Clothes and Class

By Professor Mary Evans

The fashion designer Alice Temperley recently remarked about the Duchess of Cambridge that ‘she mixes designer and high street, the perfect modern day woman’. Unfortunately, many women – given this definition of perfection – are inevitably going to fail; ‘designer’ costs money.

But as we wallow in yet another aspect of the  murky depths of women’s  failure to match up to aspirational standards we might console ourselves ( as poor girls often have to ) with thinking about the implications of the remark. It seems to suggest , with rather more economy than Hilary Mantel’s discussion of the Duchess, that what is apparently so very admirable about her is that she is good at shopping. Mantel was not writing so much about any particular choice of clothes, rather she was writing about a general persona. But in taking this viewpoint she arguably missed something that is hugely important in the twenty first century : the relationship between women and clothes, an ancient relationship but one which has now become one of the fundamental imperatives of being the ‘right’ kind of woman.

The Duchess of Cambridge, with access to the considerable funds of the British royal family does not have to worry about the cost of shopping. But clearly she does think about the complexity of fashion and everything about the way she dresses (from that wedding dress with its references to Tudor royal ladies to the Topshop choices ) is very, very deliberate. This makes her less the woman designed by a committee than a woman who uses her intelligence to negotiate the boundaries between clothes that are explicitly hugely expensive and well beyond ‘ordinary’ pockets and clothes that are hugely expensive in other terms, the terms of exploited human labour. In this, interesting twenty first century boundaries about clothes appear whilst other boundaries disappear  : in this mix of ‘designer’ and the ‘high street’ we are being asked to believe that class no longer matters in clothes and, by implication, that taste and especially ‘good’ taste is no longer attached to money. As this fantasy dissolves more traditional expectations about clothes – that money could buy taste – another boundary appears, one in which the apparent democratisation of fashion asks us to abandon the view that rich people have access to nicer ( prettier, made of more luxurious materials ) clothes than most of us. It is both the dissolution and the hardening of the class lines of fashion.

Now it is probably the case that the Duchess of Cambridge ( and others wedded to money )  do not think about their excursions to Next or Topshop in terms of dissolving the link between being fashionable and being rich. But the ways in which current fashion is produced – ever changing, literally ‘fast’ fashion – diminish the authority  of dressing  in ways which were once described as ‘classic’ or ‘elegant’. These adjectives about clothes have largely disappeared from the fashion press and where the words do appear it is largely in the context of ‘older’ women for whom the only consolation of old age is apparently the possibility of being ‘elegant’. Yet in this we can also see the workings of class : being old can bring difficulties for everyone , those difficulties multiply considerably for the poor. When clothes become difficult to put on, when the cost of heating is prohibitive, when mobility is constrained, the true class politics of fashion emerge.

Thus ageing ( and other forms of physical constraint ) can make the connection between class and clothes explicit. But all of us have to live in a world which assumes that ‘looking good’ is nowadays easy for everyone because of what fashion writers blithely refer to as the ‘high street’. The articulation of this view, is not, however, quite the statement of mere fact that it appears since one of the features of ‘fast’ fashion is that it is date stamped more ruthlessly than food. In this, wearing ‘fast’ fashion is not just about buying ‘ordinary’ clothes it is also about demonstrating that the buyer has enough money to buy disposable clothes, the clothes whose very existence is all about disposability. So when we read that the Duchess of Cambridge has ‘sourced’ her clothes from the high street we might stop and consider what this actually means : rather than a gesture towards democracy in fact a gesture away from it. A gesture which says ‘ Look at me, I’ve brought this bit of cheap stuff because these kind of clothes are just for today’.

In the rigidly class regulated world in which we live ( and in which class and disposable income are very closely linked ) we might stop and think more about the class politics of fashion : we have to dress ourselves and many of us want to do so in ways that , and hopefully especially , appeal to us. But no assumptions, please, that most of us can achieve that state of perfection which involves access to the expensive as well as what the rich call ‘high street’. Being ‘good at shopping’ is not yet cash free.

Bodies in Stress

Kate and I (the founders of Bodymatters) met while studying for our Masters in Gender at LSE. We’ve been pretty quiet over the last few months because we have both been under lockdown with our dissertations, which, I say with huge relief, were handed in on Monday.

