Saturday Linkerama
From the Guardian magazine section:
Woman writes about how 'I paid for sex': I found this cringemaking, not because she paid for it, but because, firstly, she made the appointment for the rendezvous at her own home, and secondly:
I spring-cleaned the house, bought candles, cava and coal. I organised a sleepover for my daughter with her grandma; waxed my legs, polished my stilettos. I treated myself to new lingerie and massage oil.
What is the point of paying for it if it involves this kind of preparation, more suitable to a dating scenario than one in which woman is, or should be, calling the shots. I may well be wrong, but I bet the vast majority of men who go out to buy themselves some sex don't go to this kind of trouble. And the story continues:
I wanted to see him again. We exchanged emails, and, bartering for "buy three, get one free", I booked him again. I went shopping for lingerie, and studied my schedule with him in mind. He texted confirmation for a forthcoming Friday, and then he disappeared. It was odd, sinister even, and left me with a question mark.
Maybe he'd spotted that she was getting a tad obsessive?
Germaine Greer has some interesting (and, unusually, not buried in tracts of irritating) things to say about women, and preparing a face to meet the world, in a discussion of
Metamorphosis... a new work by the Dutch photographer Annet van der Voort, who has made it her vocation to compile a new imagery of woman....
[T]he invisible referent is the copious literature of abuse of painted women....
The cumulative effect of Van der Voort's gentle observation is, if not quite to overturn the stereotype of women as great disguisers of essential ugliness, certainly to destabilise it. The camera is situated exactly as the mirror would be for the performance of the various beautification rituals of which we see the finished product. The rituals may take time and money, they may be laborious, but they are also, ultimately, insignificant. It is this that is the surprise - not for men who have probably always known it, but for women themselves....
If it was tough on women to function as indicators of real wealth, it is tougher to take on the burden of helping to brighten what is otherwise an intolerably oppressive environment.
Interesting article on modern pharmaceuticals and the placebo reaction, which includes, among other things, the following, which I find particularly interesting (emphasis mine):
Journalist Ray Moynihan located the original study detailed in the Journal of the American Medical Association which showed that 43% of women suffered from female sexual dysfunction (FSD); he found the authors had close links to Pfizer, which was testing Viagra in women at the time. He also found 1,500 women, aged between 18 and 59, had been asked if they had experienced any of seven problems for two months or more over the previous year. One was a lack of desire for sex and another anxiety about sexual performance. No questions were asked about the length of their relationships - a major factor in many people's sex lives - nor about what else the women did, how many children they were looking after, and so on.
The results of that study were widely quoted in the press. In this way, medicine enters the most intimate areas of our lives, despite evidence that our bodies respond in ways we want them to without the help of drugs. Pfizer, for example, did every-thing it could to show Viagra could work in women. It carried out several large-scale trials in women with apparent FSD only to find the women on Viagra responded but those on placebo responded more.
And from the Review section:
Exclusive extract from Kurt Vonnegut's forthcoming memoir.
Reviewers trash new joint bio of Sartre and de Beauvoir:
But more alarmingly, Hazel Rowley has decided not to talk about Satre and De Beauvoir as writers. They worked like dogs all their lives, to a punishing schedule, bouncing ideas (and 20-year-olds) off each other. Their partnership and their love existed most vividly in their literary work. Without an acknowledgment of its meaning, and its place in their lives, this book descends into a litany of dreary hangers-on, telephone calls, appointments in cafés, plane trips and girls, girls, girls. The Second Sex comes across as just a book about women that De Beauvoir wrote by going to the Bibliothèque Nationale a lot. The three volumes of Sartre's revelatory Roads to Freedom are mentioned more or less as dates in the couple's hectic publishing calendar. Rowley's readings of their novels are overly literal - there are more urgent things to say about them than which protégé was portrayed as which character. What is the point of such an approach? To treat Sartre and De Beauvoir this way is to deny them as artists.