can’t see it.
I repeat: patriarchy, you’re standing in it.
Also: Go Casey!
PC – could you please describe that line. After all I do back up my views with a bit more than simople declaration.
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Casey -
For a long time the assumption was that the Father was the Authority from whence all authority diverged and with which there was always a close resemblance. There appears to be some evidence that gender relationships could be more equal before the rise of the State but when Agrarian Civilization appears, that is to say when the Law, the Military, the Money and Kings appear, so does patriarchy. Since c1800 society has undergone massive change, this at least must be acknowledged.
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In essence the old method of social organization which for various reasons featured the rule of soldiers and priests was swept away in favour of new modes which, for all their faults, enabled people to have more choice and control over their lives than before. This included women. One of the classic texts of the revolutionary last decade of the 18th century was the remarkable Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Obviously, and especially if you’re familiar with her biography, Ms Wollstonecraft’s polemic didn’t result in immediate emancipation.
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This emancipation took many years of struggle by women individually and collectively. By the men who supported their emancipation. Major political victory occurred during the decades of the 20th century where, after middle-class then working-class males, women won the right to vote. There were comparable latter victories in wining equal pay for the same job and the rest. All of this has only happened over the two hundred and sixteen years since Wollostonecraft wrote her vindications.
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You and I both agree at least that kicked off in 1792 has not completed its task. However we have a different point of view. For you patriarchy exists because women continue to get fucked over. You say:
Well my answer to that is both that there’s a limit to what law can accomplish and that they often do impact on workplace discrimination. The ins and outs of that are not something I’m exactly expert on nor could I do them justice here if I were. But there are still battles to be fought. Susan Antilla’s Tales from the Boom-Boom Room ilustrates just how harrowing this can be. – a href=”http://www.amazon.com/Tales-Boom-Boom-Room-Women-Street/dp/1576600785
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The process by which women achieve respect, equality… the process by which the feminist project carries out its task is multifarious. It occurs all the time in the decisions that women make and the attitudes that are passed from mother to daughter, father to son. The change can be frustratingly slow. Don’t forget that Gen X are probably the first generation where little girls grew up expecting to do other things besides getting married and popping sprogs. And we ain’t elderly yet.
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But things have been accomplished. One such, as Antilla tells us, is that the law is on the side of emancipation. Because of this I say we no longer live in a patriarchy. Whether you agree with my conclusion or not you probably do agree that this situation must be exploited. At base tho’ the progress women have made has been made by women taking whatever freedoms available to them and spreading their wings. As Mary Wollostonecraft did so do you.
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But relying on a point of view that says we are programmed by a culture to do certain things, that some nefarious power matrix dominates us has limited utility. To be sure we do inherit history and can do only so much with it. But we are capable of exercising choice. Women do this. And when they do you don’t get very far blaming men for it. It’s not ‘oppression’ when other people let the side down it’s simply what other people do.
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At base my problem with the rhetoric associated with the patriarchal socialization process basis for continuing the feminist basis is that it’s vague, it excludes natural sex difference categorically and it demonizes men even if we’re not to blame. We are often to blame. But sometimes we’re not. If women buy into the bullshit in fashion magazines maybe you should ask why? And be prepared for whatever the answer proves to be.
Adrien, I have no idea what you mean by ‘describe that line’. If you mean the line ‘Patriarchy: you’re standing in it’, it’s a reference to an old TV comedy show called Australia, You’re Standing In It and I provided a link that explains what I meant, namely that patriarchy is an all-pervasive, all-encompassing, all-surrounding social and psychological reality that nobody, men or women, can simply step out of. Casey has already explained this, but I thought I’d back her up with another source. I find it hard to believe that you read the link without understanding the comment.
Jo, I unswerstand your comment and priorities. The real problem is a shortage of cosmetic surgeons, particularly female ones, to save the poor dopes now being done over by teh menz?
Let’s see, how could we finance that? I know. A cut to foreign aid. Sounds fair to me.
Well I’m glad you folks are finally getting this issue off your chest.
BOOM tiiisssshhhhh….
Thank you, thank you. By popular demand I won’t be here all week.
PC, jo and Casey, etc. There is no such thing as patriarchy in the sense people like you use the term. You are not feminists inthemeaningfulsense; why use language you patently don’t understand the meaning of.
In your cases its to do with an example of the “victimhood entitlement” syndrome encouraged in the mortgage belts in our society, of the like that High Mackay talks of.
No night terrors. No teh bogey menz.
Just an inability to grow up, face reality and take life on life’s terms.
Don’t you guys get it, its not exclusively about westernocentric women’s faces.
Get yourselves off yourselves for five seconds and have a look at the lives of billions of real people, mostly with something real to complain about, “out there”, that is, outside of your narcissistic, self preoccupied little worlds.
I thought there were moderation rules? If Paul Walter can refer to Dr Cat as “Smartarse”, does that mean I can say he’s a tool? Not that I would, of course. I’m too busy modifying my life to correspond to Feminism According to Paul Walter, as he is clearly the authoritah.
An authority who thinks “patriarchy” means “rule of men” rather than “rule of Fathers” (and yes, that capitalised F is very important). Hint, Paul: not every man mentioned in the Old Testament was a patriarch, only the men who led large groups of other men were called patriarchs. A father in a nuclear family is not technically a patriarch, despite some common misuse of the term. Fathers in extended families who exert stringent financial control over adult children would technically qualify, but only as minor patriarchs in the greater scheme of the social status hierarchy.
Is the West in a period where old patriarchal structures (i.e. every hierarchy’s senior figures are men) are loosening to include women? Sure. Is that sufficient to make Western society post-patriarchal? No way. Today’s Patriarchs’ employment of Might Makes Right wears a velvet glove camouflaged with the smoke and mirrors of legalisms and cultural hegemonies (eta: mediated at arm’s length through the corporations they control) rather than the ancient rule of my warriors can beat your warriors, but Patriarchs are still the gatekeepers of wealth, power and social influence, and the ambitious dance to their tune if they want some of what they control.
Acknowledging that patriarchal hegemonies constrain most choices of women and non-patriarch men is not to say that we should therefore throw up our hands and give up. It does mean that the utility of addressing individual choice is limited unless we also address how the patriarchal hegemonies are restricting other options with non-trivial socioeconomic penalties for non-compliance. People are risk-averse, and prudently so in many ways, because refusing to comply with social expectations comes with a cost, while drinking the Kool-Aid and shoring up the bulwark of social expectations often leads to huge material rewards.
Of course, the competition for those huge material rewards is the core of the problem, especially when combined with the fundamental building block of patriarchy, which is intergenerational wealth accumulation overwhelmingly through the male line of descent. Unless the larger social structures, including the distribution of wealth, which shape those social expectations are subverted so that expectations can be broadened, it is futile to merely tell prudently risk-averse individuals that they should just rebel against social expectations all on their own.
Adrien. Let us agree to disagree. But let me stress one thing. I do not blame men for the patriarchy/ I blame the patriarchy for the sorts of subjugations it inflicts on both men and women. You may say that doesnt make sense. But its a discourse, a pervasive system that has been around as long as the west has. That has gone hand in hand with the aims of capitalism, that has underpinned the project of imperialism, that has coopted and deformed the religion of the west, christianity. Why has sex abuse proliferated in the churches? Because a patriarchal system of protection allows it, even as it devalues women and gay people. (for lesbians and homosexuals have dared to repudiate the norm of heterosexuality in such a way that they must be forever elided from church life and absented from decision making processes.) When I use the word patriarchy I use it in the way that Pavlov and Tigtog do. A pervasive system of oppression which deforms both genders, slots them into categories, compelling them into performative enactments of old gender stereotypes. Do we have agency? yes of course. If not , we should all slash our wrists and be done with it. But patriarchal socialisations and indoctrinations start young. How much agency did we have as children? A genuine question: Did you never feel its excesses in the schoolyard Adrien? Either in the compulsions to be agressive to those weaker than you, or in the exclusions it inflicted if you did not live up to its standards, of what it is to be a man. I read an extraordinary piece once by Aaron Dark (The eye) and his experiences at the hands of a now very famous footballer in highschool. A footballer who exhibited all the most admired of traits within a patriarchal world view which rewards agression and anti social behaviour of the most heinous kind. It wasnt pretty. It made for compelling reading. It didnt stay up on the net very long. Aarons site mysteriously crashed and that piece was lost. Lucky for Aaron I saved a copy and he got it back. I hope he puts it up again one day, though I worry about the ramifications for him.
One writer who I much admire is Elizabeth Harrower who wrote in the late fifties and sixties. Her novel “The Long Prospect” deals with such patriarchal formations and deformations, of men, of children and of women. In this novel the evil character is in fact a woman. Like Harrower I believe that some women are so interpellated by the systems of patrarchy and materialism that they end up perpetuating the aims of these discourses with exemplarary results. I dont believe all women are victims, nor that all men are patriarchal bastards. I believe that both genders need to challenge and disrupt the socialisations and power formations of the patriarchal system both within and without.
Now thats all I will say on this issue, except to add: Paul Walter, you are much more *compelling* when you you USE BIG LETTERS.
I don’t have time to comment at length, but fortunately I can applaud Casey and tigtog’s comprehensive comments!
There are commonalities between feminism and the left, but not around “errors”. They’re around seeking deeper and structural causes for pervasive and often unseen cultural and social patterns which mean that a whole class (or gender in this instance) of people are deprived of true liberty and equality.
The error is in the minds of those who think that criticism of social structures and patterns (ie patriarchy) means that there must be an “enemy” and that enemy is men.
The whole point is to understand power otherwise than the contingent and evil actions of certain individuals or groups.
Great score, Helen. Except for the small fact that I nowhere said what you claim I said.
Never mind, never let the truth get in the way of a good smear.
As for Kim’s last comment: nice to see essentialism is not dead and humanity as we know i, is.
