denim and tutus
I logged back in to wordpress to publish a rant on fashion history, and what do i find still sitting in my drafts? a rant on fashion history from October 21, 2013! I don’t know exactly where I was taking it beyond what I set out, but between the titular tutus, the denim femmes who i suspected were overlaying femme stylings on a ubiquitous substrate, affecting the meaning of both while they’re at it – and the halloween costume link i’d dropped at the end (as of September 5, 2020, the article exists but all the images in it are broken and besides, it was updated a few weeks ago, who knows how much) – i guess i was talking about the bounds of variation within the aesthetic paradigm of any given time, which is rigid in what it designates not only as in or out of style, but even comprehensible or not. there are always a variety of ways in which one is allowed to deviate from the norm, but those ways are limited and defined. it all changes in the flow of time, but in any inescapable moment, you can’t do just anything. you won’t even be able to think of just anything, because clothing has a vocabulary and a grammar, which we can push and challenge but not be entirely free of. we can draw inspiration from outside the system, but how we do that is still influenced but inside. i suspect that how we do this is a determiner of whether our unusual assemblage has the potential to influence where fashion goes next, or at the other extreme, risks being condemned – perhaps as ‘ugly’, ‘unprofessional’, ‘superficial’, even ‘obscene’. yeah, this absolutely connects in with the regulation of women’s bodies, especially.
I suspect I was also talking about fancy dress costumes, a subsection of dress that i find interesting for several reasons, including the assumption that it is less constrained than everyday wear, when actually it is arguably more rigid! looking at commercially available costumes, there is an incredibly rigid language (they’ve got a lot of attention over the last decade – maybe things have diversified now but i haven’t looked, so cast your mind back a few years if required…) short but full skirt, thigh high stockings, corset stylings (probably not the real thing, they can’t be mass produced quite that cheaply, but an indication of it). there’s a lexical slot for the option of an accessory that is attached but doesn’t obscure the body (cape/wings/tail etc), and another for something on the head (hat/fascinator/wig/ears). the whole lot is organised into some kind of colourscheme, with style lines that don’t disturb the basic shape.
how does this happen? presumably there are designers with fashion figures to trace over and cost benefits to streamlining factory production, but there is also an aspect of social involvement in accepting the paradigm. i attended the Sleaze Ball in probably 07 or 08, and was fascinated to see how people en masse treated the opportunity for costume. the theme was ‘circus’, and while 95% of the crowd were guys in jeans and no top, there were enough dressed up people to analyze: notably a few ringmasters with tailcoats and whips, a handful of pony girls and a whole lot of women in corsets, tutus, stockings and heels. i myself wore a corset, probably also some sort of stockings and heels. in fact the reason i was there at all was that i had just bought the corset when i got an sms from a friend inviting people to apply to win her spare ticket from her, and having a new corset that needed an occasion to be worn was apparently a compelling partial argument.
this phenomenon is hardly news, but what i find fascinating is that it has happened over and over again through history, the shapes generated by different algorithms of style but, according to art and advertising, no less rigid (what people actually wore, especially when it was common to do the making yourself, is harder to track, but even if that varied a huge amount, the rigid trend is a phenomenon in itself and its artifacts have a legitimate story to tell). take the 1810-20s (give or take a decade, i’m not digging up images right now for a piece that has already waited seven years to be posted) there are piles of drawings and fashion plates of fancy dress suggestions. this was the time when women’s fashion had spent a while being all narrow, white and diaphanous in an interpretation of ancient statues, but there was presumably a craving for detail, colour and presence coming through, so the severity of the old style was not being radically changed, but slowly started being eased with whimsy. the easiest way to do this is at the bottom of the skirt, a nice open area of fabric with lots of scope and sufficient distance from the important things like your face and the most culturally relevant locations of curves as signifiers of style at the time (plenty of eras before and after that point it would have been crucial to display your waistline to advantage, and no matter what other messages you’re displaying, you wouldn’t let them jeopardise that. this particular moment was unusual in its focus, but the mechanism wouldn’t have been much different). so hemlines were starting to widen with padding and pattern, as well as raising just a touch (gosh how daring). it was a collective discussion, with everyone contributing, so if you now want to pretend you’re someone else for a day, you’re not going to throw all that out the window. you’re still going to get dressed in the same undergarments to create the shape you expect, skirts that aren’t unfashionably long or narrow, because that would be terribly boring (maybe they’re just a touch wider and higher than everyday, but noone is going to go overboard and make themselves panniers like people wore decades ago, you’re not dressing up as your grandmother! then, by the 1830s, it was ok to show half your calf, as long as it’s properly separated from real life by being a costume. how daring, transgressive and probably sexy – are you going to pass up the chance to wear your skirts that high, just for one day? unless you personally believe that ankles will be the downfall of society, then no, you are definitely not). you still want to look good to the eyes of the day, but you also want to pretend you’re greek. so you embroider a greek key pattern onto your dress. you don’t have to look like you’re actually from greece, everyone knows exactly what you’re doing – it’s right there in the name of the pattern! (do firefighters even wear yellow braces? they certainly don’t wear flared red miniskirts and midriff tops, but combine the two ridiculous elements together and everyone knows exactly what you’re doing.)
