Far from Light.

Lontano dalla Luce

è l’ineffabile splendore.

Mostro oscuro è colui che,

affiorando dal buio,

vedrà il riflesso della sua anima malvagia. 1

1. [TN: Far from the Light is the ineffable shine. Obscure monster is the one who, emerging from darkness, will see the reflection of his evil soul.] Dylan Dog n.82, Lontano dalla luce [TN: Far from Light], Sergio Bonelli Editore.

The Good Body broadens Eve Ensler’s exploration of the eponymous part in The Vagina Monologues into our culture’s dangerous concern about an unhealthy feminine ideal, the tyranny of “women’s deep programming to be good”, and her own preoccupation with her 40-something curvaceous belly. She observes that “a good girl equates to quite, polite, thin”; but “good”, she suggests, is inherently limited. Whose good? What defines good? It doesn’t leave room for ambiguity, nuance, for being disapproved, not following orders, for being original, for self-acceptance, and most especially, for self-love and self-esteem.

Self-esteem is someone’s deep opinion of themselves; it’s an overall evaluation, which refers to relational, aesthetic, intellectual, cultural and social aspects. It is the sentiment of adequacy to the role belonging to everyone and it’s fixed by the equilibrium and the accord that everyone expresses towards themselves. It seems easy and natural, but as a matter of fact it is uneasy to find women and men full of self-esteemed. Education, growth cycle and culture influences modify someone’s personal opinion of themselves, especially when talking about beauty. Super-slim top-models or cinema stars are oppressive trends; they are unreal examples suggested by mass media industry, and they cause a drop in self-esteem, especially in fragile or not yet formed subjects, as young people are.

One help to overcome these problems may come from initiatives clashing this attitude. For example, the Dove Self-Esteem Project, which helps young women to overcome the daily stress of the comparison with beauty stereotypes. A low self-esteem may lead to eating disorders, insecurity and introversion; so, the Dove Self-Esteem Project has been created to support those initiatives aiming at bringing up and encouraging young girls to live their own beauty in its whole meaning. It is necessary to stop self-hatred.

Jungian analyst Marion Woodman calls this insidious violence an “addition to perfection”; Ensler sees it as “some fundamental addiction to self-hatred”. This affliction is a form of bewitchment lasted several generations, beginning in the early twentieth century’s Sears & Roebuck catalogue (the first of its kind), which presented waist-reducing cinches and introduced deodorant, a product that assured a woman she could either get a man or keep the one she had, without her body odor driving him away! But, as the decades unfolded, this bewitchment travelled far beyond the borders of North America. The expansion of a global preoccupation of this Western ideal of beauty propagated through a barrage of women’s magazines still on sale.

Eve Ensler’s cri de coeur is “Can you imagine the energy that would be unleashed if women stopped obsessing about their bodies?”. The implication is that this crippling concern is stunting our social, economic, political growth. “I’ve never met a woman who unreservedly appreciated every part of her body”; and, to her horror and shame, in her 40’s, Ensler developed a fixation with her own slightly protruding stomach that “had always been flat”. She confesses that it is absolutely insane what we do to our bodies, it’s hysterical! “Women are consumed with piercing, perming, waxing, lightening, covering, cutting, lifting, tightening, flattening, starving, when we could be running the world.”

So, by perpetuating the perfection of an ideal, we are locked in a vicious cycle, a repetition compulsion. The notion of how women alter and mutilate their bodies to fit into society’s ideals is illustrated in many movies such as the re-make of the 1974 film The Stepford Wives, starring Nicole Kidman, as well as in several TV-programmes encouraging this trend.

Naomi Wolf describes this obsession with and perpetuation of the cosmetic surgery industry in her 1991 bestselling book The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. She says: “The surgeon market is imaginary since there is nothing wrong with women’s faces or bodies that social change wouldn’t cure, so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.”

