Haynes made a virtue of necessity, rewriting and reframing the narrative. What could have been a mere bio-pic became instead a wider statement about the consuming nature of fame and power. Fittingly, the rewritten story follows the structure of Orson Welles’ notoriously not-a-bio-pic Citizen Kane: reporter Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) is tapped to investigate the disappearing act of former rock idol Brian Slade, the glammest of the glam, whose most outrageous stage act drove him into obscurity.

As in Kane, the reporter tries to divine the icon’s history at second-hand, struggling to assemble the glib or sorrowful gossip of Slade’s scattered coterie into a coherent history. Unlike Kane, Velvet Goldmine ties the reporter’s personal narrative to the subject’s, expressing the slippery way we can incorporate a celebrity’s persona into our own histories, consuming the energy of those we admire or emulate, eroding their identities in favor of our own projections.

It could have been dreary or didactic, but instead the film is a giddy tissue of visual tales, richly laced with a soundtrack of glam-rock’s greatest hits, original and reworked (and notably minus any David Bowie). Velvet Goldmine shows us the grime under a layer of glitter, the sordid soul-drain that fame can become.

Thanks for your recent advertising campaign letting the world know that Dr. Pepper 10 is “not for women.” Without that warning, I might have spent money on your product. Phew, that was a close call!

But now I know that Dr. Pepper doesn’t want my money, for this product or for any other.

That’s obvious, right? If you discourage women from trying your (putatively) more robust, flavorful product, then you must think that women only want insipid, flavorless drinks. Therefore, I assume that any product you market toward women is inferior; I’ll make sure to actively avoid all of your drinks! Thanks for the warning!

Seriously, y’all: I understand the marketing trend to avoid associating low-calorie drinks with “diets.” I understand that, in a sexist society that demands eternal body consciousness from women, the label “diet” feminizes a product (and puts you at risk of missing out on the vast male market). But this attempt to attract men by subtly denigrating women is both silly and not-so-subtly misogynistic.

I hope your future marketing doesn’t rely upon gendered insults. Until then, my household (which until today went through several bottles of Dr. Pepper weekly, between me and my husband) will switch to some other, less gender-labeled brand of soda. Thanks for the heads-up!

sincerely,

Elsa

My eyebrows (especially the right one) say that I disdain this barely-veiled decree for mandatory feminine grooming as anti-feminist verging on misogyny. I didn’t see that option listed in the article, though.

… through the two shoppers whose carts were stopped, head-to-head and crossways blocking the wide aisle while they caught up on their gossip
… stopping short to avoid the dithering little lady with the overfilled cart, who wavered first one way, then another, grazing me on each side as she adjusted
… slinking through between one fellow who was doing recon on the shortest line, and his companion, who was pushing a full cart (and that was my bad, guys — sorry!)
… and into the Feminine Care aisle, only to discover
… a suited fellow standing there, facing me but blankly staring off into space, his body completely blocking the one shelf to which I needed access.

“Excuse me.”

No response.

Ahem. A little louder. “Excuse me, sir.”

Not a blink.

A-hem. “Sir, I just need to get to that shelf.” Nothing. “I just need to get to the TAMPONS, they’re right behind you.”

It was as if somebody flipped his “on” switch: he started, he glanced at me and then away, he flushed a becoming pink, and he skittered out of the corner where he was standing as if he’d been shocked, averting his eyes from me the entire time, because I had uttered the word tampons. I might as well have hollered VAGINA VAGINA VAGINA.

And next time, I will.

An actual “traditional marriage” would deny legal personhood to the wife, allow spousal rape, and deny the right to interracial marriage, among other tragedies. We as a society saw the injustice in these laws, and changed them accordingly. It’s time to do it again.

A tradition of institutional oppression is nothing to defend.

I’m walking from the break room to Dad’s private room. More like stumbling, really: it’s been a long haul, and I haven’t slept a full night for some time.

I feel pretty rough, and I look it. Every morning, I apply a touch of make-up, battle paint to get me through the school day. By the time I reach the hospital in the the afternoon, it’s all cried off. The normal dark circles under my eyes now look like bruises. I’m rumpled and slouched. I’m walking a little aimlessly, and I know I have that thousand-yard stare, the empty eyes of the grieving.

I slowly turn a corner — and almost collide with a bustling man in scrubs wheeling a teetering piece of shiny hospital machinery. He starts, then looks up into my eyes. I expect the look that all the nurses and orderlies give us: the silent almost-smile of commiseration, the death smile. It’s a small enough ward that they all seem to know the score.

He doesn’t offer the death smile. He looks me up and down and says, “Oh! How tall are you?”

