Darcy Darcy Darcy
23 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
in books/literature, love/sex/sexuality
Alright, I understand why Austen-style endings appeal to people: they contain and control issues connected to gender, sexuality, money, and all of those other issues that continue to make happily ever after marriages as pragmatic as a romantic fantasy. But I cannot handle the ways in which the fantasy of Mr. Darcy dominates our sexual landscape (I know that’s probably overstating it, but seriously: he’s so entrenched in literary women’s imaginations as a paragon of masculinity, a paradigm for romance, and frankly an excuse for/valorization of many stereotypical masculine qualities, plus a guilty pleasure: eye candy with serious money plus wit and style!).
He rests at the foundation of books like Bridget Jones’s Diary and the slightly more recent novel Austenland, which I just finished reading. Austenland should have felt lighthearted and fun, but I frankly couldn’t get past the fact that the protagonist didn’t really let go of the prefabricated system of sexual values that she believed Austen’s Darcy created in her . These values led her to have a series of unsustaining relationships and a concealed copy of the Colin Firth-Pride and Prejudice. She went to Austenland (i.e., Disneyland for very rich women who worship men in breeches and want to pay for artificial, escapist romances with British actors at balls) as therapy but returned to America with the actor who had played the Darcy-esque character. Not exactly an abandonment of the romantic illusions that had shaped her so much as a reinforcement and actualization of them.
I’m not going to lie: I’ve read every Austen novel at least once, many of Austen’s letters, plus some Austen sequels, prequels, and spin-offs. And I’ve had more literary crushes, many of them on this list of “bangable” male literary character. But the proliferation of Darcys during the 1980s and on through the recent movie, the many Austen adaptations, and even tons of etsy merchandise that recapitulates Darcy’s proposal to Elizabeth and gives men the opportunity to sport “I am Mr. Darcy” shirts seems like the kind of reusing/recycling that frustrates me: taking one man (a fictional one at that) and suggesting that he possesses a set of traits that are emblematic of what and who women should love.
Having a fantasy about a single iteration of Mr. Darcy is one thing, but idealizing this character as a sign of what smart women desire reinforces so many stereotypes (women are the types who worship Austen or not–and of course men find her dry; oh, men just don’t understand [note the high level of sarcasm]). Wanting Darcy in repeating, recycled forms–forms for every generation, starting in the 1800s–is a way of reducing female sexuality to something discrete and singular, when it’s the multiplicity, the uniqueness of desire that is so important (vintage items rather than the shirt one can find at every single Gap store, in the exact same color, with just a few adjustments for size).
Dumpster Diving for a Spouse?
19 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
in feminism, love/sex/sexuality Tags: relationships, sexuality, things that shouldn't be thrifted
I like talking animal movies. There, it’s out in the open. I am the annoying person who cried in “Cats and Dogs” and laughs hysterically throughout “Dr. Doolittle” and “Kung Fu Panda.” I also like anthropomorphized animals–animals that may not talk but clearly express human emotions (because what species wouldn’t want to think, feel, and behave like humans? eek).
Now add to that the fact that my formative years were the 90s, Chris Farley, David Spade, Adam Sandler, Mike Myers (before “Austin Powers” and “Shrek”), and Jim Carrey-style.
So naturally I couldn’t wait to see “Mr. Popper’s Penguins”:
I went last night with my partner and his kids (back story/explanatory note: I’m a divorced, bisexual single mom and have been in a relationship for almost 2 years with a divorced man who has 2 preadolescent kids). Ultimately, “Mr. Popper” is not about penguins at all–it’s about reconciling divorced parents: a “Parent Trap” romance with some “Mary Poppins” penguin antics and lots of poop jokes.
Obviously I’m all for recycling, but not for recycling relationships. Once I’ve made a mistake, I try to programmatically avoid that–and there’s no easier way to avoid repeating a past mistake than by not re-dating or re-marrying the same person.
There are exceptions, I’m sure. People change, people grow, people reach points in their lives when they see things from a new point of view. But watching this movie made me register a number of pressures to be economical in relationships and with sexuality/sexualities. Dumpster diving isn’t something I want to do in my own trash can, because the garbage I threw out was something I identified as something I don’t need (although, here’s a confession: I have gone to Goodwill and thought about buying a skirt or shirt before realizing it was something I had donated a few weeks before, which does parallel the way I treated two relationships in my teens and twenties).
