Like a Virgin: Madame B. and Lady C.

Illustration of Gustave Flaubert and Mme. Bovary

from online arts and culture magazine Salon

http://www.salon.com/2005/08/21/flaubert/   

According to Andrea Dworkin, the modern era of rebellious married women who seek freedom via adultery and sexually transgressive acts begins with Madame Bovary (1856): she is the first in a long line of female characters for whom heroism consists in taking a lover and experiencing a genuine orgasm; i.e. in being fucked and fucked good.

But, somewhat paradoxically, Emma Bovary also redefines virginity as well as heroic rebellion. For according to Flaubert, a woman who has not been overwhelmed by sexual passion, not broken the law in order to be carnal - who has been fucked by a husband, but never been truly touched or transformed by her experiences in the marital bedroom - remains essentially a virgin and a type of slave who leads an unfulfilled life of domestic boredom and impoverished fantasy.

Of course, poor Emma's story ends tragically; she mistakes illicit romance for action in the real and wider social world and fucking becomes for her a "suicidal substitute for freedom", as Dworkin rightly notes. This, however, has not prevented a long line of writers finding inspiration in her sorry tale and inventing their own virgin wives whose only hope lies in what Lawrence describes as a phallic hunting out and which involves anal as well as vaginal penetration by the male.

In fact, it might be argued that Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover is the ultimate example of this phallocentric and phallocratic fantasy in which a woman, if she is to be liberated, must be repeatedly stripped and penetrated (or pierced, as Lawrence writes - as if it were a knife or sword rather than a penis forcefully entering and occupying her body). 

Connie risks her life, but she is happy to die a poignant, marvellous death just so long as she is fucked; the one thing she really wants regardless of consequences and despite the fact that during her night of sensual passion she is almost unwilling, a little frightened, and obliged to be but a passive thing. 

It's over eighty-five years since Lawrence wrote his last and most notorious novel, but the model of female sexuality based upon a metaphysical virginity which he helped shape is one which continues to grip the pornographic imagination and continues to exercise a real effect over the lives of real women as an obscene form of categorical imperative.

As Dworkin writes: "no matter how much [women] have fucked ... no matter with what intensity or obsession or commitment or conviction (believing that sex is freedom) or passion or promiscuous abandon", it's never enough; these dumb bitches never learn! And so they must keep consenting to penetration, being desirable, looking hot (the pressure to do so being exerted across an ever greater age-range; from pre-pubescent girls to post-menopausal grandmothers).

Surely it's time to notice that whilst more girls and women are freer than ever to get fucked, they are still unable to share "a whole range of feelings, express a whole range of ideas, address [their] own experience with an honesty that is not pleasing to men, ask questions that discomfit and antagonize men in their dominance".      

And surely it's time to admit - without denying the great beauty and brilliance of their work - that dead male novelists, poets, and philosophers might not be best placed to help us all move forward into a world after the orgy.


Notes

See Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, (Basic Books, 2007). The lines quoted are on pp. 140, 151 and in the 1995 Preface, pp. xxxiii-iv.

See also D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter sixteen. The italicized words are Lawrence's own.   

    

The Museum of Failed Products

 The Museum of Failed Products: Photo by Kelly K. Jones 

The Guardian, 15 June 2012

According to Oliver Burkeman, the vast majority of new consumer products - like new lifeforms - are destined to fail; to quickly and somewhat mysteriously be withdrawn from sale and so to vanish forever from the supermarket shelves back into the capitalist void.    

Or, more accurately, these thousands upon thousands of things - ranging from non-perishable food items and household goods to toiletries and innovations in pet care - find themselves stored for all eternity on the grey metal shelves of what has become known as the Museum of Failed Products. 

Operated by GfK and based in a business park outside the city of Ann Arbor in Michigan, the Museum of Failed Products is a place which at first makes you want to laugh and then, as the full horror of so much waste and failure hits home, makes you want to cry.

The Japanese have a phrase - mono no aware - which captures this bittersweet feeling, referring as it does to the pathos of things; i.e. to what we experience when confronted by the transient and tragicomic nature of existence and the futility of all human effort in the face of this.      

We can keep inventing, keep producing, and keep marketing new goods, but, ultimately, we too will end up being assigned a place on the shelves of the Museum of Failed Species. For just as the marketplace can do without yoghurt shampoo or breakfast cola, so too can the universe do without us.


