Always wanting to be liked
Janice Turner on the difficulties of being young and female:
The young woman’s burden is always wanting to be liked. Not caring what others, especially men, think about you is the secret bonus of age. But girls crave approval. For my generation the bar was low: be pleasant and pretty. Now the arenas in which perfection must be achieved are manifold: school, career, looks, sexual allure, often of an extreme pornified type.
It’s kind of a tricky combination, if you ask me.
This week The Crown actress Emma Corrin posted pictures of her body, thin to the verge of skeletal, her breasts bound flat with tape. This was “very new, very cool”, she wrote. “It’s all a journey right.” Immediately famous people like Paloma Faith plus the official Netflix account rushed to say how much they loved these photos and Corrin’s statement that she was now non-binary: “pronouns she/they”.
How does “she/they” work? Is either one ok? Are you expected to alternate? Follow an arcane but undisclosed formula? What?
You could strap me to a ducking stool and I would still deny that breast-binding is progressive. Because I have lived through too many other ways women’s bodies have been scarred by fashion and mental illness. I remember heroin-chic models fainting backstage because designers craved sharper lines. I’ve seen self-harm, through razor blades or surgeons’ knives. I know anorexics — friends and daughters of friends — always the clever, perfectionist girls, attaining control by existing on a single cube of cheese. And breast-binding screws up female organs, can damage your ribs, limits activity and the very oxygen women breathe.
Breast-binding is very like anorexia, when you think about it. Creepily like it.
I’ve seen true androgyny too: young, butch lesbians, Bowie in a dress, loathed by everyone’s dad. If only being “non-binary” was equally cost-free.
Well, it is for men: explore your fabulous side, like Sam Smith, in nail polish and heels. But a gender clinician tells me the non-binary girls she sees, who bind their breasts often as a prequel to surgical amputation, are quiet, subdued, full of angst and discomfort: “They’re just sick of being the awkward ones at family parties. They just want to disappear.”
“The world gets harder and harder,” Hilary Mantel wrote of female saints who starved and self-abased. “There’s no pleasing it. No wonder some girls want out.” Eyes burn into prominent young women, in bodies they so rarely wear with ease. We should not ignore their distress signals, let alone cheer them on.
But the magic words change everything.
But no, it can’t be, because that would reduce gender dysphoria to body dysmorphia, and we can’t have people questioning the reality and primacy of gendersouls. Or, heaven forbid, suspecting that the gendersoul ideology is just a product of disordered minds rationalizing their disorder. Heavens to Betsy, can you imagine?
…
Also like foot binding. *shudder*
I’ve written some very ragey stuff about foot binding over the years. Especially in relation to the shoes marketed to women, which…bind the feet.
“she/they” – Well I’ll be. A new and even less sensible spin on the pronoun game: mismatching pronouns. Fuck it, mine are now I/yours.
“women’s clothes,” ugh. Misogyny from head to toe. I was in Jr High when I “upgraded” from Oxford shoes to pointy-toed flats with slick heels, that wouldn’t reliably stay on your feet. Couldn’t walk freely, much less run if you had to save your life. No more socks. Nylon pantyhose instead, which effectively gave me rope burns on my feet as well. And it was in Jr High that I first wore a skirt that wasn’t box pleated or gathered or flared. A pencil skirt in which I discovered that I could not even take a normal full stride. The hem caught my knee so abruptly that I nearly fell.
I have always purely hated clothes for girls or women. It’s virtual imprisonment. The people responsible for them obviously hate women.
maddog, and almost always lacking pockets. I have to buy my pants from one source because it is the only source I’ve found that will tell me if the damn pants have pockets or not!
Women’s clothes seem to be some sort of modernized version of the corset plus the chastity belt. They make women easier to catch if a man wants to stalk them.
Re #3
I believe the notation “she/they” is supposed to indicate that this person finds both “she/her” and “they/their” pronoun sets acceptable. I think that’s similar to what one or another of those celebrity “coming out non-binary” people stated recently. But who knows.
I immediately thought ‘she’ as the subject pronoun and ‘they’ for object: e.g. Where is Emma? She’s over there. I was just taking to they a minute a go.
I’m inspired to develop a proper suite to use in case I’m ever asked to provide some: nominative ‘mbandji’, accusative ‘mbaño’, genitive ‘ho!’, dative ‘mbæneaux’ …
OB:
My proposal for one way: It should be ‘she’ Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and ‘they’ Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
Sunday is a special case. When in church, it should be ‘she’. When not in church, it should be ‘they’.
Hope this helps. It’s as good as anything else around.