Putting your face on.

So, after a short break from blogging to move house, iron clothes, and knit socks, I’m back on my ranting high horse with something I’ve often thought about over the years: make-up.

The ‘classical’ application of makeup (eyeshadow, mascara, blusher, lipstick) has two functions. It hides blemishes (because grease, not having time to shower, bags under your eyes and dry lips are clear personal failures; what kind of woman are you if you don’t care about having a face full of spots? The implication, of course, is that women should always look their best…for who?) and it also simulates sexual arousal, to varying degrees (eyes wide, cheeks flushed, lips red). Don’t get me wrong, women expressing their sexuality is not a problem. But the idea of this being the accepted standard of beauty does not sit well with me.

I remember sitting in a lecture at college where this was discussed and a girl sat opposite me spoke up in a rather smug tone of voice saying “That can’t be true. My boyfriend says I look better without any make-up – he even tells me not to wear it when we go out.” Now, here I feel I should tread carefully. I have been told “Oh, don’t bother, you look fine,” before going somewhere. This, to me, carried no misogynistic overtones; it was a not-so-subtle way of telling me we were late. However an outright instruction not to wear make-up to me carries several disturbing messages (some of which could also be applied to the reverse scenario of trying to ‘tart someone up’):

a)      I have the right to decide how you look.  Your tastes and wishes are subordinate to mine; when you entered into a sexual relationship with me you gave me the right to own you and dress you like I would a doll.

b)      How you look is important to me. Of course sexual attraction is important; chemistry is important; during the first period of a relationship your instincts are all you have to rely on. And I freely admit that I would be upset if my partner thought I looked like the back end of a tram smash. But make-up is temporary, clothing is temporary. If you are with someone for any length of time, and if you are sleeping with them (in every sense of the word) chances are they will see you without both. If someone doesn’t like how you look at one particular moment, if they wait a few hours how you look will probably change. If seeing you with greasy hair and smudged mascara is going to shatter some ideal your partner has and change how they see you irrevocably, particularly when they are also aware you have a personality, then you may have to reconcile to the idea that you are on a hiding to nowhere.

c)       I don’t want anybody else to find you attractive. If you go out with your eyes all wide and your lips all red like that, some other person might realise you are beautiful and try and sleep with you. Clearly you have no control over the situation, I don’t trust/respect you enough not to imagine you would be seduced by anyone who walks by, so my only course of action is to make you uglier and thus further my possession of you.

d)      I feel like you could be improved as a human being if only you listened to what I say. I met my partner in a pub on a Friday night. I was wearing clothes and makeup that I still own and wear regularly. If he were to suddenly turn round and demand that I make all sorts of changes to my appearance, my first reaction would probably be “why is this not good enough any more?” The subject of trying to change people in a relationship is something I feel very strongly about and will probably produce a post about at some point, however I will say briefly that some forms of change are acceptable (giving someone encouragement to give up smoking) and some are most definitely not (stopping people associating with their friends, or being interested in something that does not concern you). Giving someone the message that you are trying to make them more attractive is not acceptable.

e)      I genuinely think you look better without makeup; and how you look reflects on me because you are my commodity. I don’t want my friends to think I’m going out with a slapper; I want them to be jealous of my attractive girlfriend. The only way I measure my personality is by who I am sleeping with, and you are a better asset to my social standing the more attractive you look.

Anyone saying ‘oh, you look much better without make-up’ should expect it to be received as a compliment, if it was meant as such. But they should not expect someone to be insanely grateful, or indeed to take any notice.

Moving out and Max Weber.

Over the last week or so I’ve been trying (and failing) to gather my flat into some semblance of order so that I, along with all my belongings, can move out – onwards and upwards/downwards to Huddersfield, Glendale and in September a nice shiny new flat in Edinburgh. During this process several things have bcome clear to me:

• I probably do not have a glittering career in removals ahead of me
• The amount of needles on my floor is alarming
•  The minute I have to move things on foot from one flat to another, the fortnight-long heatwave will break and the heavens will open
•  I have a LOT of stuff.

It’s the last one that has been, if not exactly bothering me, then lurking in my brain. I am not a very materialistic person and I certainly don’t own any wanton luxuries (by this world’s standards anyway).  I’ve lived in this flat for almost exactly one year, hardly a lifetime’s worth of accumulation, but I still manage to have suitcases full of my belongings, seemingly endless 'miscellaneous' bits and pieces that all seem really, really important if I consider throwing them out, a table, a record player and a footstool. I got rid of two binbags worth of clothes and one binbag worth of papers I didn’t need. 

To be honest I didn’t feel too guilty about getting rid of them – the clothes went to charity and the papers in the recycling bin – but there was more than a little itch of guilt about owning so much crap in the first place. However this is not a post about first-world greed, materialism, over-production or any of those things (although watch this space!). Instead I want to perhaps refute the notion that it is purely greed which motivates people to constantly be acquiring, keeping and hoarding things.  