‘Scuse me….
BTW, Helen, why not try something on the thread itself, rather than just cat-calling people who are trying discuss the issues raised?
Am not trying to accuse of Helen of incorporating an”ad feminim” in her post, btw, Kim.
Is cosmetic surgery and the paraphernalia of associated junk, from Avon upwards, that goes with the”beauty” industry really a dire necessity or merely something that people in rich countries have been brainwashed, including by means of their own complicity, into beleiving they truly need, rather merely want.
Has exchange value really usurped use value so completely as the ethical default position, and expediency rules all, as some at this site seem to claim.
Well, THAT sounds like an open ended invitation to the return of what some folk around here take to mean by what I’d call Fascism and they, Patriachy.
I would totally agree that the entire beauty myth edifice is something that people have been brainwashed/socialised into believing that they want or even need.
That doesn’t conflict with a single thing that I have argued elsewhere in this thread, and it continues to mystify me that you misread me so consistently and so absolutely.
Yep, that’s one heroic job of verballing PW.
And here was I complaining about being misrepresented myself!
Well, Tig Tog. So you finally attempt communication on a person to person basis. A strange encounter, indeed.
My impression of the response of others to my point that the beauty industry and its destructive move into heterogeneity and homogeneity through cosmetic surgery has been a series of replies telling me women know their own business, that its about necessity rather than fancy and Imust be the unspeakable beast for questioning what her lady ship feels sheisentitled to do, regardless of any harm done to others. For rejecting and opposing womens commodification and reification I am the strict representation of demon patriarchy. But this thinkng reveals a Nozickian right-libertarian bent and I still here much of “let them eat cake”, hereabouts.
Also, most argument attacking me, including all the ad feminims, have ignored the role of womens complicity in the process, which is symptomatic of the general inability of what has degenerated into womens “dogma”, to account for this complicity morphing to false consciousness, factor. That is, when related to their argument that the concept of patriarchy is any advance on the lefty response relating to class as to a more comprehensive analysis of socio historical movements. There is little to doubt in the idea that feminism has added to the ongoing social critique, particularly in describing how nglected parts of “the system” works and showing through its examples why the system itself is radically incomplete, fromthe point of view of gender repression alone.
But I dont think on the basis of this thread, riddled as it is with seperatist and exclusionist tendencies, that the version on display here has superceded the more general leftist situationalist politics
Actually it was Youie who called me a smartarse. Compared with the foam-flecked ire of Paul Walter, it was really quite friendly-like.
I wish I could say that it was a new experience to be lectured (along with Casey, Tigtog, Kim and several other people who have clearly read, observed and practised as much or more than I have in the field of feminism over the last 30+ years) on what feminism is and is not by a man who has obviously never read any, but unfortunately it happens all the time. What is surprising is that someone like PW who claims to despise this entire topic seems to remain so very very interested in the conversation.
Kim @ 300 would have been a v. worthy end point. Oh well.
Paul, the point I was making although you obviously failed to see it, is considering we live a society where the rate of cosmetic surgery is increasing and will in all likelihood further increase and considering that absolutely nothing we say here is going to make a whole lot (or rather no) difference to whether person X (including one man for every 10 women) toddles off tomorrow to pay, btw. with their own hard earned, for a totally legal and private service to be undertaken on their own person – I was thinking purely from a practical POV – that an industry funded independent free advice/counselling service should become standard procedure to provide a higher level of consumer protection. Considering that medical practitioners have strict standards in respect of undertaking unnecessary procedures, unlike cosmetic surgeons whose entire raison d’être is such, (not a jumping off point please!) it would seem therefore a fairly sensible measure to have an independent third party involved in the process. It’s not like you can take it back to shop etc.
Just ‘bread & butter stuff’ obviously, but sometimes these types of steps can be effective in modifying/ inhibiting or transforming industry practice. But then again, I have an empathy gland… and an inclination for practical solutions and remedies which don’t involve putting people up against walls or criminalising victimless activities by banning them and so on.
Do you also beat up on smokers and drug addicts/alcoholics or the obese for clogging up our public health system?? There is an enormous difference between trying to understand causes and triggers in relation to all sorts of behaviour and then trying to inform, modify, ameliorate the impact of these activities and just merely beating up on the individuals concerned and/or castigating anyone who wants to discuss the issue in way that doesn’t condemn, insult and further condemn, and in this case mostly women.
It must be also very frustrating for you when you can’t reduce a debate into “bad western people vs. good developing world peoples”. Your shtick as I’ve pointed out, is entirely false. And news to Avon(!!) who sell their products in 143 countries. (And just out of interest Paul, did your Mum buy from an Avon Lady?)
As to your overall contribution, Paulus said it far more elegantly than I ever could – “well done sir, you surpass even the most ludicrous Tim Blair parody of left-wing opinion.”
And what tigtog, Dr Cat, Casey and Kim etc. have posted with few qualifiers.
Actually, I attempted to do so much earlier, to have my arguments immediately misrepresented. If that’s what’s going to happen every time I respond to you, why should I bother?
Women can be cogs in the machines that constitute Patriarchy just as much as men can be. Women want to increase their status just as much as men do, and complying with the Patriarchy is the obvious way to do it (edited to add – for both genders), and the female pets of the Patriarchy are best placed to persuade other women that they too want what the pets have got.
Why do you think that this is some blindingly new and unconsidered insight?
Let’s all just agree to disagree yeah?
Never
OH OK
Heh.
What’s puzzling me is that there are several people on this thread who keep expressing objections to its existence yet repeatedly come back to it to read and comment. What’s that all about?
PC, I want to thank you, kim,tigtog, laura and all the other commenters for your insightful commenting on this thread about the material and psychological effects of the patriarchal society which impacts all of us, men and women.
But why do they come back indeed. Someone, something is under threat. Patriarchy, to my mind, functions well when it remains invisible and unquestioned. Make it visible, put it under a microscope and it responds by denying its own existence or power. Why? Cause some have a vested interest in its continuance. Its continuance depends on its masking. Patriarchy performs as ‘the norm’.Expose the artificiality of gender stereotyping and it collapses under the scrutiny. Things change. This has been a good conversation.
In terms of “winning hearts and minds”, in this thread, how did feminism go – how was it served, does on think? Were people (readers) won over, turned off, or somewhere in between?
What an odd question.
If one sees another’s motivations and responses to the socioeconomic incentives produced by external hierarchies continually misrepresented as purely individual and internal inadequacies, what possible benefit could it be to be silently complicit as the larger forces which restrict our choices are given a free pass yet again?
Smae old attempt at conversation; same old spittle flecked nastiness, post after post.
You really are collective dead wood, aren’t you?
Never mind, go drown in your anti-social, separatist little half worlds, you misanthropic isolates.
Yes, it’s a very strange question. It presupposes evangelical motivation, which from my observation none of the feminists in this conversation have shown much interest in. And it uses a catchphrase that originated in that cynical, hypocritical, power-grabbing clusterfuck the Vietnam War and has been associated with wars ever since.
I regard this conversation neither as a war nor as an exercise in converting the heathen. Like Tigtog I see it as chiefly a matter of putting up resistance where one group is trying to exercise power over another. As with bosomage, feminism does not exist merely to be assessed by the effect it has on men.
#317 was a response to #315.
And, of course, #314.
Once again there is the assumption that feminism is a dogmatic philosophy that seeks to win hearts and minds. I don’t think feminism is primarily or fundamentally such a philosophy, or has ever really been. Feminism is a critical philosophy which has inspired a lot of different campaigns and strategies (sometimes requiring the winning of hearts and minds, sometimes being more combative), but as a way of reading the world, of interrogating it and of offering a challenge to it, it seems a secondary concern that it should evangelize or build a constituency. A particular feminist organisation or political campaign might seek to do that, but I think it is a categorical mistake to assume that to be an aim for feminism in general. What do the feminists here think? Am I on the right track?
Yes, that was indeed a poor choice of phrase, my apologies for that. Combativeness, of any sort, was not in mind when the question was posed, certainly not war. None of that was in mind. I am interested in peoples’ ideas about the effects on people when a difficult issue is posed and discussed: whether it helps people, or not. And perhaps what does help and what doesn’t. Does it merely entrench prejudice, or does an unraveling occur? The question was given without a presumption or presupposition (an answer if so inclined could be provided without presupposing contributors do so with or without evangelising).
FWIW, I think both things happen, but the unraveling is worth it. Some seriously excellent comments have been made in this thread, and behind the question was some hope that things can be aired from this thread to work with for the next one. That’s just my two bobs. It’s a bit tricky, because it’s so easy to place a phrase unthinkingly, apologies again.
That paul walter has problems that have absolutely nothing to do with anything anyone actually says to him on this thread?
But to answer your question, Klaus, I think the aim of feminism is to understand the world in order to change it. How to change it ought to be derived from how it is understood.
Precisely right, Casey!
You must be beyond barefaced to say that kim.
Robert #321:
No worries Robert, we’re all a little bit weary and jumpy. For me addressing your question shall have to wait upon the morning, sorry.
I don’t know why any of us bother being polite to you, paul walter. The responses to you – such as tigtog’s at 308 – were measured and civil. Every time you pop your head up you can’t resist having a spray at people for – shock, horror! – disagreeing with you and thinking that some of us just might know more about feminism – and being a woman – than you. Oh noes! Essentialism! You cry. Whatevs, dude. Come clean and tell us why – given that you apparently hold us in such disdain – we’re right wingers, nay, fascists, and oppressing the third world and converting use value into exchange value or something – why oh why you feel compelled to keep coming back and commenting on this thread. You’ve been asked several times.
Please do try to answer without abusing anyone.
No, you claimed my problems with this thread were to do with something outside of the thread, rather than the incessant abuse from people like you.
You are seriously making the sort of claim you just made above, that you and several other people here have rsorted to abusing me rather than through an inability to discussing the relevant issues?