I blink, and automatically answer. “Uh, five-ten. Or so.” I almost add, “What?” but so many inexplicable things have happened lately that I’m all out of “What?”

He shakes his head lasciviously, casting his gaze up and down me one more time. “Whew! I like that! MMM, tall women!” My jaw drops as he trundles his rig past me.

Because I am a woman, there is literally no time when I am exempt from an unsolicited appraisal of my sexual appeal by (and to) random men. When I, and other women, bridle under this oppressive and constant scrutiny, we are silly, shrill radical feminists who cannot take a compliment. Note that the flip side is rarely argued: that the men who offer these unsolicited and often unwelcome assessments are tone-deaf jackasses, that a sensible person knows that sometimes a person’s physical appearance is utterly irrelevant, and that there’s a difference between a compliment from a friend and a sexual assessment from a stranger.

I hoped to write something more coherent about this phenomenon. I hoped to address it sensibly, to expand on the impossibility of avoiding it — after all, I’m forty, gray-haired, plump, and bookish, hardly the stereotype of the red-hot mama, and I still get wolf-whistles and catcalls. But it’s been happening, after all, for at least twenty-six years: since I was 14. And that’s discounting all the childhood remarks that both adults and children make, the constant monitoring of a girl’s weight and height and hair style and clothing and demeanor and and and.

I’m tired. I’m exhausted.

And so I won’t discuss it sensibly. I’ll just say: I’m exhausted.

I don’t know where to start with this, so let’s start with yuck!

And now let’s look at some underlying assumptions:

The caterers need not address themselves to anyone but the princess the bride the broad, and possibly her mother; the groom is incidental to the process.

Every woman wants to be wrapped up in gossamer and fairy dust on her wedding day. (A quieter assumption, but no less pervasive: she’ll be sporting some pretty fierce high-compression undergarments to keep the telltale bulges of humanity under wraps.*)

This iconic creature, The Bride, is made of spun sugar and fractious nerves, and needs soothing.

Um. Did I say “yuck”? Oh. Well, good. Because yuck!

But now it’s true-confessions time. It’s true that I have no desire for the sparkly dress with the swooping skirt or the tiara or the horse-drawn carriage, because, y’know, I finished playing Cinderella when I was a child.

But.

I confess that I must have some lurking princess fantasy, given the pangs I suffered upon admitting to myself that we could not justify renting a bouncy castle.

*I’m uncharacteristically blasé about getting a dress. In fact, I’ve established only one inflexible guideline: I must be able to wear normal underthings with it. Oh, and to sit on the ground with kids.

But now it’s even harder. Since my back injury, I’ve put on weight, which takes me from the top end of the misses’ sizes into the hinterlands of plus size. I dread this, in part because manufacturers often cut 16+ sizes for buxom figures, not strapping figures. On me, the sleeves are too short, the shoulders and back cling, and the boobs and waist gape.

I also dread it because so many plus-size dress styles suggest that we should cover our shame: billowing feet of cheap fabric, high necks, ballooning sleeves, ankle-length hems. So what if I’ve gone up a size? I still don’t want to dress like Sergeant Sarah Brown going to the opera.

Let me be clear: I do not dread the plus sizes because the size range indicates that I’m “fat.” I got over that worry some time ago.*

self-love

For many years, I managed a boutique. Every day, I saw women — all kinds of women: slim and willowy, tall and powerful, gracefully statuesque, plump and lovely, reed-thin, muscular and athletic — come in, try on outfits, and look critically at themselves in the mirror. It was rarely easy for them, and often agonizing.

I saw beautiful women of all shapes and sizes insult themselves in the most vicious language. A woman with a luscious round bosom talked about “these monsters” that ruined the line of a too-tight bodice. A strapping athlete bemoaned her powerful thighs and biceps, which refused to be ignored in a fitted sheath. Slim women complained that they didn’t fill out billowy dresses, and curvaceously plump women moaned that they were “too fat” for evening wear.

I saw women cry when they needed to move up (or down) a dress size. I saw women dance when something fit off the rack.

We had a roster of regular customers, and I got to know their styles and favorite colors, their shopping patterns, and — most crucially — their emotional triggers.

One rule I lived by: the fault is always with the garment, not with the woman. If the skirt clings unkindly to your bum, if the blouse pops at the button, if the dress tugs and pulls, it’s the skirt, the blouse, or the dress that’s the wrong shape. The customer is the right shape. This appeared to be a revolutionary idea to many of our customers.

