From Christian to Ricardo:
>This is too complicated for them to follow; oh, I forgot, they are
>marxists, so probably they do have a formula for you specifying
>what's the correct political line that you should follow. I am sure
>that even some gays would agree with me - those who are proud enough
>to see conflict/controversy/diverdity/divisions within their own
>group just as within any other.
>
>******
>
>Come again? You were the one that said that said that the gay men
>that run the fashion industry had identical tastes.
>
>Some other points: First, the "extra thin" model began at least as
>far back as Twiggy--that's 1969. If you want to attribute that to
>gay men, fine, but I'd like to see some evidence.
>
>Second, "asexual" as a commodity *is* sexual.
>
>Third, you view the fashion industry as a monolith--as if both its
>recent history and the differences between haute couture and retail,
>or sports fashion and eveningwear (just for example) didn't make a
>difference. If you want to claim that the homogenous tastes of a few
>powerful gay men completely determine this field, you'll need to do
>more than invoke this unconfirmed (though apparently widely
>believed) myth. How 'bout some names, companies, and evidence of gay
>men's overwhelming power over the fashion industry? How about some
>evidence that the ultra thin model began with their ascendance?
The "extra thin" model of female beauty dates further back than
Twiggy. You'd have to go back at least to the fin-de-siecle Europe
and perhaps even to the Pre-Raphaelites (the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood was founded in 1848). Ricardo needs to study art history.
For instance, Bram Dijkstra writes in _Idols of Perversity: Fantasies
of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture_ (NY: Oxford UP, 1986):
***** ...[Romaine] Brooks's painting becomes not a critique of the
turn-of-the-century's victimization of woman as passive object but an
emotionally charged expression of the manner in which women attempted
to transform their passive position in this society as manipulated
objects into the illusion of an active participation in their
domination through a supposedly self-elected ideal of physical
invalidism and consumptive fragility. To Brooks and to the viewer,
her subject, Ida Rubinstein, is an object of desire because she
represents an inverted ideal of personal control. The hollow eyes
and the anorexic emaciation were well-known and well-publicized
features of Rubinstein's dramatic personality. Through her ability
to personify the cultural ideal of woman's subjection, Rubinstein was
seen by her contemporaries, especially by her women friends, to have
gained a position of extraordinary power as, one could say, an
ambulant fetish expressive of the ideologically manipulated desires
of that society. By depicting Rubinstein prostrate, floating whitely
in a field of self-referential darkness, Brooks appropriated
Rubinstein's identity as cultural fetish to herself and to the
viewers of her painting.
But by doing so Brooks, in effect, also helped feed rather than
combat a male fantasy whose precise implications were neatly
expressed by the critic Ezra Tharp as he waxed lyrical in the March
1914 issue of _Art and Progress_ about the whispy, ghostlike women of
Thomas Wilmer Dewing...."The thinness of Dewing's women," declared
Tharp, "is part of their modernness -- thinness being a modern and an
American ideal. There's no other animal one wants to see thin,
except a dog." After having thus indicated succinctly where he
placed woman on the evolutionary scale, the critic continued with
censorious arrogance toward the general public: "One is impatient
when people, even when people who ought not to know any better,
lament the thinness of his women, for after all there is nothing so
handsome as a skeleton, as the drop and set and hang of the
bones"....Clearly the fetishized emaciation of iconic figures such as
Rubinstein made it possible for males to respond to them in either a
sadistic or masochistic fashion, depending on whether they were seen
as subjects in control of their own destiny (and hence a threat to
the aggressive self-identity of the men observing them) or as
ultrapassive objects of aggressive desire. Tharp, for his part, left
no doubt concerning the message he read in Dewing's paintings: "Among
women and flowers, he cares for one type -- puts one long-stemmed
graceful flower in a beautiful vase"....
However, the principal progression of suggestive effect from [Joseph
Noel] Paton's mid-nineteenth-century narrative painting of a "Dead
Lady" to Brooks' early twentieth-century version of the same subject
resides in the manner in which the range of subjective options had
narrowed for the latter painting's audience. As we shall see, this
is a characteristic pattern in the development of late
nineteenth-century art, a development which, to a large degree, was a
reflection of the middle-class male's changing perception of the
nature of his position in the arena of economic domination. (p. 53)
*****
Dijkstra's analysis is too long and complex (the book is 453 pages
long!) to summarize it here, but several themes stand out.
1. The bourgeoisie propagated a moral ideal of Self-Control that
legitimated their existence as distinct from & superior to
aristocrats, proletarians, & pre-capitalist "primitives," all of whom
were portrayed as "lazy, dissolute, & improvident." The bodily
expression of this bourgeois moral ideal is thinness -- hence the
emergence of thinness as a standard of beauty.
2. The bourgeoisie created the separate spheres that were gendered
and class-specific -- the public world for self-seeking men and the
private home for self-sacrificing women. The bodily expression of
bourgeois female self-sacrifice (including sacrifice of sexuality) is
the mortification of the bourgeois female flesh.
3. Bourgeois men, implicitly recognizing market competition as
"bellum omnium contra omnes," compelled bourgeois women to embody
"soul," "heart," "virtue," & other ideas of value that had to be
expelled from the dog-eat-dog world where man must live only for
himself. As the flesh is thought of as a vehicle of sin &
temptation, the antithesis of fleshliness -- thinness -- becomes a
bodily expression of feminine virtue. Bourgeois women shouldered the
burden of morality inadmissible in the world of commerce.
4. Capital accumulation was predicated upon the steady flow of
credit, and bourgeois men's ability to show off bourgeois wives'
bodies as signs of "conspicuous leisure" (as Veblen might say) was
taken to be a sign of credit-worthiness. Slender & fragile female
bodies aesthetically expressed bourgeois women's economic dependence
upon their husbands.
Dijkstra makes clear that in many ways the more morbid emphasis upon
emaciation as a fashion in the late nineteenth century was an
aesthetic reaction against the burgeoning women's movement.
In the twentieth century, thinness as a cultural ideal represents not
only continuity with but also difference from the
late-nineteenth-century fashion of female emaciation. Emaciated
female beauties in late-nineteenth-century paintings expressed
fragility & delicacy: the ideal beauty was consumptive, the ideal
woman an invalid, so to speak. Nowadays (with the interventions of
female designers such as Coco Chanel, who made upper-class sportswear
chic, and more importantly because of second-wave feminism), the
ideal female body is not just thin but *taut* and *worked out*. The
new ideal is a trickle-down version (or "democratization") of the
bourgeois moral ideal of Self-Control ("Fat? *Work* out!"), mixed
with a strong sense of female autonomy & self-assertion ("Our Bodies,
Our Selves," which constituted only a very minor thread in the late
nineteenth-century ideal), coopted & commodified by Nike ("Just do
it!"). Gay men's aesthetics may have played a role, but if so, the
role seems to have mainly to do with making *men* adopt the same
ideal as women (rather than making women adopt the male ideal). On
this subject of twentieth-century body management, see Susan Bordo,
_Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body_,
Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
Yoshie
