Further to recent comments regarding Laurie Penny and her struggles with reality, let’s turn to the New Statesman, where, thanks to Laurie, “pop culture and radical politics” are given a “feminist twist.”
This latest trend shows that female sexual shame remains big business.
Which heinous trend would this be? Why, vajazzling, of course:
The burgeoning celebrity craze for shaving, denuding and perfuming one’s intimate area before applying gemstones in a variety of approved girly patterns. The end result resembles a raw chicken breast covered in glitter.
It’s not for everyone, then.
As the name implies, this one is just for the girls – nobody, so far, has suggested that men’s sexual equipment is unacceptable if it doesn’t taste like cake and sparkle like a disco ball.
Ah. I fear some presumptuous rote feminism may be lurking in the bushes. As it were. But wait a minute. Who’s suggesting that an unadorned ladygarden is now “unacceptable”? Are husbands and boyfriends nationwide lecturing on the woes of unglittered panty parts? Do the manufacturers of vajazzling kits put ominous hints of inadequacy on their packaging? (Incidentally, any male readers in search of a sequinned sack or other “dickoration” will find suitable products online, and New York’s Completely Bare Spa does, I’m told, oblige.)
Surely it can’t catch on. Surely, no matter how ludicrous, painful and expensive consumer culture’s intervention in our sex lives becomes, nobody is disgusted enough by their own normal genitals that they would rather look like they’ve just been prepped for surgery by Dr Bling. Or are they?
I hate to be a nuisance, but I do have more questions. How, exactly, does “consumer culture” – i.e., a faintly silly fashion product – intervene in “our” sex lives? Aren’t vajazzling kits bought by women voluntarily – for amusement possibly? Are women everywhere, or anywhere, being coerced into vajazzling – and if so, by whom? And why should we assume – apparently based on nothing – that the obvious motives are insecurity and self-disgust?
Suddenly, my teenage friends are popping off to get vajazzled.
Thank goodness for Laurie’s friends, to whom she turns, conveniently, whenever evidence is needed. No doubt they too are mere playthings of the all-powerful vajazzling conglomerates.
During the biggest shake-up of higher education in generations, someone at the University of Liverpool advertised a vajazzling evening for female members of the student body.
Peddling body hatred, clearly. The patriarchal fiends.
All of this is sold as a fun, pseudo-feminist “confidence boost,” as if what women really need to empower themselves is not education and meaningful work, but genitals that resemble a traumatic, intimate accident in a Claire’s accessories shop.
An interest in all three being utterly inconceivable. Vajazzling, it seems, is the latest burden of the demoralised and put-upon woman. And not, say, just a fad. It must be quite strange living in Laurie’s world, where there’s so little room for taste, or bad taste, let alone frivolity. Practically everything – even pubic glitter – has to be framed as a sociological issue and cause of feminist angst. There must always be some dastardly agenda beyond parting punters from their cash.
Vajazzling has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the cruel logic of identikit, production-line womanhood, in which “fun” means slavish adherence to the joyless motifs of corporate pornography and “confidence” means submission to a species of surveillance whereby your nether regions are forcibly reshaped into a smile.
Whoa, Neddy, whoa. Someone fetch the blow darts. We’ve a runaway mule.
It’s all about making us feel that women’s bodies – which are supposed to smell, leak and grow hair – are shameful and need fixing.
Let’s be clear then. Vajazzling isn’t merely a diversion to amuse the wearer or enliven a seduction. It’s a patriarchal tool for propagating uniformity, insecurity and submission. What power those sticky little gems must have. And what, then, are we to make of Laurie’s own publicity shots, including the one displayed proudly above her article? Should we take the author’s own grooming and careful hairstyling as indicating some kind of “submission” and “slavish adherence”? Is that also a sign of “sexual shame”? Wouldn’t unkempt, unwashed hair be more… empowering and authentic? Does Laurie not deodorise? Does she not paint her nails to match her hair? Or are cosmetics, coiffure and careful lighting an entirely unrelated matter? Dare we enquire whether Ms Penny has piercings or tattoos – presumably to signal her liberation and womanly might?