So how about lie number one.
Leigh suggests “live and let live” but no way, some of you said in reply. So much for the grounds for meaningful discourse.
You are people I might have once respected, but I hold you in contempt after these sorts of threads.
Bored now.
Thanks Tigtog – I enjoyed (and attempted to appreciate) your answer very much as it was! Lots of food for thought.
Not bored, just ignorant.
Ok, so one last try.
Tig Tog at one stage mentioned that women did a lot of this stuff under male or social pressure. Much more recently, she talks about both sexes admitting that women, also want to, “increase their status”.
Now, first of above relates to some being a bit weak willed asserting themselves against outside pressures, yes/no? If that’s the case, that’s sad. Everyone knows there is a price to be payed for giving in. None more than me after just picking up my first cigarette for four months ( there, that should cheer you up ). No “blinding insights” here.
But it is not really “sexist” to claim that some women can be weak willed, since weakwilledness is a common characteristic of all people.
And then, there is the bit about women “wanting to increase their status”( so others are forced to follow suit?). Whaaa?
Who’s imposing on the rest here, btw?
Once again, surely the world need not be denied scarce resources because someone wants to go on something as ignoble and childish as an ego trip? Let’s shout against it. These people; male or female, are selfish scabs( reading this, Darlene?) The world is turned upside down for this? (280 million in India on 30 cents a day, remember). Come on, please, seriously, where is the consciousness here?
Let me simplify.
If I can’t feel sorry for some kid dying like a dog with Malaria for lack of treatment, how can I feel sorry for healthy attractive women who waste time on botox, plastic surgery, etc.
Jo reckons its “legal”. Does it make it right? And as for the reality that botoxing etc is a fad, why should I be less impressed with it than the other gimicks, like pokies, that Jo mentions). Am sorry. I, too, refuse the “normalisations” of (capitalism) patriarchy, as Tig Tog puts it above.
I waited a long time for someone to criticise these goings on, in this case in the cosmetics and beauty industries generally,( Tig Tog was less in denial than many others, its true) for the insult to the intelligence they are, but no, It was only me who could be the unreasonable one.
Can I dare even feel sorry for women at a shelter escaping another beating from their husbands, when I’m scorned for rubbishing the triviality of many western people’s concerns against the horrors I cite above, eg India.
And no Pavlovas cat, re your wssted effort, 306, It wasn’t the “thread” I despised so much as some of the sort of weasel worded stuff represented by posts like 306.
Robert, yes, I was a bit over-terse and I’m sorry as well. This thread is making my snark meter go all doolally.
I have no idea whether other people have been ‘helped’ in the sense I think you mean, but this thread has certainly given me some extremely useful and varied insights into the masculine world view. (NB: not snark, I mean it.) While these insights would have been a lot more useful if I’d had them a few decades ago, this thread has still helped me to make sense of a lot of life experience that I had hitherto found puzzling.
Just acknowledging with thanks your response, Pavlov’s Cat. Wishing you a lovely Adders day.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat, Paul Walter. Just yelling at people for being selfish scabs whose luxuries are letting other people starve may well ease your conscience, but they won’t listen to you.
Of course the status quo (the distribution of wealth and the consumerist attitudes the magnates foster in order to accumulate more wealth) sucks, and where the status quo is encouraging perfectly healthy women and men to mutilate their body in order to maintain/advance their status it sucks even harder. But the problem is that plastic surgery does indeed “work”, at least to an extent, in advancing people’s status within our current status quo. For people who don’t perceive that it’s actually the status quo that is the problem, their decision appears perfectly rational.
That’s why this feminist’s criticism concentrates on the sick status quo rather than on criticising the individuals who are making socioeconomically rational (edited to add: and yes, selfish) choices within that status quo. If you make the argument all about individual responsibility for personal choices, what’s your comeback to the libertarian argument that if people in the Third World just made better choices (or if their ancestors had done so) then they too could be rich consumers?
You unfortunately have been so insistent on your True Way of shaming people as individuals that you have failed to see that we share a common distaste and a common goal here.
I have found this thread very helpful. I have been trying to work on my ‘arguing’ skills (I tend to just get emotional and attack) and have found the critiques of the way arguments are put forth very helpful. Kind of like an unravelling of ‘tricks’ that people use. Also as a beginner feminist, I know it’s painful for those that have done it a gazillion times, but very helpful to have spelt for those of us that are new to it.(Also daunting, I’m not sure I would want to spell it out a gazillion times.)So Thanks!
Glad you’ve found it helpful, hmppf.
Way too many heated arguments happen when some interlocutors take an either X or Y position when a more nuanced view is a both X! and Y! because Z position (where ! = “up to a point”). Patient unravelling of the either/or dichotomy to bring out the both/and aspects is the ideal, but sometimes it’s harder to manage the patience than at other times. Getting aggro about someone else’s either/or blinders to one’s both/and position is a trap that anyone can fall into, and we’ve seen several people drop in and out of the aggro in this thread (including me).
There is the potential for many of us (including me) to learn something from this thread.
I meant the line a society crosses over when it changes from patriarchy to something else. What I actually mean is that there is no line. There is a series of steps. My repeated thesis is that we are in a transition from patriarchy to a truly open society; a society that is, amongst other things, no longer discriminatory on the basis of gender.
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And I’d also like to say that I knew that amazing guy before Tim and Debbie did. And it wasn’t a different amazing guy. I wonder if Tim and Debbie still liv in Surry Hills. ‘know where the population is so much more dense.
Indeed. But I understand what you mean by patriarchy. I also understand well the tenets of post WWII sociology (et al) which dictate that social relations are underpinned by the very language. Altho’ I think there are salient points made by this line of argument am disinclined to think that it explains all. At base, in society what determines what one can do and what one cannot do is the law. Money of course also enables one to do a lot more as well.
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From your link:
First they have it backwards. Patriarchy, I assert, grew from the division of labour between men and women. This division could be described as natural in the sense that that it was the manner in which or species carved out its niche in the ecology. The data is limited but we are aware that social systems will change according to the character of the environment. Hierarchies, that is class systems, develop when humans are able to build complex societies – what used to be called ‘civilization’. Patriarchy is created because men dominate the now-privileged ‘public sphere’. Usually via military organization. In short traditions of elitism do not create patriarchy. Patriarchy creates them.
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Secondly the systems change; systems of law, systems of family organization, systems of religion. Because we are no longer required to subscribe to any belief system, because religion is separated from politics, because the State is now answerable to its people (at least somewhat), because women have the vote, because the convention in law and the dominant-stated moral principle is equality between the sexes; because most of all women are able, even required, to be financially independent – we no longer live in a patriarchal society. However our ways are still those of patriarchy, inherited from patriarchy. So we are in transition. That is my view (again).
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BTW – If you’re genuinely interested in the male point of view viz gender issues and feminism to books come to mind – graphic novels both. Both written by guys tho’ one is illustrated by a lass. These are Preacher and Y.
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The theme of the first is masculinity the good, the bad, the ugly, the sad, the dangerous and the seriously weird. Its hero is a Texan preacher who likes stealing cars and whiskey. His best friend is an Irish vampire. And his girlfriend keeps saving his arse even tho’ he’s always leaving her behind whenever he does what men do. It really pisses her off. John Wayne talks to him…
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Probably not to your taste right?
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The second is a science-fiction story in which one day every mammal with a ‘y’ chromosome drops dead. All except this one guy in Brooklyn and his monkey. He’s on the phone talking to his girfriend in Australia when it happens. He asks her to marry him and then the phone goes dead. Very cool, they should make a movie. In it the Australian navy now dominates the oceans because we let women serve on submarines, One of the characters is a very cool lieutenant with a patch over her left eye.
Sometimes.
Very rarely, for the reasons exhaustively explained by half a dozen different people, above. I said ‘the masculine world view’, not the male point of view viz gender and feminism as such, which I have been having aggressively rammed down my throat for the last 25 years by all manner of menz and, more to the point, boyz, and most of which has been under-informed pontification from an unacknowledged position of privilege.
Correct. Apart from anything else, ‘graphic novel’ is an oxymoron; if the form is so gosh-darned new and original, surely the least they can do is can give it a proper name of its own.
Hoo boy, is that a misogynist’s wet dream or what? Is this what you’re offering as an example of the the male point of view on gender and feminism? Been there, done that, threw up on the t-shirt.
That’ll be the sort of monkey you spank, right?
Casey -
I went to 9 schools in three countries, in four states, under five different systems. When you’re the new kid so often you learn well the human capacity for cruelty.
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You are continually making the error that I simply don’t see what you refer to as ‘pervasive oppression’. That I am blind to sexism, racism and all manner of other nefarious ‘isms’. That is not the case. The fact that I have been able to discuss with a certain lucidity and depth various concepts, ideas and texts attached to feminist discourse might give you up the idea that perhaps I have engaged with these issues at some length.
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You need to read a little more widely. The post-War French schools of philosophy and their disciples do not tell the whole story. With all respect due to Mr Foucault and the rest discourse is not everything. Discourse simply means the sum of communication. Even discursively speaking the notion that we live in a patriarchy is incorrect. Equality of the sexes is not a reality but it is a stated core principle of our society that it should be, that this is the morally correct thing to be. Even a conservative such as Mr Howard acknowledges such.
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Your assertions viz patriarchy being around as long as ‘the west’ are, I’m sorry, simply ignorant. Western civilization has its nefarious histories but it’s not the root of all evil. Please compare and contrast, for example, the political rights of women in ancient Roman society with that of China of the same period. Patriarchy was a nature of all complex agrarian societies. Not one did not feature the political rule of women by men. But if I was a woman in 12 ACE and had to choose to live somewhere I’d live in Rome.
