What differentiates human beings from animals? This is one of the central questions of King Lear, which I am now teaching to high school students. In the play, through the motif of clothing, Shakespeare explores what it means to be human.
When two of the king's daughters, who plot to kill their father, attempt to take away the king's entourage, they rhetorically ask him why he needs so many knights. Lear responds, "O reason no the need! Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous." Lear sees that our humanity depends on superfluity; even a beggar, who owns and can afford little, will wear or carry something "superfluous," a thing he or she does not "need." Lear goes on to suggest that not acknowledging this fact leads one to view "[M]an's life as cheap as beast's."
He tells one of his daughters: "Thou art a lady: / If only to go warm were gorgeous, / Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st, / Which scarcely keeps thee warm." Lear points out that his daughter's royal clothing, as unnecessary as his many knights, reflects her dignity as a lady.
Later, when the daughters shut the doors on their father, leaving him out in the storm to perish and go mad, the king begins to spout wisdom in the midst of his madness; he embraces a concept diametrically opposed to his earlier epiphany regarding clothing. An eighty year old king--flawed, driven out by his daughters, and standing on the heath amidst the rain and wind, thunder and lightning--cries out that an uncivilized and unclothed man is "the thing itself," meaning: he is genuine and more authentic than the "sophisticated" man who dresses according to societal norms. He proceeds to tear off his shirt. His attendants stop him from taking off his clothes, but he is realizing here that dignified dress does NOT necessarily reflect the integrity of a person--he learns this through a painful insight: he sees how his "noble" daughters, who dress in royal clothing, are actually ignoble inside; in fact, they are evil, plotting murder, treason, and torture.
Lear captures the hypocrisy of civilized dress with the following words: "Through tattered clothing small vices do appear / Robes and furred gowns hide all." One notices or projects small misdeeds in a person poorly dressed, but royal or fancy clothing hides a person's nature, and we tend to not see the truth behind the beautiful clothing, which distracts us from the person's character.
This dichotomy--the tension between the dignity of clothing and the treachery of clothing--is resolved towards the end of the play when Cordelia, Lear's third daughter (honest, loyal, loving), saves him from the storm and attempts to bring him back to health and sanity. What is the first thing Cordelia does to make sure her father is restored to health? She has the king dressed in royal clothing. This careful concern for dress and the proper clothing for her father resolves Lear's earlier opposing ideas.
Ideally, dignity in dress does not necessarily represent hypocrisy; rather, our apparel grounds us in our identity and keeps us sane. One can marry the outer and the inner with integrity. The superfluity of clothing clarifies one's identity. Without the superfluous, we are abandoned royalty: wronged, unprotected, and out in a storm, a storm that is blind to who is human and who is beast.
In the new documentary about the artist Louise Bourgeois, the artist states in the beginning of the film that the problem with being a woman is that one has to always worry about making oneself likeable, and this constant struggle is such a "pain in the neck."
Wanting to be liked can be a struggle for both men and women, but living to please seems to take on a heightened proportions of intensity for girls and women, and it is always an issue for artists, especially female artists. I remember the poet Lucille Clifton saying that sometimes when she writes a poem she wants to sound "pretty" because she thinks "men are reading this," but then she has to remind herself that the poem must lead the way; she must "follow the poem."
This whole discussion reminds me of the thesis of Wendy Shalit's new book, which points out that at one time women and girls pleased others by being good, but these days they feel pressured to please by behaving immodestly. How do we escape from these binary oppositions? How can we function as women, girls, artists, or men, boys, and non-artists, and live without striving to please everyone? How do we let ourselves just "follow the poem"?
My last post on this blog discussed the on-line news and culture magazine, slate.com, and one piece published there where the writer declares that she is not a prude after admitting to being disturbed by an overly sexualized movie advertisement.
I could not help but post another "I am not a prude" citing on slate.com. In a recent piece published about the governor of New York being caught in a prostitution ring, the writer discusses the history of prostitution and the law. After listing the arguments that support the illegality of prostitution, she writes, "You don't have to be a moralist or a prude to buy the argument for banning prostitution."
What is this with prudes and slate.com? Is it a coincidence that both writers are women? Are women more afraid of being viewed as prudes than men?
The on-line news and culture magazine, Slate.com, hosts a section where a writer designated "The Explainer" discusses cultural issues. One piece involves an analysis of the print ads for the new movie, Hitman, on which the co-star is pictured wearing unusually skimpy attire, even for movie ads.
