Discussion of Feminine Perception: Reposted from primarylightc
A real entry on Germany and my continued adventures soon, but first I would like to engage you all in a discussion on the following video, as well as some of my thoughts on the matter and issues discussed in Melissa's original entry on the subject.
Melissa's research brings up some interesting thoughts and you should all go there and read. For me, these are some of the most interesting points:
"A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.
And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another...."
-John Berger, Ways of Seeing
"There are significant differences in gesture, posture, movement, and general bodily comportment: women are far more restricted than men [are]....to reach, stretch, and extend the body to meet resistances of matter in motion --as in sport or in the performance of physical tasks-- and [are] typically constricted [in] posture and general style of movement. Woman's space is not a field in which her bodily intentionality can be freely realized but an enclosure in which she feels herself positioned and by which she is confined. The "loose woman" violates these norms: her looseness is manifest not only in her morals, but in her manner of speech and quite literally in the free and easy way she moves."
"Feminine faces, as well as bodies, are trained to the expression of deference. Under male scrutiny, women will avert their eyes or cast them downward; the female gaze is trained to abandon its claim to the sovereign status of seer. The 'nice' girl learns to avoid the bold unfettered staring of the 'loose' woman who looks at whatever and whomever she pleases. Women are trained to smile more than men, too....
Feminine movement, gesture, and posture must exhibit not only constriction, but grace and a certain eroticism restrained by modesty: all (p.68) three. Here is field for the operation for a whole new training: a woman must stand with stomach pulled in, shoulders thrown slightly back and chest out, this to display her bosom to maximum advantage. While she must walk in the confined fashion appropriate to women, her movements must, at the same time, be combined with a subtle but provocative hip-roll. But too much display is taboo...."
"A woman's skin must be soft, supple, hairless, and smooth; ideally, it should betray no sign of wear, experience, age, or deep thought. Hair must be removed not only from the face but from large surfaces of the body as well...."
-Sandra Lee Bartky, "Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power"
In an extraodinary series of two thousand photographs, many (p. 67) candid shots taken in the street, the German photographer Marianne Wex has documented differences in typical masculine and feminine body posture. Women sit waiting for trains with arms close to the body, hands folded together in their laps, toes pointing straight ahead or turned inward, and legs pressed together. The women in these photographs make themselves small and narrow, harmless; they seem tense; they take up little space. Men, on the other hand, expand into the available space; they sit with legs far apart and arms flung out at some distance from the body....
In my experiences in Germany, I have found this commentary about women in public to be especially true. Women will do anything to make themselves seem more "slight": either to be unnoticed by unwanted commentary from men who find them attractive, or to be of less hindrance to the public that surrounds them. Another commonality I've found is that when a space is available next to a woman on a train, she will inevitably make herself smaller, bringing in her space and belongings and going out of her way to make available a seat to another. Men, however, feel free to take up as much space as they please, often making it difficult for others to sit next to them or blatantly hindering the availability of a seat by physically taking up the space of two. While this is still a generalization, it's a commonality that has become clear to me riding public transportation day after day.
The European (and sometimes American) tendency to view women as free-range objects for social commentary baffles me. While in Berlin I had an uncomfortable experience in which a man stopped me in a train station and insisted that I give him my phone number. When I told him I didn't have one (truthfully), he insisted that I was a liar. He continued to follow me and said that if I did not at least take his contact information, he would continue to follow me. I reluctantly took his number. The most disturbing thing about this exchange is I believe the man felt he was doing me a favor and paying me a compliment by insisting that I was so beautiful that he could simply not let me walk out of his life. To me, he was simply making me uncomfortable and a little bit scared. Were a woman to act the same way towards a random man in the street, I believe it would be considered completely unacceptable and out of character, and would generally be regarded as deep desperation.