Eve Ensler’s use of the term “vagina” in The Vagina Monologues is a cultural mythologist’s goldmine, both in form and content. In form, there is her name: Eve, wife of Adam; Eve of the Fall; the seeker of knowledge and independence, perhaps the first existential feminist. According to the Christian dogma, the Eve of the Ancestral Sin went for the first bad boy: Satan; she “ingenuously” chose the excitement of Shadow, of mystery, of the unknown, without perceiving that darkness engenders Light (stellar sagas still make millions thanks to that idea). The myth of her alleged Fall fabricated the excuse for five millennia of patriarchal political and religious control over women’s bodies.

The Vagina Monologues originated from a precise viewpoint: woman is good, sex is good, so “how can both be evil?”, as assumed in certain cultures. The Good Body pursues this line of reasoning. Like the Vagina Monologues, the Good Body is based on interviews conducted by Ensler to a diverse group of international women about their bodies; Ensler’s sketches are drawn from those women’s words about their revealing personal stories.

The play introduces the audience to a few cultural icons such as former editor of Cosmopolitan, Helen Gurley Brown, whose compulsion to exercise exhausts someone just by hearing about it. Ensler met also Isabella Rossellini, the daughter of the silver screen’s beauty and legend, Ingrid Bergman; age inevitably catches up with everyone and for Isabella it was in her early 40’s when Revlon, for which she had been the international advertising representative, cancelled her contract because she was “too old”! Other incisive cameos include a Puerto Rican woman’s comic advice on how to project an attractive “rear end” and a recommendation on how to conceal cellulite while making love.

But the three most disturbing encounters are with an American woman who becomes the Pygmalion of her plastic surgeon, whom she eventually marries; an Italian woman who recounts an horrific story about the repeated sexual harassment by her step-father, and her eventual elective bi-lateral mastectomy, which she felt was the only way to protect herself from the “gaze”; and an Afghani woman who risks a beating form the Taliban in order to eat ice cream in a secret room at the back of a café.

One of Ensler’s strengths is that she never ridicules her subjects: there is a palpably empathic identification, therefore, the play transcends age, marital status, ethnicity, socio-economic standing, culture.

Western obsession with fat is increasingly colonizing the cultural imagination and not just on sadistic reality-TV diet shows. In The Good Body, Eve Ensler’s one-woman show, the audience is treated to the self-loathing feminist: Eve yanks her blouse up and her belt down, and there, in all its naked shame is her little secret: a small pot belly!

“Can you be a fat female and also an object of desire?” This is the question posed by the play. Ensler works herself into intellectual knots, trying to come to terms with her own bodily obsession.

For Laura Kipnis (professor of media studies at Northwestern University), the therapeutic mode doesn’t make for gripping theatre; it also makes for a lot of wheel spinnings, particularly because she thinks that there is a hard truth that Ensler can’t bring herself to acknowledge about women’s situation today: “there’s a contradiction between feminism and femininity, two strategies women have adopted over the years to try to level the laying field with men.”

Kipnis explains her thought: Femininity is a system that tries to secure advantages for women, primarily by enhancing their sexual attractiveness to men. It also shores up masculinity through displays of feminine helplessness or defense. She says that a completely successful femininity can never be entirely attained, which is precisely why women engage in so much laboring, agonizing and self-loathing, because whatever they do, there’s always that pot belly or just the inexorable march of time.

She continues affirming that feminism, on the  other hand, is dedicated to abolishing the myth of female inadequacy. It strives to smash beauty norms, it demands female equality in all spheres, it rejects sexual market values as the measure of female worth. “Yet for all feminism’s social achievements, what it never managed to realize was the eradication of the heterosexual beauty culture, meaning the time-consuming and expensive potions and procedures.”

Why is this woman’s plight continuing? Eve Ensler trots out the usual suspects: unrealistic media images, capitalism, aestheticism. She spent six years globe-trotting to 40 countries to interview other women on the subject; and everywhere she went, she found foreign counterparts of herself, women who loathe some part of their bodies. Much of the play consists in Eve Ensler impersonating this “village” of self-abnegating women.

