This week, Featured Author Beatrice Scudeler looks to costume dramas and asks: have we really progressed past oppressive beauty standards?
Beatrice Scudeler
It is undeniable that at different points in history women wore uncomfortable clothing in the name of pursuing an ideal of female beauty. A phenomenon which costume dramas have largely neglected, but I think is far more damning evidence of Victorian beauty standards than corsets, is the trend of the crinoline. Voluminous to the point of absurdity (see here for an amusing 1860s sketch of a crinolined lady attempting to walk down a flight of stairs), skirts worn over the crinoline cage were prone to catching fire over an open fireplace. During the 1850s and 1860s, crinolines are thought to have been responsible for around 3,000 deaths. Emily and Mary Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s illegitimate half-sisters, famously died of crinoline fire in 1871 at a ball. Crinolines, not corsets, would seem a much more relevant example of women being harmed in the name of beauty.
Yet depictions of this particular form of (self) oppression are few and far between in costume dramas. The obvious, practical explanation is that inserting a death by crinoline into a costume drama plot is objectively harder than just shooting a few seconds’ worth of an attractive young actress pretending to swoon in a tightly laced corset. But it’s a lot less sexy, too.
This September, Fairer Disputations Featured Authors and friends are convening in New York for two and a half days to find a better way forward for women. If you’re interested in attending, email izziforfd@gmail.com with a short bio and why you’d like to join us. Space is very limited.
First, Defending Feminism points out that in porn and prostitution, degrading women is often the point.
Defending Feminism
Many of the acts in pornography are startlingly similar to the acts described by the detainees in the section above. I do not think I need to explain why a “golden baby shower” is degrading. What I think many people miss, however, is that women’s degradation is what makes the pornography arousing to the viewer.
It’s not as if porn stars simply like the sensations involved and seek these acts on that basis, and in an unfortunate coincidence, those acts happen to be degrading. These porn stars deliberately seek out these acts because they know that their audience is turned on by the sight of female degradation.
Next, Amber M Hill examines the objectification of women in the aughts through the lens of trauma.
Amber M. Hill
I am now a 45 year old mother of two daughters living in a post #MeToo world, but back then I seemed to be one of the only (non-religious) young people looking around and thinking that something was deeply wrong with the way teenage girls and young women were portrayed as nothing other than hypersexualized bodies to be openly objectified.
Amnesty International UK vs. J.K. Rowling, Andrew Doyle, The Washington Post
ROUND-UP: There Is Some Surprising Bipartisan Consensus on Family Policy, Elissa Strauss, Made With Care
Surrogate Mom Fights For Custody Of Babies She Raised After Purchaser Abandoned Them, Kallie Fell, MS, BSN, RN, The Federalist
Shelby Kearns refutes many of the lies that underlie the plastic surgery industry.
Shelby Kearns
When we understand that our bodies are essential to our personhood, we can also understand the dignity of each of our life stages—and why a mother’s body is something to celebrate rather than make over.
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