by Jean Roberta
What would I know of fads? I like to think my taste in most things (clothes, literature, art, music) is “classic,” but sometimes this just describes the fads of yesteryear.
When I began writing stories with explicit sex scenes, I hoped that erotica wouldn’t turn out to be a fad. So far, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
The presidency of Donald Trump is one fad that I (and many others) hope will end as quickly as an English teacher can spell “IMPEACH.”
The trouble with any fad is that no one knows when or if it will end. Motion pictures with sound were described as a silly fad when they were new. After all, "silent" movies with a musical accompaniment were universal, since they didn’t require the actors to speak in any human language.
Rock-and-roll was described as a vulgar, passing fad by harrumping adults in the 1950s and even the ‘60s. In the mid-sixties, there were three major bands that I knew of, and they were often compared, as though only one could survive for another year. They were the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Dave Clark Five. No one knew at the time which of these would turn out to be a fad.
School dress codes of the time were unbearable. Teenage girls were universally criticized for wearing skirts that showed their knees. The conservative types (and even leering boys) who assessed the moral fiber of each miniskirt-wearer didn’t understand that when a handful of designers have launched the latest style, manufacturers start producing it, and soon nothing else can be found in the stores. Short skirts weren’t all about sexual availability. And when girls were sent home to change clothes, what were they supposed to change into? Pants/trousers were considered even less suitable for school than short skirts.
At the time, my mother told me that men’s trousers had always been fairly baggy, and always would be. Apparently she hadn’t looked at any all-male rock band on TV. Nor had she noticed Henry VIII showing off his legs in a pair of hose in a full-color reproduction in a coffee-table book we had, titled World-Famous Paintings.
I was told that university education (and worse, professional training) for women was a passing fad that would have to give way to reality. How could women possibly become doctors or lawyers? Well, okay, there might be a few, but those gals were clearly freaks who were probably infertile.
Here is a passage from my historical novella, The Flight of the Black Swan, in which Emily the narrator contemplates a possible career as a couturiere for the drag queens who are her shipmates. She has shockingly chosen to wear men’s trousers, altered to fit, instead of the fashionably voluminous skirts of the 1860s.
As I stood at the rails, admiring the view, or wandered about the ship in search of occupation, men consulted me about fashion and adornment. Could I make a gentleman’s waistcoat out of brocade, assuming there was some to be had in the Bahamas? Would I consider making a lady’s gown to a man’s dimensions out of an old sail which could be dyed a beautiful dark blue once indigo was procured? Did I think pearl or diamond jewellery to be better suited to a rather sallow complexion? Did I not think that parting one’s hair exactly in the middle made one’s nose look too long?
Watching the clouds, my companions sighed about the virtues of fine cotton: its softness against the skin, its fresh smell when freshly-ironed, its fluidity, its elegance, and its scarcity since the beginning of the American war.
Early in our voyage, I asked Roger and Martin about our mission. “Husbands,” I asked them, “are we to settle in the Bahamas? And how will we survive?”
Martin cleared his throat. “We may do, Emily,” he told me, “but first we need to intercept a blockade-runner.”
Roger had explained to me that the attempts of the Union government to cut off supplies to the Confederacy were regularly thwarted by cleverly-manned schooners from the southern states which sailed to Nassau to trade cotton and tobacco for items more useful to the southerners. He hadn’t told me that few of the Green Men valued the life of a darky more than a bale of cotton or a pound of tobacco.
“Cotton?” I shrieked, completely out of sorts. “Are we sailing to the New World like adventurers of old just to steal a shipload of cotton? Are you stark raving mad?”
“Get hold of yourself, Emily,” admonished Roger. “Have you never heard of expeditions to the Far East for spices and silk? Some adventurers made fortunes for themselves and improved the lives of all their countrymen. And cotton is not all we need. Tobacco, especially in a good cigar, makes men more amiable. The best physicians attest to this. Green Men aren't spartans, dear. We need beauty and pleasure as much as we need air.”
His argument was persuasive, if lacking in moral rigor. So we were not all set on defending universal freedom after all.
