2. “You need to be tidy.”
(Part 2 of 5 of the “Mirror, mirror” series)
Her mum stopped her on the stairs; she was about 12. "It's time you started to use deodorant," her mum said. The girl swaggered back to her room – she was becoming a woman, and this was the first real sign. Her mother bought her a tall can of aerosol. When she pressed the button, the temperature of the tin suddenly dropped, the cold spread through her hand, then the release of the powdery, floral smell. She flinched involuntarily as the spray hit her tender skin. She choked on the fumes when she sprayed too much, which was often as she was now aware of the cardinal sin of being "smelly." Her friends used to share it around after PE. They collected and compared scents. They could recognise each other a mile off from the body spray and perfume cloud that went before them – the metaphorical flower girl to the gaggle of brides.
Not long after, she noticed straggly hairs under her armpits and began to steal her mum's razor to shave. The satisfaction of seeing the smooth pink surface left behind as the blade glided over was palpable; she ran her fingers over it and marvelled at the increased sensitivity and complete lack of friction. But wait, how had she not noticed the hair on her legs? It was barely visible, blonde on pale skin, but when the light hit at a certain angle, it was suddenly forest-like. Soon it was gone too, along with the peach fuzz above her upper lip and the patchy dark strands on her toes. “I must look perfect”, she thought. “I must look clean.”
Extract from “That needs to be fixed” (2021), short film accessed here
Once, she caught sight of a bogey trapped in the hairs of her nose, and a regular trim with nail scissors up the nostrils was added to the schedule. Thin eyebrows were the height of fashion when she was 14. Her mum plucked them for her, removing way too much from the front of each, leaving a lasting surprised expression. She wasn't concerned about pubic hair until her late teens when the possibility of sex sat on the edge of every interaction with boys. The girl was very proud of herself when she didn't scream as the wax ripped the hairs from her skin. "You'll desensitise, eventually," the therapist told her.
Her period started later than she wanted. Yes, wanted, because before any of the girls began to menstruate, they had mythologised it as a symbol of their burgeoning womanhood – the crossing of the Rubicon – and there was a lively competition as to who would get theirs first. It was only when they had a lecture in the assembly hall about "managing" periods that the idea of them being "dirty" was introduced. Boys got hold of some free tampons and hurled them down the corridors, teenagers scattering from where they landed, cotton-wool grenades. Then the rumours – “Sarah from the year above had been seen with blood running down her leg… pads don't work, you know… and if you use a tampon, you'll lose your virginity, and it'll make you baggy.” Now menstruating was something to be ferociously denied - girls on their period were to be avoided at all costs. Lepers, outcasts.
No one even bothered to explain to her about discharge. Her mother must have seen the milky stains in the underwear she washed but never mentioned it. It was a secret then, the girl guessed. Something she must hide, something she must not talk about. Later she would overhear mutterings from teen boys about girls "getting wet," but she knew it wasn't the same thing – their touch didn't trigger it. That wetness was a turn-on, but this wetness, this was dirty. This was shame.
Yesterday on my way to pick you up from school, I was sat on the tube, in a half-empty carriage. I noticed how little space the seated women took up. They consciously made themselves as small as possible to fit in their allocated bucket. They tucked their heavy winter coats under them, held their bags on their laps – one woman even had a scooter woven between and behind her legs so as not to block the aisle. “How tidy we are,” I thought to myself. A man came and sat opposite me. He slouched his back, so his bum sat on the edge of the seat and his knees were thrown forward, almost touching mine. He opened his arms across the window behind him, matching the sprawl of his legs. He took up three seats. “How untidy,” I thought.
Why do we women feel such a drive for neatness? At university, I was aghast at the state of the halls where the young men lived. I lived in a home of women, we had a cleaning rota and scolded each other when it was not maintained. The home of my boyfriend (not your father) was, well, disgusting! Aside from the obligatory foul bathroom and the stinking bedrooms with unchanged sheets, they had even made a pyramid of old beer cans and takeaway boxes in their living room. A monument to Dionysus perhaps. I couldn’t understand how they lived like that. But then, they hadn’t been trained to fear disgust, not like I had, not like you will.
You see we are taught that the female body is a source of great disgust, and we must work hard to contain it. I read recently about the idea of the female body as a “leaky vessel”[1], and I thought it the perfect metaphor for how I had been taught to think of my own. Men can learn to control their fluids you see. Piss, shit, spit, even cum. They might not know when the final spurt will occur, but they can choose when to pump the handle. But our fluids are rarely within our control. Menstrual blood, discharge, breast milk. We don’t choose when these things occur and we can’t stop them when they do, although we can buy products to capture them, perhaps we may even medicate to pause them for a while. And by god are they disgusting, or so society would make us think. They must not be seen, must not be shown. Not for us jokes of women using cum as hair gel in mainstream cinema. The closest we have had to this type of representation is “Carrie”.