Another point this all makes me think of is the prominence of pornographic television advertisements. While the United States has the likes of Girls Gone Wild videos that seem to never disappear, Germany takes it one step further. After 10pm, entire channels are devoted to advertisements for phone sex lines, while other network stations almost exclusively run these ads at night as oppose to normal commercials. Whereas in the US, one gets little more than a teaser, German advertisements utilize the entire female body...literally, nothing gets covered up, and no fetish is too taboo to thrust in my face while I'm trying to watch Sense and Sensibility auf deutsch. However, even the advertisements for homosexual chat lines NEVER show a man. Rather, these advertisements are text only.
I am not trying to make a comment on the porn industry as a whole, though I believe many can be made. I do, however, find it absurd that women can be made creatures of advertisement in such abundance and that the entirety of the female body can be made a point of gawking, but it is too taboo to do so with the man. The only argument I have ever heard for this is that "Women are more beautiful than men." But I simply do not find this cheap compliment an excuse to have nipples thrust in my face at all hours of the night.
I believe that this double standard that the female body is okay to look at and the male is not hinders any progress women have made in being seen as anything other than housewives and sex objects. Even non sexual based advertisements tend to stick to these two portrayals...a woman is either a housewife or a sex object. The only commercials I have found that seem to portray women in a different light are for deoderant and tampons (ie distinctly feminine products)...and the occasional ad for sportswear.
Furthermore, the lack of available clothing for women above roughly a size 14 (when in fact, the average woman IS a size 14) baffles me. It is not because there is no market for this clothing...if more than 50% of the population doesn't fit into the average pair of Express jeans, then they have to be getting their clothes somewhere. It almost seems like an out and out refusal on the part of many designers and brands to make available larger sizes. While a few companies, such as Gap, are slowly evolving to accomodate these sizes, companies that claim to be at the forefront of ethics, such as American Apparel, continue to make their womens sizes on a sliding scale. That is, the Medium is more like a Small, and the large more like a medium, so that a woman who is a true to form XL would not be able to fit into their clothes. Essentially, anyone who is not a size 12 or below is cut out of their demographic.
It's a lot to ponder all at once, and I'd love to hear some of your observations or comments on the subject...so please, do leave a comment this time around. Like I said, real Germany update soon.
Melissa's research brings up some interesting thoughts and you should all go there and read. For me, these are some of the most interesting points:
"A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.
And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another...."
-John Berger, Ways of Seeing
"There are significant differences in gesture, posture, movement, and general bodily comportment: women are far more restricted than men [are]....to reach, stretch, and extend the body to meet resistances of matter in motion --as in sport or in the performance of physical tasks-- and [are] typically constricted [in] posture and general style of movement. Woman's space is not a field in which her bodily intentionality can be freely realized but an enclosure in which she feels herself positioned and by which she is confined. The "loose woman" violates these norms: her looseness is manifest not only in her morals, but in her manner of speech and quite literally in the free and easy way she moves."
"Feminine faces, as well as bodies, are trained to the expression of deference. Under male scrutiny, women will avert their eyes or cast them downward; the female gaze is trained to abandon its claim to the sovereign status of seer. The 'nice' girl learns to avoid the bold unfettered staring of the 'loose' woman who looks at whatever and whomever she pleases. Women are trained to smile more than men, too....
Feminine movement, gesture, and posture must exhibit not only constriction, but grace and a certain eroticism restrained by modesty: all (p.68) three. Here is field for the operation for a whole new training: a woman must stand with stomach pulled in, shoulders thrown slightly back and chest out, this to display her bosom to maximum advantage. While she must walk in the confined fashion appropriate to women, her movements must, at the same time, be combined with a subtle but provocative hip-roll. But too much display is taboo...."
"A woman's skin must be soft, supple, hairless, and smooth; ideally, it should betray no sign of wear, experience, age, or deep thought. Hair must be removed not only from the face but from large surfaces of the body as well...."
