Women as culture
Oct. 15th, 2005 11:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 09:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 09:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 09:37 am (UTC)1. Toog posting a vagina on his blog.
2. Me posting a picture of Kumi.
3. Marxy posting a remark about a magazine about modelling being "superficial".
...and ask which of those stances grosses you out the most?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 09:45 am (UTC)i dont think anything youve written is overwhelmingly offensive or creepy or anything like that, it just kind of rubs me the wrong way... as a girl! who is not altogether infrequently looked at as eye candy.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 09:59 am (UTC)I think what I'm really doing here is asking my readers permission to cover "beautiful women" on this blog more often. Because this blog tends to be a morale-boosting repository of "the good things in life" as I see them, and to be forbidden to show you the women who make my life better (in no matter how small a way) would really be leaving out a big part of the picture. But, as you can see, I have an inner dialogue going on about it, because I, too, am an Anglo-Saxon and a post-feminist.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 10:08 am (UTC)i think it would be better to just show/mention women you find attractive than to analyse why youre doing it and legitimate it to death! its okay to like pretty girls - if it was just balls out pretty girls-liking it wouldnt have made me bristle at all. or saying "here is this cool girl/women/female who does this interesting stuff and also i find her attractive"... nothing wrong with that.
at any rate, i am a new reader, this is _your_ blog and i wouldn't fault you if my opinion didn't hold any clout !
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 10:09 am (UTC)During the scene where a drunken, awestruck Shimaru and his friend watch an exotic dancer- the friend says:
"That isn't art, that's something greater. Greater and more direct than art"
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 10:10 am (UTC)I agree with the premise that the intentional aspects of personal appearance are a legit manifestation of culture, and better yet, one that's about as pervasive and democratic as you can get. And I agree that the erotic is a legitimate source of inspiration.
What may have been "creepy" about your stance is the way these two premises are melded: Since it's specifically women rather than "interestingly dressed people" that are being "reviewed", the primary criteria for these reviews seem to be erotic, which cover both the aspects of their bodies/way of life that they can't change as well as the aspects that they can and have. Effectively, they're reviews of people rather than personal expression.
While I don't think it's strictly necessary or important to separate your aesthetic and your erotic response, it is important to keep separate the aspects of appearance/presentation that are intentional from the ones that aren't. I think most people would say that hairstyles (pubic ones, even), dress, body modifications or even an openly erotic performance are fitting subjects of review, most would balk at the idea of a review of (rather than aesthetic/erotic appreciation of) a woman's vagina.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 10:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 10:19 am (UTC)Isn't saying you shouldn't judge things people can't help a bit like saying "Homosexuality is genetic, so they can't help it, so we shouldn't condemn it. If it's an act of free choice, though, it's bad!"
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 10:34 am (UTC)I don't think it's necessary to refrain from comment on anything at all, but there is a distinction to be made between a review and an aesthetic appraisal. Whether or not one can actually untangle the intentionality of some phenomenon, a review (at least as I've seen the word used) assumes a creator or creators and a series of intentional acts, even if they are simply there to frame an unintentional or automatic process.
While one can comment on the aesthetic virtues/faults of a vagina or even a cloud formation, writing a review of a vagina seems to me as absurd as reviewing the constellations in the night sky.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 10:53 am (UTC)There are loads and loads and loads of blokes that say 'I love women' with a little twinkle in their eye and they invite supicion, especially if they seem to be saying 'FWHOAAAAAAwwwh" in a nice polite academic way.
Re: an aesthetic review of your aesthetic review
Date: 2005-10-15 11:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 11:16 am (UTC)I especially liked the way you provoked me to think about the dichotomies of aesthetic vs sexual appreciation and psychological vs social ways of being, among other things.
I love beautiful women too, even though I'm pretty much a straight female. In my sincere opinion, I find in general that women are more aesthetically appealing than men in general.
Reviewing The Elements
Date: 2005-10-15 11:19 am (UTC)Where would we be without Earth – and isn't there a lot of it! It's difficult for me to generalise about Earth, but the bits that I was able to check out (mainly around SW London) I found to be reliably solid, and useful for walking on. 7/10.
Fire
Ouch! Keep your distance from Fire, unless you're wearing some kind of protective clothing. Very handy for cooking and heating, Fire has the unfortunate drawback of having destructive properties which could lay waste to your house or garden. It's useful to buy an alarm to warn yourself against this particular Element. 4/10.
Air
Where is this particular element, you might be thinking? Well, it's everywhere. The most nebulous of the elements, Air is... (etc etc)
Re: Reviewing The Elements
Date: 2005-10-15 11:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 11:23 am (UTC)"When Darwin gave us the intellectual tool by which we could look at life as a unified field, he also implied that everything in that field connects to everything else: there isn't a hierarchy of life forms, but a web. We need a similar insight in the way we look at culture, a way of seeing all the cultural things that humans do - from hairstyles to abstract paintings - as different but connected manifestations of the same drive. So I start with a simple, inclusive assumption: culture is everything we don't have to do. Culture consists of the gratuitous stylistic extras that we add to the things we do have to do. You have to eat, but you don't have to decorate elaborately prepared curries with silver leaf. You have to move around, but you don't have to dance."
Re: Reviewing The Elements
Date: 2005-10-15 11:24 am (UTC)Re: I might delete this comment
Date: 2005-10-15 11:26 am (UTC)Re: Reviewing The Elements
Date: 2005-10-15 11:29 am (UTC)Re: Reviewing The Elements
Date: 2005-10-15 11:35 am (UTC)SWF seeks sights
Date: 2005-10-15 11:37 am (UTC)(Thongs - now that's something to be offended by, as champion of ergonomics)
Re: SWF seeks sights
Date: 2005-10-15 11:47 am (UTC)I fall in love with like every attractive gay guy, because they're the perfect companions, aesthetically and socially speaking. They're socialized like women, and so I feel more draw to them as human beings on par with one another than I do with straight males, for the most part.
The vagina photo was eye-blindingly white...the woman's legs were white, her thong was white... only her pubic hair and her crevice were dark. I found the whole affair very Japanese, however. Somehow the glorified juvenilia of the lacy white panties added a dimension of cuteness that subdued the eroticism, in my opinion.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 11:53 am (UTC)Re: SWF seeks sights
Date: 2005-10-15 11:54 am (UTC)