The explainer asks, "Does anyone sign off on racy movie posters?" The journalist writes that the actress is "wearing a sheer, red-tinted hanky masquerading as a dress. If you're lewd enough to look between her legs, you'll see the curve of her right buttock and a small genital bulge."
According to the Explainer, when the MPAA rejects posters, it is usually for violence. A recent rejection included an image of a man shackled with a burlap sack over his head. There were fears that many would be disturbed by the image after it became known that U.S. soldiers had been torturing prisoners with a technique known as "hooding."
On the other hand, sheer clothing and genital bulges have become acceptable to the MPAA but maybe not to slate.com. But wait. Here is the strange part: after admitting to her concern about this image, the Explainer seems embarrassed by her reaction. Yes, embarrassed that she was embarrassed.
After her dismay over the image is expressed, we are assured: "The Explainer is no prude."
It is with great relief that we learn of the explainer's lack of prudishness because, as we all know at modestlyyours, if you are disturbed by overly sexual imagery plastered in public areas then you are probably a "prude," a word which, today, connotes that one disapproves of sex and may not even enjoy it herself.
A critic expressing concern over an overly sexualized public image = the critic must not enjoy sex. Has this become the new equation?
Previous blogs here, essays on the host site, and the other sources and studies referenced on this site support an inverse equation from the above: a sensitive and uncallous attitute towards the erotic reflects a richness and sensitivity in that area of one's life.
The self-proclaimed non-prudish Explainer goes on to chide herself and her initial reaction when she asks, What "offended the Explainer's delicate sensibilities?"
Perhaps the Explainer feels pressured to reject and make fun of her initial "delicate" emotions and embrace a more callous stance.
Who is pressuring her? Is there someone who is making her feel like a "prude?" I want to let the Explainer know that she can be brave and rebel! Don't be embarrassed to be embarrassed, Explainer! Why are you embarrassed? Can you please explain?
Somehow, Vivian Gornick’s stunning memoir, Fierce Attachments, published twenty years ago, fell into my hands on one of these last breezy and humid days of summer. I began reading the rich, vivid, and vulnerable story of a little girl growing up in the Bronx among working class immigrants.
Amidst the raw, funny, wild, and sweet memories trembling with intellectual rigor, horror, and tenderness, Gornick describes one memory that took my breath away.
The young Vivian becomes close with a sad and unique woman, vastly different from the other women in the neighborhood: her downstairs neighbor, Nettie. A young widow and mother, blindingly glamorous, Nettie is impoverished, in constant pain, and with no mothering skills. She was a Ukrainian peasant who emigrated to the Bronx. After Nettie's husband dies at sea before their son is born, Gornick keeps her company in her small and chaotic kitchen. Although Vivian loves this simple woman whom she spends long hours comforting--or with whom she discusses unrealistic fantasies--she also lives in a kind of terrified awe of her and fear for her. This is how Gornick describes Nettie’s relationships and impact on people:
She had a way of walking up the block that had made me uncomfortable from the time I was ten years old. She walked like no other woman in the neighborhood…Her walk was slow and deliberate. She moved first one haunch, then the other, making her hips sway. Everyone knew this woman was going nowhere, that she was walking to walk, walking to feel the effect she had on the street.
Reading these words made me think of how we, as women, have what feels like power over others. This feeling can be thrilling, intoxicating, and it can even make one feel loved. Gornick goes on to write:
Her walk insisted on the flesh beneath the clothes. It said, “This body has the power to make you want.”…Men and women alike hungered for her. It was awful. I could see she aroused strong emotion, but that emotion seemed bound up with punishment not privilege. The way people looked at her—the cruelty in the men, the anger in the women—made me fearful. I felt her in danger. Nettie walking up the block became woven into the fabric of early anxiety.
Nettie’s desire to provoke sexual feelings in strangers wreaks a silent havoc on the neighborhood. Gornick goes even deeper into her analysis of Nettie. She writes,
Sexual malice ran so deep in her it was an essence: primitive, calculating, stubborn; enraged at the center; made reckless by some burning imperative that pushed against a shifting outer limit, wholly determined by how bad she felt about herself and her life on any given day of the week. She knew of no other way to make herself feel better than to make people want her. She knew that when she swayed her hips, raised her eyelids slowly, brushed her hand languorously through her red hair, promise stirred in the groin. She knew this. It was all she knew. She thought this knowledge gave her power. “You will feel and I will not feel,” her swaying body said, “and that will make you weak and me strong.”