-Sandra Lee Bartky, "Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power"
In an extraodinary series of two thousand photographs, many (p. 67) candid shots taken in the street, the German photographer Marianne Wex has documented differences in typical masculine and feminine body posture. Women sit waiting for trains with arms close to the body, hands folded together in their laps, toes pointing straight ahead or turned inward, and legs pressed together. The women in these photographs make themselves small and narrow, harmless; they seem tense; they take up little space. Men, on the other hand, expand into the available space; they sit with legs far apart and arms flung out at some distance from the body....
In my experiences in Germany, I have found this commentary about women in public to be especially true. Women will do anything to make themselves seem more "slight": either to be unnoticed by unwanted commentary from men who find them attractive, or to be of less hindrance to the public that surrounds them. Another commonality I've found is that when a space is available next to a woman on a train, she will inevitably make herself smaller, bringing in her space and belongings and going out of her way to make available a seat to another. Men, however, feel free to take up as much space as they please, often making it difficult for others to sit next to them or blatantly hindering the availability of a seat by physically taking up the space of two. While this is still a generalization, it's a commonality that has become clear to me riding public transportation day after day.
The European (and sometimes American) tendency to view women as free-range objects for social commentary baffles me. While in Berlin I had an uncomfortable experience in which a man stopped me in a train station and insisted that I give him my phone number. When I told him I didn't have one (truthfully), he insisted that I was a liar. He continued to follow me and said that if I did not at least take his contact information, he would continue to follow me. I reluctantly took his number. The most disturbing thing about this exchange is I believe the man felt he was doing me a favor and paying me a compliment by insisting that I was so beautiful that he could simply not let me walk out of his life. To me, he was simply making me uncomfortable and a little bit scared. Were a woman to act the same way towards a random man in the street, I believe it would be considered completely unacceptable and out of character, and would generally be regarded as deep desperation.
Another point this all makes me think of is the prominence of pornographic television advertisements. While the United States has the likes of Girls Gone Wild videos that seem to never disappear, Germany takes it one step further. After 10pm, entire channels are devoted to advertisements for phone sex lines, while other network stations almost exclusively run these ads at night as oppose to normal commercials. Whereas in the US, one gets little more than a teaser, German advertisements utilize the entire female body...literally, nothing gets covered up, and no fetish is too taboo to thrust in my face while I'm trying to watch Sense and Sensibility auf deutsch. However, even the advertisements for homosexual chat lines NEVER show a man. Rather, these advertisements are text only.
I am not trying to make a comment on the porn industry as a whole, though I believe many can be made. I do, however, find it absurd that women can be made creatures of advertisement in such abundance and that the entirety of the female body can be made a point of gawking, but it is too taboo to do so with the man. The only argument I have ever heard for this is that "Women are more beautiful than men." But I simply do not find this cheap compliment an excuse to have nipples thrust in my face at all hours of the night.
I believe that this double standard that the female body is okay to look at and the male is not hinders any progress women have made in being seen as anything other than housewives and sex objects. Even non sexual based advertisements tend to stick to these two portrayals...a woman is either a housewife or a sex object. The only commercials I have found that seem to portray women in a different light are for deoderant and tampons (ie distinctly feminine products)...and the occasional ad for sportswear.
Furthermore, the lack of available clothing for women above roughly a size 14 (when in fact, the average woman IS a size 14) baffles me. It is not because there is no market for this clothing...if more than 50% of the population doesn't fit into the average pair of Express jeans, then they have to be getting their clothes somewhere. It almost seems like an out and out refusal on the part of many designers and brands to make available larger sizes. While a few companies, such as Gap, are slowly evolving to accomodate these sizes, companies that claim to be at the forefront of ethics, such as American Apparel, continue to make their womens sizes on a sliding scale. That is, the Medium is more like a Small, and the large more like a medium, so that a woman who is a true to form XL would not be able to fit into their clothes. Essentially, anyone who is not a size 12 or below is cut out of their demographic.
It's a lot to ponder all at once, and I'd love to hear some of your observations or comments on the subject...so please, do leave a comment this time around. Like I said, real Germany update soon.