That was a week ago now, and I still feel mentally exhausted! But my body is doing ok, and so, before I have erased the last few weeks from my memory completely, I have compiled a list of six time-saving, affordable and easy steps to ensure you look after yourself while immersed in a dissertation, or whatever other stressful hell you’ve found yourself in.

1. Scrub. Start every day with an invigorating shower (my library research concluded that approximately 25% of Masters students – in the hottest British summer in seven years – were not engaging in this essential level of maintenance). Using either exfoliating gloves or a body brush, give yourself a good scrubbing. You’ll stimulate your circulation which will not only wake you up, but will get rid of dead skin, reduce cellulite (if that’s something you care about) and will leave you tingling and ready for the next step:
2. Moisturise. The worst thing about doing a Masters is that you’re going to be inside for quite a lot of the summer. If you work in the library, it’s likely to be air-conditioned, and wherever you are, it’s nice to feel a little pampered. I love Palmer’s Cocoa Butter. It’s rich enough to keep your skin soft until your next shower, and it takes a little effort to rub in completely, which, again, stimulates circulation (sorry, I’ve got Raynaud’s so circulation is important to me…) plus it’s only £3! On days when you are in a real rush, Nivea’s new In-

Body Politic

By Professor Mary Evans

Professor Mary Evans is the Centennial Professor at LSE’s Gender Institute.

Isabel Bishop (1902-1988), Scene from Pride and Prejudice: “The examination of all the letters…” (1976)

There has been a considerable amount of reaction – almost all of it condemnatory – to the Twitter attack on Caroline Creado – Perez, the woman who was the major force behind the campaign to put the face of Jane Austen on UK banknotes. The specific attack on Creado-Perez has already been defined as a criminal offence.

So that seems to suggest that there is, at least in public, a widespread reaction to the idea that it is acceptable to attempt to control the behaviour of women through sexual violence. But the story does not stop there because on 29^th July a woman literary critic , Frances Wilson, wrote a deeply critical attack in the Daily Mail on Jane Austen, arguing that, amongst other things, she was ‘obsessed with money’.

Now that is a very interesting suggestion, not least because it is published in a newspaper that on the whole takes a rather positive view of those making money and an extremely negative one of anyone not involved in that process. Many readers of Jane Austen would have some difficulty in recognising the account of her work which is given by Wilson, but what we might find most problematic about the Wilson account is the absence of any suggestion that Austen was deeply critical of greed and avarice. Every one of her novels has characters who can think of nothing but making the late eighteenth century equivalent of a fast buck and Austen is comprehensively and systematically critical of them all. Readers might recognise  Iain Duncan-Smith, for example, as the reincarnation of Mrs John Dashwood of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, a woman who is determined to talk her husband out of any kind of material support for his needy relatives.

This diversion into Austen’s novels is made here because what unites the Wilson attack with that of the writer on  Twitter is  the assumption that the politics held by women, and the expression by  women of their political views ( be it in campaigning in the twenty first century or writing fiction in the late eighteenth ) can be justifiably attacked, derided and made nonsense of, by any kind of assertion or threat that writers care to make. Creado-Perez led a powerful, widely reported campaign to challenge the disappearance of women on English currency, Austen wrote about the vulnerability of women in an age with no effective provision for the poor. In both cases what these women were doing was treated with a complete lack of respect.

It is that lack of respect for women, and the work of women, which makes these cases so particularly troubling. I want to suggest here that it is the idea that the female body includes a mind capable of critical thought about social relations which retains the power to disturb and threaten. In one sense it is remarkable that Jane Austen, a woman writer who is (entirely wrongly in my view) sometimes seen as the patron saint of the English gentry should be able to arouse such passion. The costume drama/Mr Darcy in the duck pond interpretation of Jane Austen, should, it might be supposed,  bring out hordes of zealots in favour of the author of these fantasies of secure patriarchy.

