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two weeks, february, and body image
Today's the first of February, which means that 
14valentines and halfamoon are running. I didn't actually sign up for either of them, but since I have a long backlog of - things I want to post, I'm going to try to take the challenge of posting something substantial once a day until the 14th. Maybe even something related to the day's theme on 14valentines.
Today's theme is body image. I recently went through a bunch of old art files, and found a series of self-portraits going back about 15 years that I wanted to share. They make an interesting collection of both how my self-image has changed, and how my art skills have developed.
So let's talk about body image and self-image. I lucked out when it came to body image, and I know I did. When I was young, I though a fair amount about body image, as part of my reading a lot of girl's fantasy and old books, and trying to figure out how to write them. I was trying to figure out what made an "ugly" stepsister unequivocally ugly. Because I knew - from thumbing through my dad's art books, and from broad reading - that "beautiful" had a lot of range. There were beautiful women who were short and tall and in-between, all varieties of skin tone, hair red and black and brown and yellow and curly and straight and kinky and thin and thick, long and short; slender and muscular and curvy and zaftig and even sometimes fat, hard and soft, different eye colors and noses and face shapes, gap-toothed and dimpled and near-sighted and big-eared, feminine and tomboyish and confident and shy and clumsy and graceful. Oh, some of those traits were more common than others, but they all found a prince in the end. The *only* thing, I decided, that *always* made you ugly - that no princess ever found a prince for - was having bad skin. No princess was ever described with "and the craters on her face just added to her loveliness" or "her blotchy bosom was luminous". Scars, sure, calluses, freckles, tans, rough skin from working hard, but never a just plain bad complexion. (Then I promply wrote a story about a princess with warts, but, y'know.)
Of course, I did have an idea how I wanted to turn out. The beautiful body that *I* thought was beautiful, not some hypothetical prince. I wanted long, wavy, thick, rich brown hair like Mary-Anne from the Baby-sitter's Club. I wanted a figure like the women in the frontispieces of old atlases - small breasts, because more than a handful is a waste and a pain, but nice wide round hips, so I could walk like the tour guide at the Met. Green-blue eyes behind glasses and skin that was milk-pale in winter and tan after a week in the sun. And, of course, a perfect complexion.
And I lucked out in the body image lottery. I more or less grew into exactly the body I wanted (except the good complexion- my issues with my skin are numerous), and I've never had to struggle to keep it, unlike a lot of women I know (a lot of women who I think are very beautiful, but never got the body *they* wanted.) I can buy clothes that (more or less) fit me, and easily find women who look like me in the media, and show my body without being told it's disgusting. Often talking about how I feel about my body feels uncomfortably like gloating ...all the same, my body issues, let me show you them.
Because when puberty finally hit (three years after it hit everybody else) and I started to actually get that body I'd been dreaming of, I started to get deeply uncomfortable with it. There are so many markers and expectations assigned to a woman's body, regardless of what it looks like, or what she wants to do with it. I was supposed to keep my hair styled just right, shave everywhere else, be careful how I sat or how I gestured or what parts of my body I showed or emphasized or what styles I wore because I might be signalling myself as *available* or *interested*, never let anyone know where in my menstrual cycle I was or I would *die*, wear scents and make-up and ill-fitting shoes, and then of course there was all that bad skin that I was deeply ashamed of and didn't want anyone to notice. (Embarassing moment of my adolescence, #x-42: when I was 14 and my algebra teacher noticed a rash on the side of my neck and called me up after class to ask, as if this were the most amazing thing she'd ever seen, if that was a *hickey*.) I'd never paid much attention to my appearance as a kid, but suddenly it seemed like whether I did or not, everybody else was.
And - as I do - I took the easy way out. Instead of worrying and learning all the rules and spending time and money on the rituals, I started wearing concealing clothing. Very concealing clothing. It soon became very rare for me to let anyone see any bit of my skin between my hands and my face and my toes. And since then, I've slowly accumulated a wardrobe - which I love - of long, full skirts and dresses, overalls, non-fitted jeans, knee-high socks and opaque tights, long-sleeved peasant blouses and tunics, flowing wraps and knee-length jackets and loose overshirts, kerchiefs and scarves and hats. It's amazing and wonderful. I've learned to be less self-conscious of my body - I'll wear a bikini now to swim, instead of a knee-length T-shirt; I'll wear a tank top and men's shorts if the circumstances seem to call for it - but there's nothing like dressing to conceal. I feel free, strong, confident, beautiful, and sexy. (There are no clothes that make me feel as sexy as an a-line, ankle-length dress. There's nothing like the feeling of standing out in the sun, knowing that there is nothing between your skin and the air, that "naked under your clothes" has meaning because the only thing that's keeping you from being bare is a quick yank over your head - but you know that nobody will see that unless you choose them as the lucky one, you're standing there completely naked but completely hidden, and you have complete control over your sexuality.) It makes me feel connected to my foremothers, who dressed this way in much harsher conditions, and stood strong on their own feet (which always makes me roll my eyes when women in heels and miniskirts and push-up bras ask me how I can stand the inconvenience.) And as a bonus, they're insanely comfortable, warm or cool as the season calls, convenient, and fit no matter how bloated or starved I'm feeling. And I never have to worry about all of those beauty rituals and costs, or being a tease, or being judged first based on how much time and money I spend on my looks.
