You has a flavor: Color, beauty, and the whirl of senses
Renegade Evolution, blogging here on Feministe, stirs up some interesting thoughts with a controversy about as old as feminism itself. I’m doing my usual thing of skipping around in a five-hundred-comment thread, and not wanting to spend the whole day reading the whole thread to respond, but already seeing things up near the top that I’d like to speak about… So, here, my own post on the subject.
When I started hormone therapy, I discovered that the color red — especially in sunlight — became, pleasurably, brighter. This is very weird, and to my knowledge not corroborated by any piece of research. But it’s a physical experience. It influences how I see my own face and the faces of others.
It reminds me that we all have individual physical experiences of color, scent, taste, touch, sound: experiences that are not easily communicated to others. You don’t know how my voice feels coming out of my throat, or sounds in my head. Lately to me it sounds a little like my older brother’s, which brings up perceptions and memories uniquely mine.
I might act, or speak, in ways that remind me of my older brother, and be unknowingly reflecting values and behavior patterns trained into him by the culture. Though I’ve never known him to perform drag, and he hasn’t written fiction since high school, and I can tell you thus that my life is certainly my own.
And by “my own”, I mean: a patchwork of the surfaces and images and sounds and textures that have entered my brain. Collage art. Aren’t we all?
Yes, image perception is influenced by media. It’s also influenced by sensuality, that is: enjoying the input of your senses. All enjoyment of the input of your senses will, naturally, be influenced by what other people have told you about the input of your senses.
That doesn’t mean that any thing we choose to like or dislike is either (1) conformity to authority or (2) knee-jerk resistance to authority.
These aspects are present, but in everything: the food we eat or don’t eat, the people we have sexual relations with and how we choose to pursue them, the coffee mugs we like to drink from…
And to simplify all choices into meaningless conditioned response is not only shoddy psychology, it’s a signpost down the road to utter fatalism.
(P.S. In my own experience, leg-shaving is addictive — and it’s addictive because it feels good. I’m certainly not doing it to pass. Cooler, less itchy, clothes feel nicer — what’s not to like? Of course, we’re all wired differently, so perceptions may vary, physical perceptions as much as any others. Celebrate diversity!)