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Whilst it’s true that, in certain ways, Communist societies were more pro-feminist than capitalist democracies, it’s nevertheless an empirical fact that women have enjoyed more freedom and power with a capitalist economy and multi-party democracy than any other system. The Coms were to militaristic y’see.
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If you have evidence to the contrary I’d be glad to see it.
Uh oh.
“Discourse simply means the sum of communication”
No, that’s not what Foucault means by discourse. In fact, why bring him into it at all? As far as I’m concerned, you seem to be muddying the waters by a) misattributing a concept to a certain thinker and b) assuming that feminism as it has been argued on this thread is drawing substantially or for the most part on French poststructuralist thought. I’m prepared to drop b) if you can show me where and how the Foucaultian definition of ‘discourse’ is relevant.
Kim –
Well that’s good. So why insist on a deliberately vague and rubbery concept such as discursively pervasive yet likewise subconscious ‘patriarchy’? Let’s go back to Foucault for a moment if that’s okay.
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Foucault’s work is to re-examine the period of radical transformation from the ancien regime to bourgeois capitalism in a different way. Adopting Marxian history but dealing with the piecemeal, banal operations of society. Forget class struggle, let’s examine the transformation of everyday governance: how did society deal with criminals for example. How does what we know and the way we organize what we know impact on and dictate the uses of power.
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Well I believe he showed that these things are not meaningless or insignificant. No. They have effects. Drawing on Nietzche Foucault seems to agree that rules are necessary, that power will be used and that this is generally beneficial – a public transport system after all is a use of power. As is this discussion. He does however illustrate that our liberty is impeded by subterfuge. That the education system enables us to think certain things in certain ways. This is part of the process that we call socialization.
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In my opinion Foucault deliberately excludes natural phenomena from his examination. I can see that this is useful for him. However I think, especially when discussing feminist issues, that it’s in error to make a habit of this. There is after all physiological mental illness – schizophrenia. Other people must deal with schizophrenics in some way they are not simply created by the discourse of psychiatry or by the health industrial apparatus.
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Sexual difference likewise pre-exists both human societies and the human species. It’s arrogant and foolish to assume that there is no ‘human nature’. It does not serve your purposes ultimately to simply relegate every unpleasantness about human relations to a conflation of ‘the West, patriarchy and capitalism’. Society is and has always been for the purpose of curtailing the savagery of the human heart and various nastiness that results.
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In considering this issue of modern society, its obsessive production of and focus on the female body, its aesthetics, its requirements we have sidelined into an argument about whether our society is in fact patriarchal. This is not derailment (IMHO) but vital. Are these women who obtain plastic surgery, as Tictog says victims of the beauty myth brainwashing people? Or are people taking advantage of new technologies to extend their capacities to do what they’ve been doing for a hundred thousand years – altering their appearance?
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I’d say both.
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But the concept of an all pervasive system of oppression is not helpful because that simply isn’t what’s going on. All sorts of phenomena come into play here. The way in which human beings are built: as primates with good colour vision capable of representing the world visually, capable of complex communication and widespread adaptation and making things we build all sorts of systems and gadgets in furtherance of being better. Why? ‘Cause it’s more fun.
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I’ve only known one woman to get cosmetic surgery, on her breasts. She showed me, I didn’t like it. generally I don’t. And she had trouble. Was she a victim? Mmmm. This woman has two degree in very difficult disciplines and her employers fly her all over the world where she solves problems that are too hard for me to even comprehend. She at one point, got paid $1500 a week – rent allowance! She was a beautiful, brilliant, sassy, wealthy broad.
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Ask her. Was she brainwashed? Well she did live to regret it. There were complications, that is an issue as has been raised – standards in cosmetic surgery. But the questions of the ethics of body modification, of why women do it much more than men. Of why it is so important to look good. Of the power of being good looking. These questions will not be resolved by strict recourse to a patriarchal subterfuge especially considering that the administration of the Beauty Myth and its artifacts is mostly run by women.
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There’s a lot more to beauty than that described by Naomi Wolfe or Laura Mulvey. Perhaps the new frontier would be sociological research, reliably designed to discover the facts. Test these theories. Or is that too masculinist.
So you want to bring Foucault into the discussion in order to disagree with him? Why? What is gained for this discussion by doing so?
Klaus is right about that. You really seem to take issue with the french philosophers though dont you? You take issue with the existence of the patriarchy. You take issue with the existence of an entrenched historical racism towards Aboriginals. You take issue cultural theory. You cant stand Butler. You cant stand Barthes. You cant stand (nor understand) Foucault). Oh but you know Bordieu. You know Kubrick. Perhaps you might try to read more widely? Perhaps you might get a grip on the french philosphers before you pan them?
I come out of English departments not cultural studies btw. I dont read Barthes. I dont particularly draw on Foucault in my academic work. There are newer movements about you know. I use discourse as a term which has now entered mainstream use. Im so bored by your continued suggestions that all I read is cultural theory in a narrow uninformed way. My academic work, my PhD, my published work, my conference papers – have all come from other areas all together. You binaristic world view (either it exists or it doesnt), your lack of nuance in any discussion precludes any meaningful exchange as far as Im concerned.
Thanks for the retraction PC I was a little puzzled why a misogynist would dream (and come) at the thought of all the lads dropping. I’m afraid I’m well weary of persons amongst the literati turning their noses up at graphic novels. If you read them you’d realize that the oxymoron is apt. Please pick up a copy of Maus sometime and flip thru. It’s literary merit is undeniable.
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Both Y and Preacher are critiques of feminism to a certain extent. But they are also both pro-feminist. Shame you’ll never know.
Ahem. Didn’t say I turned up my nose. Said it was an oxymoron (a novel is a novel is a novel, as Gertrude Stein could so easily have said), and agreed with your suggestion that it was not to my taste. Not the same thing at all.
My taste in comix runs more to Doonesbury and Get Fuzzy. Genius, both.
Casey –
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I challenge you to point to exactly how I get Foucault wrong? I have never said that I can’t stand Barthes, quite the contrary actually. I have never taken issue with the entrenched historical racism toward anybody against which there’s entrenched historical racism. Stanley Kubrick did not contribute to postmodern philosophy.
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Please have the honour to withdraw those remarks unless you can find a skerik of evidence for any of them.
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My umbrage with the French philosophers is that they are a. not the way the light and the truth, b. subject to reasoned criticism like anything else. In my opinion they are over-influential and their errors are amplified by the Arts’ tendency to Canonical Authority. Judith Butler is a repository of mangled syllables.
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In any event someone with post-graduate qualifications and a familiarity with the newest latest movements should be able to do better than clumsily conflate capitalism, patriarchy and say it all originated with the West. Likewise you should be able to bring something a little fresher than Mulvey into the discussion.
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I’m sorry you take exceptions to my assumptions but what basis do I have for thinking anything other than I do? If you want to demonstrate wider reading then do so.
“My umbrage with the French philosophers is that they are a. not the way the light and the truth, b. subject to reasoned criticism like anything else. In my opinion they are over-influential and their errors are amplified by the Arts’ tendency to Canonical Authority. Judith Butler is a repository of mangled syllables.”
I’m still curious as to why you have to take these little stabs in order to make a point about patriarchy. WTF does Foucault et al have to do with this thread? Was Casey leaning on Foucault to make an argument? Was I? Was anybody, excepting yourself? You are making a great leap in assuming the underlying derivations of these arguments. Reasoned criticism is not imputing a conceptual genealogy to your interlocutors in order to score points against them.
Read a graphic novel PC. You’ll see why they’re novels. I think the term originated with Will Eisner to distinguish his work from comics. comics are to graphic novels as television is to feature films.
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Klaus -
I’m not disagreeing with him so much as agreeing with him. One of Foucault’s principle contributions was to historical method: he said let’s look at different stuff. I’m saying let’s look at different stuff too. Let’s consider the possibilities rather than recite doctrine.
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I have put forth an hypothesis. This hypothesis is that we are in a transitionary society with respect to gender relations. In this hypothesis patriarchy is not particularly useful as an idea because our society has changed at least to the extent that the same rights are conferred on citizens regardless their gender. (More or less, abortion continues only to be available on the basis of a loophole not on the sovereignty of a woman over her body.)
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The reaction to this hypothesis has been a catalogue of gender-based iniquities. There’s also been a little hostility and of course the inevitable links to Feminism 101 for some reason. Generally however it seems the concept of patriarchy is tied in some ways to a Foucaultian idea of power, I say Foucaultian because it is he who, as I recall, articulated this concept of culture and knowledge as a power structure best.
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However Foucault, as his critics, including Camille Paglia and Edward Said, have said leaves out stuff: resistance and nature being two of them.
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In considering this focus on the body, on its attractiveness, of the power of being good-looking the orthodox position is to say it’s all about patriarchal oppression. To which my response is that no-one’s forcing anyone to get cosmetic surgery. The comeback to that is: that these people have been brainwashed.
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Well advertising is influential to be certain. There is peer pressure and its relationship to self-esteem. We are bombarded, children are bombarded, with images and notions that serve both as major distractions and triggers of unworthiness. But how does that play out? Who is responsible? Why does it happen that way? How influential is this stuff?
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In order to understand all this it is, I think, important to ask a lot of questions and seek answers without a prior conclusion in mind. To acknowledge the facts and make assessments accordingly.
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But instead there is a resort to doctrinal declaration, a refusal to deal with argument in the realm of empirical reality and the general pronouncement that a woman who gets cosmetic surgery is a brainwashed robot incapable of making choices on the bare evidence that we don’t approve of it.
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I’m sorry but saying things doesn’t make them real. And having cheer-squads on stand-by to say rah rah rah when you recite the mantra doesn’t mean that that mantra is a reasoned retort. It isn’t. But feel free to dance in the circle of faculty coffee shops with occasional intense sit-downs to decry the latest round of cut-backs to the Arts as yet another example of the Superstructure and its iniquities.
