Aphrodite's Girdle

Aphrodite's Girdle, contributed by Mary Metzer to

The Museum of Fictional Literary Artifacts [1]

 

 

I. 

 

The girdle has a long, long history, reaching back into an ancient time that fashion historians term BP (Before Playtex). 

 

Perhaps the most famous girdle of all was one said to have been worn by Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love - although whether it was recognisably a girdle in the modern sense is debatable [2]. 

 

According to Homer, the girdle was imbued with the magical power to arouse desire in mortals and gods alike [3]. Thus, it can legitimately be regarded as an erotic accessory rather than merely a garment worn for practical reasons; Aphrodite, one assumes, didn't require any help maintaining her shape.  

The same might not be true of Hera, who had a fuller, more matronly figure and sometimes borrowed the girdle from Aphrodite when looking for a little extra something in order to capture the attentions of her husband (and brother) Zeus [4]. 

 

 

II. 

 

Interestingly, later authors claim that Aphrodite also lent her embroidered girdle to Helen, to ensure that Paris would succumb to her natural charms. 

 

But Aphrodite was always keen to have the item returned to her as soon as possible, however, and the 18th-century German poet and playwright Schiller explains why that is so in his long philosophical essay On Grace and Dignity (1793) [5]. 

According to Schiller, Aphrodite - or Venus as he prefers to call her in the Roman manner - can be stripped naked and still remain beautiful; but without her girdle she lacks grace - and without grace she is no longer so alluring. 

 

In other words, even a naturally beautful woman is desexualised the moment she is stripped naked; something that Roland Barthes picks up on in his essay on striptease in Mythologies. 

 

Ultimately, it's the clothes and jewellery and make-up - "in short the whole spectrum of adornment" [6] that give the living flesh its erotic fascination and places the body within the realm of luxurious objects.

   

 

Notes

 

[1] The Museum of Fictional Literary Artifacts is an amusing digital project created by students at Dakota State University. The aim is to establish an online archive of imaginary objects that might - had they been actual things - have been sought after by collectors. The MFLA houses a vast number of such artifacts found in all genres of literary work, from novels to comic books. For more details, please click here.  

 

[2] The Girdle of Aphrodite has variously been imagined as a strap, a belt, or a breast-band rather than a girdle as we might think of it today in a post-Playtex world of rubber. Whatever it was, Aphrodite's girdle has been a popular theme in the arts and literature of Europe, particularly during the Baroque and Neoclassical periods.  

 

[3] See Homer, Iliad 14: 159-221. Homer. An English translation of the full text by A.T. Murray can be found on the Perseus Digital Library: click here to read Book 14.

 

[4] Theirs was not what you might call a happy marriage; she may have found him agreeable at first - just as he found her sexually attractive - but their relationship is marked by infidelity, jealousy, and violence. 

 

[5] Über Anmut und Würde (1793) is an attempt to reconcile aesthetics and ethics based upon the philosophy of  Immanuel Kant. For Schiller, the trick is to synthesise the physical and spiritual nature of man and thus produce a beautiful soul. An English translation of this essay by George Gregory can be read as a pdf online via the Schiller Institute website: click here.

 

[6] Roland Barthes, 'Sriptease', in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, (The Noonday Press, 1991), p. 85.   

 

  

It Was Beauty Killed the Beast

"It wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast."  

 

 

I. 

 

One of the greatest movies ever made opened in New York City ninety years ago, on 2 March 1933. 

 

Directed and produced by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, it starred Fay Wray as out-of-work actress Ann Darrow on the lookout for love and excitement; Robert Armstrong as wildlife filmmaker Carl Denham; and Bruce Cabot as rugged first mate on board the SS Venture Jack Driscoll. 

 

The film also featured astonishing special effects by the stop-motion animation pioneer Obie O'Brien. 

 

I'm referring, of course, to King Kong ...

 

 

II.

There are many, many reasons to fondly recall this film, in which a giant ape - captured on Skull Island and brought back in chains to America, so as to be exhibited on stage as the Eighth Wonder of the World - runs rampage in New York, climbing the iconic Empire State Building whilst carrying a lovely young woman in his huge paw.