According to Eve Ensler’s studies, in Niger, for example, women strive to be as fat as possible: girls are force-fed to achieve this ideal. This beauty norm doesn’t create the same sense of anguish that afflicts Western women striving for thinness; in Niger, failing to achieve the prevailing beauty standard isn’t a personal failure, it just means someone has bewitched you, or you have a thin constitution.

Where the Nigerian fatties and the dieting-obsessed Ensler find common ground is that all are striving for sexual attractiveness in the context of heterosexuality. “The beauty culture is a heterosexual institution, and women that participate in its rituals, they are propping up a heterosexual society and its norm”(Laura Kipnis). Heterosexuality requires asymmetry between the sexes; it always was Achilles’ heel of feminism, because the asymmetries involved usually took the form of adequacy for one gender and inadequacy for the other. “And so things seem to remain: you may hear a lot of tough talk about empowerment and independence in women’s culture today, except you hear it from women shopping for baby-doll outfits or getting Brazilian bikini waxes”. Of course, masculinity has always been afflicted with its own bodily anxieties: it just compensates for them differently.

Laura Kipnis wonder if femininity will continue to beat down the feminist challenge, or if women will keep trying to reconcile the two through conflicted enterprises such as empowerment plastic surgery and bestowing men with feminist prowess.

Naomi Wolf’s definition of femininity doesn’t work with Kipnis’ definition of feminism: you can too wear lipstick and be taken seriously in what you do; just like men can wear ties, their own nonsensical cultural symbol of oppression. Laura Kipnis seems to demolish the entire existence of femininity by pointing out that people grow old: yes, they do; but that does not mean a woman can’t still be feminine. The author conflates femininity with youth, beauty and artifice, when none are necessary components. Kipnis defines women in relationship to men: there are million of lesbians - and not just them - who would find that ridiculous.

Is Kipnis saying that fat women aren’t feminine? Or that you have to be fat to be a feminist? Therefore, femininity has never been solely about women’s helplessness and need for men; it is a sexist mindset that causes society to speak of traditionally feminine attributes in a pejorative way.

The thing that Kipnis doesn’t allow for is that women can be soft AND strong at the same time; we are not caricatures movies like The Stepford Wives, makes us out to be. The smart ones among us know you can be equal to a man without becoming a man, and that sometimes gender roles can be separate AND equal.

There is another question about Kipnis’ piece: is it femininity in itself the problem, or is it a male chauvinist culture in which femininity is persistently linked to weakness? Kipnis’ argument seems to place too much of the blame on women, on feminist women; maybe she would say that the question is moot, because femininity has always only existed as inferiority.

SOME PROVERBS, QUOTES & APHORISMS.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder [TN: La bellezza è negli occhi di chi guarda.] (Margaret Wolfe Hungerford)

Beauty is truth, Truth is beauty [TN: Bellezza è verità, Verità è Bellezza]. (John Keats)

Non è bello ciò che è bello, ma è bello quel che piace [NT: What is beautiful is not beautiful, but what we like is beautiful]. (Anonymous)

Grasso è bello! [NT: Italian title for Hairspray]

Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. [NT: La bellezza ha tanti significati quanti sono gli umori dell’uomo. La bellezza è il simbolo dei simboli. La bellezza rivela tutto giacché non esprime niente.] (Oscar Wilde)

Both Beauty and Wisdom love the one who worships them in solitude [NT: Sia la Bellezza che la Saggezza amano colui che le venera in solitudine.] (Oscar Wilde)

Physical attractiveness is a snare that every sensible man would like to be caught in [TN: L’avvenenza fisica è una trappola in cui ogni uomo assennato vorrebbe cascare.] (Oscar Wilde)

One must suffer to be beautiful [TN: Chi bello vuol parire qualche dolore ha da patire] (French proverb)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ensler, Eve. The Vagina Monologues.

Ensler, Eve. The Good Body.

Rountree, Cathleen. Article on www.headlinemuse.com [WN: No more on]

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women.

Kipnis, Laura. Article on www.slate.com

https://salute.alice.it/extra/101/autostima.html [WN: No more on]