Klaus I have made reasoned criticism. I have had people infer that I am ignorant of basic concepts in feminism, I have been told patriarchy exists in this country on the basis that it is a discourse and then when I show that to be a bit silly because of what discourse means I am told that that’s not Foucault meant. I know that. I know what the fucking male gaze is. I am sick of this constant implication that I am not following the Party Line simply because I’m ignorant.
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What is reasoned argument Klaus? Is it persistently refusing to understand what someone is saying because we are incapable of accepting that it might be truth or assembling an argument against it other than recitation of dogma. Is it logging on and cheering anyone that agrees with us even if their argument isn’t particularly well written and makes all sorts of elementary mistakes of fact?
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You know why I brought Foucault up? Because I want you to know that I know what he wrote. I do even if you say I don’t (without indicating why). I also know what the male gaze is, what criticisms Laura Mulvey really addressed in her follow-up to that over-rated Screen article and the all-encompassing and idiotically vague concepts attributed to patriarchy, the West and capitalism. And of curse while we’re ding this we in know way make the error of constructing an Enemy and defining everything we do and say in opposition to it. No. No straw men in the house.
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Foucault’s method of examining social change would come in handy if you took the time to ask certain questions about the changes in society since the end of WWII. You could look at various bits of cultural lego the way he regarded the Age of Revolution. What do we know? We could ask. And why?
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But no.
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Instead of rigorous method and information, instead of an arena where various ideas and suggestions are explored with disinterest and with reference to the facts. Instead of new ideas. We are stuck in the Trend and its current Pantheon. And we recite the catch phrases – discourse as some kind of subconscious omniscience that control our every move without us being aware of it being one – and we quote the Gods….
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And get it wrong.
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And when someone criticizes this sloppiness the gang lines up to take turns playing rounds of la la I can’t hear you and three cheers for our side. Golf clap.
“We are stuck in the Trend and its current Pantheon”
Acting out this part in your drama has been my privilege. You didn’t tell me the script was by David Williamson: I would have been more enthusiastic to take the part.
Yes, I have, several. I do try not to trash stuff I don’t actually know anything about, if I can help it. But I can’t remember any of the titles, which will give you some idea of how memorable I found them.
Well, no, actually, I won’t. There’s a definition of the word ‘novel’, just as there’s a definition of ‘play’, ‘poem’, ’short story’, ‘revenge tragedy’, ‘villanelle’ etc etc. A novel is by definition a fictional narrative made exclusively of words. A thing made of words and (non-optional) pictures is by definition not a novel.
This is merely a critique of sloppiness. Are you going to play a round of La la la I can’t hear you?
And all novels are short. Until they became as long as romances. Then romances were called novels. So we then called novels novellas. Because language and usage don’t change at all. They’re fixed, fossilised, doomed never to change with the surrounding culture. That’s why “graphic novel” is so abhorrent, even though the term does contain the essential adjective.
Adrien, I think the graphic novel you should have suggested as particularly à propos on this thread was V for Vendetta by Alan Moore. Which book Mme. Pavlova has read, of course, for its take on patriarchal culture.
La la la …
This restrictive definition of ‘novel’ opposing it to other forms is silly of course, as FfF. implies @ 11:06. By this late date, the ‘novel’ is no longer literally “new/novel” as the name implies; although it of course does pay to be conservative in what one grants the title to. Still, it’s not crazy to say that largely verbal printed (say, not performed) works which display common “novelistic tendencies” are… novels. Are we going to say that “Gravity’s Rainbow” isn’t a novel because it doesn’t have, say, sufficient stability?
Dr. Cat, if you’re looking for “graphic novels” that truly fit the bill as genuine-quality bona-fide novels, then I suggest you chuck the idiotic ‘V For Vendetta’ in the bin, and run, don’t walk, to buy the works of Los Bros. Hernandez.
“Flies on the Ceiling,” “Vida Loca/The Death of Speedy,” “Wig Wam Bam,” (by Jaime H.) and “Love and Rockets X” (by Gilberto ‘Beto’ H., to say nothing of his ‘Palomar’ series) are a good place to start. I really think this stuff is both formally and qualitatively superior to the majority of “normative” prose fiction of the past two or three decades in English. A contentious point, but like a man said, you never know until you try.
PC,
Maybe not a misogynist’s wet dream…but every FHM reader’s wet dream.
A world full of women working underwater on submarines
And guess what…just one guy and as you said, his monkey, so to speak…left alive in that world.
Adrien,
That’s false. At base, in society what determines what one can do and what one cannot do, is society.
You can’t openly murder people or molest children not because the law says you can’t.
You can’t openly murder people or molest children because at base, the people in society will tear you to ribbons.
Likewise you can’t openly ogle and comment on a female colleague’s body, or hinder her promotion based on her sex or sexual appearance…
Or can you? How openly? Does it matter what harassment and discrimination laws say? How much so?
Has that changed, has it? When, how and why? Where’s the evidence for your assertion it has? Your evidence isn’t solely that the law has changed is it…
Duh
sorry…but unless you think anything is ever fixed in an animate universe, that’s simply an easy truism.
More importantly though, you’re just acknowledging that patriarchy exists and therefore we are standing in it.
Doesn’t matter how much you want to theorise on theorists, or generalise/exceptionalise a sassy, wealthy broad, around that acknowledgement (unless you’re honestly putting forward the old ‘money + looks = or doesn’t = happiness’, or that they’re illusory/disillusory concepts…all equally banal, even/especially when you add ‘brains’ and ‘brilliance’…as valid argument…’She had it all, what WAS her problem?’?).
Or feel rationally positive and postively rational we’re on the right road to somewhere – light and truth was it?
Oh, and I’d completely forgetten the vast majority of very well-established international women’s clothing designers, swimsuit designers, children’s clothing designers, Hollywood directors, Bollywood directors, TV directors, Pop Video directors, TV and Print Ad directors, Film and TV studio execs and financiers, Advertising agency CEOs, Cosmetics company CEOs, et cetera et cetera – are in fact women, who’ve long had ‘the administration of the Beauty Myth and its artifacts’ sewn up. And who are just giving each other what they want, of course.
That’s right – I’d completely forgetten!
The video clip for this song is set in a brothel. The ten or so models and singer are wearing highly revealing silk/lace lingerie.
And in precisely 3 hours, my 6 year old niece and 5 year old nephew will absorb it into their sponges for approximately the 15th time.
Kate Perry – I Kissed A Girl
This was never the way I planned
Not my intention
I got so brave, drink in hand
Lost my discretion
It’s not what, I’m used to
Just wanna try you on
I’m curious for you
Caught my attention
I kissed a girl and I liked it
The taste of her cherry chap stick
I kissed a girl just to try it
I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it
It felt so wrong
It felt so right
Don’t mean I’m in love tonight
I kissed a girl and I liked it
I liked it
No, I don’t even know your name
It doesn’t matter
You’re my experimental game
Just human nature
It’s not what, good girls do
Not how they should behave
My head gets so confused
Hard to obey
I kissed a girl and I liked it
The taste of her cherry chap stick
I kissed a girl just to try it
I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it
It felt so wrong
It felt so right
Don’t mean I’m in love tonight
I kissed a girl and I liked it
I liked it
Us girls we are so magical
Soft skin, red lips, so kissable
Hard to resist so touchable
Too good to deny it
Ain’t no big deal, it’s innocent
I kissed a girl and I liked it
The taste of her cherry chap stick
I kissed a girl just to try it
I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it
It felt so wrong
It felt so right
Don’t mean I’m in love tonight
I kissed a girl and I liked it
I liked it
“Acting out this part in your drama has been my privilege. You didn’t tell me the script was by David Williamson: I would have been more enthusiastic to take the part.”
It was worth reading the 300 odd posts (in some cases very odd)to get to this gem.
Oh and also, what Nick said.
PC -
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No I won’t play a round of la la I can’t hear you. I never do that. To be sure the nomenclature of ‘graphic novels’ have been a problem. Lots of people say that’s it’s an inappropriate term; well and fair enough. Feel free to suggest a better nomenclature we’ll all be grateful I’m certain. Also feel free to read Maus, From Hell, Watchmen or The Sandman and tell me you found nothing memorable.
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As I’ve said the Literati are most conservative when it comes to new forms. Always have been. I fully expect that forty years hence whatever passes for the study of literature will be crammed full of persons who shake their heads in disbelief that ‘graphic novels’ were ever scorned thus (whilst they scorn some new form, as they do.)
Oh Nick so glad to have a truly perceptive and deep thinker at last.
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Let’s have a look at your insurmountable claims shall we? I think I shall be eating crow considering the sheer force of your intellect sir.
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Yes indeed. You’re so correct Forgive me my astounding ignorance. I forgot that when one murders a person or molests children the comeuppance always comes in the form of an angry mod who rips your body asunder. Complaints to the police, prosecution according to due process of law, the courts and the jails have nothing to do with it.
Well my evidence is all to hell isn’t it? Considering that the law is weak as light fabric and that the method by which society addresses transgression is to assemble a mob that tears offenders to pieces; the fact that women have the vote, have equal rights as citizens, can exercise power, own businesses, property and run for parliament have nothing to do with it.
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You’re quite right in asserting that we live in a patriarchal society. After all if we didn’t live in a patriarchal society but in one where the activities of misogynist men and sexist creeps get challenged wherever they cross the line then the likes of this fellow would find his employment challenged and protest would ring out at his nefarious activities. In fact he’d be typified as a pathological arsehole with psychological problems. But of course in our society in which men write every rule, no challenge, this doesn’t happen.
I agree. It is an easy truism. So easy in fact that many of my learned colleagues on this blog have a complete inability to grasp it.
Yes indeed. Saying something makes it true. It always has.