so the grammar of 1820s dressups involved a fashionable silhouette and certain locations in which to indicate intention and display messages, notably the wide space at the bottom of the skirt, and probably some detail and finery somewhere fashionable like on the shoulders, that echoes the important stuff but doesn’t need to contribute to the idea. fancy dress is fancy, you won’t be wearing it to work in so you may as well. the concepts to be communicated involved a whole selection of things that probably felt terribly exotic at the time, including a whole lot of racial stereotypes that are pretty cringeworthy now, and the vocabulary included some sashes and a whole lot of presumably well understood pictures and motifs embroidered onto your dress (yeah i’m probably generalising way too much, but it’s still pretty limited).
a generation or two later, with the availability of sewing machines, it’s easier to make up entire new garments in colours and patterns that you won’t wear otherwise, there’s a wider variety of and interesting fabrics to make them from and techniques like machine applique are both easier and bolder than earlier. so you have a different grammar built on different techniques and a different fashionable silhouette, with almost the whole surface of your garments available as canvas for a vocabulary that now includes a whole lot of stars and flowers and stripes, probably because – at least in one country – there was a huge new emphasis on portraying abstract concepts such as virtues, particularly liberty and other nationalistic ideas (it possibly didn’t even matter precisely what the concept was – if you have a shockingly bold stripy skirt and applique stars, you’re ready to party. who cares these days whether you’re a fairy or an angel, as long as you get to show off your legs and pretend you have wings?)
that brings me to 2013, and onesies. specifically the animal variety. it seems that they were first a thing in 2009 and were readily available in 2012, and i’m sure they were on my mind when writing this. such a big departure from the formula, it bore no recognition to it. however they have a very specific formula of their own, which they have barely deviated from in the last decade that they have become less and less popular, but haven’t gone away entirely (i haven’t noticed a crowd of teenagers roaming the night them in them for a few years, but they can still be found in discount shops, primary school mufti days and even my house in the middle of winter). the fluffiness, the wide round shape with dropped crotch, only cinching at wrist and ankle, the hood big enough to mostly cover the head are grammar, as are the back seam that will anchor a wide vocabulary of manes, ridges and tails, the capacity for a different fabric to be pieced in to indicate a pale underside, embroidery in limited use for the face and any other small key markings that can’t be achieved by the usual piecing of differently coloured or patterned fleece fabric.
