10 wnt. There are NO UNMARKED WOMEN

Perhaps a provocative title, but please read on.

First, I’ll give you an example from Deborah Tannen’s book, “Talking from 9 to 5”.  This will give you an idea of what I am driving towards.

Quote from Chapter four:

Some years ago, I was at a small working conference of four women and eight men. Instead of concentrating on the discussion, I found myself looking at the three other women at the table, thinking how each had a different style and how each style was coherent.

One woman had dark brown hair in a classic style that was a cross between Cleopatra and Plain Jane. The severity of her straight hair was softened by wavy bangs and ends that turned under. Because she was beautiful, the effect was more Cleopatra than plain.

The second woman was older, full of dignity and composure. Her hair was cut in a fashionable style that left her with only one eye, thanks to a side part that let a curtain of hair fall across half her face. As she looked down to read her prepared paper, the hair robbed her of binocular vision and created a barrier between her and the listeners.

The third woman’s hair was wild, a frosted blond avalanche falling over and beyond her shoulders. When she spoke, she frequently tossed her head, thus calling attention to her hair and away from her lecture.

Then there was makeup. The first woman wore facial cover that made her skin smooth and pale, a black line under each eye, and mascara that darkened her already dark lashes. The second wore only a light gloss on her lips and a hint of shadow on her eyes. The third had blue bands under her eyes, dark blue shadow, mascara, bright red lipstick, and rouge; her fingernails also flashed red.

I considered the clothes each woman had worn on the three days of the conference: In the first case, man-tailored suits in primary colors with solid-color blouses. In the second, casual but stylish black T-shirt, a floppy collarless jacket and baggy slacks or skirt in neutral colors. The third wore a sexy jumpsuit; tight sleeveless jersey and tight yellow slacks; a dress with gaping armholes and an indulged tendency to fall off one shoulder.

Shoes? The first woman wore string sandals with medium heels; the second, sensible, comfortable walking shoes; the third, pumps with spike heels. You can fill in the jewelry, scarves, shawls, sweaters—or lack of them. As I amused myself finding patterns and coherence in these styles and choices, I suddenly wondered why I was scrutinizing only the women.

(With this example I am not saying that women should not choose to “look nice” as they see it.  Billions of dollars are spent on fashions and cosmetics.  Who am I to condemn it?)

____________

I scanned the table to get a fix on the styles of the eight men. And then I knew why I wasn’t studying them. The men’s styles were un-marked.  (Unremarkable.)

Alfre Woodard, an Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actress, says she identifies herself as an actor because “actresses worry about eyelashes and cellulite, and women who are actors worry about the characters we are playing.”

I was able to identify the styles and types of the women at the conference because each of us had to make decisions about hair, clothing, makeup and accessories, and each of those decisions carried meaning. Every style available to us is marked with the message we are broadcasting. Of course, the men in our group had to make decisions too, but their choices carried far less meaning. The men could have chosen styles that were marked, but they didn’t have to, and in this group, none did. Unlike the women, men have the option of being unmarked.

I asked myself what style we women could have adopted that would have been unmarked, like the men’s. The answer was:

NONE. There is no unmarked woman.

If a woman’s clothes are tight or revealing (in other words, sexy), it sends a message—an intended one of wanting to be attractive, but also a possibly unintended one of availability. But if her clothes are not sexy, that too sends a message, lent meaning by the knowledge that they could have been.

In her book Women Lawyers, Mona Harrington quotes a woman who, despite being a partner in her firm, found herself slipping into this fault line when she got an unexpected call to go to court right away. As she headed out the door, a young (male) associate said to her, “Hadn’t you better button your blouse?” She was caught completely off guard. “My blouse wasn’t buttoned unusually low,” the woman told Harrington. “And this was not a conservative guy. But he thought one more button was necessary for court.” And here’s the rub: “I started wondering if my authority was being undermined by one button.”

A man can choose a style that will not attract attention or subject him to any particular interpretation, but a woman cannot. Whatever she wears, whatever she calls herself, however she talks, will be fodder for interpretation about her character and her competence. In a setting where most of the players are men, there is no unmarked woman.

I mention these stories to give a sense of what the world is like for people who are exceptions to expectations—every moment they live in the un-expected role, they must struggle against others’ assumptions, that do not apply to them,

Unquote.

_________________

Roots of MISOGYNY: Who will dare touch this electric subject?

I am not a woman, so I do not know what women think about the use of the female figure in advertising, and everywhere else. Do these beautifly ads make you want to buy more?  It is what it is, I suppose it is a job opportunity.  Half of our subscribers are women, so let’s see what they have to say?

Women want to be attractive; but for whom?  For other women, for themselves, well, there are always the men?  All the women’s-lib in the world will come to little, or only given token concessions, if they don’t investigate this underlying reality.

According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned, but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind, from that of a man. A man's presence is dependent upon the promise of power (and wealth) which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking. If it is small or not credible, he is found to have little presence. The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual - but its object is always exterior to the man. A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you, and/or for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to be capable of what he is not. But the pretense is always towards a power which he exercises over others.