Now I knew that I could earn my own fortune as a dressmaker for men, who would pay me in coin and in adoration if I could dress them in ladies’ attire – and gentlemen’s suits as well. For an instant, I imagined myself as a designer to rival Monsieur Worth in Paris. I could ease my conscience by repaying my parents for the extraordinary expense of my education, which had caused them hardship.
(If you would like a link, try copying this: http://www.amazon.com/Flight-Black-Swan-Jean-Roberta/dp/159021417)
As we all know now, the American Civil War—like other wars—was a passing fad because one side won. (And as is often the case, the side that won the first battles was not the side that had the last word, so to speak.)
Keeping up with fads is as tricky as balancing on an endless tightrope. Anyone who grabs hold of the latest thing is likely to be considered ridiculous, especially after the fad has passed, but those who don’t even seem to know what the latest thing is seem dense or deliberately ignorant.
Is erotica about Bigfoot or dinosaurs a fad that has passed? If so, I hardly noticed it.
Excuse me while I go scroll through various social media to find out what is trending so I can explain why I’m “above” being influenced by particular fads.
Showing posts with label fashion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fashion. Show all posts
Sunday, July 23, 2017
Friday, November 4, 2016
The Language of Clothes
by Jean Roberta
As various people have said, anything that anyone wears is a costume. There have been strenuous debates about whether dress codes should be enforced in schools, universities, places of worship, offices, restaurants or nightclubs. (An imaginary sign sent to me by a friend reads: “Men: no shirt, no service. Women: no shirt, free drinks.”) Freedom to wear whatever one wants seems like a very 1960s thing, much like sexual freedom, and the social conflicts that started then haven’t been resolved to this day.
As a university instructor, I am more willing to accept freedom of dress for my students than for myself. On campus, I wear clothing I consider classic (which now includes pants or trousers for women, but not jeans, IMO). I do this because I don’t want my appearance to distract anyone from the learning process.
On the other side of a generation gap or two, millennial students wear a dazzling variety of clothing styles, partly because they come from a dazzling variety of cultures. There are young women in hajibs, tunics and loose pants, and young women in leggings that look like body paint, with tops that show cleavage. A few young men wear suits to class, but most wear a range of casual clothes, including ripped and torn pants, and some items that look gang-related (but what would I know?). I won’t even discuss tattoos, piercings, hairstyles, or makeup. However young adults look in the hallways or the classroom, I don’t care. It’s none of my business. I have the right and the responsibility to enforce rules of grammar on my own students (no one else), and those rules are complicated enough. I don’t need or want to enforce a dress code.
The problem with freedom of dress, though, is that everything that everyone wears carries symbolic baggage. Clothes are never just arrangements of fabric (or leather, metal, wood, or plastic). Wearers of controversial fashions can be accused of transmitting messages they never intended. Clothing styles of the past can be misunderstood as being either more or less radical than they were at the time.
A book I reviewed several months ago (Sex and Unisex: Fashion, Feminism, and the Sexual Revolution by Jo B. Paoletti) describes the drastic changes of fashion that took place in the 1960s and early 1970s, led by innovative designers, who were mostly gay men (although this was never openly mentioned at the time), and their consumers, mostly the post-war Baby Boom generation.
Some of the responses to contemporary fashions (short skirts on females, long hair on males) by those in authority were so over-the-top that they need to be explained. Why did macho defenders of the armed forces (no matter what war they were fighting at the time) and even some school administrators despise “long” hair on young men? Why do school administrations still police girls’ clothing more than boys’ clothing? When girls are sent home from school to “change,” what are they supposed to change into? (And the ambiguity of either changing clothing or changing oneself seems deliberate.)
I learned as a teenager in that era that I could be suspected of wallowing in sex, drugs and rock-and-roll just because I wanted to look fashionable. Pants on girls were considered both sexy and rebellious because they showed the division between girls’ legs, AND they were considered “casual dress” until the invention of the pantsuit for women, which was intended to fix that problem by providing a modest alternative to skirts and dresses for school , the workplace and some churches.