In all those years, there was only one woman who routinely stepped out of the dressing room, looked at her reflection, and said “Wow! I look gorgeous!“

That woman was me. Yes, I called myself gorgeous. More than that, I did it routinely.

I’d seen too many beautiful women insult themselves, despise themselves for imagined failings, and utterly fail to see their own beauty. I swore to help them see it, and to keep myself safe from similar blindness.

I know that the whole notion of physical beauty is fraught with pitfalls. Physical beauty ought not to be a prerequisite for self-esteem, nor for eliciting esteem from others. Physical beauty ought to be is optional for women, as it is for men.

But I see my physical beauty. I claim my physical beauty. Just because it often falls outside the narrow norms defined by our culture doesn’t mean it’s invisible.

My determination not to vilify my own body was cemented by my first partner’s illness and death from AIDS, and my father’s decline from emphysema and a constellation of smoking-related maladies. I watched both of them waste away, their bodies increasingly frail and skeletonized, and I fully internalized the truth: your body is a machine to carry you through this world. If it stays reasonably strong and performs daily tasks with little complaint, you are one of the rare lucky people with a perfect body. Enjoy it. Celebrate it.

I don’t know if any of you needed to read this, but I needed to write it. After all my shopping and measuring and criticizing and fretting, I had a lapse of faith. I needed to say all this, to get this out of my head and into text, to make it concrete.

the Woman of Willendorf

It seems appropriate that this reflection roughly coincides with a celebration of the Woman of Willendorf, the profoundly rounded figurine you see above. It She was discovered in August of 1908: it’s her 100th anniversary, though of course her private history began perhaps 25,000 years ago.

In 1908, she was dubbed “the Venus of Willendorf,” a winking misnomer that seduces the viewer into making comparisons between the Willendorf figure and the classical Venus of antiquity and the Renaissance. The classical Venus was both erotic and demure, making a (necessarily failed) attempt to cover herself, thus perfectly displaying her attributes to the male gaze.

By contrast, the Woman of Willendorf gloriously displays her sexual characteristics: lavish breasts, belly, and buttocks swell to meet the hand and eye. More than that, her prominent navel and labia proclaim that it is not mere erotic beauty on display here, but fertility. She is not a sex object; she is female sexuality itself.

Her very fatness is a fantasy. Consider how unlikely a figure she would be in her presumed culture of origin: in our current understanding of gatherer-hunter subsistence modes, such lushness of frame would be a practical impossibility for most women. Her lavish rolls and swells suggest ample resources at her disposal, prominent among them food and leisure.

the truth

Though I conjecture that she is an object of fantasy, and perhaps a fertility symbol, the art historian in me admits the simple truth. We know little about the Willendorf figurine: her origin, her cultural purpose, her maker.
I do know she’s lovely. Those curves, the oval form punctuated with carved swells and valleys, the sense of luscious mass packed into that small shape — it all makes my hands ache to hold her, to feel the grainy texture of her shape in my cupped palm.

She’s beautiful.

I am beautiful.

And so are you. Yes, you.

If you can’t see it, look closer.

*Update, Mon, Sept 1st:

I must admit, evidently I’m not entirely over it, given how I sobbed in fury and embarrassment after yet another failed attempt to order one pretty dress, any pretty dress. But at least I dig in my heels and resist the conventionally approved feelings of inadequacy and shame.

Yeah, sometimes I’m fat. There are moment when that feels awful, like a moral indictment, not a mere statement of fat fact. But, because I claim my right to be beautiful outside that narrow margin, there are days when I’m fat and I rock it, baby.

Image courtesy of Matthias Kabel under the GNU Free Documentation License.

I won a couple of prizes and was inexplicably given several more: products to strip my exterior roughness, lotions to smooth me, eyeshadow and glossy lip stuff to make me slippery and shiny, and a pretty parcel full of metal prongs and barbs to strip off the horny and hairy bits of my face, feet, and hands. I was first tickled, then bewildered, and finally (secretly) a trifle panicked at this windfall of girly goods heaped on my lap, presumably intended to induct me, willy or nilly, into the ranks of girlkind.

But there was unlimited cake and coffee, so it all balances out.

49

As a 1930s wife, I am
Average

Take the test!

I make a barely adequate 1930s wife, and I’ll tell you why:

- fails to wash the top of the milk bottle before opening it? Yes.

- gives [The Fella] shampoos and manicures? No.

- slows up card game with chatter and gossip? Yes.

- tells risque or vulgar stories? Oh, hell yes — this one time, I told a risque or vulgar story in a burlesque club, when we were between acts, and I … Oh.

I fare much better as a husband.

126 As a 1930s husband, I am Very Superior Take the test!