Women as culture

[imomus]

Brian Eno—a man both refreshing and right, a rare combination—said in an interview about 15 years ago that it was important for him to have a studio in Kentish Town because it brought him into close contact with a stream of beautiful, fashionable young women, and that women were underestimated as cultural objects; it was just as important, Eno thought, to pay attention to the fashions and hairstyles of attractive women as to note what was playing at, well, the English National Opera (ENO). Perhaps more so.

On the face of it, that doesn't seem like a very controversial stance. It seems semiotic, democratic, and slightly erotic; the comment of a man who loves women, and loves culture, and is prepared to see women—or at least the strangers passing by his door—as culture. The logical extension of this is that one would "review" women, or the cultural signifiers they display, in exactly the same way as one reviews, say, a classic record by Caetano Veloso. And of course newspapers and blogs do this; papers have fashion coverage, and back in August I ended my Click Opera Beauty Week with a paen to the beauty of a girl called Nine.

Well, today I'd like to tell you that it's had a significant impact on the quality of my week to discover that Kumi Okamoto of Paris-based band Konki Duet has grown her hair long, as you can see from the photo above, where she's modelling a raw silk blouse from Paris Chinatown company Hoaly (reduced from €25 to just €16, hurry hurry!).

Of course, treating women as culture is problematical. Here are some of the problems, abstracted from complaints that arose when I "reviewed" Nine (not from Nine herself, mind you, but from "feminist" male friends of hers):

1. Women are cultural, of course, but they're not just culture. They're people too!
My response: But of course culture isn't just culture either. It's people too, and when you review it you hurt or help people.

2. How can you, as a man, distinguish your aesthetic appreciation of a woman from your sexual appreciation of her?
My response: I can't. The pleasure parts of our brains are so intimately connected with bodily pleasures—our appetites for sex and food—that it's silly to even try to disentangle the aesthetic from the sensual. But please don't assume I'm trying to seduce every woman I express appreciation of.

3. The woman may not like to be appreciated, and your girlfriend may not like you to speak about your admiration for other women!
My response: This argument comes from men, not from the women I'm "reviewing" and not from my girlfriend, who's quite capable of discussing the beauty of other women with me. The women in question have posted images of themselves in public places, seeking aesthetic admiration... as we all do. It makes the world a better place.

4. You're paying too much attention to how people look, and not enough to how they are inside!
My response: If you look at 2, you'll see that I don't dissociate the aesthetic and the sensual. Similarly, I tend to be endorsing what people do as well as how they look. Kumi, for instance, has made really wonderful pop records with Konki Duet, Shinsei, Crazy Curl, and so on. What's more, beauty (and this is something you can't see in photographs) is also about a way of being. I've known Kumi as a friend since 2001, and her way of being is simple (she works in a bakery), virtuous, sincere, serious, and slightly ingenue. These, along with things like body posture, voice, and so on, all add to the effect. Body and soul can't, in the end, be separated, and nor can a person's outside be detached from her inside, her surface from her depth.

5. Your "appreciation" might sit better in France or Japan than Britain or America, and might sit better in the 60s than now.
My response: You might be right there. One of the things that most marks one epoch from another, and one culture from another, is the way men relate to women. One of the most interesting parts of the discussion between curator Philippe Vergne and Atelier Bow-wow's Yoshiharu Tsukamoto linked from Thursday's comments section is when they talk about Yoshiharu's impressions of walking around Minneapolis, and how it compares with Tokyo. The main difference is sexuality: in Tokyo sexuality is open, on the surface, whereas in Minneapolis it's hidden, sublimated. Perhaps this explains, they speculate, why architecture made in Japan (and Europe) is more social, architecture made in America more psychological.

The kind of objections I'm rebutting here tend to come from Anglo-Saxon men, speaking, with what they think is a "feminist" mindset, on behalf of women they claim to be defending. I wonder, though, if this sort of "feminism" isn't part of the problem, not the solution. It comes from a culture where women are treated as private property, born with the names of their fathers, taking the names of their husbands, disappearing from circulation. This cautionary attitude to their public celebration might even be a kind of "veiling" of women, a desire to exclude them from the cultural process, to rule their sexuality or beauty out-of-order as a cultural signifier.

