What I learned at school
Westcliff Junior School 1971-77
Work in progress….oil on board triptych, oil, chalk and blackboard paint
Category Archives: Experimentation
Frogman 2018
AKA;
The amphibious nature of man.
Have you ever had one of those relationships?
You want them on the land, they want in the water.
You join them in the water, they yearn for the land…
Hag Wisdom
The Madness of Mis
For the story of Mis please visit Sharon Blackie here: https://theartofenchantment.net/2016/11/10/the-wild-woman-in-irish-myth/
Hag, harridan, crone: 16 words we only use to describe older women
sourced from:
Battleaxe, noun
Used to describe strict headmistresses, dragon-like mother-in-laws and any number of older women who have dared to have assert themselves. ‘A formidably aggressive older woman’ says the Oxford Dictionary online. Their example sentence: ‘a battleaxe with inflexible house rules’. Because the home is the woman’s domain, naturally.
Bint, noun
Originally from 19th century Arabic, when it meant ‘daughter’ or ‘girl’ – specifically one who was yet to have children.
Nowadays, far more likely to be used as a derogatory term for a woman of advancing years, often prefaced with ‘silly old’.
Cougar, noun
From Demi Moore to Madonna, any woman dating a younger man is labelled a ‘cougar’. Makes a change from ‘Mrs Robinson’, I suppose.
The online Oxford Dictionary, sums it up with this delightful example sentence: ‘She’s easily 20 years older than you but she’s drinking a Shirley Temple and she’s pretty tarted-up, pretty hot – a bona fide cougar.’
Which is probably about the maximum number of sexist stereotypes you can fit into one sentence.
Crone, noun
The Cambridge Dictionary online defines this as ‘an unpleasant or ugly old woman’ or ’in stories, an old woman with magic powers’. Which basically means the male equivalent would be wizard… infinitely less offensive.
Often used alongside ‘revolting old’ or ‘withered’.
Frump, noun
Shapeless old-fashioned clothes? Flat shoes? It can only be a frump. The word originally denoted mocking speech and later a bad-temper. It was only the early Victorians who started using it to describe a ‘dowdy’ woman. The current dictionary definition is: ‘An unattractive woman who wears dowdy old-fashioned clothes.’
Sometimes used to describe an outfit itself, to avoid accusations that the woman wearing it is herself being unfairly targeted, for example ‘she was wearing a frumpy dress’.
Never used to describe men.
Hag, noun
Belongs in the ‘crone’ category and defined as ‘an ugly old woman’.
While some have suggested male equivalents – such as curmudgeon or git – it is the female-centric terms that specifically denote ugliness, unpleasantness and often poor hygiene.
Harridan, noun
Definition: an unpleasant woman, especially an older one, who is often angry/bossy.
Thought to derive from the 17th century French for ‘old horse’. Oh good.
Hormonal, adjective
You’d be forgiven for thinking than only women had hormones, so often are we accused of being slaves to them.
Commonly used to reference the menopause in older women – because there isn’t enough to deal with.
Matronly, adj
‘A matronly woman, usually one who is not young, is fat and does not dress in a fashionable way’, says the Cambridge dictionary.
Commonly denotes a motherly, bosomy, caregiver, which is all a bit ‘Carry On’ and outdated.
MILF, noun
Unlikely though it might seem, this is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary online – a sign of the times – as ‘a sexually attractive woman who is a mother’. Which is about as polite as this one gets.
In the interests of fairness, the male equivalent is DILF and there are entire Instagram feeds devoted to ‘Dilfs of Disneyland’ and the like. Still, more commonly used to describe women, when father’s lean towards the ‘silver fox’.
Mutton, noun
‘A middle-aged or old woman dressed in a style suitable for a much younger woman’ says the dictionary, offering up yet another term used to judge how older women dress.
See also the offensive ‘Kronenbourg’ – used to describe a woman who looks 16 from the back and 64 from the front (or as Urban Dictionary puts it: a lady who looks great from behind, but has a face like a chopping board’).
Old bag, noun
Who knows whether the ‘bag’ refers to under-eye wrinkles, piles of supermarket shopping (see also: ‘bag lady’) or the frumpy clothing older women are so often accused of wearing.
Definition: ‘A woman, especially an older one, perceived as unpleasant, bad-tempered, or unattractive’.
Shrill, adj
Commonly used to describe a high-pitched female voice (see Hillary Clinton). Margaret Thatcher was so afraid of it that she took elocution lessons to make her voice sound deeper and therefore more ‘serious’. Rarely used to describe a high male one tone.