Even with penguin antics, “Mr. Popper’s Penguins” was basically designed to enforce these related norms:
- Marriage is a commitment. So is taking care of penguins. Yes, marriage is a commitment–but there are a lot of reasons why that commitment might not sustain one or both members of a couple. What’s interesting about this whole parallel (marriage/penguins: don’t give up on them!) is that the movie resolves itself with the penguins being set free as Jim Carrey and his wife become recommitted/remarried. There’s a tacit understanding that the penguins need something that cannot be provided in the physical contours of Jim Carrey’s apartment, but there is absolutely no recognition of the fact that maybe marriages have the same possibilities: people might discover a reciprocal love or respect that wasn’t there before because of a penguin-induced paradigm shift, but that doesn’t mean resolution can or should always come from a reintroduction of the previous terms of marriage.
- Once we’ve defined our sexuality through a relationship, that relationship is what controls us because of the undergirding value it gives to our experiences. Skating with Jim Carrey simply shifts him and Carla Gugino into a pre-kid dating world, without whatever problems led to their separation or divorce (a little unclear). Being happy with someone in the past doesn’t mean that we can simply strip away layers and return to that place. Sometimes people can, but sometimes we can’t–and for me, most of the time I haven’t wanted to turn back because to do so denigrates the millions of little daily things comprising who I am that happen between point a and point b.
Worse by far, though than either of these regulatory mechanisms (“love the one you’re with,” to quote Stephen Stills, who I promise not to invoke on a regular basis) is the message this communicates to the children of divorced parents.
My daughter was tiny when I left her father, so tiny that she didn’t really understand anything about heteronormativity, two-parents households, nuclear families, blah blah blah. But over the past few months, she has said things to me about how much she wishes I still lived with her dad. This is something that’s culturally constructed around her; it’s not an innate desire or a pattern that she should have any pleasant memories of. Rather, the media creates fantasies like “The Parent Trap” and this new variation on the same theme that tap into needs acculturated by all of the books, tv shows, movies, and songs that signal to kids that we all have one true love, usually of the opposite sex, and that once we find that person, everything is happy–and the kids who result from said relationship will have their version of the same fairytale.
For kids with single parents, absent parents, divorced parents, or queer parents, these patterns can be absolutely debilitating because they suggest a severe alienation from what’s normal and, in this example, a very easy solution to feelings of anomalousness or not fitting in: “If my parents get back together, everything will be happy, normal, and the same as it was before.” What a horrible message to communicate. Instead of offering children who probably feel outside of dominant paradigms a sense that any family structure can be acceptable, accommodating, and (gasp) even preferable to what’s “normal,” this movie yields up a message that everyone needs to fit in–and that if your parents don’t fall into a spectrum of what’s normal, you don’t either.
I know Jim Carrey movies aren’t really expected to be up there with bell hooks or Jennifer Baumgardner for offering complex takes on the multidimensional nature of relationships and sexuality, but really? Just add penguins is not a viable option for most couples (um, any couples…); recycling a relationship just because it saves money or stops one from having to expend more effort figuring out how things have changed doesn’t really seem like a way to develop a version of love, lust, or whatever that is satisfying and sustaining; and offering kids a false sense that (a) mom and dad will get back together if something magical happens and (b) things will BE BETTER if mom and dad get back together just reinforces whatever feelings of displacement, confusion, and eve shame children experience when they don’t fit in with the 66 or so percent of their peers who have two-parent, heterosexual households.
Goddess Criticism, Thrift Goddess
18 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
in books/literature, feminism, thrifting Tags: eighteenth century, fashion, feminism, jonathan swift, misogyny, thrifting
When I was in college, Jonathan Swift was my imaginary boyfriend. Yes, he’s a misogynist, and I was (am) an Ani DiFranco-style feminist, but there was something irrefutably charming about him for me from the first time I read Gulliver’s Travels to my later readings of his poems to Stella (Esther Johnson).
Swift possessed all the traits of a typical eighteenth-century misogynist: he identified women with consumerism, excess, and everything bad, unruly, and wasteful (and vice versa: those qualities are personified in/by women in his writings), he treated the women who loved him poorly, and he was condescending to many of the very smart women who frequented the same literary and intellectual circles that he did.
At the same time, though, Swift always seemed to find a way to identify and love what was eccentric and beautiful in his partner Stella. The poems he wrote to her as she grew older and when she died are the most emotionally evocative expressions any of the Scriblarians produced (not saying too much, since those dudes were not noted for their sensitivity, but still).
And somehow, even when he’s at his most misogynist (e.g., descrying women’s breasts, their sexual rapaciousness, and their fashions in Gulliver), Swift’s writing always hold a trace of self-ridicule that ensures his readers see him as equally critical of what men do, how men perceive women, what men believe about women’s minds, and how men respond to women’s bodies. “The Lady’s Dressing Room” doesn’t satirize Celia for shitting–it satirizes Strephon for being such an idiot that he doesn’t realize women’s bodies produce excrement just as men’s bodies do.