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Did you know that the world is ruled by Venusians who eat green cheese and are the creatures responsible for the fact that our justice system is determined by the whims of an
angry mobsociety who tear criminals apart limb from limb/ Personally I think that a system based on the rule of law underpinned by the separation of powers, due process and multi-party democracy is preferable but having encountered such a superior intellect as your good self I’m convinced that this is the batshit fantasy of a deluded and inferior mind..
I apologize for ever having a thought.
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In fact I apologize for having ever learned to read. How dare I? Considering the power of your mind I feel ashamed that I even know what language is. Everything I’ve ever said, thought, felt or touched is rendered insignificant by your peerless logic. My only hope is that society won’t tear you to pieces before you save the world with your wisdom.
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Can you tell me please where I can join your Church. You are the Way, the Truth and the Light.
Great minds think alike.
Oh, really? And who are these literati of whom you speak? I never know who people mean when they use this expression.
Seriously.
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The problem here as I see it is that feminists generally speaking make the mistake that Rousseau made. They think that everything bad comes from Society; it does not. Human beings are social creatures but we are also animals. Animals have a nature. Don’t believe me? Try talking a cat outta hunting se ow far that gets you.
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The feminist project, like any political project, has its actions and will entail reactions. No political project is history ever went without its unexpected reactions. I’m dead certain that Hitler would be most surprised to find that the results of his final solution would include both a Jewish state and the moral principle, amongst the West, that racism is immoral.
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Likewise feminism has its unexpected consequences. During the great social liberalization of the 60s and 70s which, amongst other ting, legitimized divorce and the non-married mode of co-habitation one of the unexpected consequences (for feminists) was that many men abandoned their responsibilities as husbands and fathers en masse. They took the freedom allowed by a loosening of social conventions viz the obligations of reproduction and sexual activity and went in a way that was contrary to the interests of the women they’d been involved with.
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Now here we are a generation and a half after and what happens? Women are surgically altering their appearance to be in conformity with what they imagine to be ‘beautiful’. Generally this is blamed on the vestiges of ‘patriarchy’ which is imagined to be some subconscious social force ‘a discourse’ in the term that may or may not’ve been deployed by a certain French philosopher.
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Whatever the terms the problem is still conceived as one of social structure. I put it to to whoever is willing t listen that this s not the problem. The problem lies instead in the natural inclinations of the human animal: the psycho-sexual dynamics that underpin everything.
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Liberated from old gender roles the heirs to liberation revert to brute natural forces with the resultant coarse relationships and ideas. Feminists react by striving to assert the social causes without acknowledging that society has eliminated the structural impediments to equality that have hereto existed. What is left is the, not so much inequalities but differences that nature imbibes, and of course this is hardly pleasing.
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I content that the feminist project should get over its old rejection of gender roles as the object of all those who fight against injustice and recognize the ‘ladies and gentlemen’ game for what it was: a social ritual and ethics by which nature’s extremes are curtailed and civilized.
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To be sure in the past this game did institute and entrench inequality. But did it create inequality? An interesting question. Whatever the answer I expect that the old truth remains: society is a means of staying nature at its door. It’s not the that the game of ‘ladies and gentlemen is inherently bad it’s just that it’s out of date.
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Just a thought.
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Naturally as I am contradicting the Orthodoxy I should be burned at the stake. It’s only right.
You need to read a little more widely.
That’s very patronising, Adrien. And then when you think Casey is saying you “got Foucault wrong”, you squeal, “Please have the honour to withdraw those remarks unless you can find a skerik [sic] of evidence for any of them”.
Goose, meet gander.
PC –
Still glad to see that the Arts faculties of this country are still hiring the brightest and the best.
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Helen -
Actually Klaus said I got Foucault wrong. I didn’t, at least in any way that’s been thus far concretely demonstrated.
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Casey got Foucault wrong. She also said I said a lot of things that I didn’t say, and hasn’t yet had the decency to apologize. I don’t verbal people in that way. Hence goose doesn’t meet gander. And skerik’s spelled in the old way sorry you don;t approve. If you (or anyone) has an argument that actually addresses my points I’d like to see them.
Not Every Man Is A Patriarch. Patriarchy does not mean rule of men, it means rule of Elder Men, and for the last several millennia the Elder Men have come from families who have accumulated wealth and power over generations of inheritance in the male line of descent. Of course “lesser” men are paraded in front of the masses as transgressors, they help deflect criticism of the Elder Men whose goal is to continue accumulating wealth and power.
Before most animals can get around to sex and reproduction, they do have to provide for themselves with food and shelter. I suggest that food and shelter might be far more fundamental drives than sex, because if one survives then sex generally happens, for most of us. Without survival, it doesn’t. Those who put sex above all have it arse about, IMO.
Actually air comes first, then water, then food and then sex. Animals mostly don’t have, need or desire shelter including us. Shelter follows. Think about it.
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I am so glad to be told yet again that not every man is a patriarch. This is because I need lectures in feminist theology. As I’m totally ignorant of it.
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Naturally I am motivated by my resentiment of the feminist claim that I’m inherently nefarious not by any actually considered opinion.
Is it time for the verbal abuse yet? I think this thread’s old enough for a bit of decent free-for-all. My preferred narrative form for such to-do is of course the graphic expletive, best printed on a defamatory broadsheet and distributed by the children of the poor.
Alternatively, it’d be the kind of True Crime And Shocking Drug Morality Tale how’s-yer-father that used to be in comic books when they were novel, filthy and shocking to the establishment, before they were cleaned up to shock the establishment’s novels. Eh?
Please, moderator or thread zeitgeist signaller, alert me when the thread’s degenerated enough for playing the dozens at ten yards. Until then I’ll just chime in snidely at paragraph spacing errors.
Fyodor, I’m told that Donna Kim Campersleone has high hopes for you, and we hope that one day you might rise in the family to become Farnarklieri.
…
BTW Adrien:
Paragraph
Paragraph
Paragraph
Look Mum, no full stops
Sorry Liam my full stops are a graphic designer type obsession.
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I’m not eager to be abusive but I do return fire. I’ve made a few assertions. They are unorthodox. But they are not, as I think has been inferred here, the product of ignorance of feminism, ignorance of social injustice or opposition to the emancipation of women.
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They are honest conclusions based on observation and reading. They may be wrong but they have not actually been addressed. Instead I am being harangued because I am heretical. I’m simply trying to add a differing perspective (please see #364). If this is not allowed two things come to mind: 1. Can this really be said to be an open discussion and, 2. can it be said to be a healthy one.
Except that you never quite get around to demonstrating a knowledge of feminism, or natural forces. Want to see natural forces? Spend time with a cat, and measure the time it spends a) seeking shelter, b) seeking food and c) getting busy. I assure you your orthodoxy will be rocked with a warm hungry tabby across your toes.
Define your orthodoxy, Adrien, as PC has challenged you, and get away with the harangue-a-lama-ding-dong.
As my Sensei, Paul J. Keating MP, used to respond to to questions such as this:
“To be sure in the past this game did institute and entrench inequality. But did it create inequality?”
Amazing then that your style choice is at odds with the rest of the entire internet.
If you mean me, you are ten years out of date; I work for myself and have done so since 1998. You also seem unable to recognise irony when you see it, an unfortunate trait in someone who professes (if his generalisations are anything to go by) to be au fait with the literary scene; I was implying, obviously much too subtly, that people who talk about “the Literati” at all, much less make generalisations about them, usually don’t have clue who they’re talking about.
So I ask again: who are these conservative “literati” of whom you speak? Name one.
Not at all; Fyodor is consistently heretical and nobody harangues him, at least not if they want to survive the experience. You’re being harangued because you are aggressive, combative, rude, patronising, condescending and frequently wrong about other people being wrong. Also, you don’t seem able to see that other people can see that you are bluffing, although nobody is haranguing you for that. Yet.
Did she? That’s interesting. I must’ve missed it. I actually don;t have an orthodoxy but anyway….
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And also in response to my arguments….
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Hello?
Liam -
Really? Oh my got. I mozt seek to conform wiz ze majority.
PC –
Um PC, irony is not defined as to capacity to know things about the careers of peoples. If I’ve made incorrect generalisations about the literati feel free to point them out to me. I’m not bluffing but anyway.
Aha. I see you’re confusing being in the minority with being empirically wrong.
Easy mistake to make, don’t worry. We all do it.
No, you’ve forfeited the right to a response. Godwin’s Law kicked in at #364 and since it was you who mentioned Hitler, you lost. FWIW I think most of your arguments are either boring, obvious or wrong, except for the part about all the blokes buggering off, which is true, but you appear to be blaming “feminism” for that which is ridiculous. You and Virginia Hausegger and Joanna Murray-Smith should go bowling.
Indeed, and that was not what I was referring to (though may I point out that it was you who got personal about careers, not me). Irony is about saying things like ‘I never know who people mean when they use this expression’ and not expecting to be taken literally.
Sheesh Adrien, you really don’t take disagreement well.
“Complaints to the police, prosecution according to due process of law, the courts have nothing to do with it”
You wrote “At base”.
If you want to argue in all seriousness that complex legal systems operate at the base of society, send me a postcard from China.
“You’re right in asserting that we live in a patriarchal society. If we didn’t…”
Were you making a point here? Was it a sarcastic point?
I’ll proceed as if it was (else can’t imagine why you raised it)…and request you view the video at Sam Newman ‘embarrassed’ by TV gaffe over Paula Wriedt.
Since he was back on air within a month (June 26) after his prostrate operation, the Nine Network sure did follow through on their ‘employment challenging’ excercise in simultaneous publicity/damage control. In case you missed it, there was a tad more to the orchestration than the article you linked to. Tens of thousands of dollars signed off and spent by the network explaining/defending/apologising for/promoting the man’s actions. Enough said.
Except forgive the sarcasm sailing straight past.
“I agree it’s an easy truism”
Good, then it’s not a hypothesis and doesn’t require your exhaustive testing by heatedly debating a tiny slice of history and theory.