Spinster, noun
Surely the days of any woman being seen as ‘left on the shelf’ are over? Yet the word spinster persists, describing an unmarried and ‘childless’ female – typically one viewed as beyond the age of marriage (though research shows that more women aged over 65 in Britain are marrying than ever).
The male equivalent? Eligible bachelor.
Wench, noun
This can be used for older and younger women – lucky us!
Witch, noun
‘A woman who is believed to have magical powers and who uses them to harm other people’ – yet this fictional (the clue being in the definition) term is still used to describe women, particularly those in positions of power. Theresa May has been called this, while the women sharing their experiences of sexual harassment via the #MeToo hashtag were accused of a ‘witch hunt’.
Vocational Arousal
In the early 1990’s, whilst toiling in the London media scene I was approached by and attended an interview at Dennis Publishing.
My interviewer was none other than the man himself, Felix Dennis; a frankly amusing and amazing man, character of legend and many a magazine myth. He had occasion to recruit a team for a new venture; the launch of the title ‘Stuff’.
A bi-monthly men’s magazine about, well, stuff:
‘Stuff is the world’s best-selling gadget magazine, and Stuff.tv is the online version of that magazine (if that makes any sense). It’s where you can find tech news that’s wry but not dry, the world’s most trusted gadget tests and exclusive previews of the latest phones, computers, wearables, tablets, games, apps, TVs, hi-fi, headphones, cameras, consoles, and media players, as well as insights into the technology that’s changing your future.
It’s not all gadgets…that’s not all – cars make us quiver and robots rock our world. We’re seduced by sport and tickled by toys. We worship watches, marvel at music and fawn over films, fashion and furniture. OK, we hardly ever do furniture. And thank goodness for that, eh?’
Stuff, stuff and more stuff. Stuff it seemed to me that was really rarely needed. Though the title was acquired by Haymarket publishing in 1999 and still exists to this day so what would I know…
Needless to say I declined the job offer but left with a kind of a pal, which in turn saw me in 2006 with a signed copy of Felix’s tome ‘How to get Rich’ .
Yeah, yeah, get to the point, I know.
The point being that I still have the book, and I know that it is a signed copy, but I have never witnessed the signature as I have never actually opened the book……
The fact that a magazine about stuff I could see no point of launched by a man whose book I possess but did not buy and have never read says way more about me than anything else I totally concede.
However, by the time the book came in to my possession I had long since left London and Media behind me to return to paint, due in no small part to the fact that working in an industry so wholly unconnected to my sense of self made me unhappy to the point of heaving……
…..and therein we have it. Finally. the point of this month’s blog.
The pursuit of stuff nobody needs can make us sick.
The pursuit of things that resonate with our-selfs makes us well.
The provocative term, vocational arousal, came by way of the visionary thinker Barbara Marx Hubbard.
Vocational arousal describes an internal yearning or calling to our highest work; to our specific duty while on Earth. While this calling used to be experienced by the few, possibly those in spiritual vocations, artists, healers, nurses, physicians, and teachers in particular, this arousal is being expressed more and more now by people not yet sure of where their joy lies; because they have never had occasion to ask…
When you love your work, you spend your days in a heightened state of arousal Marx Hubbard tells us. Good work is sexy, Pretty cool. What’s not to love?
The world has been filled with people who have unwittingly bought into the system. Namely to do as you are told, go to school, get the required education, get a good job and work for the machine – until retirement and ultimately death. Increasingly, though, students are finding that following this path does not lead to a job at all, never mind a good one. Mere qualifications are not enough, educational establishments want life experience, individuality and point of difference. Vocation.
Not job seekers
But what has a job been? And who on earth would want one long term? A job has no vitality. It is a way to fill your day while you are planning what you really want to do. And often in the planning you become numb, totally swallowed by the machine. And you forget who you are. And what role you have to play that makes your eyes sparkle and your heart sing. So we have cities filled with zombies. The most aroused they get is through very ordinary sex, too much social media, or crap TV.
Buckminster Fuller, the American architect, writer, inventor and theorist long ago did the ‘math’ and concluded that it is cheaper to pay people to stay at home, to not commute, to not produce stuff that adds no real value but consumes earth energy. They then might have a chance to discover where they are vocationally aroused. Then we could honour people for doing what was spontaneously arousing within them and that added value to the whole, collective, existence.
