OK, so, that new year’s resolution to write write write write write? Umm, working on it!
I have been ridiculously busy this week one way or another, and have not really had time to blog. On the other hand, a visit to the gorgeous William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow has prompted an idea for a potential new novel, which I have been researching in a preliminary kind of way. This is very exciting, as I don’t get ideas for novels very often – in fact the last idea I had was over 10 years ago, and I told you what became of that. So if you live to a ripe old age, you may yet get to read a rough first draft of my story about Jenny and May, the daughters of William Morris. Just, you know, based on past performance? Don’t actually hold your breath.
ANYWAY. In lieu of any actual fresh writing, I have refreshed the following article (first written in 2009) just for the sake of something to put up. I should note I am a lot less judge-y of other women nowadays (and have also learned how to put on make-up), but I still stand by the points in the article in the main, and I was pleased with it as a piece of writing. Enjoy!
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Victoria Pendleton, femininity and being a “proper girl”
I generally eschew free magazines as a point of principle. I live in London, and commute to work – this means that I am bombarded with so much free media that the mind boggles briskly at the thought of just how many trees must die each day in order that the post-rush-hour streets of London may be carpeted with greyish sludge on rainy days. I hate having to run an obstacle course from my front door to the office, vaulting over unreasonably alert young men in cheerfully-coloured rainmacs attempting to foist a range of unwanted publications on me before I’ve had my first, essential-for-interaction-with-other-human-beings cup of tea. And I hate advertising. And litter. And the tickly whisper of SOMEBODY ELSE’S NEWSPAPER brushing against my ear on a crowded tube. So no CityAM, no Stylist, no ShortList, not even The Evening Standard – I spurn these pillars of the printed word, heedless of the blandishments of their vendors. If the relentless repetition of the title in an increasingly nasal voice can be considered a blandish.
However. This morning, I was stuck in a tunnel for 15 minutes; my iPod had packed up; and my brain had started to bleed with ennui. This, incidentally, is another symptom of London life. When one is so constantly and copiously cudgelled with content – via billboards, hoardings, shop windows, smartphones – a few minutes of stimulation deprivation becomes more deafening and disconcerting than a fruit machine at a funeral. So, to escape my own thoughts, I picked up and flicked through today’s offering of hard-sell and dreck in the form of Stylist. On the only page completely free from adverts, Victoria Pendleton, Olympic gold medallist and face of Hovis Wholemeal Breakfast Week (OK, so not completely free from adverts), enlightened London on the question of how she goes about her average day. From more or less the opening paragraph, the interview was an object lesson in patriarchy for the modern age.
“I wake up at around 8.30 AM,” says Victoria, “have a shower and do my make-up. I do have to be a bit functional, so I just put on a bit of Mac mascara, YSL’s Touche Eclat (my can’t-live-without-it product) and scrape my hair into a ponytail. I worry sometimes that with all the training I do I won’t look feminine.” Quite apart from the blatant product placement making my skin itch, this sentence struck me on the femi-bone (which is to say, that part of my system that responds to any sexist stimuli by pumping me full of feminist bile).
A large picture of the woman in question dominates the page; and I see that Ms Pendleton is quite right to worry. Try though she may (and does she ever try, jutting her hip and pouting her lip for England) there is nothing ‘feminine’ about her direct look or her lean, healthy body. Her muscular arms and thighs, the flat firm wall of her abdominals, the aura of power she exudes even when not pedalling furiously in pursuit of gold, are so far removed from ‘femininity’ that all the Touche Eclat in the world cannot help her to that hallowed state.
It is often noted that conceptions of ideal female beauty, before television facilitated the homogenisation of culture, have varied hugely from country to country and from era to era. But from Rubens’ chubby, lolling lovelies to the almost preternaturally fragile models like Lily Cole who command the catwalks today; from the Japanese manga obsession with pencil-thin yet strangely pneumatic schoolgirls to the re-emerging tradition in Mauritania of force-feeding young girls to make them obese (and thus, by standards of their culture, more feminine); one factor is consistent in all conceptions of femininity. Whether it comes with rolling curves of soft, inviting flesh, or jutting bird-bones and huge haunted eyes, that which is feminine is that which is weak, helpless, harmless. It is feminine to wear soft, delicate fabrics that tear easily; it is feminine to teeter along in pin-thin heels, deliberately crippling oneself; it is feminine to cringe, to sulk, to cry – but not to shout; it is definitely not feminine to cycle 500 metres in 33.838 seconds.