Does anyone remember any more why parents and teachers frothed at the mouth when teenagers first started wearing jeans? (Consider the gang members in West Side Story: definitely not the role models that any middle-class parent wanted their son or daughter to imitate.) Denim pants, also called dungarees and levis (a brand name), were originally worn by working men in strenuous jobs who needed to wear durable fabric. Jeans on anyone else were interpreted as rebellion against authority and white-collar respectability.
On girls, jeans could also be interpreted as rejection of a ladylike code of conduct, a sign that the girl was sexually available. This must have been especially confusing for the aging dykes of my generation, who wanted to dress like boys in their youth, and who wore jeans as soon as they could get away with it. (The character of Anybodys in West Side Story is a good example.) Getting propositioned by males was exactly what they didn’t want.
When describing characters in my stories, I try to avoid specific descriptions of their clothing if I’m not sure how certain visual cues are likely to be read. Is cleavage still considered an invitation, or does that depend on the status of the person revealing it? Are tight pants on men more appealing to other men or to women? Does any item of clothing really shock anyone in 2016?
So I usually keep descriptions of clothing to a minimum in my stories, which is kind of a shame for several reasons. I loved to sew when I was a teenager, and I’m still interested in how clothes are made. I can imagine getting carried away with a detailed description of the ensemble of a lady or a gentleman in a historical piece, and this passage would seem sexier to me than to most readers.
I tried to practise restraint when writing a flasher for the old subscription website, “Ruthie’s Club,” for one of their flasher festivals. For this one, every flasher had to include a stiletto of some kind. Later, this piece became the title story in my own collection of reprints, Each Has a Point (2011, published by another dead press).
Each Has a Point
She was slim, smooth and glittering, like a jewelled blade. Even a glance from her dark eyes from across the room made him feel casually pierced, like an insect to be displayed by a collector.
“Lady,” he addressed her, feeling a need to protect himself with his usual sarcasm. “You look the part.”
The music was slow and stately. She acknowledged him accordingly, with a smile and a graceful nod of her head. She called him by his real name. “Gavin, sir.” She paused for effect. “We all wear costumes. At all times.”
He looked her up and down, letting her know that her tight scarlet bodice and her voluminous black skirt hid nothing. “Except when we are naked, my lady.”
“Even then.”
His clear blue eyes and tousled sandy-blond hair made him look boyishly innocent, but she could see predatory intent in the set of his jaw. He looked at her raven-black wig, coiled atop her head in an artful arrangement of braids. “No doubt you carry a hidden stiletto in your hair so that even without clothes, you would not be defenseless.”
“No doubt.” She smirked.
Gavin and Sarah had both performed in community theatre for so many years that they would hardly have known what to say to each other out of their current roles. And this production was big: an independent vampire movie named “Pierced.”
Sarah’s sly, ageless beauty had caused her to be typecast as the villainess. Gavin was the male lead. He distrusted her intelligence and determination. She despised his ego.
“And you’re probably standing on stiletto heels, the better to walk on some poor fool.”
She raised her rustling skirt and petticoats enough to show her ankles and the shiny black shoes below. Her patent-leather pumps were completely wrong for the sixteenth century, but they enhanced her vampire persona. She appeared to be standing weightlessly on needles, as though she could really fly.
“The dance has begun, Sarah,” he pointed out.
“Then we shall join it.”
He grasped her small waist with one hand, and began guiding her about the floor. She wobbled only slightly, but he loved feeling her unsteadiness.
“Someone, some day,” he whispered to her flushed cheek and exposed ear, “will penetrate your armour. He’ll find an opening, and go in hard and deep. You will surrender at last.” He let her feel the hardness in his codpiece.
“Why do you think I’m armed, sir? Do you think me unfamiliar with the cruelty of men?”
“You need a man with the cruelty to bring you relief, lady. And the selfishness to protect you from all others.” He lowered his tone. “You have a cunt, if not a heart. Can you honestly say you don’t want me there?”
“I will not lie,” she sighed. “Gavin, I’ve wanted you for years. And afterwards, I want to stick my blade in you. It would finish off the scene beautifully.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As various people have said, anything that anyone wears is a costume. There have been strenuous debates about whether dress codes should be enforced in schools, universities, places of worship, offices, restaurants or nightclubs. (An imaginary sign sent to me by a friend reads: “Men: no shirt, no service. Women: no shirt, free drinks.”) Freedom to wear whatever one wants seems like a very 1960s thing, much like sexual freedom, and the social conflicts that started then haven’t been resolved to this day.