so why has this phenomenon had the lifespan of a particularly good fad rather than the endurance of the other things i’ve discussed? certainly not for the reasons its critics have usually cited – being really big or being considered ugly or strange when new aren’t really big barriers according to the long narrative of fashion! part of it will be that it is so separate from the rest of the fashion world that it hasn’t been part of the cycle of continuous adaptation – even the attempt to make summer-weight versions lost something of the original appeal and didn’t catch on, which is pretty limiting. it also happened separate but parallel to the other paradigm which was already well embedded in the system – even if it’s appealing to go out as a fluffy cat, you also have the alternative of being a ‘sexy’ cat with nothing more unusual than a headband with ears on it. it is also largely a manufactured trend – i think the original company didn’t innovate the idea further, and a heap of manufacturers got on the bandwagon for a while but nothing in the hundreds of designs generated was particularly different. and nobody will be making them at home because few people sew and they were easy to find and cheaper to buy than the cost of the fabric involved, so that cuts off an organic option for evolution. a similarly artificial trend that didn’t go anywhere was court dress of the 1820s – i only recently heard about this amazing phenomenon, where fashion had changed dramatically in recent decades, but there were rules about what you wore to court, so the richest and most powerful people, who would often be the trendsetters, made these incredible gowns that paired contemporary high waists and draped shapes with full sized support structures that were originally meant to make the waist look small in contrast. the result looks utterly comical, not only because it was a clash of intentions, but because once the rule was dropped, the trend disappeared and we never saw anything like it again. we have absolutely nothing to relate it to, that would help us accept any aspect of the style as beautiful or even interesting.
Still i wonder if 1820s court gowns had any more subtle influences on the course of fashion, just as i wonder if onesies have had any significant part to play in the long transition from heroin chic to celebration of ‘booty’. we’d already had decades of subcultural differentiation in fashion, and hoodies and cargo pockets were well established in casual wear, both of which initially broke brains accustomed to the cultural imperative to prove thinness as control – and the need to do it by obsessing about the visible size of the thighs and the shape of the tummy. (remember when people were horribly disparaging about ‘muffin tops’ but so obsessed with thighs that it was the fashion to wear jeans that were so tight around the thighs and hips that you couldn’t help but spill out the top? yeah, that one was both sexist and classist) onesies are still quite a departure as they didn’t really use that bulk to contrast against other part of the body. hmm. and what of the 1920s, where the silhouette was so new and experimental and it seems there was a renewed diy focus, which i imagine was partly due to the new simplicity of outer layers (or maybe i grew up with too much House of Eliott…) and a common fancy dress option was a parody of panniers, with bulk sticking out at the sides from low on the hips without any attempt at waist shaping above. that deviated sharply from day styles, though it did appear in evening dress. did that leave any residue on the style – in shape, diversity, gathers, anything? the 1930s stayed narrow except for shoulders, didn’t it? we don’t really think about bulk as a trend again until the new look, which threw back far further to more structured shapes.
other questions to add to the long list of things to maybe address one day:
- everything that i’ve discussed has been within the (white) ‘western tradition’, and probably a pretty limited class profile, too. it’s a longstanding, strong and interesting tradition, but it’s not universal. what was happening outside of it, and what interaction was there, in or out?
- has anyone actually talked about clothing as linguistics? is it remotely similar? (this post is clearly not a referenced, academic study, but there are more and more people studying dress history these days…)
- how widespread was that white tshirt/black tshirt thing around 1992, really?
- what is the real interaction between fashion plates and actual wear, at any given time? how different is the history of costume suggestion illistrations from that of regular fashion plates? where did people actually wear these things, were costume balls only for the elites up to a certain point? what was the precise impact of technology and economics on the transition from altering your own clothes like you’re retrimming a hat, to making dedicated garments? or anything else? many of the images we see are from the ballet or opera – how did this interact with regular people? what were the popular costume concepts at any given time, how broad was the regular pool of ideas and how much did they really change, accounting for survival bias? and the grammar and vocabulary?
- what’s going on with all those images of women in breeches and trousers for costume? or dramatically short skirts, for that matter. how much did it happen, how did society understand it, did it draw from or influence rational dress movements (gotta know more about them anyway!) and how people dressed or censured others’ dress in the real world? how different is your life really if you’re in the circus, and how do outsiders treat you and think about you?
- and as always – what about the people we don’t watch? what can we know about people who actually do manage to buck trends in unauthorised ways, whether or not they pay for it socially?
