RosieBell

The Beaux Gendarmes

Amnesty International condemns the detention of several people, including two women wearing the full-face veil, who were protesting against the law banning the wearing of any form of clothing concealing one's face in public.

The law came into force today. Police said the people were detained for joining an unauthorised protest in central Paris.

Amnesty International’s Europe and Central Asia Programme Director John Dalhuisen said:

“Women in France have the right to freedom of religion and expression. They must also be free to protest when this right is violated.

Amnesty is quite right of course.  This ban is ludicrous, not to mention sinister.  The ludicrousness is what strikes me most.

 

We're public guardians bold yet wary
And of ourselves we take good care
To risk our precious lives we're chary
When danger looms we're never there
But when we meet a helpless woman
Or little boys who do no harm
We run them in, we run them in
We run them in, we run them in
We show them we're the beaux gendarmes.

Actually the women haven't been that helpless and have been flagrantly breaking the law.  Penalty:- a fine and citizenship classes.  If any law was pointlessly bossy, this one is. 

Frenchwomen used to wear veils, e.g. Madame Bovary:-

Then some hundred paces farther on she again stopped, and through her veil, that fell sideways from her man's hat over her hips, her face appeared in a bluish transparency as if she were floating under azure waves.

It didn't protect her sexual virtue.

Elizabeth Taylor

I remember going to a photographic exhibition and among many beautiful faces of Hollywood stars, her face made me stop and gasp.  She was extraordinarily beautiful.

 

 

Are you woman, are you dancer?

 

This clip is my favourite piece of Black Swan, the melodrama that‘s doing the rounds at the moment.   When I saw it one part of my mind or perhaps my gut was gripped with suspense, the other part, the feminist critic part, was saying, is this for real?  Frightening things approach you in basements, subways and behind doors in a claustrophobic apartment, which works very well on the suspense level,  the acting is good and so in spite of the crude stereotypes of character and story which date from an earlier Bette Davis age than from films like Carrie, Hallowe‘en and the slasher stable it keeps you thrilled in your seat.  But those few minutes, of a woman dancing and turning into a swan are real film magic.   (My favourite bit of Billy Elliot, which is a run of the mill film about the outsider finding his true role is the final scene when the grown up Billy Elliot jumps across the stage in Swan Lake.  It‘s such a great effect, the mechanics and cogs backstage then the dazzle of performance, and Tchaikovsky’s crescendos and climaxes can‘t help but exalt you).* 

 

A tyro feminist critic could watch Black Swan and observe:-

1.  The oppositions, on the Madonna vs. Whore, Classic vs. Romantic lines.   So here we have the pale, frigid perfectionist versus the dark sexy let-it-all-hang-outer.   Nathalie Portman plays, with believable intensity, Nina, an ambitious young ballerina who is a natural for the White Swan in a production of Swan Lake but is too cold, too repressed to play the Black Swan.  She has to learn to “feel” the part by finding her own sexuality.  This all-powerful magic token she unearths by biting the director, masturbating and having Lesbian wet dreams about her rival, Lily  (Mila Kunis, managing to look voluptuous with her heavy black eye-liner, even though voluptousness is not what you expect in classical ballerinas).  Lily of course is not so technically proficient as Nina but dances effortlessly and gropes her partner’s crotch, representing wild abandoned sexiness.  Nina, the perfect White Swan, must learn to become the dangerous and erotic black swan, Carmen in a tutu. 

This pale virgin versus the dark sexy piece is an old theme.  It appears in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) with the figures of Rebecca and Rowena.   Maggie Tulliver in The Mill of the Floss (1860) chucks aside a novel when the insipid blonde heroine appears who she knows will defeat the dark interesting woman.  I would have thought feminism had come into the mainstream to the degree that someone in the production must have recognised this, but evidently not.  The film is done straight.

For thematic purpose Lily and Nina have to appear together in many scenes but it makes Lily’s motivation puzzling.  Is she after Nina’s role, or is this in Nina’s mind?  Otherwise why does a likable young woman pursue the friendship of a frigid unpopular priss like Nina after several rebuffs?  Is her warmth assumed, covering malice?  It’s not made clear. 