Link: Oliver Burkeman's article in The Guardian that inspired this post can be found at: 
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/jun/15/happiness-is-being-a-loser-burkeman

My thanks to Simon Thomas for initially bringing this article to my attention. 

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

These are a Few of My Favourite Things: Novels

I have spoken elsewhere on the political and philosophical importance of lists, but we should not overlook the pleasure aspect: quite simply, lists make happy; they are fun to write and fun to read.

So, here's a list of my thirteen favourite novels - assembled not in order of preference nor following a critical assessment of literary value, but alphabetically by author name. For compiling lists should not be simply another excuse to exercise judgement and construct hierarchies. I love all of these books, not equally, but in any order that one might care to suggest and the only logic that links them is the fact that they have continually given amorous pleasure. 

Two final points to note: Firstly, I've selected only a single title by any one author. Obviously I could list several by those writers, such as Lawrence, of whom I am especially fond, but I didn't want to do that. Secondly, I have given the titles of non-English books in translation, but shown the publication date for the original text.  

Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes, (1962)

J. G. Ballard, Crash, (1973)

Georges Bataille, The Story of the Eye, (1928)

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, (1847)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, (1850)

Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island, (2005)

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1920)

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star, (1977)

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, (1934)

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, (1955)

Amélie Nothomb, The Book of Proper Names, (2002)

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, (1870)  

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, (1890)

Suna no Onna (Sand Woman)

The Woman in the Dunes (1964), dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara

I've always been fascinated by the thought of desert sands and the radical indifference of shifting dunes to any form of moist life, including human life; an unceasing flow of countless particles overwhelming everything in their path.

Baudrillard has provided some lovely descriptions of the desert as an ecstatic form of disappearance and pure geometry. He speaks of their grandeur deriving from negative aridity; places where all high hopes evaporate and the artificial scruples of culture are rendered null and void, leaving only silence.   
 

For other writers, the desert is intrinsically feminine and to be fatally lost in the sand is like being sexually enveloped and suffocated by the love of a good woman. The Japanese author Kobo Abe, for example, explores this erotic-fetishistic theme in his short novel The Woman in the Dunes (1962).

This strangely beautiful and disturbing book tells the tale of an amateur entomologist, Niki Jumpei, who goes on a brief holiday to collect insects that live among the sand dunes, but ends up quite literally trapped in a deep hole alongside a woman whose only task in life is to dig sand. His attempts to escape end in failure and so he learns how to love the woman and accept his fate as a type of human sand-bug. In other words, he learns how to go with the flow and transform a hole into a home.

Abe provides some nice descriptions of the woman, a young widow, the surface of whose skin "was covered with a coat of fine sand, which hid the details and brought out the feminine lines; she seemed a statue gilded with sand ... attractive to look at but hardly to touch."

That said, of course the man does eventually touch her; sometimes with savage violence and at other times with tenderness, as he helps brush or wash the sand from her naked body, from under her breasts, from her buttocks and thighs, and from the dark lips of her vulva. The sex between them is mostly impersonal and as crushing, shapeless and merciless as the desert. As Andrea Dworkin notes:

"The sand, because it is relentless and inescapable, forces an abandonment of the abstract mental thinking and self-involvement that pass for feeling, especially sexual feeling, in men in civilization. It forces the person to live wholly in the body, in the present, without mental evasion or self-preoccupied introspection or free-floating anxiety. ... What [Niki Jumpei] feels, he feels physically. The sand is so extreme, so intense, so much itself, so absolute, that it determines the quality and boundaries of his consciousness ..."

It even gives him an erection, as it trickles in a little stream over the base of his penis and flows along his thighs.  

Towards the end of the novel, the man attempts to rape the woman whilst the villagers who have imprisoned and enslaved them both in the pit watch from above. But just like his attempts to escape, his attempt to publicly violate the woman (and thereby secure a promise of freedom made by his captors) fails. She physically not only fends him off, but, like the sand, she overpowers him and obliges him to make a final capitulation:

"The man, beaten and covered with sand ... abandoned himself to her hands ... It seemed that what remained of him had turned into a liquid and melted into her body." 
  