- what happens to either costume or dress if we’re stuck in isolation forever???? or less dramatically, what is the current fairly lengthy isolation doing? facemasks are certainly something to follow as more demographics of people slowly adapt to them. there’s a strong resistance to complete adaptation, as we saw after the first wave, but they’ll definitely have something more of a presence than they did a year ago. sewists and milliners everywhere are churning out gorgeous handmade masks in gorgeous fabrics, but most people are still wearing disposable ones, in increasing varieties. and you can see people walking around together wearing matching ones! at least one more change is on the radar, i think, when we have to try to protect ourselves from both the bushfire smoke and the virus at the same time – i’m not sure we yet have anything that will do both well, and i wait to see if it’s something the handmade masks will be able to do.
Well. that was a lot, but here we go back to 2013 and the original half a post:
i’ve been thinking recently about how much people tend to treat fashion and the aesthetics of clothing as stable, when they’re very clearly not. we know that fashion changes – in fact, that’s what makes it ‘fashion’, but we still expect its meanings to be universal.
i’ve watched with great bemusement as denim has recently undergone yet another change in my world, which is inhabited by a high proportion of femmes and vintage wearers. denim was originally work wear and nothing but work wear. boring but hardy, someone who didn’t have to wear it wouldn’t be seen dead in such a low-class fabric. over time we’ve seen it become fashionable, picking up more and more meanings as it goes – from practical to a sort of visual representation of workers’ solidarity, the general trend for a long time was that denim jeans said you’re a no-nonsense kind of person who doesn’t care what they look like (supposedly) because they have more important things to do.
denim became the epitome of ‘casual’, whether at work, at leisure or on the catwalk. somehow casual became the only look in town, and denim its best expression. i remember watching in amazement as a young highschool kid in 1992, when the we had a mufti day and almost everyone turned up to school in uniform just like every other day – except that day, the uniform was jeans and a white tshirt. the next year a white tshirt would be fashion death – and everyone was just as uniform in jeans and a black tshirt. what does this say for the theory that fashion fundamentally changed in the 70s or 80s, fracturing and diversifying until we can never go back to regulation hem lengths again? maybe there’s a significance in little old me sitting in the corner in my mother’s old skirt (hideously pale green interlock, but beautifully soft and long and flowy, with big pockets), ignored as usual, but still present.
back to the story of denim – we had gotten dark denim and light denim and stone washed denim and probably a million other shades and treatments, until variations of the distinctive flecked indigo joined the ranks of what are considered neutral colours, ones that any other colour can supposedly be worn with (though i’m sure if you look at the colours the industry produced over time, you’ll see more reds and whites when navy was popular and creams and tans when beige was in, with hot pink going up and navy going down with the swell of denim). eventually colours came in, then patterns, and the meanings of the fabric started to fade. jeans have always been labeled as ‘comfortable’, but they’re actually not for everyone. stretch denim made jeans more accessible for curvier people, and stopped regulating away their curves. i suspect there is much that could be said about jeans and cultural conceptions of fatness.
i could be wrong, but i think ‘jeggings’ were the nail in the coffin of denim as a cultural icon. stretchy garments that aren’t even made of denim, but are printed to look like traditional jeans texture and stitching, jeans and denim have finally been somewhat decoupled, and people don’t even need to know what denim is any more.
back to the reason i embarked on this subjective history of a fabric i personally have barely ever worn: the phenomenon of denim femme.
the femme movement has been strong in sydney over the last several years. many queer women are rejecting the previous imperative of butch or androgynous presentation, and calling loud and proud for femme representation, femme visibility, femme understanding. there are femme groups, there are the beginnings of codifications for how to present as queer femme rather than straight feminine. for that is probably the biggest problem for queer femme people – the aesthetic is following an almost identical trajectory to the (nominally straight) world of vintage, a world big enough to support a whole circuit of vintage fairs, heavily biased towards the feminine styles of the 40s and 50s.
so how does denim fit in these two related worlds? well that’s the question!