2.    The controlling stifling mother (Barbara Hershey).  She isn’t as batty as the mother in Carrie, but getting there.  Nina’s bedroom is sugar pink and full of stuffed toys, which an eleven year old would find too much.   Three felt markers on a placard:- “Infantilised young woman dominated by disappointed mother.”

3.    The idea the dedication to an art and ambition are basically bad for a young woman's womanhood and lead to neurosis. 

4.    The Svengali figure - the man who can make and break the dependent female.   He’s the director of the ballet, an excitingly attractive Frenchman (Vincent Cassel) with a crooked nose.   Like the hero of a Georgette Heyer novel he can read Nina’s mind and know exactly what’s wrong with her.

5.    The dangers that the city holds for solitary young women.  There are apprehensive shots of subways and of the practice rooms in the basement of the ballet studio.  Nina, sitting in the carriage of the subway, is confronted by a pervert who jiggles his tongue at her while touching his crotch.  

6.    The ageing woman (Winona Ryder) who after being thrown out of her primadonna role goes mad and stabs her own face.

The film taps into particular female fears - the menace of the streets and public transport, the fear of their own bodies, the fear of being unattractive, the fear of ageing and being discarded, the fear of sex and men  Nina’s body attacks her, by getting odd rashes and marks on her skin.   Finally she accepts her body and her own power but in her moment of consummated perfection she throws herself from a great height and dies.   Pure romantic, pure Gothic.  

Of course a classical ballet dancer does horrible things to her body to make it do things that a human body is not designed for.   Classical ballerinas get eating disorders and break their toes.  I went to Black Swan with a friend whose daughter had done classical ballet but when the daughter got older she didn’t encourage it, having by then met crazed dancing teachers who were crippled with arthritis.   She says she now finds the shapes and angles that classical dancers get into ugly.  Mind you, the daughter, who is beautiful, walks like a princess.

*I was once on holiday in Estonia, staying in a town on the Baltic called Haapsalu, which had been a resort for Russians and where Tchaikovsky had often stayed.  In the evening we were walking in a park beside the Baltic and sat down on a park bench, then leaped up with shrieks as the bench struck up Swan Lake.   Behind the bench was some kind of music player with a sensory device.  In a holiday mood by the tideless Baltic which was covered with wild fowl the Tchaikovsky played as if by ghosts was the icing on the cake, being both beautiful and absurd.

Up above the world so high

It has been Battle of Britain every evening on BBC4.  When will they sound the All Clear?  However, it has been pretty good coverage of an inspiring period in our nation’s chequered history and I’m properly respectful in my attitude towards the ancient men with their rows of medals who tell their stories.

What came as news to me was Spitfire Women, which gave an account of the Air Transport Auxiliary (the ATA).  Some splendid old ladies were interviewed.   Ladies they were - upper class women with the kind of accent that in another thirty years will not be heard from living mouths.  In the 1930s these debby types had been rich enough to learn to fly, some of them owning their own aeroplanes or taking passengers on joy rides for a living.  So they had hours of flying time under their belts and as one of the aviatrixes was the daughter of an MP, she managed to get them taken on to transport  aeroplanes from factory to airfield or anywhere else they needed to be taken. 

It was a marvellous tale.  These young women knew how to fly and ride horses, but were mostly virginal and had led sheltered lives.  So the atmosphere in their headquarters was something like St Winifred’s of head girls and hockey captains with names like “Lettice“, with a sprinkling of It girls who would work hard and then put on lipstick and play hard.  One out of ten of them was killed and when they did marry a young man, there was a chance he would be killed as well.  They met some male opposition of course but won through so eventually they were flying Spitfires, which one of them said were so beautiful to fly, a real woman’s aeroplane, that would respond to the slightest touch.  In the cockpit you would feel you were flying without a machine.  A wonder that they were not allowed to fight with as well as transport these aeroplanes they could handle so well.