As a university instructor, I am more willing to accept freedom of dress for my students than for myself. On campus, I wear clothing I consider classic (which now includes pants or trousers for women, but not jeans, IMO). I do this because I don’t want my appearance to distract anyone from the learning process.
On the other side of a generation gap or two, millennial students wear a dazzling variety of clothing styles, partly because they come from a dazzling variety of cultures. There are young women in hajibs, tunics and loose pants, and young women in leggings that look like body paint, with tops that show cleavage. A few young men wear suits to class, but most wear a range of casual clothes, including ripped and torn pants, and some items that look gang-related (but what would I know?). I won’t even discuss tattoos, piercings, hairstyles, or makeup. However young adults look in the hallways or the classroom, I don’t care. It’s none of my business. I have the right and the responsibility to enforce rules of grammar on my own students (no one else), and those rules are complicated enough. I don’t need or want to enforce a dress code.
The problem with freedom of dress, though, is that everything that everyone wears carries symbolic baggage. Clothes are never just arrangements of fabric (or leather, metal, wood, or plastic). Wearers of controversial fashions can be accused of transmitting messages they never intended. Clothing styles of the past can be misunderstood as being either more or less radical than they were at the time.
A book I reviewed several months ago (Sex and Unisex: Fashion, Feminism, and the Sexual Revolution by Jo B. Paoletti) describes the drastic changes of fashion that took place in the 1960s and early 1970s, led by innovative designers, who were mostly gay men (although this was never openly mentioned at the time), and their consumers, mostly the post-war Baby Boom generation.
Some of the responses to contemporary fashions (short skirts on females, long hair on males) by those in authority were so over-the-top that they need to be explained. Why did macho defenders of the armed forces (no matter what war they were fighting at the time) and even some school administrators despise “long” hair on young men? Why do school administrations still police girls’ clothing more than boys’ clothing? When girls are sent home from school to “change,” what are they supposed to change into? (And the ambiguity of either changing clothing or changing oneself seems deliberate.)
I learned as a teenager in that era that I could be suspected of wallowing in sex, drugs and rock-and-roll just because I wanted to look fashionable. Pants on girls were considered both sexy and rebellious because they showed the division between girls’ legs, AND they were considered “casual dress” until the invention of the pantsuit for women, which was intended to fix that problem by providing a modest alternative to skirts and dresses for school , the workplace and some churches.
Does anyone remember any more why parents and teachers frothed at the mouth when teenagers first started wearing jeans? (Consider the gang members in West Side Story: definitely not the role models that any middle-class parent wanted their son or daughter to imitate.) Denim pants, also called dungarees and levis (a brand name), were originally worn by working men in strenuous jobs who needed to wear durable fabric. Jeans on anyone else were interpreted as rebellion against authority and white-collar respectability.
On girls, jeans could also be interpreted as rejection of a ladylike code of conduct, a sign that the girl was sexually available. This must have been especially confusing for the aging dykes of my generation, who wanted to dress like boys in their youth, and who wore jeans as soon as they could get away with it. (The character of Anybodys in West Side Story is a good example.) Getting propositioned by males was exactly what they didn’t want.
When describing characters in my stories, I try to avoid specific descriptions of their clothing if I’m not sure how certain visual cues are likely to be read. Is cleavage still considered an invitation, or does that depend on the status of the person revealing it? Are tight pants on men more appealing to other men or to women? Does any item of clothing really shock anyone in 2016?
So I usually keep descriptions of clothing to a minimum in my stories, which is kind of a shame for several reasons. I loved to sew when I was a teenager, and I’m still interested in how clothes are made. I can imagine getting carried away with a detailed description of the ensemble of a lady or a gentleman in a historical piece, and this passage would seem sexier to me than to most readers.
I tried to practise restraint when writing a flasher for the old subscription website, “Ruthie’s Club,” for one of their flasher festivals. For this one, every flasher had to include a stiletto of some kind. Later, this piece became the title story in my own collection of reprints, Each Has a Point (2011, published by another dead press).