in world war two, women rolled up their sleeves and contributed to the war effort. regardless of the ethics of building war machines or the politics of assembly lines, it was no doubt amazing for so many women who had been stuck in the home, to break their many and various bounds and be in public, do something useful beyond the family, do things that people had thought they couldn’t. and yes, some of them did it in denim. rosie the riveter is an wonderful icon, even if she’s just a single image. ‘we can do it’ is a slogan to live by. but if she manages to portray being feminine while strong, it’s not the blue work shirt that does it. i’d say it just might have something to do with the full makeup, the nails, the eyebrows, the elaborate hair peeking out from under the kerchief.
on the other hand, http://www.buzzfeed.com/erinlarosa/badass-halloween-costumes-to-empower-little-girls
…and yes, that’s as far as i got in 2013. welcome back to 2020.
niephling
niephling, nibling, niefling. no consensus yet, but people are working on it: a gender-neutral word for nieces and nephews.
we have parents, siblings, cousins, grandparents. children and kids and offspring are not perfect but will do. now we need one for aunts and uncles – aurents has been suggested.
these words will not only make me more comfortable, but have the potential to lessen the gendering of the newest people in our gendered society, the ones people people still argue over, swearing that preferences for pink dolls or blue trucks are inherent because they start so early. of course they don’t start nearly as early as people start using the words niece and nephew for their niephlings.
of course good words will also make plurals much easier – and who wouldn’t want plural niephlings and aurents? they’re all potential and no responsibility (well maybe not, but it’s much less of an issue than whether you want to breed yourself). so everyone should get behind them!
stitch and bitch
stitch and bitch. sewing group. knitting circle. i’ve run them on and off for years. at first i was wary of the most popular name for such things, but over the years i was won over by its recognisability and openness – i don’t care if you knit or sew or crochet or tat or do something obscure like making friendship bracelets.
at QC 2012, i scheduled a stitch and bitch, and it was so popular that we ended up having three of them, and our crafting spilled joyously onto conference floor. however the women’s caucus took issue with the name and reprimanded me, with no right of reply.
this year we scheduled four sessions straight up. it wasn’t as novel as the year before, but there was still an impressive number of knitters on conference floor. i didn’t change the name, and there were no complaints. i thought about addressing the issue with the new caucus, but refrained.
over the year i’ve thought about the term, and i can’t find any reason i can credit, to not use it. surely ‘bitch’ is a sterling example of a word ready for reclamation. we can’t just get rid of it because it actually is a legitimate word in the english language, and even though it refers to dogs, it is very specifically gendered. the concrete implications of its initial meaning will not fade away, even if we try to exile it. all that does is make yet another feminine word bad and taboo.
if we embrace it, however, by accepting this positive usage that has evolved organically, we are associating a feminine word with something good, changing it from a word which attaches an unequivocably negative connotation to femaleness, to a word with mixed usage. after all, what could be more positive than the informal political learning and exchange of ideas encouraged when we come together as a group to share our communal love of fibre arts?
non-cis males
i know why we use this term, i understand it’s important to support groups of people who are discriminated against and put at a disadvantage. i understand that it’s just as important to catch all the various people who have experienced these things, and not just aim our support at the people who fit into groups big and obvious enough that we can name them. i understand that trying to list them all doesn’t work, even if we keep going, from women to trans women and trans men to genderqueer people and intersex people and sex and gender diverse people (let’s not get started on what it would mean for an individual to be diverse).
still, i’m anxious for the next change in terminology. a non-cis male is, gramatically, a male person who is not cisgendered. that’s about as good as arguing that the term ‘men’ includes everyone. you can insist… or you can look for something better.
wacky
another word to use instead of crazy or mad or insane is wacky. but it’s replacing the positive uses of those terms, so maybe i really should still call a fabric insane when it’s over the top and bright and i love it. i don’t know.
no poo
for the life of me, i can’t remember what prompted me to google ‘no poo’ half an hour ago. turns out, it describes me! it means no shampoo, usually using bicarb and apple cider vinegar, egg yolks, conditioner only or mint tea on your hair, and sometimes, as i have done for nearly fourteen years, water only. amusingly, it seems that water only is the ideal to aspire to!