Instead, a furious person  writes threats of sexual assault and a young woman has her work, of the  recuperation of a female presence in a public space, rapidly transformed into a matter of  the most brutal sexuality. The question then remains for us of what is the connection between the threat of rape and Jane Austen… a question which has been largely absent from literary criticism. We have to ask, therefore,  what is so powerfully worrying about the mere picture of a women on a banknote . We also have to ask about  the extent to which our culture has become so literal in its understanding of sexuality, and the male and female body, that the sight of a woman’s face can trigger ideas about physical, sexual relationships of dominance and control. It is as if a picture of Austen (or any other woman)  has become so absolutely connected to questions of sexuality that anyone with a fragile sense of sexuality (not to mention reality) can only react through sexuality ..and a sexuality which of course invokes the most vicious form of sexual control.

The Austen affair perhaps suggests that the ‘sexualisation’ of our culture about which there is so much discussion has had , amongst other possible effects, the production of a new DNA which cannot see a body – or even a female face in a bonnet – without thinking, literally, of sex. Not sex in the terms of the charged and complex ways of which Austen wrote but sex in the most limited and proscriptive terms. Amongst those limiting terms, most crucially, is the recognition that women have minds as well as bodies.

The body as the site of social justice

By Sasha White

Sasha White is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Boston University, where his research focuses on the biopolitics of race and gender.

 

As the rapid pace of technological change and achievement raises new questions about the role of the corporeal self, especially in the fields of medicine and biology, we must critically examine which tools we have at our disposal to engage with the social justice questions that have and have yet to emerge at the forefront of modern bio and medical ethics. In this piece I hope to tease out several key questions to explore in future and explore how the theoretical frameworks around race theory can help to drive the discussion.

I was inspired to write this by an interview with Professor Ruha Benjamin regarding her new book,  Peoples Science by the Center for Genetics and Society. Her interview touched on these questions and explores many of these issues latent within the stem cell debate that has taken place over the last decade in California.

Professor Rosi Braidotti of the University of Utrecht is also publishing extensively on the theoretical implications of the augmented human and has recently published The Posthuman, a work that critically analyses the discourse surrounding the human in our current epoch, as both the site of identity but also as a being extended beyond the body, both geographically and temporally through second life, biological augmentation and social networking.

The body has always held a specific and vital role in the realm of critical race theory. Frantz Fanon, in his work Black Skin, White Masks, describes the painful colonial experience of racialization as epidermalization- the process of applying certain essential qualities to the racialised body on the basis of skin color, which carries with it pre-determined character traits and social value. Any decoupling of individual identity from the troubling social connotations of racialised bodies becomes all but impossible under such social paradigms. The nature of existence under such racialized schemas become coded to reflect the socially constructed racial norms of behaviour with which the racialized self must constantly contend. The liberating process of anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle is in many ways a fight to deconstruct the racialised self to assert the body not as a signifier of racial tropes and limitations but rather as an autonomous and self-directed person, free from pre-conceived notions of validity, aptitude or physical characteristics.

While the battles with racialization and racism are far from over, the areas of science and medicine are seeing and may soon witness a marked rise in corporeal subjectification that may well require the same tools employed by Fanon, Duboise, Wright, Biko, Gilroy and many others to articulate a space for social justice within the realm of new bio-medical research, gene therapy and medical testing. The questions raised by such innovations may often hinge on the relationship between the self and the social and physical determinations placed upon the body. The progress being made along these scientific lines raises many vital questions regarding life and biological processes as a chosen project rather than one dictated by unforeseen circumstance.

Our new understandings of genetics, genetic predisposition, variation, disease on an atomic level as well as humanity’s capacity to alter these components, are making the human form inessential to the self and rather a signifier of it. Racial and eugenic schemas have previously employed the body as the indicator of social and political worth.  Rather than within the racial schema in which biological and phenotypical signifiers exist to constrain the abilities of the self, the individual is moving towards an existence in which it is able to determine its own limits. The human body is becoming the site of existential orientation- the result of various projects chosen over the course of life. Is existence beginning to precede essence even down to our biological formation? If genetic determinants can be re-engineered, and altered, cloned and augmented, then humans may soon cease to be the result of heritage but the culmination of surgical and bio-medical choice. If the lived experience of death, dying and disease moves into the realm of existential choice, what will that mean for those without access to such opportunities? Who will receive the possibility of augmenting their biological experience and who will remain tethered to their physical pre-conditions? Such questions return to the schemas of race making and the physical and social limitations applied to historically oppressed peoples. How will the oppressed and neglected other be articulated within a genetically modified era, especially if the intellectual self now has the capacity to form the corpus to its own making?  Will bio-medical augmentation, treatments and therapies become another way for further entrenching systemic social inequalities by constraining access to the right to alter the biological state and destiny of the individual?