I get asked by store clerks, at least a couple times a year "What country are you from?" or "So are you one of them Amish people" or even sometimes something like "Why do you let them make you wear that headscarf?" (The answers, by the way, are "Gondor!", "No, I'm Lutheran!" and "Because I haven't brushed my hair in three days.") But far more often, I get complimented on my hat or asked where I got my jacket or get told by boys to wear that skirt dancing more often. And I continue to boggle when I meet women who think of themselves as active, extreme feminists, but keep torturing themselves to hold to arbitrary, *stupid* beauty standards when there are other options out there.
Anyway, I don't know how to segue from that into art-posting (which was the orginial point of making this post anyway) so I'm going to put the art in its own entry; this is already long as it is.
14valentines and halfamoon are running. I didn't actually sign up for either of them, but since I have a long backlog of - things I want to post, I'm going to try to take the challenge of posting something substantial once a day until the 14th. Maybe even something related to the day's theme on 14valentines.Today's theme is body image. I recently went through a bunch of old art files, and found a series of self-portraits going back about 15 years that I wanted to share. They make an interesting collection of both how my self-image has changed, and how my art skills have developed.
So let's talk about body image and self-image. I lucked out when it came to body image, and I know I did. When I was young, I though a fair amount about body image, as part of my reading a lot of girl's fantasy and old books, and trying to figure out how to write them. I was trying to figure out what made an "ugly" stepsister unequivocally ugly. Because I knew - from thumbing through my dad's art books, and from broad reading - that "beautiful" had a lot of range. There were beautiful women who were short and tall and in-between, all varieties of skin tone, hair red and black and brown and yellow and curly and straight and kinky and thin and thick, long and short; slender and muscular and curvy and zaftig and even sometimes fat, hard and soft, different eye colors and noses and face shapes, gap-toothed and dimpled and near-sighted and big-eared, feminine and tomboyish and confident and shy and clumsy and graceful. Oh, some of those traits were more common than others, but they all found a prince in the end. The *only* thing, I decided, that *always* made you ugly - that no princess ever found a prince for - was having bad skin. No princess was ever described with "and the craters on her face just added to her loveliness" or "her blotchy bosom was luminous". Scars, sure, calluses, freckles, tans, rough skin from working hard, but never a just plain bad complexion. (Then I promply wrote a story about a princess with warts, but, y'know.)
Of course, I did have an idea how I wanted to turn out. The beautiful body that *I* thought was beautiful, not some hypothetical prince. I wanted long, wavy, thick, rich brown hair like Mary-Anne from the Baby-sitter's Club. I wanted a figure like the women in the frontispieces of old atlases - small breasts, because more than a handful is a waste and a pain, but nice wide round hips, so I could walk like the tour guide at the Met. Green-blue eyes behind glasses and skin that was milk-pale in winter and tan after a week in the sun. And, of course, a perfect complexion.
And I lucked out in the body image lottery. I more or less grew into exactly the body I wanted (except the good complexion- my issues with my skin are numerous), and I've never had to struggle to keep it, unlike a lot of women I know (a lot of women who I think are very beautiful, but never got the body *they* wanted.) I can buy clothes that (more or less) fit me, and easily find women who look like me in the media, and show my body without being told it's disgusting. Often talking about how I feel about my body feels uncomfortably like gloating ...all the same, my body issues, let me show you them.