Each Has a Point
She was slim, smooth and glittering, like a jewelled blade. Even a glance from her dark eyes from across the room made him feel casually pierced, like an insect to be displayed by a collector.
“Lady,” he addressed her, feeling a need to protect himself with his usual sarcasm. “You look the part.”
The music was slow and stately. She acknowledged him accordingly, with a smile and a graceful nod of her head. She called him by his real name. “Gavin, sir.” She paused for effect. “We all wear costumes. At all times.”
He looked her up and down, letting her know that her tight scarlet bodice and her voluminous black skirt hid nothing. “Except when we are naked, my lady.”
“Even then.”
His clear blue eyes and tousled sandy-blond hair made him look boyishly innocent, but she could see predatory intent in the set of his jaw. He looked at her raven-black wig, coiled atop her head in an artful arrangement of braids. “No doubt you carry a hidden stiletto in your hair so that even without clothes, you would not be defenseless.”
“No doubt.” She smirked.
Gavin and Sarah had both performed in community theatre for so many years that they would hardly have known what to say to each other out of their current roles. And this production was big: an independent vampire movie named “Pierced.”
Sarah’s sly, ageless beauty had caused her to be typecast as the villainess. Gavin was the male lead. He distrusted her intelligence and determination. She despised his ego.
“And you’re probably standing on stiletto heels, the better to walk on some poor fool.”
She raised her rustling skirt and petticoats enough to show her ankles and the shiny black shoes below. Her patent-leather pumps were completely wrong for the sixteenth century, but they enhanced her vampire persona. She appeared to be standing weightlessly on needles, as though she could really fly.
“The dance has begun, Sarah,” he pointed out.
“Then we shall join it.”
He grasped her small waist with one hand, and began guiding her about the floor. She wobbled only slightly, but he loved feeling her unsteadiness.
“Someone, some day,” he whispered to her flushed cheek and exposed ear, “will penetrate your armour. He’ll find an opening, and go in hard and deep. You will surrender at last.” He let her feel the hardness in his codpiece.
“Why do you think I’m armed, sir? Do you think me unfamiliar with the cruelty of men?”
“You need a man with the cruelty to bring you relief, lady. And the selfishness to protect you from all others.” He lowered his tone. “You have a cunt, if not a heart. Can you honestly say you don’t want me there?”
“I will not lie,” she sighed. “Gavin, I’ve wanted you for years. And afterwards, I want to stick my blade in you. It would finish off the scene beautifully.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Friday, November 20, 2015
Hard to be Hip
by Jean Roberta
“Mom,” said my daughter as only a popular twelve-year-old can, “I need something with the right brand.” (She named it, but I’m not sure any more what it was: Someone and Someone Else. Lululemon clothing wasn’t available in our town in the late 1980s, but there was some other brand, based in California, that was a serious social marker for young fashionistas.)
I was a single parent living on a variable income. Did I put my foot down and give her a stern lecture on economic reality? I did not. What I couldn’t tell her was that sometimes a gust of cash came into my bank account from the men I served through an escort agency. I was supporting my daughter by doing something that would surely give her a stigma by association if it became known to her friends. The least I could do, I thought, was to provide her with at least one upscale item of clothing that would enable her to compete (more-or-less) with the more pampered kids in her crowd, including the daughter of two medical doctors.
So we went shopping, and looked at brand-name clothing. I didn’t see why it had so much more appeal than the second-hand and reduced-to-clear items I usually bought for myself. (This is how I acquired items designed by Adrienne Vittadini and Donna Karan.)
My daughter would have liked to have more than I bought her, but I had to set limits. In a probably doomed effort to look like the well put-together mother of a fashion-conscious daughter, I bought myself a pale turquoise-coloured leather belt. That was all, but it was an Esprit, and it matched an outfit I already had.
We came home from shopping to our two-bedroom apartment in a co-op for low-income single parents. Of course, most of my daughter’s friends lived with two parents in family-sized houses. For better or worse, our co-op of four small apartment buildings was an island of poverty in the town’s South End, known as Snob Hill. All her classmates (except the other co-op kids) came from a higher tax-bracket than ours.