Since my post wasn’t long, I’ll assume you conceded the rest.
Poor Adrien, you make sneaky cracks about “theology” instead of “theory” and then wonder why people get snarky. If you’re not actually ignorant of the theory then why write things like this?
That appears to assert that patriarchy should mean that no men are ever punished by the System for being sexist (matches nicely with your oft-repeated claim that if some women are acting as Tools of the System then that also means patriarchy doesn’t exist). If you are going to continue repeating such simplistic misrepresentations of how patriarchal systems are structured, then no matter how much you say you understand the theory, people aren’t going to believe it.
Can you all actually make yourselves read Adrien’s comments, then? I can’t.
Before or after ma donna makes me an offer I cannot refuse?
You know, I resent that ageism, Tigtog. Some of us patriarchi are young. ish.
Not only, but also: Adrien, please listen to Liam. About the superfluous punctuation, I mean.
That’s the lesson of the desert, oh Naib of Naibs, you cut down every full stop and excessive ellipsis with your knife, and say “it is finished there”.
Well, as reasonable heads of families, you should reason together. Fnar fnar.
Truly, Vizier Outan, you are a golden river to your people.
Well, I long for the vanished gardens of Córdoba. But before the gardnes must come the name-calling.
Shorter Adrien: Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. There’s no structural inequality, just difference. Impossible to take seriously. And I’d suggest that if you feel like your arguments aren’t being addressed sufficiently, it’s because people are just so bored with having to tackle this sort of silliness. It’s simply not worth the effort. Besides, Adrien you enjoy feeling persecuted so much, it would be a pity to remove your pleasure.
The confluence of forces brings us Liam and Leonid’s stoush gym once more. Its true then that if the alignment of lunacies are right, if the punctuation is loopy enough – they appear – not the heroes we want, but the ones we need (yes, yes the Dark Knight – go see it).
.*.
And what, with the ravings of pistols at dawn, punctuated with cat nature watching as proof that there is no patriarchy, not to mention film noir verbals under single white lightbulbs, along the way instructing someone who sat on the Miles Franklin Board what a novel is, they come at last to show how
.*.
its really done
Gotta watch those confluences, Casey, and you never *ever* cross the streams.
(Surely you mean Lunokhod referring to Fyodor: after his heid like a planetoid?)
Say pfft, Hathair. Also: “moonwalker” WTF? At least you didn’t go with poonraker.
Lunokhod, boxhead. And Zuul? I don’t think you could pull off the slinky dress quite as well as Sigourney.
Oh, I’m sure Fyodor’s pulled off a slinky dress or two in his time. BOOM-tish
!
Laura, me neither. The scroll to read ratio has gorn through the roof.
!
Although I love his graphic design chops.
!
I know what they were, pocket-rocket, I just don’t see the comedic connection to my colossal cranium. What it looks like, in fact, is a flimsy and unsubtle excuse to post more of your depraved cosmonaughty porn.
If Sigourney were wearing it, I’d pull it off with my teeth.
I do love a moonbuggy, it’s true, though I think if it were up to me, I’d lower it, install a body kit, tint the windows and shove a chuffin’ great big stereo in the back. The back seat of my Cadillac’s heading for the heavens.
♣
Wasn’t Hugo Drax’s plan in Moonraker to establish a colony of superior humans on the moon? I don’t recall, I think I got distracted by the laser battles in space suits. Anyway, it occurs to me that if men are from Mars and women from Venus, we’ve already rejected in fictional form a spacepatriarchy. Shame. Everyone got nice jumpsuits.
♣
There is no paragraph three.
*%*
*%*
*%*
Who needs paragraphs?
Yes I meant Fyodor. Its just I think Breshnev was a strapping patriarch. And he was, after all, one of the biggest stoush gymnasts of all time.
He certainly was, Casey, he certainly was.
Yah. The future used to have nicer jumpsuits. Still, for PATRIARCHS. IN. SPAAACE. you really can’t go past the original Battlestar Galactica. More Moses-type dudes than you can shake a gold-beige jumpsuit at, and the women knew their place, dagnabit. Plus: Jane S
chwingeymour.Liam, I just spat my coffee all over the screen.
But it was worth it.
I please to aim, Casey, or do I aim please to? I can’t even work it out anymore.
I’ll see your Battlestar, boxhead, in this game of high-stakes space-patriarchy, and raise you a Lensman, and just for Adrien—because I know you’re still reading—I’ll add the libertarian-space-patriarchy of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.
Me, I’m more into the luvvie lefty feminist Presbyterian sort of space drama. Where’s that DVD of Enemy Mine gone to?
I didn’t make any such statement viz the irreconcilable difference between sexes. I merely point out that in the absence of inequality as dictated by the political system we must look to other things besides ‘patriarchy’. There is no coercion at play when someone chooses to get cosmetic surgery; why then do they do it? And if they’re doing it is there something actually wrong with it?
Really. So you are saying that men in patriarchal societies are actually punished or derided for sexism? Examples please.
A theory is a proposition about the nature of a phenomena that can be subjected to empirical testing. A theology is an organized series of assertions about metaphysical reality that purports to be engraved in the metaphysical fabric of the cosmos and cannot be questioned – ever. Given the standard of argument my description is accurate.
I haven’t said this once let alone many times. The assertion I repeatedly make is that as there is no sexual discrimination built into the political system, or rather, as sexual discrimination that has been built into the political system has been systematically rolled back and continues to be; as it is the dominant discourse of our society that people should be equal regardless their gender; as it is perfectly possibly for women to be independent, to do as they please, to make decision – then patriarchy is not a useful idea.
.
Again and again you fail to understand that that’s what I’m saying. You do this on purpose.
.
My argument is simple. In response to the notion that women who get cosmetic surgery or express their sexuality in some ways are brainwashed by the system (what system) I say well actually I don’t think they are. I think maybe they’re making choices. Maybe they want to. Mmmm.
.
It’s really funny how often people who purport to support the rights and emancipation of women display contempt for them.
.
But you’re right of course. All of you. PC is right I don’t understand what is meant by literati. Why? Because she says so. I also don’t understand ‘irony’. She will then proceed to demonstrate how twelve syllables are actually thirteen. Nick is right (genius that he is) because in furtherance to his supposition that the law is of no consequence he requests I should send him a picture of China. And of course we live in a patriarchy because The Footy Show is Yob-central and Sam Newman comes back. In a patriarchy Sam Newman would have no trouble at all – gettit!
.
Of course please persist by all means in believing that saying things makes them true, that responding to a series of reasoned statements by quoting doctrine is effective and of course relegating all of the activities and tastes by and held by women of which you collectively disapprove as ‘evidence’ that they are the patriarchy’s showroom dummies.
.
Please also persist in subjecting anything anyone else says to the CRM-114 discriminator treatment and naturally ascribe to one’s opponents arguments that they haven’t made and opinions they don’t hold. After all you’re the good guys arencha? And that’s what good people do.
.
Golf clap.
…
“…he requests I should send him a picture of China”
What are you doing?
Diggin’.
Why?
To make a hole.
A hole for what?
More diggin’
Gotta watch that sarcasm boomerang.
You brought up Sam Newman. He has no trouble at all.
!!!
” What is left is the, not so much inequalities but differences that nature imbibes, and of course this is hardly pleasing.”
Men are from Mars. Wmen are from Venus. Natural differences explain all.
=^^=
Adrien, did you really say there’s no coercion at work when women get plastic surgery? How are you defining coercion?
There was a letter in The Sunday Age magazine yesterday which said the following in response to an article about Botox:
“Was “Plastic Fantastic” meant as a joke, having a 26-year-old write about wrinkles and Botox? I can guarantee that Rachel Hills will feel differently when she is old enough to experience what she is protesting about.”
Bollocks, Dr Linda Dayan, cosmetic physician. Why will Rachel Hills feel differently? Why should she feel differently? Hmmmm, what a disgraceful epistle that was. Thanks to Dr Dayan for being part of that mammoth industry that’s designed to make women feel like crap if they aren’t a size zero and have faces that express emotion (christ knows, you wouldn’t want those womenfolk expressing emotion on their faces; it might make blokes uncomfortable).
PC, your last post looks like cat ears. Very cute.
/, ,\
{ 0 }
+
No. Again that’s not what I mean. I don’t think natural differences are the entire explanation. I take umbrage with the Rousseauian presumption that society is always to blame. In other words it ain’t that Nature is everything it’s that Society is not.
.
I believe that I made that clear.
.
Also I’m not saying Nature is the explanation necessarily, simply that it might be relevant. Capitalist democracies do not work on the basis of universal proscription: they don’t dictate: thou art. People have a lot of choices. So when we exercise choices why do we choose those things and not those. Desire comes into play here; and desire is imbibed in us by nature. Society may provide a means to fulfilment but does it create the raw hunger?
Well done Nick.
.
La la I can’t hear you’ play
And make the facts go away.
*@*
I can’t hear that dreadful John Grey line without thinking “Men are from Mars, Women have no Penis”.
But that might just be me.
Damn you Adrien, address my argument. Is it Society or Nature that provides the Right Stuff? Could Dolly Parton have bailed out of her NF-104 and put the parachute fire out on her own charred hands with a tambourine? At least she had the choice to be part of the space programme, unlike command economy cosmonauts in the Russian country music scene. F’n balalaika, I’m sick of its rotten la-la-la strings.
Oh c’mon, Adrien, you know the answer to that. The last known survivor stalks his prey in the night, and it’s because he rises up to the challenge of his rival. Kids’ stuff.
&^&
Sigmund, you’re always thinking about doodles. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigarette (unless a fellow has a penis enlargement). I’m sure the cosmetic physician can assist with that.
Incidentally, there’s been a book written in response to John Gray’s Mars and Venus theory:
http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Mars-Venus-Different-Languages/dp/0199214476
0 0
1
Sorry, my attempt at doing an amusing thing with numbers has gone all bent.