As so often in supposedly feminist pieces of this kind, there’s an urge to pathologise the prosaic and an implicit disregard for women as autonomous beings with preferences of their own. It seems we’re supposed to believe that women – other women – are largely passive and adrift, at the mercy of advertisers and trivial social tides. Apparently the women who choose to stick beads and glitter on themselves are being duped and manipulated in ways never quite made clear. Unlike fearless leftwing columnists who wear their hair just so.
And according to the talk page on her Wikipedia article, someone claiming to be her contacted one of the contributors to the article saying “I have never used my surname in my public work, do not consent to your use of my surname, and eschew it for serious, private, family reasons. Please cease reinserting it. I will not enter into negotiation with you about this.”
The history of the Wikipedia article is interesting too. Edits from anonymous users with edit summaries like “Surname removed. Bidisha never uses her surname and has in the past taken legal action against newspapers who have. She has also contacted her old college, Saint Edmund Hall, to cease usage”, and repeatedly removing a cited reference to both her parents being IT lecturers, with summaries like “Hello, this is Bidisha. I was brought up by my mother, who is an academic in the field of Computer Science. The original article was wrong. Do not reinsert it please.” Psychodrama indeed.
TDK,
“Yesterday, I’d never heard of vajazzling. Now in one step I learn how exploitative it is. I missed the stage in between where I could enjoy an innocent pleasure before I learnt how wicked I was.”
Quite. Yet it’s still not clear who’s being wicked, if indeed anyone is.
Some people are a little too keen to invoke the Terrible Crushing Force of peer pressure, as if no-one else had a mind of their own or the capacity to ignore it. And if peer pressure is an issue, if only for the less capable, then surely the peers in question are likely to be other women? I suppose it’s possible that there are huge numbers of porn-addled men who are quietly coercing their partners to denude their nether regions, but that hasn’t been established in either article. So why must we assume it, adamantly, based on nothing? As Anna pointed out, neither Laurie nor Bidisha provide even one direct quote or anecdote to that effect. Apparently many of Laurie’s friends are “popping off to get vajazzled,” yet none have obliged with a comment supporting Laurie’s argument. There doesn’t seem to be much evidential basis for the claims being made.
In the NS comments there is, though, this, from a reader “elliban”:
“[Pornography] leads to pressure on women to act the way the porn stars do and allow their bodies to be treated similarly extremely, not because the men themselves even necessarily want that, but because they [women] assume that’s what sex is supposed to be like.”
So if there is any coercion to be railed against, who’s doing it?
I think the point is, if feminists want to consider women “oppressed” in the modern west, and their movement thus still necessary, then unless they’re prepared to make stuff up (which a fair few of them are – sex trafficking at the Ryder Cup?), peer pressure is about the only thing they have left to be oppressed by. There’s a pay gap, which is more than made up for by other sources of wealth to the extent that women spend four times as much as men. There aren’t many women in parliament or in boardrooms, but women can achieve wealth by marrying it and political change by media campaign in a way that men can’t, and there are also not many women on building sites, down coal mines, on the front line in war or sleeping on the street. Women live longer, retire earlier, have more money, more leisure, more choice, more legal rights and fewer responsibilities than men. All they have left to call “oppression” is trivia like vajazzling. Why are we still indulging them?
I thought Bidisha’s surname was an exclamation mark.
“I thought Bidisha’s surname was an exclamation mark.”
As we’re apparently not allowed to use her actual surname, it seems only fair to make the most of what we’ve got.
So. It’s Bidisha! [jazz hands]™
The jazz hands are silent, obviously.
David:
How many people are casually talking to you about the appearance of your genitals?
You’d be very, very surprised. You cannot deny that the fact that almost every man consumes porn has had an influence on their sense of ‘aesthetics’, for want of a better term, as much as it has had an influence on what actually is expected of you as a woman. I haven’t got any scientific study on this, but I’ve been around long enough and talked to enough men and women to believe I’m right.
Porn has messed up a lot of things in a lot of people’s heads.
Broadly speaking, it’s as damaging as you allow it to be.
Very true, which is why it is important that people like Laurie (shite though they sometimes write) bring up the subject and question it. When I was young and rubbish was afloat about what you should wear / eat / do, it always helped to have the budding school feminist proffer her opinion, if only to make you see the thing for what it was. If you’re fifteen or sixteen, and the subject is taboo in your house or embarrasses your parents, that can be very important.