I hoped that providing my kid with one suitable brand-name outfit would be enough to compensate for our circumstances. I knew it wouldn’t.
Since then, I’ve been told about the necessity for writers to brand themselves. Well, okay, I had that done on a physical level when I got the turquoise-and-mauve lizard tattoo on my shoulder in 2002, but that doesn’t seem to have given me a cult following as an erotic writer. After reading something about skinks (a type of lizard), I was tempted to call myself “The Skank with the Skink” on my website, but I resisted temptation.
Actually, the reference to skinks came from a thread started by a post by Hanne Blank on Facebook, where she regularly posts glamorous photos of herself in red lipstick, with generous cleavage. Both her image and her writing (literary erotic fiction and scholarly non-fiction) are distinct and easy to recognize, not to mention her trained voice. (As a favour to interested listeners, she posted a free recording on-line at about this time last year. Her voice is as opera-worthy as I had imagined.)
Somehow, Hanne’s multiple roles/identities don’t seem to detract from each other. (Among other things, she advocates against fat-phobia and the unhealthy obsession with weight-loss in North America.)
Well, then, could I brand myself in multiple ways too? But here’s the catch: branding seems to be about creating an image which appears to be unique, even if it really isn’t. So I could hardly follow anyone else’s lead in an obvious way, and expect not to look pitiful.
It’s a catch-22. I’ve been told that one way to acquire a Name is to claim that one writes like someone better-known. To give an example of this theory, in about the year 2000, an editor for Black Lace Books in England (an imprint of the Virgin publishing empire) sent an email to Adrienne Benedicks of the Erotic Readers & Writers Association, asking if anyone in the group could write lesbian erotica like Carol Queen or Pat Califia. Adrienne recommended me, and I was thrilled. I was more thrilled when I got four stories published in Black Lace anthologies, but I couldn’t see how “writes like Carol Queen and/or Pat Califia” could be a useful tag-line to propel my literary career. Why wouldn’t readers prefer the real thing?
I’ve seen websites and on-line newsletters that brag about the breath-taking sexual magic of So-and-So’s work, and some of this promotional material makes me cringe. This is not to suggest that braggarts always lack talent for anything else. I’m sure there are skilled writers who are undeservedly ignored, and who would like to find ways to emerge into the spotlight. Maybe I just can’t get past the values of my middle-class upbringing, in which bragging was considered uncouth. Friends were supposed to brag about friends.
So apparently I have no clear brand, and probably never will, unless a brandless condition can seem to be a brand unto itself. In my teaching career, this seems to have worked. When asked, several years ago, to define my "philosophy of teaching,” I surprised myself by realizing that I actually have one. I said, “It’s not about me, it’s about the material. I’m only the messenger." I explained that I learned to overcome the stage-fright of a new teacher by trying to present the material as well as possible to the students, much like a matchmaker introducing two good friends in the hope of igniting a strong new relationship.
Maybe that’s my brand on the page as well as in the classroom. If so, I could do worse than to be a mouthpiece for the characters, or the subject-matter.
“Mom,” said my daughter as only a popular twelve-year-old can, “I need something with the right brand.” (She named it, but I’m not sure any more what it was: Someone and Someone Else. Lululemon clothing wasn’t available in our town in the late 1980s, but there was some other brand, based in California, that was a serious social marker for young fashionistas.)
I was a single parent living on a variable income. Did I put my foot down and give her a stern lecture on economic reality? I did not. What I couldn’t tell her was that sometimes a gust of cash came into my bank account from the men I served through an escort agency. I was supporting my daughter by doing something that would surely give her a stigma by association if it became known to her friends. The least I could do, I thought, was to provide her with at least one upscale item of clothing that would enable her to compete (more-or-less) with the more pampered kids in her crowd, including the daughter of two medical doctors.
So we went shopping, and looked at brand-name clothing. I didn’t see why it had so much more appeal than the second-hand and reduced-to-clear items I usually bought for myself. (This is how I acquired items designed by Adrienne Vittadini and Donna Karan.)