For some of them it was the best time of their lives.  One said this, though she lost a cluster of male cousins and a beloved brother.  They were doing exciting work they loved, for a purpose which they supported whole-heartedly and among their comrades.  What a way to spend your youth.

Amy Johnson, the most famous aviatrix.  
If only cycling helmets looked as glamorous as that.

Reclaim the streets!

I’d like to see a day when I don’t have to worry about having obscenities yelled at me or disgusting gestures made out of car windows when all I’m doing is walking to work or going about my business. I am sick and tired of being told this is all ‘harmless fun’ – it is not: it sends a worrying message that aggression towards women is acceptable and even desirable. . . .

Street harassment is so normal and pervasive (it’s everywhere) that we don’t even register it many times when it happens – but it’s there and it’s eroding our sense of safety, self and what we believe is possible. How many women feel safe walking home after a night out? We should.

That’s from a thread over at the London Anti-Street Harassment campaign (here). The women express those familiar feelings of fear, intimidation, and the impotent, boiling rage of those harassed and bullied by men who think it’s amusing to shout out “nice tits” or whatever to some woman who is out in public. What makes you furious is that you have no effective come-back. Swearing or fuck off gestures usually attract laughter or escalated abuse or an amazed huffiness. When seeing a cluster of blokes hanging around outside a pub (the smoking ban has made this worse) or a gang of guys walking along the pavement, women will cross the street or make detours to avoid passing them, for fear, at the very least, of being embarrassed and humiliated.

Recently I wrote a post which among other things dealt with men who think they are entitled to intimidate random strangers - if the random strangers are female. The example I gave was of a Muslim woman who was spat at by co-religious males because they didn’t approve of her cycling and the clothes she wore. This looked to me like yet another way of keeping women down and I thought at the time that a Reclaim the Streets! like the Reclaim the Night! movement was needed, and then I read this in the Guardian:-

Vicky Simister, a financial analyst, . . has found street harassment particularly problematic since moving from Ireland to London for work. "I was walking down a busy road in the middle of winter," she says, "wearing a huge jacket, when these two guys slowed their car down to pay me 'compliments' about my appearance. This escalated into sexual comments. I eventually lashed out in frustration, and they got out of their car and ran after me, physically assaulting me. The police were called, but I wasn't happy with their response. One said: 'They said they were following you, but only to say nice things.'"

After this, Vicky set up the London Anti-Street Harassment campaign (Lash), to lobby MPs and journalists, and begin a serious debate. "I want women to put their hands up and say: 'We don't want to be treated like this,'" she says, "and I want men to realise the impact their words and actions have."

It's often suggested that street harassment is inevitable. But, as May says, while it might not be considered "as serious as domestic violence or sexual assault, street harassment is on the same spectrum of violence against women." The fact that it is so often just accepted by people suggests women's bodies are still considered public property – an attitude the anti-street harassment movement aims to change.

(Actually from what the women on the thread are saying, street harassment is particularly bad in London, so no, it‘s not inevitable if it varies from city to city. Some think it has been getting worse in recent years.)

Right on, sisters! I wish you all the best for this campaign.

Oriental King vs Western Queen

There has been a meme going around on whether Western feminists have been slack at showing  solidarity with women oppressed in other countries or even solidarity with women living in the same country but from a different cultural background for fear of being branded as Orientalist, aggressively Western, insensitive, being part of a pro-imperialist agenda etc. (Links to arguments for and against).  I can’t give a verdict on the behaviour of Western feminists, but  I came across a scene from an allegorical drama, when the king of anti-Orientalism, Edward Said, met the queen of international feminism, Simone de Beauvoir.

In March 1979 Edward Said was attending a seminar at the invitation of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Beauvoir was already there in her famous turban, lecturing anyone who would listen about her forthcoming trip to Tehran with Kate Millett, where they were planning to demonstrate against the chador; the whole idea struck me as patronising and silly, and although I was eager to hear what Beauvoir had to say, I also realised that she was quite vain and quite beyond arguing with at that moment. Besides, she left an hour or so later (just before Sartre’s arrival) and was never seen again.