These problems arise more often in Anglo-Saxon cultures (you'll search English-language blogs in vain for the celebratory, non-sexist vagina seen on Toog's blog this week, for instance) because what poses here as feminism is actually a post-protestant, puritan attitude to women and to beauty. You see it when rockist music fans talk about music made by attractive women, and insist that the music's all that matters, or that attractiveness must somehow equate with superficiality, a link you could find pretty much anywhere, but I most recently found on Marxy's blog in a comment about Relax magazine. "For those worried about the current state of subcultural sophistication in Japanese youth culture," he said sarcastically, "you'll be happy to know the new issue of Relax is dedicated to that eternal source of depth and artistic inspiration: modeling." Somehow I think Brian Eno wouldn't be sneering; he wouldn't see a magazine about modeling as in any way diminishing subcultural sophistication. I'm with Eno; "Sometimes I think that Japanese hairdressers are generating more basic new forms than pop stars," I told Modern Painters magazine in 2003.

No apologies at all, then. Click Opera will continue to endorse beautiful women just as it endorses beautiful music, architecture, design and art. Some of which—unsurprisingly, really—also happens to be made by beautiful women.

Comments

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I agree with this post. Beauty is basically part of social inequality. While it's better to be honest and admit how much we're motivated by beauty, I don't see that there's anything particularly admirable or healthy in that situation itself, certainly not insofar as beauty equals sexual beauty.

To give an example of how depressing this is as a fact of life, I would say that, although I am really rather unattractive physically (and probably in many other ways) that still doesn't make me more drawn to having relationships with unattractive people. It's just a tragedy and nothing more, one of nature's hideous practical jokes, and even if art must, to some extent celebrate sexual beauty, I think it should not claim that there is something 'healthy' or 'positive' about the whole thing. It should be open to the tragedy of beauty, and only then can it begin to comprehend the compassion that leads to an appreciation of beauty beyond the sexual.

Yes, I do favour agape over eros.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I mean, of course, that I agree with the anonymous post directly above.

[(Anonymous)]

I suppose what I find most disconcerting about physical beauty in western culture is the effect it has on young women, I mean this struggle starts when we are very young and affects us to such a great deal as to follow us into adulthood. I know we cannot escape the natural human reaction to beauty but culture has a great impact on how it affects the individuals within it. There are a lot of different kinds of beauty, and they can probably all be traced back to some evloutionary development, as they are all relative. And in my humble oppinon beauty would not exist without someone to percieve it, but because of this I like to suspect because of this relativism we have a choice in what how we percieve beauty and how it affects us in turn.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

One of my favourite films is Tod Browning's Freaks, because it deals with the whole idea of beauty, and how lack of it can make people outcasts in human society. I do find it a strangely beautiful film, though. It's as if the 'freaks' in the film exist entirely outside of our notions of beauty. That's an idea I find very attractive.

I had an experience in Taiwan with someone who probably would not generally be considered physically beautiful. There was a woman in a wheelchair, who appeared to have been born with very short limbs, and was unusually proportioned in other ways. I never spoke to her, but I passed her a number of times on the street, and each time she gave me a truly wonderful smile that I have never been able to forget. The sad thing is that I feel guilt even in relating this story.

Inequality, not beauty

[(Anonymous)]

"the tragedy of beauty"
--would make nice song title.

Isn't it the tragedy of inequality, though, as well as relative to time and place?

Let's say everyone is ugly. Would we not begin to differentiate between various degrees of ugliness? Would not some of the "ugly" (over time) come to be seen as beautiful?

As to time and place, do you know an old "the Twilight Zone" where a young lady with her face wrapped in gauze is hoping her recent operation was successful, or she will be "cast out" of her society. The bandages come off, revealing a beautiful face--but alas! There is a commotion and we soon realize that the operation failed as everyone else has a pig-like face--presumably the norm on this particular (we now realize different) planet.

