Beards, Brows and Procrastination
Today was one of those muggy languid days that compels you to dramatically lower your standards to reap a sense of achievement, any achievement, at the end of it. Or dispose of standards altogether. In this way such mundane pedestrian activities such as cheese eating, wall staring or even hand-eye coordination will seem like a veritable tour de force.
Speaking of which, I was browsing GQ today.
Reason 540 why I hate GQ: Spinning some vacuous bile about the fear of appearing middlebrow as if you were the freaking Bourdieu of coolness, while failing to mention that the high/low culture divide is a deeply ingrained arbitrary divide borne out of the Industrial Revolution, developed specifically to preserve a condition conceived of as “high” from dilution and corruption by new forces seen as “lower” - for instance mass-production and increased purchasing power. See how easy it is? I don’t even know what I wrote there - I just turned on my cultural theory babble mode. Obviously this writer’s switch has been stuck since 1960. Which would explain GQ’s attitude towards women.
(Yes I did just lambast GQ’s lack of incisive cultural critique. I must obviously be insanely highbrow. In fact my brows are so divorced from my eyes that a look of permanent incredulity frames my face. Like finding out that Zach Galifianakis’ beard is apparently lowbrow. And that I should care.)
One of my favourite quotes…
“Sylvia Plath - interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.” Woody Allen in Annie Hall (1977)
Why Feminism is still relevant and Germaine Greer is not
All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There’s oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
Sometime ago I came across an article that bemoaned the death of Feminism and the reluctance of many women to label themselves as feminists. Aren’t these women interested in equal pay, asked the author? Do they not want to be given the same opportunities as men? Well, yes they do, but perhaps they don’t want to be associated with the increasingly shrill and vituperative voice of 60s feminists, whose antics left such a profound imprint, it seems, so as to essentially trademark feminism in popular culture. They weren’t even the first wave of Feminism - that honour is normally given to the suffragettes - and are by no means the most recent one, yet they are seemingly the ones that stayed in the public’s imagination. I blame Germaine Greer, grand doyenne of angry women everywhere. She nearly made me rescind of my own feminist tag, and for that I’m very angry.
Greer is of course best known as the author of The Female Eunuch. Its publication in 1970 created a sensation, as it urged women everywhere to embrace their sexuality, become self-reliant and cast aside the passive roles they had traditionally been allotted. Delivered with great humour and wit, it gave patriarchy a deserved kick in the teeth whilst still treating men as potential partners, not antagonists. These two qualities, humour and a more forgiving view on men were, sadly, rather scarce amongst other feminist theorists of the time. A product of the 60s, some of the book’s suggestions might be too mother-earthy in the cold light of the present. I, for one, fail to see the liberating properties of tasting one’s menstrual flux and I am quite happy to remain repressed on that front. But over time, many of her suggestions worked themselves into the mainstream, watered down perhaps, but still there nonetheless. This is how ideas become socially acceptable over time, you shout loud enough until your echoes start reaching enough people. A viewpoint is rarely accepted into the hall of dominant ideologies retaining its original strength.
I should be forever grateful to Greer and company for paving the way for me and other women, as we no longer need to stay at home reading The Good Housekeeper, popping Valium and hoping our husband might accidentally stumble across our g-spot while looking for the cocktail shaker. I should be grateful, and I am, but I’m also disappointed, because somewhere along the line these women got stuck, and started sounding like broken records, parping on ad-infinitum about the whore/madonna dichotomy, without seemingly contributing to the debate, passing off tired observations as radical aperçus, breaking taboos that were no longer there to be broken.
Desperate to discard anything that had even the slightest whiff of sexism they soon ran into a wall, the one every feminist runs into eventually, as they realised they didn’t have enough pieces not tainted by that all pervasive patriarchy to build an alternative world. Language became the main battlefield, with never ending debates over Ms/Miss, humankind/mankind… (they’re still raging now). Reappropriation became one strategy, although I still don’t think “bitch” should be taken a compliment, no matter how many times Meredith Brooks insists on singing it. Others, like Julia Kristeva, suggested the invention of a “feminine” language marked by soft sounds, humming and other earthly noises, which I suspect would make women sound like Teletubbies. Then Greer lost it (although it could also be argued that Kristeva beat her to it).
Thirty years after her first book, and to much fanfare, Greer published The Whole Woman, a sequel of some sorts to The Female Eunuch. Greer was still angry of course, although this time she was incensed over things that were cunningly disguised as progress - well they fooled me - like the contraceptive pill and today’s more lenient abortion laws. At this point, it seems, Greer had pretty much decided that women were and always will be regarded as disposable holes by men, and that any development only benefits some vague yet omnipresent phallocentric conspiracy.