Pendleton seems to know that in spite of everything she has achieved, her lack of femininity exposes her to an opprobrium that she cannot get out from under by winning medals or breaking records. To her credit, she has not allowed that fact to put her off. But she does work hard in this interview and elsewhere to reassure society of her essential harmlessness. “For years I’ve been the only girl on the team, but now there are three of us – it’s so nice to have someone to share your nail polish with when you’re on tour!” she gushes, glossing over the heartening fact of increasing numbers of serious sportswomen with a girly giggle.
She concludes: “at the moment, I’m working towards two things: the Olympics and my wedding.” The symbolism of the fact that the first thing she does when she gets home from training is to put back on her engagement ring (which might be lost or damaged during her intense sessions at the Velodrome), and the reassurance such an image offers to a nervous patriarchy, is so glaring it’s almost embarrassing. Although if you want genuinely embarrassing, try Pendleton’s photoshoot for lad’s mag FHM and the accompanying commentary:
“Anyone who watched the 2009 World Track Cycling Championships in March will be aware of two things. Firstly, that FHM’s July issue cover star Victoria Pendleton has the sort of legs that could, should you inadvertently find yourself in a sexual embrace with the woman, kill you. Secondly … Pendleton cried so much that her lips were spasming and big drippy bogeys were on their way.”
The combination of fear and contempt encapsulated in this passage expresses all the social pressure that comes to bear on the women who either can’t or won’t be feminine – that is, who either refuse or are unable to feign weakness and debility wrapped up in a pretty chiffon package. FHM’s solution to the problem of Pendleton’s strong, healthy body, dismissively described as being ‘constructed for function rather than form’, is to photograph her in her underwear in a variety of vulnerable poses, those life-threatening legs hobbled in six-inch heels.
Now I KNOW that Pendleton is an independent woman and nobody forces her to simper about make-up or pose in her underclothes; and I KNOW that the feminist movement cannot cry conditioning forever, and that no matter how much progress is made on the equality front, there will always be women who prefer the trappings of femininity to the potential power of womanhood. Nor do I think the two are perforce mutually exclusive; I myself am wearing nail polish right now (well, more or less; I put it on about a week ago and it is now little more than a series of purple archipelagos clinging to my regrettably much-chewed nails) and have not yet felt the urge to jack my job in and make cakes all day – no more than I do after the average working day, in any case. I don’t think we all need to be nine and a half stone of twanging muscle, faces scrubbed clean and hair scraped back to face the glorious dawn of the matriarchy.
What I object to is the desperation which women like Pendleton, who for whatever reason can’t or won’t do ‘femininity’, feel the need to explain away their strength or their intellect with the silent reassurance: ‘I’m still a proper girl.’ And for all that I object to it so strongly, I am guilty of it too.
I don’t really wear makeup. I never have. I dabble in eye shadow now and then, and every so often I’ll buy a pot of blusher or tube of concealer that is used once and then gathers dust on my dressing table until I throw it out two years later. What usually prompts these pointless purchases is a sudden dread of becoming one of those old women with blue eye shadow up to her hairline and orange lipstick stuck to her dentures – women who have looked in the mirror at about sixty and panicked, after decades of scrub-faced complacency. I don’t want to be that inept when my time comes, I think. I need to develop a cleansing regimen, I need to figure out how to apply foundation without looking like a ghost, a leper or an Oompa-Loompa, I need to become a proper girl. The notion that I might just simply continue not to bother until the day I drop down dead doesn’t seem to get much of a look in when the fear is in me.
This creeping sense of shame at my failure to be a proper girl is what drives me to periodically part with great wodges of cash for some variation on a glorified crayon. But the real reason I don’t use the damn things, the reason I have not devoted the time and effort required to becoming proficient in their application, is that I simply don’t like how it looks on me. Not just because I can’t put it on right; on several occasions, for special nights out or just for fun, I have asked girl-friends to ‘do my face’; the result is invariably, subtly wrong – I may look nice, but I don’t look like me. And while me might not be much to look at, when I am offered the choice between that and the painted stranger in the mirror, my gut reaction is to reach for the wet wipes.
On one occasion when this wasn’t practical (the friend in question had spent half an hour anointing me with her best items and would probably never have spoken to me again) I wore my strange face to the pub, and was told by another (male) friend that I looked like ‘a very sexy clown’. At the time I thought he was being a dick; but looking back, it was perceptive. The make-up I was sporting was subtle by the standards of the group; but on me, it sat strangely. I wasn’t wearing it to bring out my eyes, or emphasise my smile; I was wearing it to be a proper girl. And so, of course, I looked as stagey and ridiculous as Victoria Pendleton, Olympic cyclist, in stilettos and a scrap of silk, prone on the floor in a gentleman’s wank mag.
Everything is better in a Fairisle Sweater 