Dworkin again provides the best (somewhat romantic and profoundly Lawrentian) reading of this scene:

"In this vision of sex, while the man is by contemporary standards emasculated by the failed rape, in fact rape is supposed to fail. Men are not supposed to accomplish it. They are supposed to give in, to capitulate, to surrender: to the sand - to life moving without regard for their specialness or individuality, their fiefdoms of personality and power; to the necessities of the woman's life in the dunes - work, sex, a home, the common goal of keeping the community from being destroyed by the sand. The sex is not cynical or contaminated by voyeurism; but it is only realizable in a world of dangerously unsentimental physicality. Touch, then, becomes what is distinctly, irreducibly human; the meaning of being human. This essential human need is met by an equal human capacity to touch, but that capacity is lost in a false physical world of man-made artifacts and a false psychological world of man-made abstractions. The superiority of the woman, like the superiority of the sand, is in her simplicity of means, her quiet and patient endurance, the unselfconsciousness of her touch, its ruthless simplicity. She is not abstract, not a silhouette. She lives in her body, not in his imagination."

  
See The Woman in the Dunes, by Kobo Abe, trans. E. Dale Saunders, (Vintage Books, 1964), pp. 44-6 and 232. And see Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin, (Basic Books, 2007), pp. 33-4 and 36.

In Praise of Shyness

It's wrong to always identify shyness negatively as a form of social anxiety or awkwardness due to low self-esteem, or some other psychological failing.

In fact, I tend to agree with the poet and philosopher Simon Thomas who writes that there is nothing more seductive than a certain reticence in the object of one's desire and that - at its most adorable - the trait of shyness can be characterized as a withholding of luminosity, i.e. that which radiates like a tiny star within the body of the beloved and makes such a dazzling impression (causing blindness and preventing speech).   

Besides, what's the alternative? The super-confident, self-assertive types who have shamelessly forgotten how to blush and never know when to lower their eyes or keep their big mouths closed? 

No thanks. For me, the bold are very rarely beautiful ...  

Brian Clough's Socialism of the Heart

Brian Clough (1935-2004)

 

Apart from the fact that he believed in fairies and amusingly challenged Muhammad Ali to a fight, the thing I admire most about Brian Clough was his class solidarity and socialism. Speaking in a television interview with Brian Moore, he explained his political thinking:

"I think socialism comes from the heart. I think I've been lucky and I've got what I've got. I've made a few bob, I've had a car, I've got a nice house and I don't see any reason why everybody shouldn't have that. People who I've met sometimes with a few bob and who have got on, don't think everybody else should have a few bob and get on. I think the opposite. I think everybody can have it. ... I think everybody should have a book, I think everybody should have a nice classroom to go to, I think everybody should have the same opportunities. And I brought my children up to think the same. I brought my children up not to be greedy. My children are generous children and they're generous not [just] with money or that type of thing ... they're generous giving themselves to people; they're generous with their smiles ..." 

This is what Lawrence would describe as a good form of socialism; one which springs from the sincere desire that all people should live well and free from any envy, hatred, or lust for revenge (i.e. what Nietzsche terms the spirit of ressentiment). A socialism of the heart which, if it could be implemented, would make the best form of government.  

It's a shame that there are not more people in football, in the arts, and in the wider world of this view; people prepared to speak up for equality, act with benevolence, and rear their children into a shared culture of kindness and comradery.

   

The Model and the Mannequins

Abbey Clancy and friends in the new ad  for Veet and Scholl

(Virgo Health/PA, 2014)

Just when I thought I'd finished with the question of female objectification, model and Strictly Come Dancing winner Abbey Clancy appears semi-nude in the company of five mannequins as part of a new promotional campaign for hair-removal specialists Veet and leading foot-care brand Scholl.

Ms Clancy is literally prepared to play the dummy in order to encourage other women to have the confidence to expose their legs and feet with pride. She informs us with all the spontaneity and warmth of a corporate sex doll reading a press release written by condescending and misogynistic morons:

"With such a busy lifestyle and a little girl to run around after I barely have time to visit a salon for beauty treatments, so easy-to-use products such as Scholl Velvet Smooth Express Pedi and Veet EasyWax help me get long-lasting professional results from home. It's not just about how great your feet and legs look, but how you feel when they are prepped and ready to bare as soon as the sun comes out!"

 
Rather coyly, and unlike her plastic associates, Ms Clancy keeps her knickers on. Presumably this is to help us spot which one she is. It is also intended to eroticize the image. But, dear Abbey, don't you know that whether she is in or out of her underwear makes very little difference to the desirability of modern woman having lost her nakedness long ago?

No matter how prepped your legs and feet might be and no matter how much you may flaunt your body, you do so in what Lawrence describes as a non-physical, merely optical aspect and your nudity is about as interesting as a dolls, cut off from any mystery or charm.