Gornick reveals Nettie’s mistake in believing that her beauty gave her power or strength. Her sense of power was an illusion. This truth becomes apparent when Nettie’s son Richie, an eight year old boy, sexually attacks Gornick when she is seventeen years old. Obviously, as an eight year old, he was no threat. But one thing was clear. Gornick writes that “Richie understood better than [Nettie] what was actually going on, and one hot summer evening when I was seventeen and he was eight he showed me what he knew…He knew then his mother’s life was not an exercise in power but an exchange of humiliations. Now he was just trying out what he knew.”
In the center of Jerusalem there is a wilderness. This summer my friend and I headed down the trail for a short hike. We walked towards the watering hole through parched grass, stone ruins, in the middle of the dry intense heat. Beneath the small pond, where a few people were swimming off the heat and dust, we picniced under an almond tree on the browned but blossoming earth. On our way back up the trail we met two Israeli teenage boys who approached us cautiously, one of them asking in soft rapid Hebrew, "Are there girls swimming in the pool at the bottom of the path?" My friend replied, "Yes, there are girls there." The boys looked at each other, concerned. "Are they dressed modestly?” We weren't sure if the girls were finished swimming or not and tried to answer their questions as best we could.
Now that I am home, back in New York City, that moment feels like a dream. The fact that boys would be worried that they might find themselves in an inappropriate situation rather than seeking one out now feels like a made-up utopian fantasy.
Last week the New York Times Magazine ran an article about the popularity of "sex magazines" on college campuses. Student editors at Vassar College, Boston University, University of Chicago, Harvard, University of Massachusetts, and Yale were interviewed for the piece.
These student produced magazines include photographs of fellow students posing nude, simulating sex with each other, or masturbating as well as "erotic" prose and poetry by students. The photographs are literally of the girl next door--one can find photographs of students from Shakespeare class, one's own friends, exes, and people you see at parties or in the library.
The editors of these magazines oppose the term "pornographic" to describe the publications; to their ears, the word denotes a non-literary and mainstream commercial venture dominated by men, and they consider themselves to be renegades. The editors also don't see themselves as producing material for the purpose of male masturbation, which is the primary goal of pornography. These college editors, many of them women, prefer the term "sex positive."
The magazines' target audience is supposed to be diverse: male, female, straight, and gay. The vision of a varied audience allows students to get away with publishing the magazines with support from mentors--the magazines have gained acceptance and respect from many quarters (and some student councils have funded them), because editors are supposedly not just targeting hetereosexual men. A recent issue of Boink, Boston University's sex magazine, displays a series of photographs of naked B.U. female students followed by a couple of images of male students, including one shown masturbating completely naked except for a silver cross around his neck.
One editor insists that her parents have been supportive of her venture. "'As much as they could be,' she said. `I was raised very Catholic, but they live in today’s world'." It seems that much of the parents, faculty, and administration of "today's world" are surprisingly comfortable with these college sex magazines. One professor who supports his college's magazine hopes that upcoming issues will explore "sexistential questions."
One student muddles through her feelings about Boink: “I believe Andrea Dworkin, that porn perpetuates violence against women...Most pornography is just women. Boink is different in that way, but because porn does feed into that system, I tend to be against it in general, and I don’t think just because we’re putting men in it that makes it O.K. But it’s a step forward that men are being put in it.”
Although using men for the magazines have made the publications hip, the choice to include men has not made the magazines profitable. The editors acknowledge that they lose financially when they include men. (It turns out that straight men prefer to buy pornography that includes only women and gay men prefer to buy pornography that includes only men.) Also, the editors receive little manual assistance from their peers when laboring to turn out the issues. Many students who first hear about their college's magazine want to help out. But, as one editor put it, "Their interest lasts about five minutes once they find out that they’re not going to be surrounded by naked girls. People have a very skewed view of what it’s all about. They think it’s going to be the Playboy mansion 24-7.”
Even though the sex magazines are supposedly counter-culture enough to include naked men in the face of financial pressure, women still end up losing at the game. Women get involved with the magazines, as editors or models, to gain power and control in an onversexed culture that has maxed out on objectifying women; but the enterprise backfires on them. Here is a story that The Times recounts: a male student, who modeled for one of the issues, met a female model at a party for the magazine. They briefly dated. But then he stopped calling her. He said, “She’s a porn girl, so ... I dunno. I assumed she wasn’t really looking for much from me. I’m a guy. There’s a lot less stigma attached to it. A chick, people think ‘slutty,’ whereas a dude gets associated with male bravado.”
The woman the male student referred to as the "porn girl" was then interviewed. The Times writes that the woman became distraught when asked about this relationship. She said, “That’s not why he told me he broke up with me...The reason we split up is because [he] was in a time in his life when he didn’t want to have a relationship.”