I clearly do not have the answer to these questions, but within the complex discourse on social justice, human rights and the boundaries and lived experience of the human body, the field of critical race theory, alongside queer, gender and sexuality theory may likely hold the tools for constructing a new language for discussing the human body in our rapidly changing times. These are the questions I hope to interrogate in further detail in the future.

Riots, Religion and Pussies

I just got back from a few days of brilliant documentaries at this year’s Sheffield doc/fest (God Loves Uganda, The Man Whose Mind Exploded, and The Square to name a few) but one that stuck in my mind was the festival’s opening night film, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer.  The film is a thrilling rendition of the trial of Nadia, Katia and Masha, who were arrested shortly after a Pussy Riot performance in a cathedral in Moscow. The film does an excellent job of bringing out the women’s ardent feminism, eloquence, intelligence and poise throughout the trial and is a great tribute to all of their characters. It also reinforces the point that the trial was not a political conspiracy devised by Putin, even though Putin may look every bit the part of a James Bond villain. Given this point, I was left wondering what was in fact so threatening about the Pussy Riot performances. Why did this punk band—self-admittedly inspired by the Spice Girls—cause a government crackdown? Their music is cacophonous and, at times, they appear to be little more than a gaggle of girls in balaclavas smoking cigarettes is somebody’s garden. They certainly succeeded, though, in grabbing the world’s attention. One of the individuals featured in the film puts the reason for their notoriety bluntly, comparing their performance to taking a shit. Should you be able to walk into a cathedral and, metaphorically speaking, take a shit? What kind of shit are we talking about?

Both Pussy Riot’s performances and the woman’s rhetoric—‘taking a shit’—conjure up thoughts of Julia Kristeva’s writings on abjection in which she explains the abject to be that which defies social order. As the film makes clear, one of the most threatening aspects of the ladies’ provocative performances was its insult to religion, which triggered the kind of breakdown in meaning that abjection (which has been embraced as a feminist aesthetic) involves. The Russian Orthodox Church saw something incredibly worrisome in the Pussy Riot performances; I would suggest that this panic was conditioned by a fear of feminism, bodies, pussies, women, atheism, and probably an amalgam of other anxieties, too.

To play devil’s advocate: the religious response to the women’s actions in Russia is also indicative of a large number of individuals’ genuine upset at what they feel was an insult to their core beliefs. It seems to be a massive challenge to preserve respect for those beliefs while maintaining the right to energetically (and sometimes explosively) advocate for other beliefs. I am not religious, but I can say that feminism is a belief system that has stuck with me for a while, and I, like any Muslim or Christian or Buddhist, want others to respect it. As Turks protest what they believe to be Muslim-inspired laws and Tony Blair writes an op-ed on “The Trouble With Islam”, the issue of what that old, basic cliché—‘respect for others’—means is popping up time and time again. How can we protest in a way that doesn’t alienate, confuse or offend people’s core sensibilities? Is protest meaningful if it doesn’t shake those sensibilities and force profound questioning?

As a documentary that probes the nature of resistance and the real repercussions of it, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer certainly provides food for thought regarding a lot of these questions. Challenging power structures—especially religious ones—is obviously not a new thing. But at a time where the intersection of protest, resistance, religion, and conservatism appears so messy and complicated, instances like A Punk Prayer can remind us why we riot and perhaps why we must respect other riots, too.

Me and My Body: Lauren

Ava met Lauren practicing yoga on a beach in India, where they swam with dolphins and drank masala chai as the sun went down.  Lauren has since said goodbye to India, and has relocated to another tropical part of the world: Costa Rica, where she teaches yoga and writes Raise Your Beat. Here she reflects upon how she learned how to appreciate her body through yoga.

