These last few days I have had some interesting impressions whirling around in my head, but it’s been difficult to pin them down into a cohesive thought. This blog post is going to be my attempt at bringing them together.
As I have mentioned in a previous post, within the first few days of arriving in London, Annie and I walked to the British Museum together but separated once inside. That first day I wandered into an area featuring Greek sculpture where I was first struck by a large sculpture of Aphrodite crouching and looking startled at an invisible intruder to her bathing. Something about the alarmed look on her face and her alluringly revealed yet still covered body struck me and I have gone back to look at her every time I have returned to the museum. This sculpture is also what started the ball rolling for these thoughts rushing through my brain for the next few days. I began to ponder what it must be like for this goddess to embody beauty, love, pleasure, and procreation. I speculated how much pressure that would put on any mortal human, but also what Aphrodite herself must also feel. As I moved through other parts of the museum that day, covering more Greek sculpture and living and dying, I began to notice other female figures meant to represent similarly unattainable ideals. Such as Demeter, the Greek goddess of the harvest, who is presented as a paradigm of Greek motherhood as serene, mature, and modest. I also began to notice the disparities between male and female rituals and conventions for when a family member or spouse died. In many cultures around the world women tear their hair out or commit other painful acts of mourning and widows often have to symbolically mourn for long periods of time before they may remarry, whereas men in mourning for a spouse or relative generally pay their respects and are allowed to move on with their lives socially. The obvious disparities between societal expectations for men and women which still pervade today were palpable among many of these exhibitions.
This became even more apparent to me when we experienced London nightlife a few days later. For Sara’s birthday, our flat along with Stephanie and Griffin decided to go to a club called Café de Paris. We assumed that all of us would have to pay a cover charge to gain entry, but in fact it was only Griffin who was required to pay twenty pounds for access. (Of course we split the bill equally). This blatant sexism offended me not only because of the clear discrimination, but also because of the implications this type of business model has on individual’s mindsets and psyches. This situation was analogous to a strip club experience despite the supposed atmosphere of a place where everyone can dance separately or together, but not where particular people are necessarily ‘on show.’ The men must pay to gain access to see women, who can enter for free, dance. I think that this can also certainly affect men and women’s psyches upon entering this place wherein men may expect to receive services or at least get to dance with a woman and women may feel a strange sense of obligation to the men who have paid to be in their presence or of being put on display. This also takes a heteronormative model in which men will pay to see women who will then provide them with a service. What if homosexual men or women wanted to come to this club? It is clearly unfair for the men to have to pay and the women to not given that neither of them are paying for nor providing the services which the club expects them to. This situation related to Aphrodite as well as a sense of female agency in my mind. The women in this position are being put up on a pedestal by society, much like Aphrodite, in which they are expected to represent beauty and sensuality, primarily for a male audience, but they are not expected to have many of the other qualities which women, and humans, can embody (i.e. intelligence, malice, wit, ugliness, etc). They are also not expected to have or are not respected when they utilize their agency. Much like Aphrodite being intruded on while she bathed, many men at this club intruded upon our revelry with one another in order to sexualize and proposition us. And many times our rejections were not respected and we were propositioned (to put it kindly) numerous times after our initial refusals.
These museum and nightclub experiences have served to remind me constantly how my women’s and gender studies and feminist thought can be applied not only to history and literature, but also to everyday situations. It forces me to consider how societally constructed gender roles and expectations can simultaneously limit and expand both men and women’s opportunities. It also relates, for me, to our theater experiences and Judith Butler’s conception of gender as performativity. If ‘all the world’s a stage’ then how does performing these actions change our perceptions of ourselves and others and if we find them problematic then how can we go about changing them? Add to all of this my recent people-watching at the Natural History Museum which generally gave me the impression that humans are bizarre creatures and that clothes, fashion, and most of what we do is extremely odd on a fundamental level and you’ve created a sense of complete bewilderment towards humans but especially towards social constructions such as gender.