Women's Work

[juantoo3]

Darn, there's an ocean between us...

and a cast iron wok waiting on my end... <where's the "ouch" smiley when you need it?>

(If you've never been womped by a wok, trust me, you don't wanna try... )

[greymare]

detail. my friend,,,,,,,,,,,, attention to detail
that s all that is required and to make her feel like she is the most desirable woman inthe world/////////////////
thats all really, not much to it............

[juantoo3]

I've been attendin' to de tail.

I'll be OK as long as it's *only* her tail I'm attendin' to.

[greymare]

lol.
there is you rfirst mistake
lol
lucky you are married
cos here in thee land of oz you just might not make it
lol

[17th Angel]

Listen, care, trust, embrace, protect make her feel beautiful, let her KNOW she is beautiful... Be truthful.. A woman isn't complicated... Just a female version of the male. The only thing that makes anything complicated is when we look at a woman as some alien life form lol.

[China Cat Sunflower]

Originally Posted by Alex P

Listen, care, trust, embrace, protect make her feel beautiful, let her KNOW she is beautiful...

Yes, yes. It's of utmost importance that a woman feel beautiful because...because...er, uh, it's important because... Why is it important again?

Oh, I remember. Pretty is an ability.

Chris

[China Cat Sunflower]

The Rites of Beauty are intended to make women archaically morbid. Five hundred years ago, men thought about their lives in relation to death as women today are asked to imagine the lifespan of beauty: Surrounded by sudden inexplicable deaths, medieval Christianity made the worshiper's constant awareness of mortality a lifetime obsession. The dangers of childbirth intensified the consciousness of death for women, as was exemplified by the use of Psalm 116 by women in labor: "The snares of death compassed me 'round, and the pains of hell gat hold on me...O Lord I beseech thee, deliver my soul." This once general morbidity became primarily feminine in the nineteenth century. Scientific advances tempered men's sense of fatality, but well into the industrial age, the specter of death in the childbed forced women often to dwell upon the condition of their souls. After antisepsis lowered the maternal death rate and once women became valued as beauties rather than mothers, this preoccupation with loss was channeled into fears about the death of "beauty." So many women still feel they are surrounded by ill-understood forces that can strike at any time, destroying what has been represented to them as life itself. When a woman with her back to the camera describes a botched surgical job, saying, ""He took away my beauty. In one blow. It's all gone," she is expressing a sense of helpless resignation that harks back to the way preindustrial societies responded to natural disaster.

To understand the primal force of this religion, we need to see that men die once and women die twice. Women die as beauties before their bodies die.

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

Chris

[greymare]

kkk, whatever, i was just given my advice as a female of the species......... for what its worth.

[China Cat Sunflower]

Originally Posted by greymare

detail. my friend,,,,,,,,,,,, attention to detail
that s all that is required and to make her feel like she is the most desirable woman inthe world/////////////////
thats all really, not much to it............

You said desirable. Desirable goes way beyond pretty. Especially for us old farts!

Chris

[17th Angel]

Chris pretty and beautiful, do you see them as the same value?

[China Cat Sunflower]

Originally Posted by Alex P

Chris pretty and beautiful, do you see them as the same value?

Yes, no...yes and no. It depends on the definition. What is beauty? Is it a more superlative state of prettiness? Is pretty an ability? It could be a job prerequisite. Human bodies are beautiful as objects, but what about the creation of a free floating value called "beauty" as a social control mechanism? What about the whole spackle and goo women's cosmetics industry? How do the politics of advertising abet coercion mechanisms supporting patriarchal power structures?

I like crows feet on women my age. I like those pleasant lines and crinkles that show personality. That's beautiful to me. It's not pretty. It's desirable I suppose, but it's not sexually stimulating in the way that one might describe as "attractiveness." It's more an idolatry of the body sense of object art. There's a whole massive cosmetics industry dedicated to, among other things, ease the wrinkles that I like. That's Beauty Incorporated, which is an entirely different, institutional thing.

Chris

[17th Angel]

I get ya!

Thanks for the reply brah.

[path_of_one]

I think it comes down to, as y'all have pointed out, what we think of as beauty.

One of the reasons I love my husband so deeply is that I know, without a doubt, that when we are 70 he will find me beautiful.

That is not to say that I will be attractive in the same way that I was when we met and I was 17. But rather, that he finds *me*- the me inside the body I currently possess, as a beautiful creature. And so he feels that this beauty shines through my body at any age.

I don't know if that makes sense.

In terms of cosmetics and fashion and all that, there are different ways to look at it. I can think "I am trying to make myself something I am not" or I can see it all as paint and my body as a canvas. I choose the latter. Make-up, fashion, hair, whatever... I see it as the same kind of thing as tattooing and piercing. My shot at making my body say something about me, putting some of the inside on the outside. There are different ways to fight against the US tendency to market to women by making us feel bad about ourselves. We can avoid or we can redefine. I like art, I like my body, and I like seeing what I can do with it, so I choose to redefine what all these objects mean to me and how I use them. The most permanent concepts I have about myself and my life go on my body in ink (tattoos), the more fleeting things like mood are put into makeup and fashion. I get to be a new person every day!

What makes me feel beautiful is that my husband knows everything inside that is and is not on the outside, and it is *that* which he finds beautiful. The good, the bad, the crazy- I can see that he is sincerely in love with it all and finds it all beautiful. Even things that aren't pretty now, he finds beautiful. And so I know I am safe to grow older and less outwardly attractive with him, and in that safety comes a deep-seated love that transcends attraction.

[China Cat Sunflower]

Hi Kim!

I've spent some time wondering why it's so hard to have an unemotional conversation about sex roles. Why are we so easily diverted into the men versus women trap? What is the unspoken taboo against admitting how each of us use the game to ostensibly game the game? Why do we defend social mores that don't actually benefit us?

Chris

[China Cat Sunflower]

How can self-decoration function in a way so that it is purely about self expression and not about signifying status? Even the size of the bone in one's nose signifies some achieved strata of tribally recognized status.

Chris