you can find reams and reams of writing on different people’s assessments of their hair, with blow by blow accounts of what they’ve put into it, how much and how often, how they combine it with massaging or brushing or combing or cutting. what it felt like when it was wet and dry, whether there was this or that effect, whether they’ve been ‘brave’ enough to try successively minimalist versions. i wouldn’t be surprised to find people charting their experiences in haircare!
yet i haven’t found a scrap of information about why you’d put vinegar in your hair.
dozy
how’s this for a word?
i think i’m pretty good on not using words associated with physical disabilities as pejoratives, but i have trouble not using mad, crazy and insane. this is hardly unusual, according to the comments in http://zeroatthebone.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/next-on-the-list-of-things-that-really-annoy-me/ . it’s something we need to work on, and part of it is more than language; while most of us do understand that someone in a wheelchair isn’t less human than those of us who walk unaided, we don’t necessarily actually believe that about someone who is displaying erratic behaviour, going somewhere completely unexpected in conversation or even using unusual speech patterns, any of which may be attributable to a ‘mental illness’ or other non-neurotypicality. thorny, thorny issues.
please correct me if i’m wrong, but i don’t think dozy is a word that anyone will be upset about beyond what i’m actually meaning. in the last couple of days i’ve been noticing plenty of dangerous behaviour on the roads, and just now at macquarie centre, dozens of people just walked uncaringly in front of both my father with his walking stick, and me with a very full trolley. neither of us are able to stop as easily as they seem to assume. dozy. so dozy. i feel a little strange at feeling so accomplished by virtue of having found a word to be negative but not too negative with, but it really is necessary. any others?
update:
numpty – a good word i hear, mostly for people who believe in woo.
atheism and religion in queer communities
this is an article i got published in Querelle 2012.
As I was thinking about writing this article, by chance I came across a word that summed up exactly why I care about atheism: religionormativity.
Just as we’re familiar with heteronormativity, roughly the privileging of heterosexuality, religionormativity is the privileging of religion, religious views of the world and religious interests.
Religionormativity, and specifically christonormativity, is rampant in Australia. It’s why our atheist Prime Minister spends tax money for catholics to visit the Vatican and says that she doesn’t think society is ‘ready’ for marriage equality. It’s why we see churches and billboards displaying crosses like gallows in the town square, and dub it ‘freedom of speech’. It’s why cuts to cities’ christmas budgets generate more outcry than cuts to the country’s welfare budget, and even minority religions feel the need to vocally perform their acceptance of the all-pervasive decorations.
It’s why we accept religious private schools and the fact that they often get more funding than public schools, while even the ‘secular, compulsory and free’ public schools teach christmas as curriculum for three months of the year and allow scripture teachers in to openly teach dogma every week. Primary Ethics has fought hard to run ethics classes in NSW schools for the non-scripture students who are often neglected and discriminated against, but even they dare not touch the religions’ regular access to school students, nor acknowledge any link to atheism. Now our government now upholds the right to put untrained religious ‘chaplains’ into state schools despite the High Court’s ruling against the program. Our government which still has prayers in parliament. It’s all religionormativity, and it’s dangerous. Secular people regularly accept that queerness and nonbelief are matters for adults only, which allows religions to stereotype us as the dangerous ones, who shouldn’t be around kids. Certainly not all religions commit these travesties, but they all support the religionormativity which is why we have to fight for adoption, insemination and even the right to teach. Not only do religions get tax breaks because dissemination of religion is still categorised as charitable in our law, but they also get permanent exemptions to the anti-discrimination laws that keep us out of their schools, adoption agencies and crisis shelters.
The census doesn’t give us data on atheists, as the question is framed religionormatively. However the number of people who marked ‘no religion’ has grown in this latest census to 22.3% of the population, counting us at nearly a quarter of the country, and bigger than any single religious group except catholicism, even without the 8.6% of the population who didn’t answer the question, those who answered ‘jedi’ or ‘pastafarian’ and all the people who put down their family’s religion instead of their own beliefs. Yet people still say ‘but we all believe in the same god anyway’ and really believe they’re being inclusive. And we let them get away with it.
