Weekly report 5
- Aug 19, 2018
- 8 min read
Weekly Post
17.8.18
Week six. Still in Turkey – still relaxing, reading, listening and digesting the information. With my mind clearly attuned to beauty and the ideals attributed to that concept in regards to women I have found myself much more aware of the women around me and the way they present themselves in and around the holiday resort. Isn’t it strange that when on holiday we all wear far less clothes than we would ever normally do in day to day situations, and yet, people seem to be more comfortable to ‘let it all hang out’ and don’t seem to worry about their body image and who is looking at them – or maybe everyone is feeling insecure inside but are just able to hide it well? I found myself having a conversation with a man in the pool about the size of our unicorn (see picture below) – half way through I found myself becoming acutely aware that I was wearing hardly any clothes and had my legs straddled around said unicorns neck! - Moments like that are when my anxiety kicks in and I have hundreds of thoughts running through my head as to what he is thinking about me, my body, my fat, my hair, my bikini. I tried to finish the conversation so I could escape the anxiety but the unicorn was so big I couldn’t actually move anywhere – I had to jump off as elegantly as I could and swim to safety!
The Beauty Myth written byNaomi Wolf
I have now read the chapters titled:Sex, Hunger and Beyond The Beauty Myth.The following quotes below are parts I found interesting and would like to investigate further in the studio or to inform our future work.
“There is an officially enforced double standard for men’s and women’s nakedness in mainstream culture that bolsters power inequities”.
“Beauty pornography is clearly making women violent toward ourselves.”
“The asymmetry of the beauty myth tells men and women lies about each other’s bodies. Women’s breasts must be perfectly symmetrical; men’s genitals sure aren’t.”
“She leaves his bed at dawn to paint over her face.”
“He may know her as confident; she stands on the bathroom scale and sinks into a keening self-abuse."
“‘Beauty’ leaves out smell, physical response, sounds, rhythm, chemistry, texture, fit, in favour of a portrait on a pillow.”
“If anorexia is defined as a compulsive fear of and fixation upon food, perhaps most western women can be called mental anorexics.”
“Women’s bodies are not their own but society’s, and that thinness is not a private aesthetic, but hunger a social concession exacted by the community.”
“To maintain hunger where food is available, as western women are doing, is to submit to a life state as unnatural as anything with which the species has come up yet. It is more bizarre than cannibalism”
“Li’l Miss Make-up (is a doll who) resembles a girl that’s 5 or 6 years old who, when cold water is painted on, springs eyebrows, coloured eye lids, fingernails, tinted lips and a heart-shaped beauty mark.”
Naomi Wolf refers often to the Iron Maiden within her writing. The original Iron Maiden was a medieval German instrument of torture. It was a body-shaped casket with a ladies’ features painted on. The victim would be encased in it and left to die through either starvation or from the metal spikes inside it. Wolf compares this to women’s modern day self-torture and cruel entrapment of themselves into the beauty standards – a striking visual image and an apt metaphor, if not a tad dramatic! This imagerary is something we could explore in the studio.
P.S – My book has now fallen apart.
Podcasts – Who Knew!!
I have continued to listen to Susan Calman’s Mrs Brightside podcast this week and have found it really interesting to hear other people’s experiences and feelings regarding their depression and anxiety. I now feel more than ever that these conditions are very personal and never the same for any two people – whilst there may be similarities the experience and the way it affects you will always be different.
The other podcast I listened to today was DoubleX Gabfest: The has Amy Schumer Bought the Beauty Myth edition.
The discussion was based around Amy Schummer’s latest film – “I Feel Pretty” in which the protagonist bumps her head and wakes up feeling that she looks like a supermodel and has all the confidence that goes with it. Some interesting points made regarding the film and the message it is sending out about beauty and also about Amy Schummer herself and the way in which she has a reoccurring character that she has invented in all her work that is always butting up against the stereotyped beauty expectation in modern western culture. This film may prove an interesting point of reference for our final performance piece.
Question – If this girl above (Amy Schummer) is making her career and money out of NOT being the ‘beauty norm’ then what message is she sending out to the thousands of women who sit at home longing to look like her? My opinion is that she is doing more harm than good by saying “hey look I’m just normal” - she is setting yet another standard for people to compare to and if they don’t measure up to Amy Schummer 'the normal' girl then the feelings of self-doubt and critical analysis will surely only worsen? The more an issue is pressed and investigated the more it will become an issue to others.
Further Experiments & Ideas
Downfall of women – Peaches Geldof, Paula Yates, Whitney Houston.
Being held down with physical weight – sand bags, laundry, detergent etc.
More mask work
Using authentic movement to explore the themes.
Using interview technique to push and challenge our own perceptions and ideals.
Use the cut-up articles to create.
The great umbilical cord
10 beauty commandments
Jessie Cave – doodles
Iron Maiden
Margaret Atwood
SONIA: Drowning in information
While Sarah is swimming to safety in Turkey, I am drowning in all of this information about depression and social anxiety
Podcasts for understanding
I’ve always loved podcasts because it’s easier for me to retain information and allow my imagination to create whatever it wants than when I get distracted with visual elements.
I discovered the following podcast by the artist Byron Vincent (https://www.byronvincent.com/) Hell is Other People: A self-help Guide to social Anxiety https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06fkd1y. I thought this had amazing moments and situations that I’m trying to talk about for our performance. I will explore this in more detail for next week.