In fact, it's even less interesting and little wonder that many men will look at this picture and quickly decide in favour of the mannequins: for why desire an object still tainted with traces of subjectivity when one can love an object free from all residual humanity?

Love, Hate and Intercourse

Intercourse: The Life and Work of Andrea Dworkin, 
dir. Pratibha Parmar.
Presently being filmed in San Francisco and 
scheduled for release in January 2015

According to Rawdon Lilly, the Lawrentian persona in Aaron's Rod (1922), hate is a form of love on the recoil which invariably results in destructive violence, be it on a personal-individual or an impersonal-collective level: It flies back, the love-urge, and becomes a horror.

I've long accepted the logic of this and still think it's a crucial insight. But might we not turn it around and suggest that rather than hate being an extreme reversal of love, love is actually a sublimated and disguised form of hate? That, essentially, even the highest and most celebrated expressions of love are coercive forms of spiritual and/or sexual abuse based upon the threat of violence.

This rather more disconcerting and pessimistic view is perhaps where Andrea Dworkin was coming from in her radical feminist study Intercourse (1987).

Although Dworkin doesn't actually write that all heterosexual intercourse is rape (this oft-quoted line was invented by her critics in an attempt to disparage her sophisticated argument by reducing it to a crass slogan), she does suggest that the male lover is more often than not in a position of power over the female object of his desire and that penetrative sex therefore invariably involves some degree of violation and all the flowers or boxes of chocolates in the world don't alter this fact, even if they serve to mask it and somewhat sweeten the deal.

Extending her own analysis developed in earlier works, Dworkin argues in Intercourse that the eroticized subordination, exploitation, and abuse of women within a phallocratic society is central and determines the behaviour and beliefs of both sexes.

This is increasingly apparent within a pornified culture, although the hatred, contempt and revulsion for women is reinforced by and throughout the arts, media, law, politics, science and religion (i.e. all of those discursive practices which between them produce the truth of our engendered human condition). You can read many classic works of literature or watch almost all films to see this; pornography is by no means exclusively to blame and is ultimately just another symptom of a far more serious disease: misogyny.     

And this is why what we need is not more censorship or attempts to outlaw extreme pornography, but what Nietzsche terms a revaluation of all values.


Note: this post is dedicated to KM and all those like her sensitive to the issue of invasive male penetration and the internal occupation of their bodies; those women who, like Dworkin, realise that the question of intercourse is fundamental to feminism and women's freedom. 

In the House of the Sleeping Beauties

 Emily Browning in Sleeping Beauty (2011) dir. Julia Leigh

House of the Sleeping Beauties (1961) is a short, surreal novel written by the brilliant Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata. 

It tells the story of a lonely old man, Eguchi, who frequents the above establishment in order to enjoy the exquisitely poignant pleasure of touching young flesh and sleeping besides a naked girl, sharing her drug-induced dreams and reflecting upon his own memories and mortality.

Whilst he, like other elderly clients, is free to enjoy the body of the sleeping beauty as he will, there is a house rule which dictates no penetration. Thus violent fantasies of rape and necrophilia must give way to an almost chaste ideal of female worship; religious veneration of purity is the name of the game rather than sexual violation and the vagina is posited as a temple off-limits even to worshipers. Of course, we know that the fetishization of virginity is itself a fatal form of perversion and abuse.

The novel was adapted for the cinema by German filmmakers in 2008. Unfortunately, Das Haus der Schlafenden Schönen, dir. Vadim Glowna, was not entirely successful; it certainly wasn't well received by the critics who dismissed it as pretentious art-house pornography that dramatized impotent male self-pity and decrepit perviness in a sordid, soporific manner that threatened to send even the audience to sleep.   

A far superior cinematic adaptation was made in 2011 by the Australian novelist, director and screenwriter Julia Leigh and starring Emily Browning, who gives a near-perfect performance in the role of Lucy. 

Whilst Sleeping Beauty retains the central premise of Kawabata's novel, Leigh crucially reverses the viewpoint thus creating an intelligent and disturbing feminist film, rather than merely another exploitative and misogynistic movie designed to titillate.

Leigh knows that at the heart of every fairy story, every religious myth, and every sleazy male fantasy about women (on whichever side of the virgin/whore dichotomy they're placed), is a kernel of the real: i.e., real bodies, suffering real abuse, experiencing real pain at the hands of those who wield real power.