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!)
DaisyDeadhead said,
August 24, 2007 at 11:20 pm
But do you think our choices are above criticism at all? For some people, ANY criticism = repression.
There has to be a happy medium, somewhere.
A. J. Luxton said,
August 25, 2007 at 2:45 am
I don’t think anything is above criticism. I also think gender policing of any kind is not the same as criticism.
At the same time, I think the line between criticism and gender policing exists both in the person making a criticism, and the person receiving it, and may exist in a different place for each party.
Which often leads to inadvertent injury as a side effect of discourse between people who are different from each other. Criticism is this thing like driving a car: there might be casualties even if one does it responsibly, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it; and there are fewer casualties when the interactions are cautious and wise…
Dw3t-Hthr said,
August 26, 2007 at 5:08 pm
I find it interestingly ironic that I read about the sensual experience of dyeing my hair before reading anything related to the spat Over There.
(Also, you have the context for this: Set fancies redheads. Generally, when people are on about Pleasing The Mens they’re referring to corporeal ones, as opposed to gods who may or may not technically exist. Ahem.)
I tried shaving my legs once to see why people were on about it. Once I stopped the bleeding I said, “Okay, that was silly” and never bothered with it again. (I did, I will admit, make a slightly more serious attempt at armpits because I don’t care for the texture of the hair, but the process was more effortful than the hair was distasteful, so I stopped.)
belledame222 said,
September 4, 2007 at 9:34 am
You know, I don’t buy the “no criticism is okay” thing, increasingly so. I mean, to me this IS critique in the real sense, and a very interesting on. in my experience–and not saying I see you do this, Daisy, just when it’s come up on many occasions–I find that when people say this they don’t really mean “oh, you don’t want to analyze ___,” What they mean is “you won’t let me -judge- you (and find you wanting); and/or you won’t accept -my- interpretation of what ___ means, even if it’s -your- experience we’re talking about.”
btw, AJ, got a sec? was looking for an email to contact you at. gimme a shout at bel4 AT earthlink DOT net.
belledame222 said,
September 4, 2007 at 9:41 am
anyway, yeah definitely, I think sensuality often goes missing from these discussions. it’s like everything can only be examined from the neck up, which is weird when we’re talking about such physical, often visceral subjects. you know: what does it all MEAN dear. and people often come back with, well just because it feels good doesn’t mean it’s good -for- you.
and i think: okay, you know, and here i -also- call bullshit. That’s so vague: “feel good;” When’s the last time you paid a tenth as much attention as to the -specifics- of the -feeling- as you do to the symbolism or who supposedly is influencing whom to do what? What do you -mean-, “feel good?” A dreamy state of relaxation? A warm feeling in the pit of the stomach? That weird sort of addictive biting-on-tinfoil feeling? What’s “feeling bad?” Do you even know how you feel -right now-?
The Internets makes the whole thing even headier than need be, of course, since it’s disembodied by nature, but honestly, i don’t even think that’s the main problem here. I don’t agree with the whole “mistrust your feelings” truism; to me that -is- part of the very System a lot of these supposed “radicals” are supposedly trying to get to the root of, if not actually uproot. How can you possibly get to the root of anything if you can’t trust your own gut and gonads? Whose impressions are you relying on, ultimately, if not yours? Whose emotions, whose passions, whose interpretations of them? That’s a serious question.
besides which I think often, on a simpler level, that sort of tsk-tsking reflects a very reactionary sort of suspicion of any sensuality as hedonistic (Maude forbid) and thus dangerous all by itself.
A. J. Luxton said,
September 5, 2007 at 12:05 am
Belle: sure — email winging its way now.
I don’t think Daisy *was* saying I thought that; I think she was just testing the waters. It’s good to know what kind of conversation you’re stepping into.
The line between criticism and judgment is an interesting one. I suspect that there may also be cases where person A intends only to analyze, and person B feels judged. It’s rather hard to locate verbal fists and verbal noses. It’s rather like playing a game of Battleship.
I seem to run into this a lot with premise conflict — you know, the sort of arguments that have at their basis a basic worldview which is not shared by all participants, but is a basic worldview and doesn’t register to the person making the argument as a part of the argument: like — and I’ll risk being relevant — one woman might think “no woman could possibly like male attention,” and another might think “no woman could possibly *not* like male attention”, and these opposite assumptions might be so strong and so deeply experiential that neither would have an easy time recognizing their own subjectivity in the matter.
Or, I keep crashing into this one — “no person of reasonably high social class could ever not want to work 40 hours a week in an office, if the pay is right.”
Dw3t-Hthr said,
September 8, 2007 at 11:33 pm
Or, I keep crashing into this one — “no person of reasonably high social class could ever not want to work 40 hours a week in an office, if the pay is right.”
I have this one, or its close cousin.
It mostly makes me feel like a failure.
(It also crossbreeds with the professional-class feminism that I was steeped in as a small child, with highly unfortunate consequences.)
Whee, neuroticism.
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