We would honour those who love to do the caring roles that our current society regards as worthless; taking care of children, the elderly and the physically challenged. We would not say that they are less valuable than the ‘worker’ who gets paid silly money for trading bits on a screen. We would honour men who wanted to be stay at home fathers, and women who wanted to be stay at home mums. We would celebrate the artists and artisans, music makers, poets and musers. We would measure value by the joy in their eyes, the weight of hell lifted from the collective consciousness and the contribution they make to the joy and well-being of all.
Vocational arousal is the real work of life. It is the twinkle. The divine spark.
As Buckminster said:
‘We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living’.
We need far less Stuff than we have led ourselves to believe.
‘Enough is as good as a feast……’ now was that Thomas Mallory or Mary Poppins? You decide as I am currently vocationally aroused by this:
Just this:
Inaugural Seminar 8th April 2017
Goddess in the Machine
The SpringheadTrust
Fontmell Magna
Dorset
3-13th April 2017
The phrase ‘the ghost in the machine’ and its many levels of meaning has for some time been used in an, often derogatory, fashion by critics of the philosophical concept Dualism; as set out be Descartes et al.
The ghost being the consciousness, or mind, carried in a physical entity: the machine.
Gilbert Ryle coined the term in his 1949 work The Concept of Mind as a criticism of René Descartes. Descartes believed that the human mind is not physical, that it exists independently of the human brain. Ryle contrarily believed that human consciousness is dependent upon the human brain.
The phrase has come to also describe the supposed consciousness in a mechanical device that behaves as if it has a will that is independent of what its human operator wants it to do.
Computer programmers have also appropriated the term to describe programs that run contrary to their expectation.
It is a metaphor, a comparison made figuratively.
Long debated on several levels of meaning; at its core it is a phrase used to describe the soul [ghost] and the machine [body] and infer one’s interference, existence and influence on, and as distinct from, the other.
Hijacking this phrase and all its meandering debate is simply a way to attempt to structure discussions on the inextricable duality of human existence; suggesting that the ghost [Goddess] and the machine [patriarchal societies] are indivisible from the whole whilst constantly acting upon and, interfering with/defining one another.
SHOW
Running from the 3rd to the 12th of April [11am – 5pm – closed Thursday and Monday] an exhibition of new paintings by the artist Deanne Tremlett curated by Anne Hitchcock.
EVENTS
Workshop; Research for painting; developing thematically within your work
Friday 7th [1-5pm]
Participants will be asked to come along with a piece[s] of their recent work and be ready to discuss their interests and, where relative, narrative with Deanne Tremlett and Anne hitchcock. We shall be discussing why it is crucial to develop as an artist, not just in skill, but in inquiry.
£25 – concessions available on inquiry, to book your place email:
Seminar: Goddess in the Machine
Saturday 8th [10am-5pm]
a structured, but loosely,a day consisting of talks and panel discussions around the construct of the new phrase; plus participation, performance and casual conversations engendered by it.
£30 – concessions available on inquiry, to book your place email:
With artists, curators, actors, singers and writers:
Deanne Tremlett
[artist] on – goddess in the machine
Her current body of work; on show in the galleries, motivations and necessities for establishing one’s place in the world and the existence of the male muse
Anne Hitchcock
[curator of the accompanying show] on -curating women artists
What makes a good exhibition? Why are some exhibitions more memorable than others? There is no doubt that the works shown are important, however in this talk Anne Hitchcock will propose that a successful exhibition is more than a collection of individual works, no matter how good those works may be. She will suggest that much depends on the underlying curatorial premise – the concept – on which the exhibition is based. Drawing on her own experience of curating exhibitions both at The Slade Centre and elsewhere, she will consider the development of exhibition concepts and the importance of context in the widest sense
Fiona Robinson
[artist, curator, writer] Subverting the feminine – Angela Carter and Visual Art
The exhibition Strange Worlds The Vision of Angela Carter which has just finished a three month run at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol was an opportunity, as curator, to gather together artwork which related to Carter’s writing. The exhibition included work by Ana Maria Pacheco, Paula Rego, Alice Maher, Lisa Wright, Marcelle Hanselaar, Wendy Elia, Eileen Cooper and others.
Carter’s iconoclastic writing with its intensely visual use of language focused on revisioning fairy tale from a feminine point of view. She explored gender, metamorphosis between animal and human, and deviant behavior, nothing was sacred; there were no taboos. It included a controversial female take on the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Using contemporary works from the exhibition and contextualizing them historically where appropriate, I will look at how these artworks subvert traditionally accepted attitudes to women, gender, identity and the male gaze and suggest that Angela Carter is still an influential force for contemporary artists..