 

But the reason I'm reminded of it now is because I have just returned from a 6/20 meeting at the London home of Christian Michel [1], in which a guest speaker presented her thoughts on the subject of beauty, seemingly oblivious to (or unconcerned with) what we might term the politics of the subject - even though, as the French philosopher Jacques Rancière puts it, aesthetics is that which ties together art, thought, and issues to do with how we choose to live together as a culture and a people. 

 

I'm not criticising the fact that Miss Hasan [2] chose to mount a conservative defence of beauty (informed by the work of Roger Scruton) against what she regards as the disenchanted utility of our modern world. But I do think she might, in future, consider how beauty itself can turn very ugly - and even murderous - when, for example, it is written with a capital 'B' and conflated with other ideal notions of Goodness and Truth.

 

Plato famously made this mistake. And failed artist Adolf Hitler also acted not in the name of hate, but in the name of Love informed by Classical ideals of what constitutes Beauty; harmony, wholeness, purity, etc. 

 

Indeed, one is almost tempted to say that just as it wasn't the airplanes that killed Kong - It was beauty killed the beast - neither was it the military-industrial complex of the Third Reich that resulted in genocide; it was, rather, the Nazi aesthetic and their totalitarian desire to eradicate all they deemed ugly, monstrous, degenerate, alien (i.e., all forms of otherness) [3].           

       

Notes

 

[1] Christian Michel is a French polymath who has graciously hosted the twice-monthly 6/20 Club at his west London home for almost twenty years, during which time an impressive assortment of speakers have presented papers on a huge number of topics.

 

[2] Born on the southern coast of Pakistan, Mariam Hasan is a London-based writer who runs discussion groups in pubs and parks. Her academic background is multidisciplinary, stretching from Frankfurt-style critical theory to explorations of collective memory. 

 

[3] As the Swedish film director Peter Cohen says: 

      "Defining Nazism in traditional political terms is difficult. Mainly because its dynamic was fuelled by something quite different from what we usually call politics. This driving force was aesthetic. Its ambition was to beautify the world through violence." 

      Quoted by Matthew Gault in the online artcle 'The Nazis Obsessed Over Beauty', on medium.com: click here. 

      Readers who are interested in this might like to watch Cohen's 1989 documentary The Architecture of Doom (originally released in Swedish as Undergångens arkitektur). The film explores Hitler's obsession with his own neo-Classical (and yet paradoxically Romantic) vision of what was and was not aesthetically acceptable. The Nazis didn't just eliminate enemies of the State, they killed anyone whose very existence conflicted with their ideal of what they deemed Good, True, and Beautiful.

 

 

For those who can bear to watch, click here for the final tragic scene from King Kong (1933). 

 

 

Reflections on Venus Emerging Slowly From an Old Bathtub

The Venus of Willendorf [1]

Image: Naturhistorisches Museum Wien

nhm-wien.ac.at

 

 

I.

 

I recently reflected on how the figure of a woman emerging from the sea allows us to glimpse something of the goddess Aphrodite in her flesh; and how, in turn, this invites us to consider the relationship we have with our own bodies and the bodies of others (as well as the nature of the divine) [2]. 

 

Of course, such meditations are made easier when that woman is, for example, Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder, or Ana de Macedo skipping among the fishes and rock pools, like a Portuguese Venus; one could spend all day happily musing on lithe and lovely limbs and firm young breasts, etc. 

 

It is not so easy, or so pleasurable, however, to consider what we might collectively term vile bodies - i.e., old bodies, ugly bodies, obese bodies, deformed bodies, mutilated bodies, and, at the extreme, dead bodies (there is surely nothing more repulsive than a decomposing corpse, which is why necrophilia remains such a rare phenomenon).

 

The problem, as Nietzsche pointed out, is that everything ugly weakens and saddens the spectator [3]. Thus, reflecting upon vile bodies has a dangerous psycho-physiological effect; it actually depresses and deprives one of strength. 

 

Ugliness, like sickness, is therefore not only a sign and symptom of degeneration, but a cause of such; which is why healthy happy souls prefer to be surrounded by beauty and turn to art when such is lacking in reality; for art, as Nietzsche says, is the great stimulant of life - a counterforce to all denial of wellbeing [4]. 

 

However, having said all this, the philosopher, as Nietzsche understands them, is one who lives dangerously and who can not only embrace more of human history (in its entirety) as their own, but, like the artist or great poet, find beauty in those individuals, things, and events where most people would see only horror and look away in disgust. 