The personal stories that women submit to be considered for publication in the magazines are very telling. The editor at Harvard's sex magazine, H Bomb, sums up the short personal memoirs that come in from women this way: The women conclude their sad stories of sexual encounters with the realization that "they’re not fulfilled by casual sex, and yet they can’t find someone they can connect with.”
Although the editors deny that the magazines are pornographic, it seems that the magazines continue to be popular because men want to look at pictures of naked women; and women somehow feel that they can gain a kind of power in this system. Yet, no one admits to this dynamic, which hides behind the compelling veneer of equal opportunity objectification.
This is how one student describes her understanding of her college's sex magazine: “What really stood out is that there were male students in it. Because there were men in it, and gay men, under the same cover, it was sort of alternative. It kind of equalized it: gay men could look at it, women could look at it, and that was great. Women as objects, men as objects.”
Let me repeat that last line, "That was GREAT? Women as objects, men as objects."
Can anyone reading this post make a strong argument for the benefits of objectifying men? Comments by Katha Pollitt, a leading feminist thinker, on the post, Porny Poetry, published on this blog a year ago, reflect a thought process that seems to value just that. Pollitt argues that when true equality exists between men and women some day, men will also be objectified. Pollitt wrote:
Feminism hasn't gotten us far enough-- to economic, social, cultural equality. I think if women were not subordinate they would not be seen as the bearers of sexuality (more than men, that is) and men as the consumers of it. In that world, maybe there would be lots of naked photos used to sell poetry magazines, or maybe there would be none -- but it wouldn't be just WOMEN'S photos.
Is the success of college sex magazines a sign that we have achieved full equality between men and women?
To be honest, I am baffled, but it seems that many intelligent people support the notion that objectifying men is a step forward.
I can't think of an argument that would bring me to believe that the objectification of men could lead to anything positive, but, dear readers, I am willing to listen.
Several years ago the BBC aired a report finding (see this report on their website) that most prostitutes are psychologically "shell shocked" and that two thirds suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
This is an important study because it debunks the "pretty woman" happy hooker myth.
But one prostitute in San Francisco interviewed for the piece disagreed with the findings saying that "My job is stressful and my job has bad days, but it's way better than anybody else's I know...The most stressful thing about my job is that it's illegal."
Do you think that prostitutes would stop suffering from psychological trauma if their job was legal? Or do you think that the nature of the job causes a deep distress that the report compares to the shell-shock many war veterans endure?
Yesterday morning the BBC radio show aired a segment on the recent report by the American Psychological Association, which states that the current popularity of sexualized images, songs, clothing, and toys among young people is damaging the health of children.
In the BBC's words: "In a report released today, the APA, the American Psychological Association, says that a generation of young girls is being psychologically damaged because of the proliferation of sexual images in the media, clothing and toy industry."
The BBC interviewed activists in England, India, Japan, Nigeria, Iran, and the U.S. where feminists and others expressed their concern about the prevalence of this type of exposure and its negative impact on girls in their countries. You can read about it here.
An article appeared recently in the New York Times magazine profiling Tariq Ramadan ("Tariq Ramadan Has an Identity Issue"), a Muslim intellectual originally from Switzerland and of Egyptian descent now living in England.
Buruma tells us that Ramadan is having an impact among thoughtful Muslim intellectuals and that Americans in both the liberal and in the conservative camps are baffled because Ramadan's belief system does not seem to fit into any recognizable category.
While Ramadan espouses many liberal views he has also said that "The body must not be forgotten. Men and women are not the same. In Islamic tradition, women are seen in terms of being mothers, wives, or daughters."
Buruma then writes about the "allegations" made against Ramadan. Ramadan has been attacked for advising "Muslim girls to avoid shaking hands with men..." and for warning "against mixed swimming pools" and "women engaging in sports if their bodies were exposed to men."
I was surprised by the content of the above quotes. I expected to read a string of statements that reflected abuse or condescension. If Ramadan's ideas are being attacked by some feminists and others then surely he is saying something that involves the mistreatment of women.
Ramadan's words are so ugly to some that he has had to practically deny them. Buruma writes that Ramadan "claims that those quotes were taken out of context." Ramadan defends himself by saying that "men and women should have a choice. If they want to follow the rules of modesty, they should be able to choose to do so."
This is the moderate approach, yet many are still schocked or offended by this man's beliefs.
What is offensive about suggesting to girls within a certain religious context that they should try not to expose their bodies to men in public? What is threatening about CHOOSING to follow a modest lifestyle?