Growing up in America I was bombarded with media, social standards and pressures on body image. I admit I was a skinny girl, born with a high metabolism and long lanky limbs. My mother, who is a beautiful woman, raised me. Her kindness, unconditional support and love radiate from the inside out. Although she was blessed with a stacked genealogy – model height and classic beauty – she is so honest about her body, and has a wonderful sense of humor about it (especially now at the age of 62) that she is my true definition of genuine beauty.

Even though I was lucky enough to be surrounded by a positive female figure, I still grew up wishing I could change parts of my body. Through my adolescent years, I had insecurities when I would compare myself to the other girls at school, and to the false images of flawless women plastered on billboards, magazines and on television. Adolescence is an age when you are so vulnerable to your surroundings and care so much about what others think of you – and so little about yourself, it is no wonder many young girls feel negative about their bodies.   

At the age of 18, I took my first ever yoga class.  It was a hot yoga called Bikram – which left me breathless, humbled and totally enchanted. I first fell in love with yoga for the physical benefits. As a naturally skinny girl, I loved the way yoga brought strength and definition to my body. I also loved the emotional high, as I would leave class feeling more healthy, happy and inspired. Soon I began crave the deeper benefits of the practice.

I wanted to return to class day after day, not only for the lean muscle and flexibility I was gaining, but from the simple happiness it brought me. If there is one thing that is universal about any yoga class, it is the positive effect it will have on your mood, self-esteem, and maybe even your day. From the postures, my teacher’s enthusiastic energy, to the other 10 strangers who shared the experience with me, I realized that surrounding myself with positive people was one of the best feelings.

Suddenly, when my atmosphere changed, so did my attitude. During each 90 minute class, the wisdom that my teacher passed on soaked in a little deeper. She taught us about the most important yet simplest aspects of life: the health of our internal bodies, spiritual growth, and appreciation for that very day. I realized yoga became therapeutic. I exposed myself to a whole new way of thinking, with other like-minded people, who also treated themselves to the small dose of reality and happiness that they deserved. The more time I spent in the yoga studio, the less the shape of my nose, the size of my feet or the brand of my clothing held relevance in my life.

I was fortunate enough to learn to look beyond the pressures of materialism and media in order to look at what was in the mirror in front of me: a strong, healthy, and real woman.

I understand now that yoga is a process. It is a process of evolvement: of learning more about your capabilities as a person. For me, it has been a process that began physical, and is now mental and spiritual. Part of this mental evolution is learning to love myself. Learning to treat my body as if it were a temple. Learning to be grateful, that I can practice yoga freely with all my limbs working, and with a healthy heart and lungs.

My wonderful mother and yoga community – fellow students and my teachers – have helped me to accept who I am today. They are the simple reminders that looks only take you so far in life, and that personality, character and morals say much more about you then any body part ever could.

Me and My Body: Archie and Bharat

Archie and Bharat have been going to the gym together for three months now. They are both eighteen. They co-wrote this post, reflecting on how they feel about their own bodies and how going to the gym has affected this.

 

Emphasis on bodily perfection has become a controversial topic in recent years. The news is full of stories of anorexia, steroid abuse and teenage insecurity. These are, of course, horrific examples of this type of social pressure. We, however, have found what we consider to be life changing revelations from our personal emphasis on our bodies.

One of us has been going to the gym for about a year and a half, and the other for just over 3 months. This journey began when one of us, Bharat, stumbled across Zyzz. Zyzz is at once a God and a devil, a hero and a villain. He transformed himself from a scrawny teenager to an ‘aesthetic God’ in a matter of years. This gave me, Bharat, the inspiration and hope to start training. At first this was for social validation, but soon my transformation became more than that.

There are a number of different changes we have noticed since the start of this journey. First and foremost, our bodies have changed. Whilst we cannot regard ourselves as ‘big’, we have put on size and toned our physiques. This has become a symbol, a battleground for a teenager’s struggle to control his or her life. We have so little control over our day to day, over the way we are perceived, over the life we lead, that controlling one important aspect of that gives us confidence in every interaction we have.