The pill, she insisted, did not give women greater autonomy over their bodies, but made them a “manmade nonmother”, it was a “male interference with conception and birth”. “Women are driven through the health system like sheep through a dip […] The disease they are being treated for is womanhood” she hectors from her soapbox. Then she goes on to blame Roe v. Wade for giving women the dubious privilege to “undergo invasive procedures in order to terminate unwanted pregnancies, unwanted not just by them but by their parents, their sexual partners, the governments who would not support mothers, the employers who would not employ mothers, the landlords who would not accept tenants with children, the schools that would not accept students with children.”
No wonder she is so miffed, being endowed with a pair of fallopian tubes apparently make her an object of universal hatred. I bet even the postman secretly hates her uterus. And Ms Greer has no time for actual mothers either, who have, of course, been deluded into popping babies into patriarchy’s lap. Being a woman in Western society is clearly a no-win situation, but at least they can take solace in knowing that they’re not having their genitals mutilated, like in some African countries. I mean, that must be some sort of consolation, now that you’ve discovered everybody hates you. Right?… You’d be wrong! You’ve obviously been blinded by your Eurocentric arrogance! Your penchant for make-up clearly exposes your secret ambition to become a Stepford Wife. Your reservations on female genital mutilation, on the other hand, are obviously “an attack on cultural identity”.
That’s right, mutilating often unwilling 13-year-old girls must be “a procedure with considerable cultural value because it has survived 50 years of criminalization and concerted propaganda campaigns”. Oh, you mean like backstreet abortions…? Sex trafficking? No? Is it because we’re seeing this barbarous.. um tradition.. out of context, through our myopic Western eyes? I can only conclude that Meaning is Contextual, and in Greer’s case, this translates as ‘anything goes as long as it’s done by people who are sufficiently unlike you’. Oh, and as far as I’m aware, she still refuses to accept men who have undergone gender-reassignment surgery as women, her argument being more or less the bob-marleyesque sounding “no ovaries, no woman”. No wonder she is still regularly trotted out by lazy producers whenever gender is on the agenda: the woman is clearly a visionary, her enlightened and progressive views on transsexuality on par with Leviticus and other cutting edge gender theorists.
Every time I see Greer’s angry mug on TV, I get this unexplainable urge to become a Vegas showgirl. Strategically placed ostrich feathers are after all a tradition that have survived not only brief periods of criminalization but also years of concerted propaganda campaigns. Then it slowly dawns upon me, very slowly of course, as the epiphany has to tunnel its way through multiple layers of denial and lack of self-awareness deposited over the years by patriarchy. But lo and behold! Eventually I see the light! Greer’s constant presence on these panels is an evil machination of that all-seeing all-knowing Top Gear-loving cabal! By exposing me to her increasingly outmoded and tired arguments I will be lulled into the illusion that there are no nuanced or insightful minds left in Feminism!
No wonder then that so many women shy away from the feminist label. Women are not stupid, despite Greer’s churlish insistence to the contrary. They still want equality - if anything it boils down to self-interest - and neither are they oblivious to the plight of the, still depressingly large, number of women who are routinely trafficked, raped, beaten, aborted for being the wrong sex and generally treated as second class citizens. And yet women grew tired of the ideology of oppression so beloved of 60s feminists and other professional martyrs, simply because most people don’t want to view themselves as losers. Is that shallow? No secret society pulling the strings behind the scenes. Most people, and I believe Greer would count herself amongst them, like to think of themselves as individuals in possession of at least an ounce of independent thought.
Yet whenever a woman diverts from the narrow party line set by Greer and company she is instantly labeled as patriarchal automaton, with zero self-awareness and independent thought. The perennially popular Foucaltian model is promptly peddled out and the dissenting voice is accused of internalising the oppressor. You want to be a stay at home mum? Patriarchal lobotomy! You like pink? Ideological brainwash! And yet they have so far failed to provide an alternative model. So pink is patriarchal? Okay, what precisely is your alternative? Blue? I think we are ALL aware that society gives feminine connotations to the colour ‘pink’ now. In fact, so familiar have we become with the language of gender semiotics that when a girl plumps for a frilly little pink number she is not a mindless follower of old patriarchal models who should be sent to reeducation camp. She’s perfectly aware of the symbolic ramifications of her sartorial choice and also bound to be familiar with reappropriation.