In queer communities, we often think we’re better than that! We can analyse the effects of religious lobby groups on politics and the media, and we’re certainly clued in to the marriage debate and the motives of the players. A high proportion of us are nonbelievers, and an understanding of the destructiveness of intolerant churches and conservative religious families resonates through us, whether or not we’ve experienced the effects personally. Indeed, I’m glad to live within such an astute crowd.
However, all is not perfect. We have our own subtle forms of religionormativity that we often hold dear. In communities so full of atheists and other nonbelievers, we often let this aspect of ourselves remain closeted. We don’t want to recognise this, because we still fall prey to the idea that outing ourselves, declaring our belief structures, is oppressive to those of us who still are religious. Even while we find some people’s beliefs to often be pretty odd, we underestimate them by placing our assumptions about their sensibilities above our own freedom to be out and proud atheists, agnostics, secular humanists or whatever else we want to be.
We need to come out about our beliefs just as much as we need to come out about our sexualities. To name ourselves allows us to build communities where we can openly express ourselves and stand together for what we need. We already know this. So examine your own internalised religionormativity and come out, so that everyone else can too.
Kate Alway
Join the Queer Atheists at sydneyqueeratheists@gmail.com
http://anarchia.wordpress.com/2007/06/25/christonormativity/
http://abs.gov.au/websitedbs/censushome.nsf/home/CO-61?opendocument&navpos=620
manspleen
i’ve been thoroughly enjoying the recent upswell of new words. mansplaining is one of the wonderful ones, an evocative package for a behaviour that has been allowed precisely because we didn’t have such a nice, concise, powerful word to call it out with.
it’s a valuable addition to the feminist arsenal, without the essentialism which makes so much of feminism difficult. it defines a behaviour attached to a performance of masculinity as a cultural category, rather than defining the actor themself.
however the first time i heard it, what i thought i heard was manspleening. and maybe i should’ve. for i’m much less likely to be subjected to a man telling me why i’m wrong about feminism than i am to hear one going on and on about how they have body image problems too and women rape too and why should unis have women’s officers and women’s rooms and affirmative action in general.
these rants bear no resemblance to explanations at all, and are a concrete step up from mansplaining in terms of aggression, selfish incoherent venting and, frankly, bullying.
and with all the usefulness of a spleen.
vegetarian acting
despite my appreciation for vegetarian food and my support for vegetarianism, veganism and most other thoughtful, humane approaches to consumption, i am not, nor have i ever been, vegetarian.
so why do people keep apologising for eating meat in front of me?
this generally happens while i’m wearing my full length leather coat, not that i’m seen without it all that much. this marker of my less-than-rigorous-vegan status might be a bit subtle for some, but it does suggest to me that people are pretty certain of where i stand if they don’t even look for clues before they speak.
but that’s not all. at a friend’s party, standing around the barbecue, the all-meat barbecue. talking to the cook who is supervising said barbecue and surely knows he’s cooking no vegie patties. sausage on fork, twixt plate and mouth. surely that’s a bit more than a subtle sign that i eat meat. why does the cook ask me how long i’ve been vegetarian?
i don’t really mind, i guess they’re displaying some consciousness of what they’re eating and that it’s not entirely value-free. besides, of all the assumptions people make about me, this one is hardly unflattering. i’m just confused.
do i look like a vegetarian? what does a vegetarian look like?
have they seen me eating fruit or vegetables? haven’t they gotten past hating spinach yet?
is it that i know vegetarian people? is vegetarianism catching?
is it because i’m political and try to live by my principles? what, vegetarianism is a principle they’ve heard of so it must be one of mine?
is it because they saw me refuse leftovers because i couldn’t store them in the vegetarian house i once lived in? did they forget both that i was offered that dish because i’d been eating it, and also that they had been so fascinated by the situation that they got me to explain it in detail?
is it because i’ve mentioned that i like vegetarian food, or that it tends to be a safe option? have they never had a good meal without meat in it?
can anyone shed some light on this for me? i suspect there may be further consequences of this phenomenon, and i just don’t understand.
kate's adventure 