 

 

II. 

 

And so we come to Rimbaud's poem, Venus Anadyomène (1870); one that I think important, but which critics often overlook, or dismiss as less serious than his later (more mature) verses. 

 

For one thing, the poem - written when Rimbaud was just sixteen - challenges static and traditional ideals of feminine beauty [5] and dares readers to glimpse some aspect of the divine even in an ulcerated anus (which, admittedly, isn't easy). 

 

Wherever the poet might be taking us, we're a long way from Botticelli and moving towards Bataille territory; this hideously beautiful Venus in an old bathtub serves as the vehicle of love in much the same manner that a drunken woman vomiting - or a dog devouring the stomach of a goose - perform the role [6].   

 

Ultimately, not being a scholar of French literature or a Rimbaud expert, I'm unsure what he intended with this verse; is it a serious (slightly disturbing) attempt to revalue beauty, or simply an adolescent parody of the Venus myth - who knows? 

Anyway, readers can decide for themselves by clicking here to access Venus Anadyomène as found in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, a bilingual edition trans. Wallace Fowlie and revised by Seth Whidden, (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The Venus of Willendorf is a small figurine, carved from limestone tinted with red ochre, and believed to have been made almost 30,000 years ago in the Paleolithic period (i.e., the Old Stone Age). It was found in 1908, during archaeological excavations at a site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria. Anyone wishing to see it should get along to the Natural History Museum in Vienna. 

 

[2] See the post entitled 'And Venus Among the Fishes Skips' (18 Feb 2022): click here. 

 

[3] See Nietzsche, 'Expeditions [or Skirmishes] of an Untimely Man', §20, in Twilight of the Idols.  

 

[4] See Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), §853 (II), p. 452.    

[5] For more on the challenge to these ideals presented by Rimbaud's poem, see the essay by Seth Whidden, 'Rimbaud Writing on the Body: Anti-Parnassian Movement and Æsthetics in "Vénus Anadyomène"', in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 27, no. 3/4, (University of Nebraska Press, 1999), pp. 333–45. This essay can also be accessed online via JSTOR: click here.

 

[6] See Georges Bataille, 'The Solar Anus', in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Alan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 5-9. The lines I refer to are on p. 6. 

 

 

Reflections on the Woman with the Heart Shaped Face

Sylvia Sidney: The Woman with the Heart Shaped Face

Is this the perfect female face?

I suppose it depends on who you ask - though it would surely be churlish to dispute that Sylvia Sidney's face is anything other than lovely to look at. At any rate, attendees at the 1934 Southern California Cosmetologists conference declared it to be ideal, displaying as it did their seven key features:

1. The length of the face equals three nose lengths ...

2. The space in between the eyes is the width of one eye ...    

3. Upper and lower lips are the same width ...

4. The eyebrows are symmetrical and conform to the line of the nose ...

5. The distance from the lower eyelid to the upper eyelid is the same as between the upper eyelid and eyebrow ...

6. The eyebrow begins on the same line as the corner of the eye nearest to the nose ...

7. The width of the face from cheek to cheek is equal to two lengths of the nose.

Obviously, the crucial thing here is symmetry. No one wants to look at a lopsided face and ugly mugs, we might say, begin where facial regularity ends. 

And yet, studies suggest that - as a matter of fact - most people don't want perfect symmetry; that it's the tiny imperfections and imbalances that add character and charm to a face.

Besides, aesthetically pleasing doesn't always mean sexually desirable; physical beauty of face and form can sometimes bore rather than arouse - does the Venus de Milo cause an erection in anyone other than the most ardent statue fetishist?    

D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Cioran on Sex Appeal and the Beauty of Flames

Image: Desktop Nexus

I. Sex on Fire 

Just as for Lawrence sex and beauty are one and the same thing, so too is being something he always conceives in terms of fire, or what he calls the god-flame, burning in all things. Indeed, Lawrence ultimately conflates terms so that his erotico-aesthetic and ontological speculations form a unified metaphysics.

Thus it is, for example, that Mellors characterises his illicit relationship with Connie in terms of a little forked flame that they fucked into being.

And thus it is that Lawrence asserts in a late article that whilst he doesn't quite know what sex is, he's certain that it must be some sort of fire: "For it always communicates a sense of warmth, of glow. And when the glow becomes a pure shine, then we feel the sense of beauty."