This attitude can partly be seen as rebellion against the old guard. It was bound to happen. As the new generation grew tired of being declared the victim, and with no alternative model to build on, these women thought that they could reclaim territory by taking symbols tainted by sexism and subverting them through ironic-self-awareness . The return of red lipstick and burlesque are examples of this philosophy, but so is the popularity of “porn star” and “deep throat” t-shirts. As long as it’s a conscious choice, the argument goes, there is no exploitation.
Now this is being heavily debated by another wave of feminists who are concerned by the increasing trend of posing in the buff for lads’ magazines. Is it possible to feel empowered without having to go topless? The most disturbing example is of course the perma-tanned former glamour model and all around entrepeneur Jordan, who has made her fortune by selling her privacy. Addicted to fame, Katie Price, as she now prefers to be called, has more or less rented out her womb to Hello magazine. She has, as Charlie Brooker memorably put it, “[had] herself sliced open and injected and sewn back together until she resembles some kind of rubbery pirate ship figurehead, a weird booby caricatured looming at us out of the mist.” And yet many women regard her as a role model, assuming, perhaps, that as long as those millions sit in a bank account, then it can’t possibly hurt. As long as it is you who tells the surgeon where to make the incision, then it is okay.
Which is why feminists have returned to the drawing room. Many of them never left of course, but I assure you - assuming you made it this far - that Feminism still has a lot to offer. The ‘ism’ deceives, like any other political movement, it conceals a plethora of views. If you haven’t found one you sympathise with, then you just haven’t looked hard enough. But Feminism is still relevant. Don’t let Germaine Greer put you off.
The Proto-Madonna
Sunday found me feeling more misanthropic than a tobacco lobbyist, my faith in humanity deflating faster than an overcooked soufflé, a really angry soufflé sputtering bits of cheese in sheer psychopathic rage. I had gone to Martin Gropious Bau to revisit the Olafur Eliason exhibtion - which deserves its own blog entry - only to be confronted with a long queue patiently waiting to get into the Frida Kahlo retrospective. Why, oh why mighty capricious zeitgeist ? She must be the most overhyped monobrow after the Gallagher brothers. I don’t get the hoopla. I took a Latin American Visual Arts module at university and was exposed to her colourful candid take on self-portrait before Madonna started collecting her works, before Salma Hayek played her (Look, she owns colourful pottery and drinks tequila! She must be Mexican!). She undoubtedly led a fascinating life and got to see Trotsky naked (well that happens when there’s Mexican quantities of tequila involved), but there are so many other female artists that deserve the same level of attention.
So why precisely her? Why should Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón, to give her full name, be placed on such a histrionic pedestal? Well, after much pondering I think I have found my Rosetta Stone, and it’s none other than the Material Girl herself and her fascination with the Central American painter. Think about it. Frida Kahlo is like a proto-Madonna. They have both changed their names to present more easily identifiable and therefore more marketable images, both have included Catholic imagery in their works, flirted with lesbianism, dabbled in controversial ideologies, liberally used popular cultural symbols in their works for maximum impact. They are also masters in forging their own myth, so that Madonna rarely mentions her comfortable middle class Michigan upbringing, whereas Kahlo went as far as to change her birthdate to make it coincide with the Mexican Revolution and claimed that her (German) father was of Hungarian Jewish ancestry, as opposed to the more pedestrian Lutheran branch.
And Kahlo’s oeuvre consists mostly of self-portraits, which might explain why a fellow narcissist like Madonna might be attracted to her. Portraits that feature Frida with thorns round her bloodied neck, because she is in PAIN, portraits of Frida in which she has been stabbed because LOVE HURTS, and portraits that contain two Fridas, because as a woman she is SPLIT, portraits of Frida in indigenous attire (never mind her bourgeois background) because she is MEXICAN, portraits of Frida with that omnipresent monobrow - which she never sported outside a canvas - because she is SUBVERTING CULTURALLY ACCEPTED MODELS OF BEAUTY. Oh and portraits with monkeys, because everybody likes monkeys. Her approach to visual semiotics is so heavy-handed that gallery visitors are advised to wear protective headgear, lest they risk getting being bludgeoned to death by a particularly enthusiastically wielded metaphor. Shame that she was too early, she would have worked modern media brilliantly. I bet Lady Gaga is a fan
Feminism and the Welfare State in a Cold Climate: Scandinavian Gothic
The Economist recently featured an article on Scandinavian crime fiction, and true to its penchant for punning, entitled it “Inspector Norse”. Yet Nordic writers have - with the exception of Ian Rankin - far surpassed their Anglo-Saxon counterparts in recent years - and Inspector Rebus is not even English. Murder, it seems, thrives in cold climates. Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy and Henning Mankell’s laconic Wallander are its best known archetypes, yet northern writers have been toiling for years with a characteristic Lutheran work ethic to create a veritable smorgarsbord of sublime landscape, murder and decay. Gothic might have had a renaissance with Stephanie Meyer’s vapid and toothless Twilight series, yet Nordic writers show us that Gothic can still be a subversive force - that it, to follow the pun, still has a bite.
