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

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[(Anonymous)]

Oh poor Momus. I'm frequently on your side in these sorts of disputes, but this one has you cornered.

Then again, I'd hardly much more defend Marxy's stance on Japan; sometimes it seems the both of your are just laying over different Westernized projections, the one frolicking and smelling flowers, the other angry and proselytizing. In the end, Momus' is rather more fun.

But there are s few things about the link above that irked me enough to respond.

As a linguophile in general, a bit of a mut (though identifiably white), and someone interested enough in Japan to have become fluent in the language over the years, it bothers me just a bit to see an umbrella caricature of "Asiaphilia" drawn in such a way. The "white male" subject inevitably takes the character of a headstrong man-of-action, afforded an infinite store of narcissistic white-male entitlement from his colonial privilege and ever on the prowl for things to pillage, women to steal.

And this character -- presumably, from the tone of the writer, generalizable to all non-asian purveyor's of Asian culture, thus finds his image of Asia inexorably determined by colonial power dynamics, "docile, exotic, mysterious, dangerous, yet strangely alluring."

But where is the space for the thinker, the aesthete, for the man who could hardly seek to claim such colonial entitlement for himself? Who may see Japan, for all of his being foreign, not as "other" but as "same"? Can a person like Donald Richie, for instance, truly be shoehorned into this caricature?

More pertinently, can Momus? I think it's important to realize that even the postmodern fetishization of Japan has been actively perpetuated by the Japanese themselves to legitimize notions of Japanese exceptionalism. And its academic origins go back to decades before WW2, by which time Japanese philosophers had already gone a long way to asserting that Japan was unprecedented in the world for synthesis of East/West, destined to go beyond the merely modern -- a stance Japan had built up without *ever* having been directly subject to colonial rule.

I can think of another rather simple example for how the categories of cultural politics can fail to properly explain one's proclivities.

Say that you are an American, and happen to go to live in a foreign country for a few months (heaven forbid) There you meet people from various other countries, one of whom happens to be French and whom you befriend, and he introduces you to wonderful little things like drinking wine and eating fine cheeses -- which, simply because you find this delicious, you take quite a shining to.

You pick it up as a habit and bring it home to America. When your fellow countrymen see you drinking wine and eating cheese, however they summarily dismiss your actions as little more than pretentious posturing.

Why? Well, because the American category of Things French has this air of elevation associated with it, and American society incidentally codes any claim to such elevation as pretentiousness (by contrast, for example, to Louis Vuitton in Japan -- elevated, but to different effect) You are therefore seen as doubtlessly motivated by this mechanism.

In reality, however, the context within which you developed the habit was not America; it was the small space of fellowship created by you and your French friend. Nor had your basic motive (gustatory satisfaction) much to do with inter-cultural politics.

And there need not be so much difference, I would say, between developing a taste for wines and cheeses, and developing a taste for Asian culture.