. . .Beauvoir had been a serious disappointment, flouncing out of the room in a cloud of opinionated babble about Islam and the veiling of women.

Beauvoir’s “patronising, “silly“ and “opinionated babbling” on the veiling of women was presumably something like this:-

"We have created the International Committee for Women's Rights (CIDF) in response to calls from a large number of Iranian women, whose situation and whose revolt have greatly moved us…We have appreciated the depth of the utter humiliation into which others wanted to make them fall and we have therefore resolved to struggle for them."

This was in response to events in Tehran on 8 March 1979, International Women’s Day. 

On that day, Iranian women activists and their male supporters demonstrated against an order for women to re-veil themselves in the chador worn in more traditional sectors of society. The demonstrations continued for five days. At their height, they grew to fifty thousand in Tehran, women as well as men. Some leftist men formed a cordon around the women, fighting off armed attackers from a newly formed group, the Hezbollah or "Party of God." The demonstrators chanted "No to the Chador," "Down with the Dictatorship," and even the occasional "Down with Khomeini." One banner read, "We made the Revolution for Freedom, But Got Unfreedom," while others proclaimed "At the Dawn of Freedom, There Is No Freedom." For their part, the Hezbollah chanted "You will cover yourselves or be beaten," but their response was mainly nonverbal: stones, knives, and even bullets.

Kate Millett from the U.S. and Claudine Moullard from France attended the demonstration to express their solidarity with the women marching.

I don't suppose Edward Said ever called Westerners showing support for Palestinians “patronising and silly”.

Upmarket Veils

You very rarely see a niqab in Edinburgh but today I was in Princes Street and a couple of women walked by who were wearing them, and rather elegant ones, with a neat piece of light grey cloth over the bottom half of the face and a smooth grey scarf covering the forehead.  Their clothes weren’t billowy chadors or tent-like but straight and severe, in the same light grey. They looked well-dressed and stylish and I imagine were tourists.  They did cause a slight stir though. One  young bloke said to another, “They shouldn’t be legal, those clothes.”   The publicity that burqa banning is getting is bound to lead to racist attacks.

Reclaim the streets

I saw this comment to an article in the New Statesman, which gives evidence for my theory that the way to get Muslim women to stop wearing burqas is to encourage them to cycle.

I am also a Muslim woman from Pakistan who lives in the ultra Muslim orthodox area of Bow and Mile End in London. I have lived in London for around ten years and this is my first experience of living in a majority Muslim area as I lived in Clapham before. The problem I personally find with these radical talibanised Muslims is that they don’t seem to approve of me going around on my cycle and not adhering to their code by covering myself up. I get all sorts of harassment by the "orthodox" Muslim men even though I am not dressed like a prostitute but I might as well be one in their eyes as I am not covered up from head to toe. But for some reason I just have this feeling that even if I was dressed the way they think is right, they would still find a problem with me because I am a woman. The thing that makes me so angry is their confidence, this being England and not a Muslim country, thank God!

The Muslim men in Mile End have the cheek to spit at me when I am cycling past them on my way back from work if I by mistake just glance at them because either they think I'm making a pass at them, or they feel so degraded because a woman has just glanced at them. But the thing is they are all the same. They are the same in Pakistan and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and even in England!!! So even though it is a bit of a touchy subject, I feel I need to say something as I left that country to escape this kind of constant sexual persecution which is worse than racism as that really hits the roots of your identity.

[Yeah, sister, we’ve all been there.  Sexual persecution takes different forms - groping, comments shouted at you as you go about minding your own business. If you’re a cyclist and a woman you will have to put up with a lot of shit, and shake with impotent rage.   You, poor thing, just get an extra helping of religious shit on top of it.  There are some men who can‘t accept a woman as a fellow citizen, and the righteous and the pure are the worst of all.  They are bullies who regard themselves as having a God-given right to be bullies.  They'd really like to stone you.  "Women," said Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch, "have no idea how men hate them."  Now that's not all men, or most men, but it's enough men to make life dangerous and difficult for women. Give that kind of man a holy pretext and see how creative his hatred will become.]