“I made you this” (2020), clay, wire and cellophane sculpture in an airtight box
What I want to teach you, my child is that the reason we can’t control these fluids is because they are linked to energies greater than us. Women are entwined in the cycles of nature – the moon can affect your period; did you know that[2]? We birth, we nurture, and traditionally would have tended to the dead and dying. The miraculous fluids created by our bodies are the very materials used to create and sustain life. We should feel no shame about them. A woman does not conquer her body but learns to listen and respond to its rhythm. But we are made to feel inferior for our lack of control. Those in power have long sought to eradicate women who stand fast in their feminine energy, who revel in the wild nature of their bodies. “Witches” they would have called us in the past; “bitches” they may call us now. So, the tendrils which reach out from our bodies connecting us to mother nature are severed and we are told we must be “tidy”. We are hermetically sealed in moulds and then criticised as emotional, hysterical when we step out of place. “Calm down dear,” they say[3].
I have noticed, through the span of my lifetime, the fetishization of the pre-pubescent female body. Perhaps it was always thus. There are certainly evolutionary reasons why a young woman would be chosen over an older to bear a child[4]. But I sense now that the drive is different. Your childish body has no aberrations yet, no spots, pocks, marks, creases, or scars. I should aspire to this perfection, according to cosmetic adverts and magazines[5] that use girls in their late teens to advertise anti-aging products. The mainstream porn young people are exposed to today largely features only the hairless vagina[6]. I cannot help but think of a child’s body when I see these images and I wonder if this is the intent - it is certainly no reflection of a grown woman’s natural state. We are encouraged to de-age ourselves for aesthetic reasons, and that certainly creates a bouncing economy, but are the roots of this infantilisation more insidious still? Children are easy to control you see, women are less so.
“Samson, whom no man could conquer, is robbed of his strength by Delilah. Judith beheads Holofernes after giving herself to him. Salome carries the head of John the Baptist on a charger… The series of such instances is infinite; always, everywhere, the man strives to rid himself of his dread of women by objectifying it… May not this be one of the principal roots of the whole masculine impulse to creative work – the never-ending conflict between the man’s longing for the woman and his dread of her?” (Horney and Kelman, 1993)
Psychoanalytical theory is that sex and death are more connected for men than women. Men are commonly active when they have sex – they penetrate and thrust, as it were. And we say they are “spent” when they climax - most feel a sense of lethargy afterward, la petite mort. For females, sex has the potential to create new life, and so perhaps at a subconscious level, we make a different connection. Sex and death versus sex and life. Another reason to fear the other, another reason to control her.
…And, my love, if you have a question about your body, please ask me. I am not ashamed of my body or yours, and neither should you be.
Footnotes
[1] “The female body’s propensity for creating and releasing fluids has been used to reiterate its faultiness and subordinate status. Blood, urine, and tears are universal bodily fluids, yet the female body additionally produces amniotic fluid, menstrual blood and breastmilk.” (Morgan, 2018)
[3] In 2011, Prime Minister of the UK, David Cameron, told a female MP to “calm down dear” during a debate session in parliament. His spokesman denied misogyny saying it was a “humorous remark”. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13211577
[4] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12557-men-with-younger-women-have-more-children/
[5] “The cosmetic companies seem to propose the notion that ageing can be reversible and repairable: that we do not have to let the world see the facial and bodily changes associated with the ageing process (Coupland 2009). In fact, you can be thought of as negligent or ‘‘morally lax’’ (Coupland 2009: p. 956) if you do allow the effects of ageing to show. Elizabeth Arden ran an advertisement in 2007 with the strapline ‘‘It just breaks my heart when I see younger women look older than I do’’ promoting their Prevage Anti-Aging Moisturizing Treatment. Allowing age-related changes to show on your face or body is constructed as a problem to which the different cosmetic companies offer a range of ‘‘solutions’’ (Coupland 2009). The dominant message is that the acquisition of the visible signs of ageing is unacceptable for women. There is an imperative which underlies all of the advertisements: one that insists women should hide and deny the ageing process” (Searing and Zeilig, 2017)
[6] “Pornography and popular culture idealize hairlessness and prepubescent female genitals (Schick, Rima, & Calabrese, 2011), with most mainstream pornographic films and images depicting hairless genitals as the “industry standard” for genital beauty (Cokal, 2007).One study of 647 Playboy Magazine centerfolds found that hairless, undefined genitalia resembling those of aprepubescent female appeared in the vast majority of Playboy photographs published recently (Schick et al., 2011).” from (Fahs, 2014)
Link to bibliography here