I’ve also been listening to Susan Calmans’s (https://www.susancalman.com/) Mrs Brightside (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06b90qs#play) and I really identify myself with how Felicity Ward (https://www.felicityward.com/) (episode 3) describes her thinking process:
“My brain is at me at all times… My mental hilliness voice in my head is not like he he he … it comes across as genuinely concerned”.
“Yes you can train yourself, that’s absolutely true, but then my brain whispers: you know that’s not true…” “When I tell myself: you didn’t get the thing but you did a great job, you should be really proud of yourself. And my real self says: yes, I am proud of myself. And then my mental hilliness voice goes: weak people let themselves off the hook”
Kindness: “I’ve wasted so much of my life being sick” “It’s like being in a nightmare chamber”
Mindfulness and meditation: “It’s not about getting a peaceful mind…” It’s about telling your brain it can do whatever it wants but you’re going to sit there for 10 min, it’s about to set time for yourself.
Susan Calman: “Sometimes I think that if I work hard it will disappear but I just get tired, so tired…”
After thinking about these points of views I concluded:
Depression and social anxiety have a set of symptoms but they vary according to the person’s personality. Therefore each person shows and deals with their symptoms in their own way.
It seems hard for people who don’t have these to really understand all the suffering, because they do feel depressed and anxious sometimes but it’s not a constant state of mind.
Person: “It will get better”
Me: “Tell me something I don’t know already”
Person: “Why are you so anxious then?”
Me: I know it will get bad again… I’m preparing in advance!
Working on self-acceptance means recognising that my hilliness makes me who I am. If I didn’t have it, I would have a less stressed life but I would also be a different person.
Comfort vs Acceptance
I wrote a few weeks ago about this idea of feeling comfortable in doing/feeling something we know it’s bad for us… So why do we do it?
In my case I know that this permanent state of worrying is exhausting me but my mind keeps telling me I need to think about all the possibilities to be ready for everything. Since that is impossible every time something unpredictable happens, I blame myself for not being ready for it. I am never ready because when I think about trying my brain tells me (in its sweet snake voice) not to bother because I will screw up anyway! And here we have a vicious cycle. I was thinking about how this applies to the concept of beauty also:
Books for solutions
What can we do then?
First let’s try to get some clarification, to know a bit more about the subject… ABC of Anxiety and Depression, this one must be good, let’s have a look:
“Depression is more than unhappiness. A person who is depressed will experience low mood, which is lower than just being sad or unhappy, and crucially, is associated with difficulty in being able to function as effectively as is usual for them in their everyday life.” (2014: 1)
Anxiety: “People who are suffering with one or more of the anxiety disorders also experience symptoms of anxiety to a degree that it interferes with their ability to function. The central emotions at the heart of anxiety are fear and worry” (2014: 2)
… Hum nothing new here… Let’s see what they say about the causes for them: “A combination of biological, social and psychological factors… these interact with each other to differing degrees in each individual” (2014: 3)… since it’s a combination of factors and they adapt to the person, blaming the parents (or oneself) will accomplish nothing (which is a pity because that is just so easy).
“This new age of anxiety suggests to us that anxiety is something that one should get rid of or at least try to control” (2004: 141) Like most things, anxiety is not bad, it helps us to be prepared and to live in society (Oh really?! Easy brain! God, I need to put you on a leash!) as long as it doesn’t stop us to do our routines. “Your goal is not to be able to completely control your thoughts – no one can do this!” (2002: 132)… and there it goes the leash…
So controlling is not the answer… How about some relaxation? It sounds good I’ve never managed to accomplish it… “The achievement of good relaxation is indicated by stillness of the body, looseness of the muscles, regular breathing and motionless eyelids” (1980: 232) it’s just letting go, how hard can it be? Pretty hard actually, I don’t stop being alert even when I’m sleeping. No wonder Felicity Ward joked about it saying: “Of course you can’t meditate, you’re mentally ill”… I should put that on a t-shirt!
Comedy… because I’m tired of searching for "the right approach"
These are serious matters so, why have we decided to talk about them in a comic way?
I was raised in a context where if you don’t take things seriously that means you’re not a serious person. Nevertheless I strongly disagree with that. For example, we already know that depression is sad so it requires a lot of strength to find the comic side of it and, yes, there is one. As Susan Calman says “I like making misery funny” and why not? Laughing is the best remedy!
I decided to watch The Marvellous Mrs Maisel for some inspiration (Sarah I'm not a big fan of Amy Schummer also) ... What a surprise to me when, right on the pilot episode, I noticed that the main character behaves and talks about most of the topics we are exploring. Even though the story takes place in the 50's, the way she is obsessed with her appearance and behaviour is quite similar to nowadays women. She measures herself everyday, has a beauty routine and tries to maintain a specific appearance/ life style. Plus she juggles all of these social norms with trying to be a stand up comedian.
In terms of laughing about "what's wrong with me", I identify with all of these examples of “social anxiety texts” and I laugh of every single one of them:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/jasminnahar/incredibly-rude-texts-from-your-social-anxiety?utm_term=.avDqRPbnQg#.gpww4ZQgPM.
Baer, L. (2002) The Imp of the mind, New York, Penguin Group.
Gask, L. and Chew-Graham, C. (2014) ABC of Anxiety and Depression, Oxford, John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.
Marks, I. (1980) Living with fear, Washington DC, McGraw-Hill Ink.
Salecl, R. (2004) On Anxiety, New York, Routledge.
Comments