✓By contrast, a woman's presence expresses her own attitude toward herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her body, her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste - indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat, or smell, or aura.

To be born a woman has been to be born within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage, within that limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self, being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whether she is walking across a room or if she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

And so, she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed-within, as the two constituent, yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.

She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another. 

Men survey women before treating them. Consequently, how a woman appears to a man, can determine how she will be treated. To acquire some control over this process, women must contain it and interiorize it. That part of a woman's self which is the surveyor, treats the part which is the surveyed, so as to demonstrate to others how her whole self would like to be treated. And this exemplary treatment of herself by herself, constitutes her presence.

Every woman's presence regulates what is and is not 'permissible' within her presence. Every one of her actions — whatever its direct purpose or motivation — is also read as an indication of how she would like to be treated. If a woman throws a glass on the floor, this is an example of how she treats her own emotion of anger and so of how she would wish it to be treated by others. If a man does the same, his action is only read as an expression of his anger. If a woman makes a good joke, this is an example of how she treats the joker in herself, and accordingly of how she as a joker-woman would like to be treated by others. Only a man can make a good joke just for its own sake.

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is the male part: of the surveyed female. Thus, she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

European oil painting reveals everything about man-woman relations in our western acculturation.  This is a most important indicator, which is even more prevalent today in millions of advertising images.

In one category of European oil painting women were the principal, ever-recurring subject. That category is the nude. In the nudes of European painting, we can discover some of the criteria and conventions by which women have been seen and judged as sights.

In the depiction of the Garden of Eden, Nakedness was created in the eye of the beholder by eating an apple. Before that, there was no concept of naked.  AND; the woman is blamed and is punished, by being made subservient to the man. In relation to the woman, the man becomes the agent of God.  During the Renaissance this single depicted moment became the moment of (naked) shame.

In all subsequent nude paintings, there remains the implication that the subject (a woman) is aware of being seen by a spectator.  She is not naked as she is. She is naked as the spectator sees her.

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure. The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.

With the Judgement of Paris, later paintings become the Beauty Contest. Those who are judged most beautiful, are given a prize (an apple).  The real prize is to be owned by the judge — that is to say to be available for him. 

Nudes were painted (by men) with the blank expression of submission.  Non-European nude art, is never portrayed as supine, nor in submission.  A nude is not the starting point of a painting or a photograph, but a way-of-seeing which the painting achieves.

(That blank expression is one of the most important conventions in modern advertising. When used with the advertising of “things”, it is usually thought of as a feature of envy. We are to envy her, because she possesses this “widget”, but she does not envy us, because we don’t yet have it. Not only she does not envy us, she looks right over our heads as if we are not there. Without this widget, you are a nobody.)

The nude is always conventionalized. The convention is quite clear that the nude also relates to lived sexuality.  In lived sexual experience nakedness is a process rather than a state. If one moment of that process is isolated, its image will seem banal and its banality, instead of serving as a bridge between two intense imaginative states, it will be chilling.

A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.  To be on display is to have the surface of one's own skin, the hairs of one's own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded. The nude is condemned to never being just naked. Nudity is then a form of costume, a dress for the observer.

Everything must appear to be the result of a spectator being there. It is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity. But he, by definition, is a stranger - with his clothes still on.  The woman's sexual passion needs to be minimized so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly of such passion.) Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.

(This one is called “White Stockings” by Gustave Courbet 1819 - 1877. My guess it was used in a hosiery advertisement.)

The nude in European oil painting is usually presented as an admirable expression of the European humanist spirit. BUT IT IS NOT.   In the art-form of the European nude, the painters and spectator-owners were usually men and the persons treated as objects, were usually women. This unequal relationship is so deeply embedded in our culture that it still structures the consciousness of most women. They do to themselves, what men do to them. They survey, like men, their own femininity.

The essential way of seeing women, the essential use to which they, and their images are put, has not changed from the Middle Ages. Women are depicted in a quite different way from men - not because the feminine is different from the masculine - but because the 'ideal' spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him.

It has to be women that will reject this, doesn’t it?  I have always questioned it myself, maybe even since grade school, but my little private feeling adds nothing.  I have never been “a buyer” for conventional beauty, and I think it is usually counter to what I see as a human value.  If someone is endowed with conventional appeal, well, they have to deal with it in the best way they decide.  I think it is a huge momentum in a certain direction.  I am also sure it is easy to cash-in on.  It strikes me as giving up equality, for security.  It is not part of my lifestyle. 

I am not a woman, and I would not treat a woman in this way.  Nor would I buy into any of the sales ploys, that women are used for, and that women use on themselves.

__________________

Let’s see if any women will weigh-in on this discussion?  
Is this just the reality that you have to accept?
Is being beautiful just another job opportunity?
If you have a rich husband that is older than you, does that make you a “trophy-wife”?
Are you satisfied being a piece of merchandise? 
Do you admire renaissance nude painting as a form of high art?  
Or is it just a high point of subjugation?
Do you feel that this is just the-way-that-it-is, and to go with the flow?

Do you feel this is provocative, or is there some truth to it?

.