Now, most people will automatically associate the Gothic with vampires, abandoned castles and other legendary monsters. True, these are some of its most widely-recognised tropes, yet Gothic literature has always concerned itself with the the human condition and interior terrors, about the exploration of the monstrous self. Edgar Allan Poe, his macabre tales a staple of Halloween, more or less creates the detective story with his The Murders in the Rue Morgue (although others give the honour to E.T.A Hoffman’s exquisitely Gothic Das Fraülein von Scuderi, published 22 years earlier in 1819). The murder history is thus firmly cemented in the Gothic tradition and has never looked back, constantly reinventing itself, from Sherlock Holmes’ London to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. And now Scandinavia. Sweden and Norway, with their epic yet desolate nature, their short days and long nights and their people “brought up to hide their feelings”, according the Norwegian Jo Nesbo, provide the perfect ingredients for a whodunnit.
Scandinavian crime fiction is no Cluedo - it contains a veritable fjord of social criticism and discontent. True once again to their Gothic roots, these boreal narratives are too drawn to decadence, to the destructive undercurrents lurking underneath civilisation. If fin-de-siècle Victorians were fretting about social unrest and the fissures showing in their vast empire, Nordic writers show us the misfits, the ones the Welfare State left out. Their stories are populated with ostracised characters, sometimes in self-imposed exile, living at the margins of these seemingly harmonious societies. They hold up a mirror and show the cracks in the social experiment. Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander, protagonist of the Millenium trilogy, with her borderline autism and fiercely individual - and often questionable - ethics, sticks out like a sore thumb in a society that values integration above all. She is the Elephant Man of the Welfare Society. A ferociously intelligent sociopath, Larsson’s heroine is like an updated and twisted version of Sherlock Holmes, more faithful to modern times, and omnisexual rather asexual.
Lisbeth Salander is (technically) a woman, and she is not the only female protagonist in Nordic thrillers. In fact, women abound in these tales, and its seems that female writers are drawn to this genre too. Gothic, in its original inception, attracted both female and male authorship. One of its pioneers was the professional writer Ann Radcliffe, and the genre was known to have a strong female following as parodied in Northanger Abbey. Jane Austen’s satire shows that these tales of gloomth were not placed on the literary pedestal, particularly when produced by women. Often at the margins of the canon, many of these works have since been reevaluated, and I am also pleased that many of their female contemporaries have had their literary efforts recognized. Just as Gothic was in its time, crime fiction remains a second-rate genre to many members of the cultural intelligentsia, the Booker Prize mafia.
In the past, female writers used Gothic motives in their narratives to bypass patriarchal censure and thus express the unexpressable. Not content with with the limited representations offered to them as women, they attempt to go beyond the madonna/harlot dichotomy by subverting the femme-fatale stereotype, narrating events from a seemingly neutral male viewpoint, by reversing roles, making the male protagonist the hysterical figure, or by resorting to Gothic archetype of the Doppelganger to highlight their own fragmented subjectivity. Through vampires and other monsters, they attempted to explore their sexuality and other taboo subjects. In her short story, La mujer fría (The Cold Woman), the 19th century Spanish writer Carmen de Burgos gives us a covert critical response to the passive vestal blonde inevitably falling prey to a satanic lover, a common male trope that resurged in popularity during the Belle Époque. It attacks the seemingly morbid male fascination with beautiful anaemic, almost ghostly, women, when it is revealed that the pearly alluring blonde is actually a living corpse. Camilla Läckberg’s 2003 novel Isprinsessan (The Ice Princess) opens with a blonde woman dead and covered in ice, the narrator clearly fascinated with her arctic beauty and blue-tinged lips.
Although contemporary female writers suffer less censure than their predecessors, and thus have less need to conceal their message, they remind us that inequality and prejudice have not completely vanished - not even in seemingly enlightened Scandinavian societies. Not only must they solve a mystery, these female investigators must also confront chauvinistic colleagues and console partners unable to understand their career choice. Crime fiction is not only a perfect platform for social criticism, but also shows that feminism is very much alive and thriving despite the tiresome buzz surrounding so-called postfeminism. Anyone who declares themselves a postfeminist should be bitch-slapped. Long live Scandinavian crime fiction.
