dreamer_easy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dreamer_easy) wrote2007-04-11 09:21 am
dreamer_easy) wrote2007-04-11 09:21 am
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And one more...
... because it's relevant to The Shakespeare Code which contains an example of an ancient misogynist idea, the beautiful woman who's actually ugly, the seductress who lures and destroys hapless young men.
The author, Anne Hollander, is talking about the development of the skirt, which keeps the bottom half of women a mystery, even as fashion changes led to exposed arms, backs, shoulders, and cleavage above completely hidden legs. "It corresponds to one very tenacious myth about women, the same one that gave rise to the image of the mermaid, the perniciously divided female monster, a creature inherited by the gods only down to the girdle. Her voice and face, her bosom and hair, her neck and arms are all entrancing, offering only what is benign among the pleasures afforded by women, all that suggests the unreserved, tender and physically delicious love of mothers even while it seems to promise the rough strife of adult sex. The upper half of a woman offers both keen pleasure and a sort of illusion of sweet safety; but it is a trap. Below, under the foam, the swirling waves of lovely skirt, her hidden body repels, its shapeliness armed in scaly refusal, its oceanic interior stinking of uncleanness."
(She goes on to suggest that women's eventual adoption of trousers conveyed the political message that women's bodies, and therefore their brains, were no different to men's.)
The author, Anne Hollander, is talking about the development of the skirt, which keeps the bottom half of women a mystery, even as fashion changes led to exposed arms, backs, shoulders, and cleavage above completely hidden legs. "It corresponds to one very tenacious myth about women, the same one that gave rise to the image of the mermaid, the perniciously divided female monster, a creature inherited by the gods only down to the girdle. Her voice and face, her bosom and hair, her neck and arms are all entrancing, offering only what is benign among the pleasures afforded by women, all that suggests the unreserved, tender and physically delicious love of mothers even while it seems to promise the rough strife of adult sex. The upper half of a woman offers both keen pleasure and a sort of illusion of sweet safety; but it is a trap. Below, under the foam, the swirling waves of lovely skirt, her hidden body repels, its shapeliness armed in scaly refusal, its oceanic interior stinking of uncleanness."
(She goes on to suggest that women's eventual adoption of trousers conveyed the political message that women's bodies, and therefore their brains, were no different to men's.)
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