I read Bidisha’s article in the Graun on the subject today. Almost every time Bish picks up a pen, you know she shouldn’t have bothered, but this one I liked very, very much – not the bit where she whaffles about the ‘subjugation of women’ (whatever that means) but the one where she says that the self-hatred and body disgust amongst women has no parallel in the male world.
I think that’s something lots of women don’t want to face, and which feminism exposes – that women do stupidly follow trends or delude themselves about their own motives, right down to doing things that are painful, humiliating, time-consuming and expensive.
Nele,
“…which is why it is important that people like Laurie (shite though they sometimes write) bring up the subject and question it.”
Well, it’s possible that even inept, inconsistent, grossly question-begging articles can prompt readers to ask questions of their own. But that’s setting the bar pretty low. One might also argue – more convincingly, I think – that Laurie and Bidisha are providing readers with other, less edifying lessons. Say, that conclusions can simply be rushed to and announced, regardless of evidence, realism or internal contradiction. Or that adamance and assertion are just as good as argument (and hey kids, so much easier – plus that way you’re always right). Or that being a walking parody, an oblivious caricature, is the yardstick of edginess.
But that’s setting the bar pretty low.
Like I said last week, if we ignore almost everything she writes she’s doing really well.
Well, it’s possible that even inept, inconsistent, grossly question-begging articles can prompt readers to ask questions of their own. But that’s setting the bar pretty low.
I frankly don’t care where the bar hangs, what it’s made of or who hung it there if it provokes some interesting train of thought.
I agree that generally Bidisha’s writing is a shit-stirring letdown, but only generally, not always. Her article on the subject at hand was quite funny and clever. I read all of her stuff only for the freak-show value that is inherent in most offerings on Cif, so I was quite astonished to find she could come up with something coherent. Not earth-shatteringly brilliant – just some nice, clever, original piece of writing.
And I think in this case she is right. To get somebody to rip their pubic hair out with strips of wax takes a long time of prior cultural conditioning. It is of course hard to prove this, because nobody likes to admit that they only do it because they think they ought to. And that’s basically the point she’s making – that most women are sold to an image of hair-free splendour that portrays body hair as something undesirable, and that the increasing cultural acceptance of a hair-free pubic area comes from porn.
I don’t think it’s wrong to point this out, and to me, this is the real meaning of feminism, to constantly ask women whether what they are doing comes from a healthy place or not.
Nele,
“To get somebody to rip their pubic hair out with strips of wax takes a long time of prior cultural conditioning. It is of course hard to prove this…”
Well, quite. Yet questions are begged and adamant claims are made, based largely on supposition and rather doctrinaire beliefs. Extrapolating from anecdote and presumption to sweeping sociological claims is a hazardous business and shouldn’t be indulged in, or indulged, quite as readily as it is. We could use some actual data, yes? And if a political columnist doesn’t have any evidence (or much apparent interest in finding any), shouldn’t that limit the kinds of things she can assert? Isn’t that a basic condition of being taken seriously – of writing in good faith?
Which is sort of my point.
“To get somebody to rip their pubic hair out with strips of wax takes a long time of prior cultural conditioning.”
Umm, well first of all it doesn’t have to be ripped out. Second, I have it on quite excellent authority, namely my own, that there were a few women shaving their private areas (OK, two by my count, but it was a small county in Florida) in the 80’s long before free porn was available. Even then, when what porn was bought-and-paid-for-available showed hairy privates. Had to do with bikinis and a “why stop there” thought. Or so I was told. Thought it a bit strange myself at first.
“To get somebody to rip their pubic hair out with strips of wax takes a long time of prior cultural conditioning.”
If that’s true, what about the “cultural conditioning” that requires men to shave their faces? The denuded male face is our cultural default – hair grows naturally on the male face, but we are required to shave from the moment it first appears, and “bum-fluff” and adolescent moustaches are mocked, although they’re entirely natural and normal. It takes a deliberate decision to stop shaving and grow a beard. Not only that, but the part of the body we are required to depilate is always on display, so everybody can see if we haven’t shaved, or the razor has slipped and we’ve cut ourselves. There can be real social consequences to not shaving. If I turn up to a job interview unshaven, chances are the interviewer will not consider me a serious applicant. I know a guy who missed the first half hour of one of his A Level papers because he turned up unshaven, and the school made him go away and shave before they’d let him in. It is a requirement of employment in the army to shave one’s face (although if you reach the rank of sergeant you may grow a moustache).