Because when puberty finally hit (three years after it hit everybody else) and I started to actually get that body I'd been dreaming of, I started to get deeply uncomfortable with it. There are so many markers and expectations assigned to a woman's body, regardless of what it looks like, or what she wants to do with it. I was supposed to keep my hair styled just right, shave everywhere else, be careful how I sat or how I gestured or what parts of my body I showed or emphasized or what styles I wore because I might be signalling myself as *available* or *interested*, never let anyone know where in my menstrual cycle I was or I would *die*, wear scents and make-up and ill-fitting shoes, and then of course there was all that bad skin that I was deeply ashamed of and didn't want anyone to notice. (Embarassing moment of my adolescence, #x-42: when I was 14 and my algebra teacher noticed a rash on the side of my neck and called me up after class to ask, as if this were the most amazing thing she'd ever seen, if that was a *hickey*.) I'd never paid much attention to my appearance as a kid, but suddenly it seemed like whether I did or not, everybody else was.
And - as I do - I took the easy way out. Instead of worrying and learning all the rules and spending time and money on the rituals, I started wearing concealing clothing. Very concealing clothing. It soon became very rare for me to let anyone see any bit of my skin between my hands and my face and my toes. And since then, I've slowly accumulated a wardrobe - which I love - of long, full skirts and dresses, overalls, non-fitted jeans, knee-high socks and opaque tights, long-sleeved peasant blouses and tunics, flowing wraps and knee-length jackets and loose overshirts, kerchiefs and scarves and hats. It's amazing and wonderful. I've learned to be less self-conscious of my body - I'll wear a bikini now to swim, instead of a knee-length T-shirt; I'll wear a tank top and men's shorts if the circumstances seem to call for it - but there's nothing like dressing to conceal. I feel free, strong, confident, beautiful, and sexy. (There are no clothes that make me feel as sexy as an a-line, ankle-length dress. There's nothing like the feeling of standing out in the sun, knowing that there is nothing between your skin and the air, that "naked under your clothes" has meaning because the only thing that's keeping you from being bare is a quick yank over your head - but you know that nobody will see that unless you choose them as the lucky one, you're standing there completely naked but completely hidden, and you have complete control over your sexuality.) It makes me feel connected to my foremothers, who dressed this way in much harsher conditions, and stood strong on their own feet (which always makes me roll my eyes when women in heels and miniskirts and push-up bras ask me how I can stand the inconvenience.) And as a bonus, they're insanely comfortable, warm or cool as the season calls, convenient, and fit no matter how bloated or starved I'm feeling. And I never have to worry about all of those beauty rituals and costs, or being a tease, or being judged first based on how much time and money I spend on my looks.
I get asked by store clerks, at least a couple times a year "What country are you from?" or "So are you one of them Amish people" or even sometimes something like "Why do you let them make you wear that headscarf?" (The answers, by the way, are "Gondor!", "No, I'm Lutheran!" and "Because I haven't brushed my hair in three days.") But far more often, I get complimented on my hat or asked where I got my jacket or get told by boys to wear that skirt dancing more often. And I continue to boggle when I meet women who think of themselves as active, extreme feminists, but keep torturing themselves to hold to arbitrary, *stupid* beauty standards when there are other options out there.
Anyway, I don't know how to segue from that into art-posting (which was the orginial point of making this post anyway) so I'm going to put the art in its own entry; this is already long as it is.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2009-02-02 01:23 am (UTC)(link)And I'm looking forward to the art.
--siegeofangels
no subject
When I post the art I will probably talk some about specific outfits and the ways my thinking has changed over time. So that should be fun!
no subject
I don't think this is entirely fair; your aesthetic is as much a response to social pressure as theirs is.
no subject
Though I do think mine is in some ways less based on social pressure: it started out that way, but I've tried different styles and I really to prefer mine as an aesthetic (and for comfort.) I don't have any problem with women who like dressing to magazine standards and are aware it's a choice (I like to do it once in a while, too), or who do it because they have to for their career (though I think most women can get away with a lot more than they think on that front.)
Mostly I boggle at the women who complain about how horrible and wrong and harmful it is, and how it makes them poor and miserable and unhealthy, but keep doing it, as if they truly can't imagine doing anything else. (And also boggle at the women who honestly think that long skirts and wraps are some kind of *handicap*, as if they've never noticed that several millennia of women (and women) haven't managed to do much more in long skirts than they can in exercise gear. That's another sort of cultural blindness I wish we could get past.)
And I do mean boggle, as in "am bewildered by" - that sort of worldview is just really alien to me; of being so thoroughly trapped by the system they don't even consider escape an option.
(And the women who claim that fullfilling modern beauty standards is empowering are a completely different pile of issues.)
no subject
But the above was mostly just meant to add substance to the comment. Really, I just wanted to say that your answers to rude assuming questions are fabulous.