This communicating of warmth and beauty is what Lawrence understands by the term sex appeal, something which he believes to be a universal human quality and not just something belonging to the young and conventionally attractive. In a typically Lawrentian passage, he writes:

"We all have the fire of sex slumbering or burning inside us. If we live to be ninety, it is still there. Or, if it dies, we become one of those ghastly living corpses which are unfortunately becoming more numerous in the world.

      Nothing is more ugly than a human being in whom the fire of sex had gone out. You get a nasty clayey creature whom everybody wants to avoid.

      But while we are fully alive, the fire of sex smoulders or burns in us. In youth it flickers and shines; in age it glows softer and stiller, but there it is." 

I quite like this (re)definition of a golem as a human being in whom the fire of sex has been extinguished and who communicates only a cold, ugly deadness (unfair and as meaningless as it may be). 

And I like the idea of fire calling to fire and of sex appeal kindling a sense of joyful warmth and optimism. Lawrence is right, the loveliness of a really lovely woman in whom the sex fire burns pure and fine not only lights up her whole being, but transforms the entire universe. Such a woman - extremely rare even in a world of numerous good-looking girls and cosmetic enhancement - is an experience.  

Lawrence concludes:

"If only our civilization had taught us how to let sex appeal flow properly and subtly, how to keep the fire of sex clear and alive, flickering or flowing or blazing in all its varying degrees of strength and communication, we might, all of us, have lived all our lives in love, which means we should be kindled and full of zest in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of things …

      Whereas, what a lot of dead ash there is in life now."

II. Light My Fire

I don't know if Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran read Lawrence when young - his obsessions led him towards German and French thinkers, rather than English novelists - but there are certainly quasi-Lawrentian resonances in his early work for those of us familiar with the writings of Lawrence.

Thus, like Lawrence, Cioran was interested in love in all its forms, particularly the concrete and monogamous love between man and woman which he took to be the quintessential form; not only in its sexual aspect, but as a "rich network of affective states". Love, born not of suffering, but of sincere generosity, is what Cioran most cherishes.

And, like Lawrence, Cioran ties his idea of love to beauty, being, and to fire. Man's sensitivity to beauty, he writes, intensifies as he approaches the joy that love brings. And in beauty "all things find their justification, their raison d'être".

Further, beauty allows us to conceive of things as things and to accept existence as is: "To place the world under the sign of beauty is to assert that it is as it should be [...] even the negative aspects of existence do nothing but increase its glory and its charm." This, of course, is a profoundly Nietzschean as well as a Lawrentian idea.

Beauty, concludes Cioran, may not bring salvation, "but it will bring us closer to happiness" and to the point where we can make a total affirmation of life. And what is more beautiful than the nakedness of flames, dancing in darkness:

"Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. [...] The beauty of flames creates the illusion of a pure, sublime death similar to the light of dawn."

It's not only moths, it appears, that are transfixed by candlelight and dream of a fiery climax to their lives ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). See the famous letter from Mellors to Connie with which Lawrence closes the novel.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Sex Appeal', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Often known as 'Sex Versus Loveliness', this article can be read online by clicking here. 

E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (the University of Chicago Press, 1992). See: 'Enthusiasm as a Form of Love' (75), 'The Beauty of Flames' (88), and 'Beauty's Magic Tricks' (119). All lines quoted above from Cioran are taken from these three sections.

Readers interested in earlier posts that compare and contrast Lawrence's work with that of Cioran on questions to do with becoming-animal and becoming-ash, can click here and here.

Musical bonus #1: click here. Musical bonus #2: click here. I must admit that I don't much care for either of these (hugely overrated) songs, but readers of a more hippie-persuasion will doubtless enjoy listening to them once more.    

A New Entry in the Big Book of Little Girls: Alma Deutscher (The Prodigy)

Photo of Alma Deutscher 
By Anna Huix (2016)

I.

One of the books I would still like to write, is my Big Book of Little Girls - a work dedicated to all of those fantastic creatures who are so much more than merely young females destined to grow up to be women in a conventional bio-cultural manner.