My daughter would have liked to have more than I bought her, but I had to set limits. In a probably doomed effort to look like the well put-together mother of a fashion-conscious daughter, I bought myself a pale turquoise-coloured leather belt. That was all, but it was an Esprit, and it matched an outfit I already had.
We came home from shopping to our two-bedroom apartment in a co-op for low-income single parents. Of course, most of my daughter’s friends lived with two parents in family-sized houses. For better or worse, our co-op of four small apartment buildings was an island of poverty in the town’s South End, known as Snob Hill. All her classmates (except the other co-op kids) came from a higher tax-bracket than ours.
I hoped that providing my kid with one suitable brand-name outfit would be enough to compensate for our circumstances. I knew it wouldn’t.
Since then, I’ve been told about the necessity for writers to brand themselves. Well, okay, I had that done on a physical level when I got the turquoise-and-mauve lizard tattoo on my shoulder in 2002, but that doesn’t seem to have given me a cult following as an erotic writer. After reading something about skinks (a type of lizard), I was tempted to call myself “The Skank with the Skink” on my website, but I resisted temptation.
Actually, the reference to skinks came from a thread started by a post by Hanne Blank on Facebook, where she regularly posts glamorous photos of herself in red lipstick, with generous cleavage. Both her image and her writing (literary erotic fiction and scholarly non-fiction) are distinct and easy to recognize, not to mention her trained voice. (As a favour to interested listeners, she posted a free recording on-line at about this time last year. Her voice is as opera-worthy as I had imagined.)
Somehow, Hanne’s multiple roles/identities don’t seem to detract from each other. (Among other things, she advocates against fat-phobia and the unhealthy obsession with weight-loss in North America.)
Well, then, could I brand myself in multiple ways too? But here’s the catch: branding seems to be about creating an image which appears to be unique, even if it really isn’t. So I could hardly follow anyone else’s lead in an obvious way, and expect not to look pitiful.
It’s a catch-22. I’ve been told that one way to acquire a Name is to claim that one writes like someone better-known. To give an example of this theory, in about the year 2000, an editor for Black Lace Books in England (an imprint of the Virgin publishing empire) sent an email to Adrienne Benedicks of the Erotic Readers & Writers Association, asking if anyone in the group could write lesbian erotica like Carol Queen or Pat Califia. Adrienne recommended me, and I was thrilled. I was more thrilled when I got four stories published in Black Lace anthologies, but I couldn’t see how “writes like Carol Queen and/or Pat Califia” could be a useful tag-line to propel my literary career. Why wouldn’t readers prefer the real thing?
I’ve seen websites and on-line newsletters that brag about the breath-taking sexual magic of So-and-So’s work, and some of this promotional material makes me cringe. This is not to suggest that braggarts always lack talent for anything else. I’m sure there are skilled writers who are undeservedly ignored, and who would like to find ways to emerge into the spotlight. Maybe I just can’t get past the values of my middle-class upbringing, in which bragging was considered uncouth. Friends were supposed to brag about friends.
So apparently I have no clear brand, and probably never will, unless a brandless condition can seem to be a brand unto itself. In my teaching career, this seems to have worked. When asked, several years ago, to define my "philosophy of teaching,” I surprised myself by realizing that I actually have one. I said, “It’s not about me, it’s about the material. I’m only the messenger." I explained that I learned to overcome the stage-fright of a new teacher by trying to present the material as well as possible to the students, much like a matchmaker introducing two good friends in the hope of igniting a strong new relationship.
Maybe that’s my brand on the page as well as in the classroom. If so, I could do worse than to be a mouthpiece for the characters, or the subject-matter.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Pushing Perfection
To the Editor in Chief, Elle Magazine
Dear Editor:
Last week I was waiting in the doctor's office and I picked up a copy of your publication. I must congratulate you on your global reach. The headlines were in English, but the text was in an alphabet you've probably never had seen before. You appear to be doing a top-flight job at peddling your conceptions of beauty to the developing world.