I’m not 100% certain of it, but I do believe there’s a joke going on here that I just… don’t… get.
Julie? Can you explain it to me please?
[original text deleted] Damn, multi-line ASCII art just doesn’t work here.
Cause friends like these are just yobs who mean nothing in the world of Australian business and society.
“There was never any intention to insult Paula Wriedt and any suggestion to the contrary is grossly unfair,” Tim Cleary, a Nine executive said today.
AFL Chief executive Andrew Demtriou, who said he had watched the show also said he believed Newman had made an honest slip.
“I think it was a slip. I understand what he said, I didn’t take the double meaning in it, I understand why people might,” Demetriou said to Fairfax Radio Network today.
(you did watch the video didn’t you?)
Maybe South Park tonight said it best:
Ladies and gentlemen, my name is John Warsog, I’ve prepared a statement for you on behalf of the network.
He clears his throat a couple of times…
Fuck you. Thank you ladies and gentlemen. If there any questions, you may direct them to that brick wall over there.
__________*/.)_______
_________*/•|________
________*/• \________
_______*(•_ )________
_______ .|¯|_________
_______ .|•|_________
_______ .|•|_________
_______ .|•|_________
_______ .|•|_________
_____,__.|•|_________
____/#|_.|•|__/\_____
___(##(_,|•|,_)))____
___\###/ |•|/&&/_____
____\##)&___&&(______
_____)#/&&___&&\_____
____/#|&&&___.&\\____
___(##\__&&&_’._)|___
____\ ######## //____
_____”+,_____,+”_____
Laura: ok, have a hand-knitted internets.
Shucky darn, they never made bras that goshdarned big when I was a youngun.
True, Pavlov’s Cat, as Mae West might have said, it must be hard to escape two well-pushed envelopes.
(and Laura FTW)
It’s the outside edge of the envelope Chuck.
I thought she found it pretty easy – pups runneth over, yada, yada.
Easy is as easy does, Radio Birdman. After all it’s not how long your double entendre is, it’s all in the delivery.
It’s not hard to be a clever dick,
When all you’re taking is the mick.
Yah, but it’s hard to be a clever mick,
when all that’s talking is your dick.
Anway, to hear speaking from beneath
The waistline, you need tongue, and teeth.
You can’t have speech without the latter,
But you *could* have a rappin’ vagina dentata…
Not always “beneath”, confrère,
An affliction not quite so rare -
The lesson from this thread:
Quit when you’re a _head.
It’s good to see you rhyming now,
So to your wisdom I will bow -
Just make sure it not be said
That every dick is always a_head.
And just to make my meaning clear,
I’d take it as a righteous smear
If every dick that was to quit
Was treated to your caustic wit.
Nice geetar, laura
Good Lord.
Oh, and that’s a bass guitar people.
A Fender Precision, if I’m not mistaken, with the custom pointy-body mod.
Struggle on, Adrien, don’t get weary
You’ll one day understand the theory:
see how Teh grand Patriarchy has ensured
we’re not talking mine, but yours.
And as for you two, Cool and Cooler:
I’d sort this one out with a ruler.
Them’s fighting words, chuckles.
Let’s see if you can find my knuckles.
This dream’s not the one I remember,
The one where Zoe grabbed my member…
Rhyming couplets
Give them up let’s
The one thing I really can’t figure
Is if this goes to show MH’s a lipsniger.
Maybe the dream’s the one you recalls,
When Zoe grabbed you by the balls
Speaking metaphorically of course
It’s a nightmare I’d endorse.
for Zoe @ #435, but with a self-critical chuckle, to be sure… (and w/ apologies to the Grateful Dead)
Just like Ptolemaeus,
Just like Timmy Leary,
Just like all the Marxists
With a bogus crackpot theory…
Just like Richard the Second,
Just like John of Gaunt,
Yer Feminism
Might not be realism,
Just a list of
Stuff you want…
Did you say your name was
Rattlin’ Rose?
Rattle on, baby,
settle down easy…
Just like Charlie Darwin,
Just like De Beauvoir (Saint),
You say Biology
Is destiny,
Except for when it ain’t…
Did you say your name was
Rattle On Rose?
Prattle on etc.
[VAMP AND FADE]
/runs away
Ah well perhaps at least admit
As you judge against this plaintiff
Despite what passes for my wits
I’ve inspired you lot to be creative
.
I think I like Zoe’s the best
A little more than just mere jibe
But still my thesis ain’t put to test
You’re all switched in on the wrong vibe
.
I ain’t no patriarch y’see
I know you’ll scoff and shake yer heads
And disregard those who know me
. /’Cause ‘at might say
. /What you think I mean…
Is entirely something else instead?
.
But what I say I won’t repeat
These keys are worn from days of that; and
We’re stuck i’th’ Jam of No Retreat
And a gun’s been hired by Pavlov’s Cat.
.
The rules of this blog do so attest;
And I’d fain not abuse it.
Not to indulge a Mandelbrot Jab Fest
I say only: women – free; and they use it.
Yes, getting back to Adrien’s words,
floating around this blog like turds.
A simile that’s gross I know,
But I’m just going with the flow.
Ah ‘turds’, what pretty picture do ye make
I am shamed in grace and court’sy for certain
And for yer épée tribute now must ye take
‘Fore on this High Talk scene draws a curtain
.
I’ve failed I know the knowledge erks me
And face I now the facts; yes I am dumb
My disgrace comes from lack of work see
Marry my manhood, cogito ergo sum.
.
I am an Heretic on the lawn of Gaia
Serpent seek to harm they that love ‘er
And ’tis Evil, I know! Praise I will aspire
To fight myself and love Big Brother
.
And seek me also the pleasant timin’
You’re right, my poetry needs a fix
I’ll follow your leader on th’ Art of Rhymin’
Eschewing Blake and Swift for limericks
….nice end for a nasty novel, that.
“He loved Big Brother.”
Gather all the, In each newsletter?Talk about the, you will eschew.Be healthy If, you play Golf.Game the next The Logo Monkey Quality Custom Logo Design Service Create A Corporate Identity, wine WHY: Solvang Weil D says.Meditation tools and, purchases is the.,
Please, Admin, do not delete that spam at #447, it is too beautiful to kill.
“Logo Monkey!”
Oh, I remember this one well.
Hooray! As far as I can tell
A spam attack
Best brings back
The Zombie Boobie Threads From Hell.
#447 is indeed beautiful
free verse on the scorched
plains of Andalus
White death of reason
Pale fire of lustrous
Dark gitana eyes
Will Solvang meet
Solveig in the
Hall of the Mountain
Mernkeys?
Do you ‘ave a permit for your mernkey?
Speaking of body politics and flarfing spam, your WTF moment of zen for today.
Sorta NSFW. Or not. Why not find out?
Is using Big Brither really appropriate? I mean really, the people who go on Big Brother tend to be a little on the shallow side, a little short of intelligence and a little too much into their own ego. They are not representative. The show is trash and using it to make this sort of argument risks normalising the shallowness that the show represents.
That was quite cool Nabs, but pronologically not even up there with Mr Garrison’s Dildo Controlled Monowheel.
I can’t bear to watch that (the anime thing, not BB, although I pretty much can’t stay awake watching BB), how bad would the skin removal factor be with nude highway surfing? Aieeeeee!!!
Just had to delete a spam/objectionable comment which contained the words “Iam a big fanny of the State of Israel”.
#447 is not spam. It is a message from God. Hear and obey.
A lot of females are wasting energy and rescourses worrying about their physical appearance,like their breasts rather than finding realistic solutions. The fact these insecure women exist means they have come from a gene pool that was attractive enough to find partners that bred with them. Most males are quite realistic and attracted to ordinary females in daily life. Sure they drool at media created ideals & even in the everyday register larger full breasts, but aren’t expecting or even needing that compared to a happy compatibale female partner who can range from pretty to no perfect picture book. Guys also drool at porches and bmw’s never expecting to or needing to have one as long as they can have some basic car they like driving.
For the big tits looking at surgery, smaller tits won’t solve a spinal problem if it’s due to a spinal malformation, Big tits in cheap conventional bras will hurt, so when they can leave it off as its the straps putting pressure on doing the hurting, wear strapless ones if there is a need to have them caged in public and accept they will be positioned at a lower level, get one super expensive wide strapped on the shoulders, underneath a longer section, sewn to hold a large mass shaped to have an appealing form and support fitted properly to wear comfortably on special occasions. The tiny tits when they want to fill out a certain dress or top just by a well padded one, even add inserts and the rest of the time forget it. All women are best at finding a casual everyday style that flatters other good bits so draw attention to those. If a woman really isn’t going to look physically great it’s critical to be confident and have a great personality, at ease with herself and not be envious of other females prettiness.These women are never lacking in partners. All women without even aiming to greatly alter their body type would benefit from activity, strengthening their muscles to some degree and eating a healthy diet. In doing that huge titted ones will decrease a bit of their boobs as well as other bulk with stronger back and stomach muscles able to help support any load. Little tits will find pectoral muscles will push out further what they have and if they are as is often the case thin have better developed contours even becoming head turners.Plus if their healthy diet including correct amounts of all required food groups may add a couple of kgs upping theit boob volume a bit. Unless a woman is a model or actress or high class call girl purely cosmetic boob jobs are a poor long term investment. It’s not that long before middle age approaches and it’s pointless trying to keep up with youthful media images
Hark! Who dares revive the Norks Thread of Doom?
Don’t feed it
with Brigitte on the job, we could sally forth and rival the Twin Towerrs thread. C’mon “Twin Peaks” has to be a goer, eh?
Eh? Say no more!
Very timely, too – just had several sets of GG and H cup underwear arrive in the mail. I have two drawers full now and they all have names and fully elaborated back stories.