At their best - which is to say at their most phenomenal and inhuman - little girls are extraordinary events whose individuation doesn't proceed via subjectivity, but by pure haecceity. They are defined, thus, not by their age, sex, or material composition (sugar and spice), but by the intensive affects of which they are capable. 

I already have an index of possible candidates for the book, both living and dead, actual and fictional. And now I have another name to add: Alma Deutscher ...   


II.

Born in February 2005, Alma is a highly celebrated and much-loved composer and performer. Starting her musical career early - she began playing the piano aged two, followed by the violin at three - this wunderkind has already written sonatas, concertos, and operas.

For some, she's an angel sent to redeem the world through melody and she herself contrasts the simple beauty of her music with the ugliness and complexity of the times. Anyone wanting to see people in jeans or hear works that deal with social issues, should probably stay away from her recitals: Let them look at passersby in the street or watch TV, she says, with the regal disdain perfected more by Marie Antoinette than by Mozart.

And suddenly one recalls that the term prodigy refers not only to a young person with exceptional gifts, but - as her own mother reminds us - to a monstrous being who violates the natural order and brings with them something more troubling than a nice tune; something unbidden and unexpected ...

At the very least, I think it reasonable to regard this young girl as genuinely inspired, if not, indeed, one possessed; a witch who whirls a magical skipping rope about her head and allows strange forces to work through her. Whether these forces be divine or daemonic in nature is debatable; but it's surely worth remembering that the Devil has all the best tunes and that the positing of Beauty as the highest of all high ideals has, in the past, put dreamy Romantics on a path to Hell ...

But then I'm just one of those whom Robert Schediwy characterises as an advanced culture-theorist, suspicious of any attempt to steer contemporary classical music back to the 18th and 19th centuries with their "uninhibited love of melody", before those decidedly ungalant, 20th century composers dared to experiment with dissonance and require listeners to develop new ears.

As for Alma, obviously I wish her well. But I also hope that, as she matures, she rethinks her relationship to the present, to reality, and to popular culture and sees how even beauty can become an ugly impediment to genius ...


See Robert Schediwy, 'Alma und die gefährliche Liebe zur Melodie', Der Standard (13 Jan 2017): click here.

To listen to Alma play, or to read numerous other press reports and interviews with her and her parents, go to her website by clicking on the link already given. Alternatively, there are plenty of videos available to watch on YouTube, including this one, in which Alma not only performs her own piano and violin compositions, but speaks about her work before an invited audience at the WORLD.MINDS Annual Symposium (2016).

Anatomy Presupposes a Waxwork Venus

Clemente Susini: Venerina (1782)

Bella Italia! Terra d'amore! And home also to some of the most exquisite art works depicting the goddess of love, including, famously, Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (c.1486) and Titian's rather more risqué Venus of Urbino (1538). Less well known - although just as exquisite in its own macabre manner - is the life-sized wax sculpture made by Clemente Susini known as the Little Venus (1782).

Anatomically accurate in every detail and vividly displaying the internal organs, this and other disemboweled beauties were primarily used for teaching purposes at a special workshop within the Natural History Museum, Florence (La Specola). But they were also put on public display for those whose intellectual curiosity terminated in thanatological voyeurism.

Feminist commentators, keen to read these figures in terms of sexual objectification and what we might term necropygmalionism, find something profoundly unsettling about them. Indeed, for Zoe Williams:

"There seems to be something blasphemous, inhumane, in creating a corpse and trying to beautify it - or rather, in considering beauty to be a necessary trait in an anatomically accurate dead body. In taking beauty to be such a critical component of womanhood, it misses, and seals in wax its own misapprehension of, what beauty is."

But one might suggest that it's Ms Williams who, in this case, misunderstands; not what beauty is, but what its function is and why we need to lend to even the most revolting of all things - death, not womanhood - an element of aesthetic delight.

The unfortunate fact is, corpses don't look great: "Their droopy, open eyes cloud over in a vacant stare. Their mouths stretch wide like Edvard Munch's The Scream. The colour drains from their faces" - and no one wants to see that; not even in wax replica. 

As Nietzsche wrote: We need art so that we don't perish from the truth ...


See: Zoe Williams, 'Cadavers in pearls: meet the Anatomical Venus', The Guardian, 17 May, 2016 - click here. 

Note: the description of the corpse and its horrific nature is by Caitlin Doughty; Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, (Canongate Books, 2016), p. 116. 