I leafed through the glossy pages. I couldn't help admiring the models' glowing complexions, their artfully tousled hair, their slender bodies frozen in artful poses, baring a golden midriff here, a creamy thigh there. Their ripe, half-open lips suggested breathless excitement, possibly of a sexual sort. (I am, by virtue of my vocation, sensitive to such cues.) They were perfect, every one of them, page after page without the slightest trace of cellulite or sag. No birthmarks, bellies, knock knees, or flat feet. Any woman, gazing on their unblemished beauty, would feel a mixture of awe and envy. Any man would feel desire.
Aren't you ashamed of yourself? Have you ever considered the worm of evil coiled in the heart of this perfection?
How many women look in the mirror and lose hope, because of the false visions you sell? You and your colleagues teach us that we're fat, ugly and undesirable. We're all flawed. It doesn't matter how many hours we spend at the gym, how many jars of anti-wrinkle cream we buy from your advertisers. We will never achieve the ideal presented in your pages, regardless of how hard we work or how much money we spend. Meanwhile, our men are equally dazzled by your images of sleek flesh and limpid smiles. When they leave us for younger women who more closely approximate perfection, we blame ourselves, not you.
For much of my life, I hated my body. My hair was kinky. My stomach bulged. My full thighs were slabs of lard. I liked my breasts, for the most part—some versions of perfection incorporated cleavage like mine—but I looked odd in most fashionable clothing. I was too short. I had no arches; high heels sent pain shooting up my calves. And of course I wore glasses with lenses like coke bottles.
Toward the end of my teens, I tried to mold myself into the perfect, slender woman I thought that I should be. I dropped from 120 pounds to 75 pounds. Alas, I still wasn't beautiful, though I was proud of my self-discipline. My hair started to fall out in clumps. My clothes hung on me as though I was a skeleton. I understand now that I came perilously close to death in my pursuit of perfection.
You can of course defend yourself, claim that it's not your fault. Nobody told me to starve myself. Everyone knows that fashion is a fantasy. How silly of me to take those images seriously!
You are right, in a sense. The blame is not yours alone. All those companies trying to to sell us things we don't need conspire to make us feel inadequate. We're missing out on happiness and satisfaction, they tell us, because we're just not good enough. But if we purchase this product or that, we'll set ourselves on the road to perfection. It's depressingly easy to make us believe this. You're not completely responsible.
Now that I'm older, I've built up some immunity. I can flip through your lavish photo-spreads, admiring the art that has created such luscious, unattainable beauty, with barely a pang of regret. I'm at home with my own imperfections, despite the fact that they multiply with the years. I find it deliciously ironic that I like my body better now, with my wrinkles and flab, than I did when I had the smooth skin, taut muscles and sexual vitality of youth.
I worry, though, about the young women and men, innocents who don't recognize the falseness in what you offer. You tell them that what matters most is how they look. They learn that in order to look attractive they must have money, to buy the products that will perfect them. They wear away their lives pursuing the material, lusting after an unattainable dream.
I do think that the term lust is appropriate. Underneath it all, you're selling sex, even with your flat-chested models reminiscent of teenage boys. Be beautiful and you will be desired, you whisper, like the snake in the garden. The message might be disguised, but I recognize it loud and clear. I am, after all, an expert in evoking desire.
I don't know why I'm bothering to write this letter. Even if you read it, it will have zero impact. After all, your very reason for existence is to sell these visions. Even if you took me seriously (a wholly improbable outcome) and closed down your publication, there would still be Glamour, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Self, Seventeen and dozens more titles—not to mention Playboy, Hustler, Maxim and their ilk. Perfection is a potent adversary.
My time would be better spent writing to my local paper or my congressman, about marriage equality or universal healthcare, immigrants' rights or reproductive choice. In these cases I might have some tiny chance of making a difference. In writing you—well, I'm just asking to be dismissed as a crank.
I shouldn't waste my energy on letters like this. What I should do instead is get to know some young women. I should try to share my knowledge, gleaned through the painful experience of anorexia and its aftermath. I should be telling them that they're beautiful as they are, helping them to understand that material things and physical attractiveness will never, by themselves, convey happiness.
Will they believe me? I can't say. Perhaps they'd trust me more if I weighed fifteen pounds less and had a face lift.
Sincerely,
Lisabet Sarai
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