Mike Z.

Re: Inequality, not beauty

[(Anonymous)]

...that "the tragedy of inequality" is an absurd notion, is intentional--though at some deep level far removed from any human practicality, it rings true. The tragedy is how many people deal with inequality and difference: with intolerance and knee-jerk categorizing.

Re: Inequality, not beauty

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, it is the tragedy of inequality, but, as someone else has piobnted out elsewhere, beauty does not only create misery for those who don't have it, but for those who have it too, who are often valued for nothing else, and then end up losing it, anyway. So, in that sense, the tragedy involves both haves and have-nots.

attractiveness..."Luck not skill"

[svenskasfinx.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit drawn in too by trying to avoid being biased concerning beauty as well.. it seems to be not only a bit of the idea of the "misfortune of someone else.. but the fact that beauty is something we have "luck of the draw" with.

Sometimes good luck, being born beautiful-- in this situation almost everyone healthy is born STUNNING as all babies are BEAUTIFUL... however we are not always lucky, accident lack of care, neglect, bad health and habits will sometimes turn a person born "beautiful" into something society considers "ugly"..

I think I realized that search for the "agape" version of love lead me to have to totally neglect any of the illusions of beauty (or ideas of ugliness and bias) and turn to the soul and the mind for what I eventually fell in love with, sight unseen...The man I'm with now and I met via the internet (without looking and without seeing the other) realisticly asked ourselves and each other "when we meet, what will we do if we are not pleasing to each other physically?"

It's a hard question for anyone who is within a relationship with someone they enjoy their beauty but realize there was nothing more than that they had in common.. the reverse of such a thing is surrealisticly inside out.. ..

strangely enought though, we NEVER had to address that question.. it worked out completely, From Sweden to Chicago, (a long way to go just to see if these feelings were real..) both of us were prepared for THE ULTIMATE WORST.. we were worried.. I for one was in fear that he may smell bad to me, or have some weird habit..(I wasn't thinking about LOOKS at all and I guess neither was he)

agape vs erotic love -- both are fine both can be in the SAME place.. only difference is when you just have erotic love alone, it may be just the feast of the eyes and not of the soul.

Both ways it goes, luck is luck..

Re: attractiveness..."Luck not skill"

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I suppose my original comment might have seemed overly pessimistic. I do think that physical appearance has too much social influence (in the wrong way), but I have also noticed what I hope might be a kind of antidote to this situation. That is, sometimes, when at first I don't find a person physically attractive, but then get to know them, and find I like them as a person, they come to appear physically beautiful to me, too.

[fireflesh.livejournal.com]

Thank goodness for agape. I'm considered pretty/sexy (young American woman speaking here) but when I apply any effort whatsoever into my appearance, or look towards selection with eros in mind, I always attract foul slime with no regard for intellect or even real kindness. Thus, for emotional and mental health, I often end up in beauty/beast relationships with very kind partners, who have to cringe on the street when we overhear befuddled strangers openly pointing out our difference in appearance.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Well, I've had a surprising amount of replies to my comment here. Do you suppose that means I've struck a chord?

Actually, your description of beauty/beast relationships reminds me of a funny story about myself. I'll try and keep it brief. There were a number of people discussing an 'odd couple': "I just don't get it, she's a wonderful, ethereal, willowy blonde, with a great, positive attitude, and he's a short, balding Irishman with a chip on his shoulder. What on Earth does she see in him? It's so weird," says one of those gathered.

"I saw something like that the other day," says an Australiam fellow, "Does anyone here know Elise [name changed to protect the innocent]? She's this really lovely, bubbly blonde, who could probably go out with any bloke she wants. I met her the other day with her boyfriend, and he was this really pale, withdrawn bloke who looked like he was going to hang himself at any moment. It was really weird. Does anyone know him? His name's Quentin."

"Yes," said my father, who happened to be present. "I know him. He's my son."

I wish I had been able to see the look on the Australian fellow's face.

[svenskasfinx.livejournal.com]

I guess you did strike a cord! Yes....