Those interested in knowing more about this topic might care to read Joanna Ebenstein's beautifully illustrated book, The Anatomical Venus, (Thames and Hudson Ltd., 2016).

On the Joy of Flirting and the Experience of Beauty

 Ayaan Hirsi Ali

 

Flirting is one of the great joys of life, which, regardless of intent, is always an innocent form of sexual play at the level of language and gesture; by this, I mean it lacks the consciously cruel and manipulative aspects of teasing.  

People who do not know how to flirt are like those who do not know how to laugh; they lack that insouciance which is so lovely in wild animals and flowering plants and in men and women who intuitively understand the mystery of beauty.

 

For beauty, ultimately, is the key thing: when we flirt, we communicate the happiness that arises out of an experience of beauty. We find others sexy and appealing when we find them beautiful. But, as Lawrence rightly argues, living beauty is not a fixed pattern or a conventional look which comes ready-made or photoshopped. This is why even the most skilled cosmetic surgeons fail to produce a truly beautiful face, despite an almost perfect arrangement of features. And this is why there's nothing flirtatious about a sex doll.

Because beauty is something felt and something which can be shared with others, even the plainest person can be beautiful and flirt successfully. On the other hand, even the most attractive person in the room can seem ugly and undesirable when they lack the warm glow of beauty and don't know how to communicate joy. Only when the sex-glow is missing, writes Lawrence, do people move in ugly coldness like "one of those ghastly living corpses which are unfortunately becoming more numerous in the world ... and whom everybody wants to avoid".

Today, it takes a rare woman to genuinely rouse a sense of loveliness; and a rare man to have the courage to respond to her loveliness and to flirt in a spirit that is neither lewd nor crude, but generous and playfully tender, with perhaps just a touch of irony. Luckily, however, there is an example of such to be found on YouTube and involves a very touching and amusing public encounter between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christopher Hitchens; he full of old school charm and she smiling and giggling in an almost coquettish manner.

Perhaps, as well as everything else, flirting is an important sign of freedom ...

Notes: 

Readers interested in viewing the encounter between Hitch and the very beautiful Ayaan Hirsi Ali at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, on Feb 13 2007, should click here.

The line quoted from D. H. Lawrence can be found in the article 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 146. 

Aly Buttons: On Her Lumpiness and Loveliness

Photo by Nina Lin (2011)

Not all young women can be stick thin like fashion models. But this doesn't mean that they can't be beautiful. 

This is a realization that alternative fashion and lolita lifestyle blogger Aly Buttons (aka Miss Lumpy) happily arrived at following a period during which, like many girls, she hated and starved her body in an attempt to conform to an ideal shape.     

The post in which she writes about this - about how her self-loathing gave way to self-acceptance - is open and honest, even if it's not entirely convincing (one suspects, for example, that she'd still like to drop a dress size if possible) and even if there are some things that one might find troubling as a feminist (her obvious need for male validation and boyfriend approval). 

    

Still, I don't want to be harsh or judgemental here; particularly with reference to this latter point. Perhaps we all need to see ourselves reflected in the adoring eyes of a lover and not just in our bedroom mirrors or as selfies on the screens of our i-Phones before we can truly feel beautiful and desirable. 

Maybe the fact that we're never absolutely self-contained or completely independent - that we need one another - is what makes us human. And this includes needing others to compliment us on our looks (our faces, our hair, our smiles, our make-up, our bodies, our clothes, our shoes, etc).

And so, Miss Lumpy, let me reassure you that there is no form of beauty more poignant than that which you model so wonderfully. The complex sweetness of your features - including the lily-white complexion and well-defined contours of your mouth - eclipse the most perfectly assembled of conventional faces. You have transformed your life into a work of art and a miracle of heroic survival. 

Yours is a beauty born of resistance to "so many physical and mental corsets, so many constraints, crushing denials, absurd restrictions, dogmas, heartbreaks, such sadism and asphyxiation, such conspiracies of silence and humiliation", that it signals a daring revolt into style. And for this, I admire you hugely - lumps and all.
           

Note: quotation from Amélie Nothomb, Fear and Trembling, trans. Adriana Hunter (Faber and Faber, 2004), p. 66.

Link: http://www.herlumpiness.com/2010/06/lumpy-gets-personal.html