I’ve never heard anyone claim that men are “oppressed” by this cultural quirk, or that shaving is based on shame and disgust at our natural male faces, which are supposed to grow hair. I’ve never heard anyone tell women that, if they have a preference for a clean-shaven man, they can’t cope with the natural male body or want us to look like pre-pubescent boys. And I don’t think we should start thinking or saying any of these things. We’ve been selectively grooming and removing hair since the stone age. It’s natural human behaviour.
‘It is a requirement of employment in the army to shave one’s face (although if you reach the rank of sergeant you may grow a moustache)’.
Not disputing your basic point, but you can’t wear an NBC respirator with a beard. Even with stubble it breaks the air-tight seal. So in the British Army and RAF you can’t have beards (although you can request permission to grow a tache). The Royal Navy insist on a ‘full-set’ (beard) or nothing. No taches.
With Op Herrick British troops are allowed to grow beards in theatre, partly because it supposedly impresses Pashtuns, but also because the Taliban don’t have WMD. I did grow a tour tache in Iraq in ’04, but I shaved it off. Not because of any peer-pressure, but because I looked like a militant member of the Village People.
As for sexual pressure, I had at least one lady-friend who insisted I shaved off my stubble, because it would irritate her skin when we smooched (or when I performed another act of intimacy). But then maybe I should have complained that I was being ‘repressed’ …
Patrick: That’s because everything is men’s fault. Men shaving, women shaving, the rise and fall of the tides. Men’s fault. The claim doesn’t need to even be explained. Just asserted.
For further reading, see: Penny, Bidisha! et al.
> you can’t wear an NBC respirator with a beard
The female hegemony have stopped designers even considering the needs of men!
Do they want them to die?
/Mirror world Bidisha
AC1, I believe that this was one of the logistical problems the Army faced on Telic 1, when Rowan Williams came out to visit.
“Bidisha never uses her surname and has in the past taken legal action against newspapers who have”
Hmmm.
http://www.independent.co.uk/money/pensions/making-sense-of-the-report-what-does-it-mean-for-you-517659.html
“Bidisha Bandyopadhyay, 26, is a self-employed writer from north London. She used to contribute £100 a month to a private pension but could not sustain this due to her sporadic earnings, so now contributes nothing.
“With my own parents coming up to retirement age, it is frightening to see how little money they will have. They have always been prudent with money but my mum [aged 59] has calculated her income will drop by two-thirds.” (Mum works at UEL)
It’s a bit rich to assert that no-one’s trying to exploit male body-image for commercial gain, or that they’re failing at it. Check your inbox. How many emails advertising a bikini wax? How many offering a larger, harder, more awesome erection, so that women will like you?
I disagree with David a bit: people are influenced by what they see, whether or not they “let it get to them”. Something to do with neurology, and contrast bias, stuff like that. And in the case of porn, plenty of men and women enter their sexually active years with nothing but porn tropes to set their ideas of normal, desirable, or likely.
wreckage,
“I disagree with David a bit: people are influenced by what they see, whether or not they ‘let it get to them’.”
Well, it seems to me there are two broad approaches to this kind of issue. One, as favoured by Laurie Penny and many others on the left, is to invoke dark conspiracies and to fall back on a kind of presumed victimhood and feebleness, as if the alleged victims had little or no mental autonomy and thus little or no responsibility for whatever it is they’re doing. Among those who take this view, the most commonly proposed solution is to regulate or abolish whatever the temptation in question is. And of course there’s always something, somewhere making someone feel inadequate.
The other approach is to accept that there will always be things that may potentially bruise someone’s self-esteem and there will always be social fads and preoccupations that are trivial or geared towards unrealistic vanities. And since one can’t – and shouldn’t – go through life banning and regulating everything that might – just might – overwhelm the insecure and foolish, and since cultivating victimhood is patronising and dishonest, it’s best to try something else. That being to encourage an inclination to rely on one’s own judgments rather than peer group expectations or shiny advertising.