~ The Book of This and That, by Robert Lynd, 1915
And that’s why I keep it seldom.
A good article from The New Inquiry on women and beauty, specifically this idea in our collective minds that the perfect woman should be a blank slate meant to be slathered with artifice:
“ To play the woman game well and win, you must be able to exchange identities as easily as you might cast off last winter’s peacoat and slip into a see-through tank top. Underneath it all, women are all the same — aren’t we, girls? Like Barbie, under her clothes the perfect woman is neat and spare, smooth and pale, bleached and stripped of hair.”
I think as women we think about this problem of beauty all the time, and we, or at least I, pay a lot of lip service to the idea of inner beauty, and beauty of all shapes and kinds. But the ideal still matters Recently, I got a stretch mark on my stomach. Some people seem to never get them, I’ve been prone to them since puberty, but never before on my stomach. And as soon as that mark appeared, I was plunged into depths of despair, because I feel like now that my body is marked this way I am ruined forever, even if I lose lots of weight, and keep myself perfect in every other way, I can never get rid if this mark, and I can never, therefore, be who I am supposed to be. It’s a useless thing to think. Mostly I’m the only one who notices. But there it is.
“We can’t perfectly control our online selves any more than we can control the contours of our flesh. Bodies, like data, are leaky. Out of the mess of bodies and blood and bones and pixels and dreams and books and hopes we create this mess of reality we call a self, we make it and remake it. Each human being is a palimpsest of possible faces, of personas, and none of us were ‘born this way.’”
What if it didn’t even matter? What if we expected our bodies to change and to be marked, and weren’t in a panic to keep it at bay or cover it up? What if nobody thought the performance of beauty was the main thing about women? What if we performed exuberantly, but only exactly as we wanted to? What kind of world would that be?
The “Cathedral Dress” from Micro S/S 2012
© Iris van HerpenFREAKY