Francesca Steele
[performance artist] – A Performance Piece
A live and video artist who is mid PhD with the Visual and Material Culture faculty at Northumbria University. Francesca is currently researching on how processes of trauma impact on art practice and will talk on her work and perform a piece.
Steele’s work features on internet sites such as ‘girls with muscle’ and persists outside the tradition of the white box space; permeating wallpapers, concealed within the doctors surgery, hidden in cheap hotel rooms, living in the gym, held in a reflection and breathing through scar tissue.
Wendy Elia
[artist] on – the female gaze in the 21st century
A brief history of female self portraiture and a dissection of the female gaze.
Judith Jacob
[British Actress, Compere and DJ (Conscious Radio)]
Judith has been on our TV screens for more than 30 years, she recently started performing stand up comedy. As a DJ Judith presents her own show on Conscious Radio 102fm on Thursdays between 1 and 3pm
http://www.thebritishblacklist.com/thebritishblacklist/judith-jacob/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Jacob
http://geestor.co.uk/judith-jacob/
Madi Shrimpton
[singer, songwriter]
Madeleine Shrimpton is a singer, performer, creative facilitator, yoga teacher and sounder healer from London. She studied Drama at Exeter University many moons ago now and has a wealth of experience performing and singing (former co founder of female performance art trio Goodbye Leopold), running creative arts, singing, music and drama workshops with diverse groups of children, women, families and refugees (Blackheath Conservatoire, Artis and Eastside Educational Arts) and more recently she trained to be a Kundalini yoga teacher (Karam Kriya School) and sound healer (with the esteemed Gongmaster Don Conroe). She is passionate about the healing power of sound and incorporates elements of sound medicine in her performing and teaching.
Students
There will also be students from the Visual Art, Photography and Drama departments of the Gryphon School, Sherborne; who will be reacting to, documenting and participating in the event.
NB:
The theme of the event is definitely female but participation will in no way be gender restricted and, indeed, many of the students who have expressed an interest are male.
Artist Talks
Sunday 9th [brunch/lunch]
Brunch/Lunch with the artist, Deanne Tremlett
Other activities
Monday 10th Private Day
Student talks
Wednesday 5th and Tuesday 11th
Invited students from school/college Art Departments will be asked to bring work for critique and enter into critical debate within the space.
*image of Springhead Gardens’ water turbo by Edward Parker
SEMINAR TIMETABLE SATURDAY 8th APRIL:
10am COFFEE and INTRODUCTIONS
10.30 ANNE HITCHCOCK
11.10 FIONA ROBINSON
11.50 WENDY ELIA
12.45 LUNCH and TOUR
2pm DEANNE TREMLETT
2.40 FRANCESCA STEELE
3.20 Q&A into PANEL DISCUSSION*
4.20 MADI SHRIMPTON
5pm CLOUTIE TREE**
6.30 – 9pm PRIVATE VIEW
*The floor will be opened to questions for any of the participants to put to the panel, should there be an awkward beginning to this process then it is asked that the panel have a question formed in their minds in response to the day to lick start the process
**Cloutie Tree creation and spring head dressing explained and implemented
LUNCH WILL BE AVAILABLE FROM THE CAFÉ, OR BYO please email with any dietary requirements with at least 48 hours notice
GODDESS IN THE MACHINE
*
Goddess in the Machine
The Spinghead Trust
Fontmell Magna
Dorset
3-13th April 2017
The phrase ‘the ghost in the machine’ and its many levels of meaning has for some time been used in an, often derogatory, fashion by critics of the philosophical concept Dualism; as set out be Descartes et al.
The ghost being the consciousness, or mind, carried in a physical entity: the machine.
Gilbert Ryle coined the term in his 1949 work The Concept of Mind as a criticism of René Descartes. Descartes believed that the human mind is not physical, that it exists independently of the human brain. Ryle contrarily believed that human consciousness is dependent upon the human brain.
The phrase has come to also describe the supposed consciousness in a mechanical device that behaves as if it has a will that is independent of what its human operator wants it to do.
Computer programmers have also appropriated the term to describe programs that run contrary to their expectation.
It is a metaphor, a comparison made figuratively.
Long debated on several levels of meaning; at its core it is a phrase used to describe the soul [ghost] and the machine [body] and infer one’s interference, existence and influence on, and as distinct from, the other.
Hijacking this phrase and all its meandering debate is simply a way to attempt to structure discussions on the inextricable duality of human existence; suggesting that the ghost [Goddess] and the machine [patriarchal societies] are indivisible from the whole whilst constantly acting upon and, interfering with/defining one another.
SHOW
Running from the 3rd to the 12th of April [11am – 5pm – closed Thursday and Monday] an exhibition of new paintings by the artist Deanne Tremlett curated by Anne Hitchcock.
EVENTS
Workshop; Research for painting; developing thematically within your work
Friday 7th [1-5pm]
Participants will be asked to come along with a piece[s] of their recent work and be ready to discuss their interests and, where relative, narrative with Deanne Tremlett and Anne hitchcock. We shall be discussing why it is crucial to develop as an artist, not just in skill, but in inquiry.
£25 – concessions available on inquiry, to book your place use the contact form below
Seminar: Goddess in the Machine
Saturday 8th [10am-5pm]
a structured, but loosely,a day consisting of talks and panel discussions around the construct of the new phrase; plus participation, performance and casual conversations engendered by it.
£30 – concessions available on inquiry, to book your place use the contact form below
With artists, curators, actors, singers and writers:
Deanne Tremlett
[artist] on – goddess in the machine
Her current body of work; on show in the galleries, motivations and necessities for establishing one’s place in the world and the existence of the male muse
Anne Hitchcock
[curator of the accompanying show] on -curating women artists
What makes a good exhibition? Why are some exhibitions more memorable than others? There is no doubt that the works shown are important, however in this talk Anne Hitchcock will propose that a successful exhibition is more than a collection of individual works, no matter how good those works may be. She will suggest that much depends on the underlying curatorial premise – the concept – on which the exhibition is based. Drawing on her own experience of curating exhibitions both at The Slade Centre and elsewhere, she will consider the development of exhibition concepts and the importance of context in the widest sense
Fiona Robinson
[artist, curator, writer] Subverting the feminine – Angela Carter and Visual Art
The exhibition Strange Worlds The Vision of Angela Carter which has just finished a three month run at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol was an opportunity, as curator, to gather together artwork which related to Carter’s writing. The exhibition included work by Ana Maria Pacheco, Paula Rego, Alice Maher, Lisa Wright, Marcelle Hanselaar, Wendy Elia, Eileen Cooper and others.
Carter’s iconoclastic writing with its intensely visual use of language focused on revisioning fairy tale from a feminine point of view. She explored gender, metamorphosis between animal and human, and deviant behavior, nothing was sacred; there were no taboos. It included a controversial female take on the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Using contemporary works from the exhibition and contextualizing them historically where appropriate, I will look at how these artworks subvert traditionally accepted attitudes to women, gender, identity and the male gaze and suggest that Angela Carter is still an influential force for contemporary artists..
Francesca Steele
[performance artist] – A Performance Piece
A live and video artist who is mid PhD with the Visual and Material Culture faculty at Northumbria University. Francesca is currently researching on how processes of trauma impact on art practice and will talk on her work and perform a piece.
Steele’s work features on internet sites such as ‘girls with muscle’ and persists outside the tradition of the white box space; permeating wallpapers, concealed within the doctors surgery, hidden in cheap hotel rooms, living in the gym, held in a reflection and breathing through scar tissue.
Wendy Elia
[artist] on – the female gaze in the 21st century
A brief history of female self portraiture and a dissection of the female gaze.
Judith Jacob
[British Actress, Compaire and DJ (Conscious Radio)]
Judith has been on our TV screens for more than 30 years, she recently started performing stand up comedy. As a DJ Judith presents her own show on Concious Radio 102fm on Thursdays between 1 and 3pm
http://www.thebritishblacklist.com/thebritishblacklist/judith-jacob/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Jacob
http://geestor.co.uk/judith-jacob/
Madi Shrimpton
[singer, songwriter]
Madeleine Shrimpton is a singer, performer, creative facilitator, yoga teacher and sounder healer from London. She studied Drama at Exeter University many moons ago now and has a wealth of experience performing and singing (former co founder of female performance art trio Goodbye Leopold), running creative arts, singing, music and drama workshops with diverse groups of children, women, families and refugees (Blackheath Conservatoire, Artis and Eastside Educational Arts) and more recently she trained to be a Kundalini yoga teacher (Karam Kriya School) and sound healer (with the esteemed Gongmaster Don Conroe). She is passionate about the healing power of sound and incorporates elements of sound medicine in her performing and teaching.
Students
There will also be students from the Visual Art, Photography and Drama departments of the Gryphon School, Sherborne; who will be reacting to, documenting and participating in the event.
NB:
The theme of the event is definitely female but participation will in no way be gender restricted and, indeed, many of the students who have expressed an interest are male.
Artist Talks
Sunday 9th [brunch/lunch]
Brunch/Lunch with the artist, Deanne Tremlett
Other activities
Monday 10th Private Day
Student talks
Wednesday 5th and Tuesday 11th
Invited students from school/college Art Departments will be invited to bring work for critique and enter into critical debate within the space.
*image of Springhead Gardens’ water turbo by Edward Parker
BOOKINGS AND INQUIRIES:
Magpieman
Resolving your issues in paint can often be a long process. Knowing when you have hit your nail on its head is one of the most satisfying feelings known to Deanne.
Finally…. I give you…..
Magpieman
Make of him what you will
Women Beware Women; finished and detail
Women Beware Women
WBW detail
Women Beware Women
Women Beware Women – work in progress
Writing in the Daily Telegraph last year, Hannah Betts, unwittingly helped me with my research into a phenomena I had witnessed firsthand in my social circle, something that is anathema to me as a woman who has outgrown the playground; namely ‘divide and ostracise’ and a subject first visited by me in paint 15 years ago in The Three Muses, now in a private collection in London:
The Three Muses
The events leading to and fallout from the spectacle were felt rippling through the entire village, to a lesser or greater extent, for years and things have never, and may never, be the same a gain.
Women Beware Women is a Jacobean Tragedy by Thomas Middleton that deals with several episodes/facets of ‘female transgression’ and has not one likeable girl in it. To be fair the men are all pretty bottom dwelling too, however, the play is notable for its scathing description of female motives and reasoning. Admittedly a period piece, where the concerns of the protagonists bare not a lot of resemblance to first world 21st Century issues, the idea represented here of woman colluding with man to bring down her fellow female is seen to be both laudable and villainous at the same time. However the girl on girl crime is the real crux of the story, the men manipulated by the women to enact retribution upon their sisters.
Hannah Betts wrote under the headline:
Women are being bitchier than ever – where’s the sisterhood gone?
Women have always judged each other – usually in private. But overt bitchiness seems to be on the rise as everything from weight to wardrobes is harshly judged. Are we all Mean Girls now?
……the Daily Mail website’s notorious right-hand column, aka the “sidebar of shame”, a diet of celebrity sex scandals, fashion faux pas, reality television and incredible weight-loss stories, with judgment of women’s bodies and behaviour the underlying theme. One of the kindest people I know, a mother of teenagers and friend to all, describes it as her “dark addiction”.
“I ‘right-hand’ constantly, day and night,” she says. “No matter what is going on in my own life, there is always solace to be had in fashion fails and bikini bodies. It’s a compulsion.” Many who openly despise the body baring of Page 3 are covertly devoted to the bodily critiques of Mail Online.
This compulsion – as with the compulsion then to let rip – originates with childhood, according to Dr Frankish. “Something happens that triggers a relatively infantile response, belonging to the pre-socialisation stage of development. Not all women attack others, so the implication is that those who do are insecure in their attachments and are triggered by what they see as someone being better than them, or getting more attention than them.” We justify ourselves with the delusion that it is a victimless crime, the subject as virtual as the medium.
For my part, I see the escalation of bitchiness as a symptom of the overall rise in and currency of misogyny. Not only do people – women included – get lured into replicating its manifestations, feminism has become a live issue again, and with this liveness comes a backlash and sense that it can be used to foster divisiveness. There have even been reports about a Reddit group that may be striving to seed infighting among feminists, encouraging them into ever more “extreme” stances.
The effects of this girl-on-girl sabotage can be still more concrete, affecting women’s relationships in the workplace and their polarisation into mother and non-mother camps, each virulently opposed. They divide us into ugly versus pretty, fat versus thin, small-breasted versus large, fashionable versus unfashionable – all enforcing the stereotype that a woman must be pretty, slim, buxom and stylish rather than, say, bright, healthy, happy and fulfilled.
One must not be naïve, of course, we are never all going to get along merely by merit of possessing two X chromosomes and a vagina. Equality means equal opportunities to like and dislike rather than exist in some Pollyanna universe. But neither should we turn against each other because of possession of said attributes. Not least because in sisterhood lies strength.’ [source; The Daily Telegraph 21 February 2015]
Hysterical
Zombabie;
#workinprocess
#inthestudio
#singlemindedfemale
#obsession
#needyneed
#arestalkerspretty
#possession
#femalehysteria
#flesheater
#blowjoblips
DEANNE TREMLETT 