We would never say this emphasis is wholly positive, however. We recognise that the culture and increased vanity and superficiality can be distasteful and even dangerous, but this focus is no longer for superficial reasons. Much like where we would imagine anorexia comes from, this focus comes from a will to control and increase confidence. This is not as simply as seeking social validation or attention from the opposite sex. When working on our bodies, we are happier in a personal sense. We are doing something for ourselves, by ourselves, for our own purposes. We chose to better ourselves and we are able to do so through control over our bodies. We see the transformation of our bodies not as ends in themselves, but as conduits through which we can control our uncontrollable lives and, of course, find validation in our society.

The danger is, of course, that this goal can go too far. Excess is, as ever, dangerous and awareness of this is an important proviso to our choices. Zyzz died at the young age of 22. This was undoubtedly a result, at least in part, from his choice of lifestyle. Our bodies are controllable aspects of our lives, however, and we have changed ourselves through manipulation of our bodies. We will continue striving, continue achieving goals that can be met, and continue to use our bodies to do so.

Women’s Equality in the UK – A Health Check

On Monday, the Women’s Resource Centre and the CEDAW Working Group launched ‘Women’s equality in the UK – a health check.’ The report makes for a difficult read. It gives substantial evidence of how the government’s austerity measures have disproportionally impacted upon women, and provides numerous case studies that show how the policy changes that have been implemented over the past five years have pushed marginalised women deeper into poverty. I was part of the team that collated evidence for the report, and I drafted a number of the articles within it. While it was great to see such a big collaborative piece of work finally in print, none of us felt like celebrating as we launched the report in Westminster.

The report raises specific concerns on all aspects of equality in the UK, from education to employment to health to political representation. While there isn’t the space to outline each of these here – there are far too many – I will highlight the area of domestic violence, as it has such a clear relationship to women’s bodies.

One concern noted is around the introduction of Universal Credit, which incorporates child benefit and is paid as a single payment to one partner in a couple. The report shows that women experiencing domestic violence find it much harder to leave abusive relationships without access to their own funds. The introduction of Universal Credit is therefore likely to result in a further obstacle for women trying to leave violent relationships, and has the potential to fuel financial abuse. Even for those women who are able to escape violent relationships, the outlook is bleak. The report states that violence against women and girls (VAWG) services have lost 31% of funding, and, in 2011, 9% of women were turned away from refuges due to a lack of bed space. Increased demand for services and reduced funding means that this figure is likely to have risen. Services that specifically cater to the needs of black and minority ethnic (BME) women have faced further difficulties, and the report sites research that shows that 100% of BME VAWG organisations have faced funding cuts. The reality is that it is women’s bodies, and the bodies of those who already face multiple forms of discrimination (including BME, refugee, disabled and economically disadvantaged women) that are bearing the brunt of the austerity measures.

The report argues that the long term health consequences of domestic violence, which include post-traumatic stress, depression, self-harm and eating disorders – all of which can stop women from working – cost the state hugely, both in terms of health care and through welfare benefits. While the CEDAW Working Group, who compiled the report, are clear that the wellbeing of women and girls is their focus, they demonstrate that cuts that disproportionately impact on women are simply not cost effective and not in the best interests of the country.

The report will go to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in July, during the UK’s examination under CEDAW. The goal is for the report to provide information to the Committee, so that they can tell the government what needs to be done to improve gender equality over the next four years. For now, it acts as a snapshot of how things are for women in the UK today – and it isn’t pretty.

Me and My Body: Josie

Our first guest post for the ‘Me and My Body’ series comes from Josie Hinton. At 31, and with a beautiful one year-old daughter, Josie discusses how parenting has impacted on her relationship with her body.

Like most, no probably all women, there are parts of my body I’d like to change (hair, ears, hands in case you’re wondering) but I’ve also come to accept the way I look at the ripe old age of 31. Growing up, my parents would regularly tell me and my sister we were beautiful which I think was essential in developing our self esteem with regards to how we look. I am well aware I’m no supermodel but even in my teenage angst years I never truly hated my body and I credit my parents for this deep down confidence, something I really hope I can pass on to my daughter. Not that looks are the most important thing in the world, but how we look – or at least how we feel we look – has a huge impact on feelings of self worth; especially for women, so feeling good is pretty important. 