And what about the Muslim women who are covered up? They seem to walk around extremely confidently in Mile End. They don’t seem to need all that burqa /hijab/ niqab because they seem to be able to defend themselves quite well without it. But the problem is that these women are in with the men on this. They are as radical and fundamentalist as the men - they protect their oppressors and wont let anyone question them or even let a woman fight for her rights as long as they are around to say how it is a symbol of their freedom! [Yeah, there were horrible smug cows who opposed women's suffrage, talking about women's place and pure influence and such shit.]  It infuriates me everyday. If they behaved like another minority which happened to be quite conservative and religious, it would be okay. But these people are aggressive, uneducated, ignorant and complete bigots and they have a terrible sense of fashion. [I bet they do.]  I could say a lot more but this argument is just going to start sounding weak (not to me though). Just wondering if there is any kind of support group I can go to which is not as radical as the other side? I cant go to the police just because Muslim men are spitting at me and calling me names everyday, can I? And believe me I dress quite conservative as it is.

[I do wish this woman could find a group of woman cyclists to pedal along with her shouting “Reclaim the streets!” against harassment as feminists used to go about shouting “reclaim the night”.]
 

How Fairy Tales End

Someone sent me some pictures entitled How Fairy Tales End:-

Snow White

Cinderella

Beauty and the Beast

The Little Mermaid

Charlotte the Harlot

There are some media madams you really want to get scrubbing floors, or, to bring that up to date, vacuuming the open plan at 6am or on a nine hour shift of cold calling.

There’s Charlotte Raven with a wardrobe of staples - Madonna - Katie Price - Pole-dancing cunningly put together and accessorised to produce this season’s look of feminism’s death. It is all the fault of the media woman, who is, of course is in the vanguard when it comes to female empowerment. 

In a recent study of 1,000 British girls (admittedly by a mobile entertainment company), quoted in Walter's book, 60% said glamour modelling was their preferred career. A quarter said they would consider becoming lap dancers. By all measures, the value map has shifted in Price's favour.

Yeah, and once they would have dreamed of being film stars or marrying lords.  Then the hard hammer of the factory or the farmhouse would have knocked those dreams out of them.

I'm sorry to say that we are culpable. Thinking women have turned their backs on feminism. This might not have been a disaster if we had remained neutral.

I knew it would be about you, Charlotte.  But y’know, whatever the thinking women (and your thinking is about at the level of Madeline Bunting’s – a quick glance at the glossies and a book or two, and there you are, Hannah Arendt), are doing, the working women are getting jobs in IT support, in medicine and in law.  They are attending university in huge numbers.  They may be going to spas as a treat and asking for a French manicure for a birthday present, but they are working their arses off.

But Charlotte is beating her breast at having let down those women who looked to her for inspiration by using her sexiness for getting ahead in her media career (by the way, note the boastfulness – I was very bad for being such a tart, but what a beautiful stylish tart I was).

I wore Chanel's Night Sky at meetings with editors, aware that much was at stake. Large contracts were being handed to women displaying attitudinal oomph. I hoped my nail colour would convey my capacity for reckless candour and a readiness to say the unsayable.

Yeah, those are just the attributes that the average Manager of Human Resources (normally a woman) is looking for when she is hiring the Marketing Assistant, the Call Centre Team Leader, the Applications Developer and the social worker.  All your fault, Charlotte.

All right, I hate Katie Price, Madonna*, Julie Burchill’s novel Ambition, Hello magazine and ghastly shops that sell everything that’s pink.  However the women I know who go in for that kind of thing will laugh and say that is pretty silly, and a bit of frivolity.  Life was never a Barbara Cartland novel in more romantic times, and it isn’t a shopping-and-fucking novel either, but any sane female over the age of nineteen knows that.  As for the clueless, their fantasies will take some form or other. 

Charlotte Raven’s article bolts on some more reasonable concerns about the growth of the sex industry and the toll it can take on the workers in it. but by the time I got there I was so infuriated by her thinking that the media world = the whole world I didn’t want to read on.

*Actually, I did like her in Evita.