Mere personal charms...

The Times describes Elizabeth Young as 'the high priestess of Post-Modern lit crit.' Now I know nothing about lit crit (I am a theology and philosophy graduate - although on reflection I know next to nothing about these subjects as well) but I love her collection of essays in her book, 'Pandora's Handbag', a collection of literary criticism and journalism. She's subversive and brilliantly witty.

But one of her pieces is achingly sad. 'The agony of losing your looks.' She originally wrote if for The Independent, but then a woman's glossy picked it up, and insisting on running it against a Before and After photo. A medley of extracts:

For about fifteen years I rarely paid a train or bus fare. People just let me off. I never went food shopping. Men gave me expensive drugs all the time. I wasn't trying to ponce off people or to prostitute myself. They just offered... Jean Cocteau said, 'The privileges of beauty are enormous', but it is hard to make the damning admission that one is, or was beautiful, or to speculate on what the inevitable loss of such looks entails.

It would have been stupid to pretend I didn't know that many people were attracted to me. But conscious awareness of my looks made me feel superstitious and desperate. The hysterical emphasis on youth and beauty everywhere was a forcible reminder of their temporary nature. Everything I depended on was slipping away, day by day...

But things are much easier for the pretty girl. When you are indulged like that you acquire a sort of learned helplessness. It makes you very lazy with your life. You drift along like sea kelp.

Every little sign that you are getting older is a dagger to the heart. You really feel it. The first time a man's eyes don't follow you. The first time you like a guy who is completely indifferent - no offers of a lift, a drink, not even a telephone number. The increasing callousness regarding your welfare. The growing anonymity - standing alone at a party.

Two centuries earlier, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote warningly about this:

• Men are not aware of the misery they cause, and the vicious weakness they cherish, by only inciting women to render themselves pleasing.
• The respect consequently which is paid to wealth and mere personal charms is a true north-east blast that blights the tender blossoms of affection and virtue.
• Love's silken wings are instantly shrivelled up when anything beside a return in kind is sought.

But it's not just women who have this problem. This quote resonates with me particularly: When a man falls in love with a woman half his age, it's not her youth he seeks, but his own.

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.

Powerful women: Mary W and St Catherine

I had dinner at a friend's house a while ago. Fred and I met in a literature class we took at university. I get on incredibly well with his mother. We were gossiping in the kitchen (ouch - female cliche. Mary Wollstonecraft, forgive me) and she told me this hilarious story of when Fred was 2. He was in the bath with his mum, his dad was shaving. Fred shouts out in alarm, 'Daddy! Mummy doesn't have a willy! We have to go to Harrods to buy her one!'

Have been reading Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, finally. Another university friend who lived on the same corridor as me used to leave books, including this one, in the loo. I never managed to get very far, so am finally settling down to it. One passage, in particular, resonates:

Weakness may excite tenderness ... but the lordly caresses of a protector will not gratify a noble mind ... that deserves to be respected. Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship!

This severely reminds me how pathetic it is of me to long for lordly caresses rather than genuine friendship. And do some men really find weakness appealing? Some of her reflections on male and female relationships are really disturbing. She writes that gentleness, which she equates with insipid softness, is a particular characteristic of women, developed with the aim of ensnaring men. Without it, woman would then lose many of her peculiar graces... For Pope has said, in the name of the whole male sex:
Yet ne'er so sure our passion to create,
As when she touch'd the brink of all we hate.
I went round the Uffizi and the Accademia recently, and was very taken with St Catherine. In
pictures she is often painted with the Wheel (instrument of torture) somewhere around her robes, and is often arguing with pagan philosophers. According to various legends, Catherine of Alexandria declared to her father that she would only marry someone who surpassed her in beauty, wisdom, reputation and wealth. (I love her already) After refusing the advances of Emperor Maxentius, he threw her in prison. When she began converting all those around her to Christianity, she was condemned to death on the wheel. However, the wheel broke at the crucial moment.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c7/Michelangelo_Caravaggio_060.jpg/456px-Michelangelo_Caravaggio_060.jpg

A little list of favourite children's books:

• Charlie and Lola
• all Eva Ibbotson books, especially her less well-known monster and witches books (Monster Mission, Dial-a-Ghost, The Haunting of Hiram)
• One Ted Falls Out of Bed (Julia Donaldson)
• Jellybean (Tessa Duder)
• Journey into War (Margaret Donaldson)
• Anastasia (Lois Lowry)
• Tom's Midnight Garden (Phillipa Pearce)
• Midnight is a Place (Joan Aitken)
• Gemma and Sisters (Noel Streatfeild)
• The Steps up the Chimney (William Corlett)
• Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry (Mildred Taylor)