Knowing that someone craftier than me has made Swift wearable for any 21st-century person with pierced ears (with these Gulliver’s Travels earrings) is pretty exciting: I love that a man who crafted essays, poems, a “novel,” an tons of narrative prose objectifying and commodifying women’s bodies has been made into a product.
But when I started thinking about the term “thrift goddess,” I also remembered Swift’s Goddess Criticism–one of his definitive, archetypal versions of profligate femininity.
Mean while, Momus fearing the worst, and calling to mind an Antient Prophecy, which bore no very good Face to his Children the Moderns; bent his Flight to the Region of a malignant Deity, call’d Criticism. She dwelt on the Top of a snowy Mountain in Nova Zembla; there Momus found her extended in her Den, upon the Spoils of numberless Volumes half devoured. At her right Hand sat Ignorance, her Father and Husband, blind with Age; at her left, Pride her Mother, dressing her up in the Scraps of Paper herself had torn. There, was Opinion her Sister, light of Foot, hoodwinkt, and headstrong, yet giddy and perpetually turning. About her play’d her Children, Noise and Impudence, Dulness and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and Ill-Manners. The Goddess herself had Claws like a Cat: Her Head, and Ears, and Voice resembled those of an Ass; Her Teeth fallen out before; Her Eyes turned inward, as if she lookt only upon herself: Her Diet was the overflowing of her own Gall: Her Spleen was so large, as to stand prominent like a Dug of the first Rate, nor wanted Excrescencies in form of Teats, at which a Crew of ugly Monsters were greedily sucking; and, what is wonderful to conceive, the bulk of Spleen encreased faster than the Sucking could diminish it. Goddess, said Momus, can you sit idly here, while our devout Worshippers, the Moderns, are this Minute entering into a cruel Battel, and, perhaps, now lying under the Swords of their Enemies; Who then hereafter, will ever sacrifice, or build Altars to our Divinities? Haste therefore to the British Isle, and, if possible, prevent their Destruction; while I make Factions among the Gods, and gain them over to our Party.
The Goddess Criticism pieces together clothes from scraps of paper. Words, waste, women–these three things are layered upon female bodies, concealing them but revealing them as well.
I know this is satire, and I know that the Goddess Criticism reflects Swift’s horror of feminine embodiment (oh no! women can give birth to babies and ideas! they can write! they can create all kinds of things with their unruly, messy, uncontainable bodies!). As someone who loves to read, write, and find clothes that are different, recycled, disposable, or not-quite-mine, I find the image recuperate-able–like the words that feminism has worked to revitalize: cunt, bitch, slut. Each of these words is a palimpsest. Each has a storied past of misogyny and hate, but each has also been grabbed hold of by feminist polemicists like Inga Muscio, Elizabeth Wurtzel, and everyone involved in the SlutWalk movement so that women can reclaim terms that had been used to alienate them from their bodies, their sexualities, and their identities. It’s so difficult to know what work needs to be done to take old terms, old texts, old artefacts, and old clothes on, to make them into legible and external signs of something different from but inextricably, materially bound up in their past.
Learning a New Language
14 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
in thrifting Tags: fashion, thrifting
Sammy Davis’s Thrift Shopping Dictionary absolutely explains the impulse behind what I’m trying to do by making up my year-long thrifting challenge!
This is my favorite definition:
THRIFT GODDESS: Ladies who thrift shop the majority of their wardrobes and are continually complimented for their flattering outfits and high-fashion looks. They accept compliments with thanks and respond with the shocking information that it was “bought at the thrift store.”
Yesterday, the ladies I work with complimented my outfit and were pretty shocked that the heels and the skirt was from the thrift store (in this case, “GDUB” or “GW,” according to the Thrift Shopping Dictionary).
Sure, there’s thrifting jargon (i.e., co-sign is NOT the same as when my ex-husband and I had to co-sign loans–it’s consignment, which is a much happier thing than my lease or family-friendly Honda ever was!), but what’s at the foundation of this is a sense of collectivity and community. I love “Thrifted Sister”–seriously, half of my clothes are from my own for-real sister, and thinking about the other half being part of something I’m sharing with other women makes dressing up into something that feels like a form of embodied feminism, literally bringing women together through clothes.
One of the cool aspects of that community is that fashion is often something that divides women (patriarchy blah blah blah). Long before Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (in which, despite all of its polemical wonderfulness, Wollstonecraft re-marginalizes women who care about fashion), women beat each other up for either (1) not being pretty or fashionable enough AND/OR (2) caring too much about beauty. Feminist misogyny, anyone? I love how the words “thrifted sister” and “thrift goddess” build relationships between women that are positive–not competing about bodies, beauty, or fashion, but showing how we can actually appreciate each other.
Dressing up for under $35
13 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
in fashion, thrifting Tags: fashion, feminism, thrifting
I discovered Chic to Chic when I needed a dress for a fundraising event. My colleagues started talking about dresses a month before the event, and I browsed on Modcloth, Urban Outfitters, and Anthropologie. Working for a nonprofit organization, though, means all of the dresses I liked were too expensive and/or a little too cookie cutter. I thought about borrowing one of my sister’s dresses, but with this event, I really wanted to feel like I was presenting myself: being there was part of a big transition, from English teacher to grantwriter, and I wanted my dress to reflect some of what had changed about my life over the past few years.
One of the big changes, naturally, is the decrease in income. Finding a dress for $15 that was still beautiful helped me feel like I was striking the right balance between playing dress up and being a grown up. The dress is from Banana Republic, and I found a necklace with matching ear rings that were less than $20, so my outfit for this fundraiser cost less than other people’s tickets to the event.
Over the past few months, my other big thrift store/consignment store finds have been my Halloween costume and a Charlotte Ruse dress I’ve worn to some summery parties. I found the red dress at one of the local Goodwill stores and the little black dress (yes, my Halloween costume was a little black dress, hat, and sunglasses–trying to pull off “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”) came from the Thrift Shoppe down the road from my house. 
Between these stores and some creative consignment shops downtown, I have a lot of options for putting together a new style without buying anything new. Now I just have to figure out how to dress like Virginia Woolf by way of Natalie from Bake and Destroy.
I’m dropping off some of my old teacher-y clothes at Goodwill on my way into work today. Time to start performing my feminist, vegan gender (with a little extra femme thrown in for International Femme Appreciation Day in July–that will definitely be a fun shopping trip!).
A year of thrifted fashion
13 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
in fashion, thrifting Tags: fashion, feminism, thrifting
In July, I turn 34.
Since 2005, I’ve gotten married, moved from the South to the Midwest for my soon-to-be-ex-husband’s job, had a baby, taken part-time work as a “contingent” spouse, gone through a divorce, run three half marathons, and changed careers. In the midst of these changes, I haven’t exactly developed a sense of style–I’ve tried to take on new postures and new identities to help make some of the transitions easier, and in doing so, I’ve bought clothes for each of these roles: stretchy pregnancy pants, sensible mom shoes, glam feminist clothes (i.e., a Virginia Woolf dress), job-seeker slacks, single lady fishnets, and non-profit organization employee eclectic casual clothes.
For years, I’ve read Bust magazine and wondered longingly what it would be like to really have style–some of the women profiled in Bust manage to piece together thrifted items, vintage finds, expensive shoes, and hand-made accessories in a way that ultimately engenders beauty, panache, and empowerment that I have never felt in (or on) my own body.
Right now, I’m not exactly a “glamazon” (whatever that means), or even a woman with much style. And I most certainly do not have more than $100 a month that I should spend on developing a sense of eccentric, confident style. But I want to start making my body feel more like its organically connected to who I am, and I want that “who I am” to be confident, reveling in my own idiosyncrasies.
What better way to do that, I guess, than making up my own little challenge?
For my birthday, I have decided to spend the year only buying gently used clothing. I want to piece together a new version of myself, but I want to do it in a way that is sustainable for me, for the planet, and for my own local economy. This week, I’m making a Goodwill donation–clothes from anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, Gap, Target, whatever. And from now until July 7, 2012, I’m only buying, borrowing, and finding clothes, accessories, and shoes (my only exceptions will be running shoes and panties).
Here’s why:
1. I’m tired of wasting things as I try to figure myself out. I’ve been too into disposable culture, and I don’t want to keep spending half of my paychecks on clothes that come in the mail or from a prefabricated, Gap model display.
2. I’m pretty darn poor, but I want to enhance the style I have so that when people see me, I’m embodying more of my values and my identity.
3. I love Judith Butler (gender performativity–woo hoo) and feminism, and I want to take a new degree of control over what my body says and how it says it.
4. I want to feel like I’m part of a larger cycle (ahem, recycling): Sure, I send old clothes to Goodwill, but I’m pretty wasteful. As a vegan who cares about where things go, that matters to me.
So…1 year of styling myself with other people’s clothes, and a year of blogging about how I’m finding fashion in a way that helps me piece myself together.