I’ve also been gangly and some what scrawny (or slim and lithe if I’m being kind to myself). When I was 16 I found out I had scoliosis (curvature of the spine). I didn’t have surgery to correct it so have been wonky spined since then. 16 was the worst time to find this out as of couse I was totally obsessed with what boys thought of me and was convinced they’d reject me in favour of straight spined girls. Turns out boys don’t really care about things like this. Phew 😉 And now, whilst I would rather have a straight back if there was a choice, it has become a bodily quirk like all my other body parts. 

Being pregnant I was one of those rare women who enjoyed getting fat. Having spent most of my life trying to put weight on, it was lovely to feel more curvy and well, sexy. Women might strive to lose weight more often than they try to gain it, but I feel more sexy when I’ve got more rather than less fat on me. But within a few months of giving birth I was back to my pre pregnancy weight, more or less, which kind of makes me think we all have a natural weight we might fluctuate around but are unlikely to change massively from without extreme measures. 

Pregnancy and breastfeeding isn’t that kind to boobs, stomachs or lady bits. But it’s my physical record of growing and giving birth to my child and no matter what my feelings are about it, it is what it is. 

If there’s one thing life’s taught me lately it’s that you have two choices in life: to accept a situation or to change it. I’m choosing to accept my body as it warts and all!

For more of Josie’s musings on motherhood and life, check out her lovely blog: http://www.ohyouprettythingsuk.blogspot.co.uk/

What is your body worth? Purity culture and the female body

By Kate Stonehill

The past few weeks have witnessed the news awash with information about the escape of Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight from their kidnapper’s home in Cleveland, Ohio. The fortuitous flight from the kidnapper’s house has been documented internationally, and the women have now returned home. The accounts in the media are horrific stories of sexual assault and torture, with one article comparing the women’s experiences to that of prisoners of war.

This comparison is a particularly apt one as the women’s bodies were not only physically at the mercy of Castro’s perverse will, but are also the site of a larger battle over the way in which women’s bodies are valued—or, as the case may be, devalued. As a crime that gets at the heart of a woman’s control over her own body, sexual assault has long been associated with efforts to make a woman feel worthless and ashamed. Sexual assault represents the most extreme attempt to remove a woman’s agency, but the notion that the worth of women’s bodies is something that increases or decreases with sexual penetration by men can be put in a wider cultural context.

At a Johns Hopkins human trafficking forum, another kidnapping victim, Elizabeth Smart, recently spoke about how her abstinence-only education reinforced the guilt and shame she felt after being raped by her kidnapper. Sex, Smart says, was portrayed to her as something that would devalue her body, making her a less attractive mate to potential partners. A powerful analogy stuck in her head: having sex was like chewing gum, and once the gum had been chewed, nobody would want it anymore. Smart says, “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away.’” Smart is now critical of her abstinence-only education—something she sees as part of a purity culture—and argues that the belief that virginity is a woman’s most valuable asset exacerbates the already insidious effects of sexual violence. A society that values women is not compatible with a view of female bodies that sees them as depreciating in value with each sexual encounter. What are we left with, after all, if our relationship capital is forcibly removed from us in the violence of sexual assault? A female body whose worth is so unstable, so flimsy, is a female body that has no intrinsic value.

This is a frightening idea, yet it’s one that many of us have internalized in our day-to-day lives, regardless of whether or not we grew up with abstinence-only education or a religious background that told us we should wait until marriage. Many women worry that the number of men they’ve slept with is too high, or that ‘giving’ a man sex too early on will cause him to suddenly lose interest. This isn’t just a worry. Many women will also tell you that they’ve experienced the wrong end of this Madonna-whore dichotomy firsthand. Under this view of the female body, sex both defines and defiles us. We cannot expect much in the way of dignity and respect, the story goes, if we lay the only cards we have on the table too early.

When we tell men and women that women’s worth is dependent on the number of sexual partners they’ve had, we are envisioning the female body as not much more than the site of male exploits. It goes without saying that we do not view male bodies in the same way, and that such a view entirely removes female agency from the picture. Besides, where is the potential for healthy, intimate relationships in all this? If women’s sexual role is to withhold something, their full participation as agents in sexual acts is surely quite limited. This is exactly the kind of logic that is followed in the “no means yes” mentality that contributes to a normalization of sexual violence. Women must be valued first and foremost as humans. We are worthy of respect and dignity intrinsically, regardless of sexual history.