a helpmeet

My mother made a lovely Christmas eve dinner for the whole family tonight. (damn, really wanted to try and get through this whole season without making use of the C world here) As she dished up, she explained the portions distributions. I was to have one tortilla wrap, my brothers were to have two. There was a spicy tomato sauce to go with it, but she had made a special non-spicy one for me. (I have never expressed a dislike of spicy tomato sauce. If anything, it is my brothers who are a bit wussy about spice. Their noses start to run when anything is quite strong... It's an Oriental thing!) I couldn't, even at a family dinner, let this go without a tease, and so I made a silly comment about only the Y chromosomes being allowed the special sauce.

All this triggered an interesting conversation with my older brother (late twenties) about feminism. He mentioned that my feminist rhetoric was at variance with my love life, with the type of man I seek out. This is undeniably true. I suggested that maybe it was precisely this acknowledged tendency of mine that made me cling to feminist theory, as at least an abstract reprimand of my behaviour, something telling me that this was wrong. My brother added that when he was younger, as a liberal fair-minded male, he was something of a feminist. But he became very bitter when all the women who advocated feminism where themselves attracted to misogynistic men.

Been reading some more of Wollstonecraft. Beauty, our obsession with it, the way it clogs up the minds of virtually all of us, is a particular interest of mine. I liked this quote: Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adore its prison. Photographer Clare Parks captures this beautifully in this photo which is seen here as the jacket cover of Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth.