Topic 56: On Boasting of Weakness

Carol:

The Chic of Weak

 I haven’t seen a comic book in a while, but the ones I read when I was a kid had advertisements in them. One famous ad showed a “ninety pound weakling” being humiliated in front of a girl by a bully kicking sand in his face. But, he could beat the bully and win the girl by following the Charles Atlas “dynamic exercise” program. What a perfect gimmick for an audience of ninety- pound boys who were already feeding on the nerd to superhero fantasies of Superman, Spiderman, and Batman.

 For a male, being viewed as weak was never an acceptable image of attractiveness, and the worst thing you could taunt a boy with was to tell him, “You fight (throw, walk, whine, etc.) like a girl."  Dating rituals reinforced the notion that girls were weak . A boy walked on the outside of the sidewalk  to protect his girlfriend from getting splashed with mud or, I supposed, being run over by a runaway vehicle.  He was supposed to open doors for her and carry her books.  The little lady needed taking care of... Such was the chivalric code of the 1950’s
 
For a woman, manners and fashion styles often accentuated the image of females as “the weaker sex,”  reflecting the class lines between women who labored and ladies  who leisured.   In  European cultures, 18th and 19th century middle and upper class women went to great lengths to appear fragile. They wore pale make-up often mixed with arsenic or used whiteners containing mercury, lead or zinc oxide and hid their complexions under hats, gloves and parasols to protect their delicate pallor.

Late 19th Century ball gowns

Women achieved the exaggerated hour-glass shape by cinching in the waist with unforgiving corsets and bulging out the hips with hooped crinolines. Breathing and movement were difficult, sometimes injuring internal organs. Although it would be unseemly for a woman to openly boast, she nevertheless would take great pride in achieving a waist circumference of 15 inches.   Fainting, or swooning, was fairly commonplace: “…when a woman of the higher social classes encountered something offensive to her elevated moral sensitivities, she responded with a simple faint” (Colagrande). It was fashionable for ladies to carry a vial of smelling salts as intricately designed as a piece of expensive jewelry. So widespread was the belief in women’s weakness that doctors considered corsets and stays a “medical necessity” to keep them upright.

Late 19th Century bound feet

While American and British women were shrinking their waists, Chinese women were shrinking their feet. The practice of foot-binding in China had been practiced for over a thousand years. A dutiful daughter of the upper class who wanted to marry well was expected to accept the torture of binding her feet from a young age, and a young woman with a   “golden lotus” of 3 inches in length was something a family could boast about. So weak were her stunted feet that she could barely walk, producing the tiny steps and mincing walk that were considered elegant and erotic although a man who made a good match with a small-footed woman often never actually saw her feet bare.  Foot binding was outlawed in the early 20th century, but it took another forty years or more before the practice was completely eradicated (source: “Bound Feet—a History”).
 

The  torture tools of 21st century fashion have gotten more sophisticated. American women have exchanged their corsets for Botox, 5- inch heels, tanning salons, tummy tucks and breast implants. In 2008,in the United States more than 10 million cosmetic procedures were performed, both surgical and nonsurgical (source: American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery).  And the numbers have risen dramatically for men who are foregoing Charles Atlas for ab, pec and butt augmentation.

All this emphasis on physical perfection, artifice over nature in a Barbie and Ken world, is enough to give me the vapors. Where are my smelling salts?


Sources:
A Brief History of Fainting
Bound Feet-- Origins
Cosmetic Surgery Statistics—Articles Base.com
The Way We Look

 

Megan:

Harry Potter and the Weakness of Twilight

I’m not one of those people who dress up or go to the midnight book releases or premieres. I’m not into costumes. Or standing in line.  But I do have a deep and abiding love for Harry Potter. I’m not sure that it is a weakness, but it did interfere with my responsibilities last Friday. I didn’t write this essay on time because I was too excited about seeing The Deathly Hallows, Part 1. That’s one of the signs you have a problem, isn’t it? Another sign is hiding your habit, or feeling shame about it. I’m sort of embarrassed to say that I saw the movie again yesterday. In fact, I manipulated the situation so that I saw it with my mother at a time when my dad wasn’t available, so I would get to see it again with him.

I came to the Harry Potter series relatively late.  The first four books had already been published when the first movie came out, and I hadn’t read them on principle (the principle being I was a rebel. Pop culture had NO effect on me!). My best friends in college were obsessed though, and dragged me to see the movie in a fancy San Francisco theater. All the children running around in capes and waving wands with lightning bolts drawn on their foreheads amused me. I liked the movie, (my friends did not) and decided to read the books.

Where JK Rowling wrote The Sorceror's Stone.  Edinburgh, Scotland.

By the time the fifth book, The Order of the Phoenix, was published, I was living in England.  That was when I discovered that the English and American versions were different. The American versions have been dumbed down. The title of the first book had been changed because the publishers decided that the more “accessible” Sorcerer’s Stone should replace the original Philosopher’s Stone. 

Otherwise, the Americans might not realize the books were about magic. (I have to admit that as much as I loved living there, I never met a British person who wasn’t a bit condescending towards Americans. They seemed to think of us as the dumb jocks of the world – big and strong and good in a fight, but not on their level intellectually.)

The writing is not particularly impressive. I could say the same about the Twilight Saga (which I also love, and that is a weakness), but they are not meant to be literary masterpieces. They are fairy tales: stories that spark the imagination with themes of loss, love, redemption – and magic! Rowling may not be Tolkien, but she has a similar and clever grasp of fantastical phrases. Those crazy-fun words! Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff and Slytherin – the names of the school houses are practically onomatopoeic: Gryffindors are proud, brave. Ravenclaws are sharp, intelligent. Hufflepuffs are a bit dopey … and Slytherins are suspicious and serpentine. Most importantly, these books get children (and adults) reading in an age of video games and the Internet and 1000+ channels on TV.

When the final book was published, I was up early waiting outside the only bookshop in my little English town. I was determined to read only the first 5 chapters because I had stuff to do, and I wanted to draw out the pleasure of reading it. After 5 chapters, I kept reading straight through to the end, stopping only to use the toilet and to turn on the light when it got dark. The next day, I read it again.

I was a little depressed that the series was over, but also relieved. I thought, maybe now I could get on with my life… and then I remembered there were still three films to be released. Now there is only one left. I do not rue the end of an era; I look forward to a new beginning. And, there are still two Twilight movies left… 

This could be the view from Hogwarts. Scotland, 2010.