I noticed while packing that lots of the things I own carry some sort of emotional connection or memories – the records I bought when my dad came to visit before Christmas, the dress I bought for the first party we had in the flat, the scraps of paper that were once booking confirmation for a bus ticket to Skye - and even less significant things, small memories, fragments of conversations, the memory of how something came to be in your possession, ghosts of days and nights and people and places and moments. I’m glad to be moving out; this flat is incredibly difficult and expensive to heat, it’s on the top floor of a filthy staircase, my ceiling periodically caves in and I’m not sure how much more life my window has in it. But in a way clearing out my belongings, putting clothes in suitcases and binbags, sorting through old papers and books feels a bit like the end of an era. And I think that materialism, hoarding, whatever you want to call it, might sometimes be based on the human connections that people often perceive through physical objects. I was flicking through a magazine the other day and stumbled on an article about dealing with grief; one of the tips it gave was if you feel you’re ready, throw out lots of your old clothes, because clothes are some of the most emotionally-charged items there are. I think that applies to books as well – and, in my case, to just about everything; I have a bad habit of being over-sentimental.

 But why is this? Clothes are just bits of fibre held together. Books are just paper – yes, they can also be ideas and communication but nothing irreplacable and nothing that isn’t available online, in the library or at another bookshop further down the line. My CDs are all on my computer. So what causes this projection of emotion?

It’s my view that, in developed countries at least, we are encouraged consciously and unconsciously to have fewer and fewer truly meaningful connections with each other as people. Higher living standards, the growth of a more individualistic political culture, an increase in urban population and decline of traditional communities (rural and industrial) have, it is generally agreed, resulted in a more atomised society. Some people think this is a good thing; I do not. We are now in touch with more people than ever before. Whatever age, gender, or social class you are from it is generally possible through the Internet (social media in particular) to get back in touch with old acquaintances or meet new people. An increase in professional specialisation and decline in self-sufficiency means that we now have to have much more contact with a wider variety of people just to ensure that we eat (restaurant staff, supermarket staff, takeaway deliveries, individual small suppliers, street vendors), have somewhere to live (landlords, maintenance staff, estate agents, lawyers, builders, architects, painters, decorators to name but a few), have a reliable source of income, that our children receive an education, that our pets are looked after, that our health is good, the list goes on.

 But if you stop to think, almost all these connections are superficial; Louis Wirth described how ‘the multiplication of persons in a state of interaction under conditions which make their contact as full personalities impossible produces…segmentalization of human relationships…In relation to the number of people with whom they rub elbows in the course of daily life, they know a smaller proportion, and of these they have less intensive knowledge.’[1]. Simplified: We meet more people but know less, and those we do know, we don't know well, because our life situations make it very difficult to. The phrase 'segmentalization of human relationships' is also interesting'; the idea that relationships - often considered a private area of life, separate from work or the public arena - have actually also become part of the divisions and organisation associated with modern lifestyles. To me, this carries echoes of E. P. Thompson's theory of 'time-work discipline'. This was the idea that in pre-industrial communities time was divided not by constantly equal units of seconds, minutes, hours and days, but by seasons, tides, the sun, the moon, crop rotations, etc. (Thompson believed that this idea of time had its source in a collective human wisdom, compared with the new system which was solely based around profit and efficiency.)

Have human  relationships also fallen prey to this new, unitary organisational system - compared with the (necessarily) closer, more all-encompassing ties of pre-capitalism and pre-industry?

 To sum up - or attempt to - in the course of a day we can come across tens or even hundreds of different people; but how many of those interactions will be meaningful and life-enriching and how many will be simply ensuring that we can continue living to the standard to which we are accustomed, with a couple of words and probably an exchange of money? Obviously, most people have at least one or two close friends, potentially a relationship, family ties, etc. But I believe that one of the most fundamental changes between what might be termed pre- and post-industrial society is  that our ‘close’ personal ties (lovers, friends, family) and those people we rely on for survival (providers of food, shelter, childcare) are no longer the same. In the novel Liza’s England one of Pat Barker’s characters says to another “We looked after each other. You loved thy neighbour because if you didn’t you’d be dead, and so would she. We’ve lost that now.” 

Obviously it is no bad thing that the crushing poverty which kept millions living hand-to-mouth has disappeared, at least in this country. But Max Weber explains the current situation not as a land of milk and honey but simply as ‘a lack of that mutual acquaintanceship which ordinarily inheres between the inhabitants in a neighbourhood.’[2] This can result in increased personal freedom; the individual no longer has to worry about ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ or ‘what will the neighbours think’, he or she only has to please themselves. But there is a trade-off to be made – the loss of a sense of belonging to a community, and a feeling of being integrated into something which is bigger than the sum of its parts. Durkheim calls this the ‘social void’, or ‘anomie’; and this is something which I plan to post on more in the future. However the basic idea is that when a society goes through change (urbanisation – industrialisation – war, famine, disaster – economic depression) the fundamental rules and structures of that society are challenged and break down. This results in the components of the society (i.e. people) being unable to function or at least unaware of the social norms governing their existence, or the expectations that are on them as members of a society.  

I believe that part of what motivates materialism is this social void. I do not deny the existence of greed; nor do I deny that a higher living standard can make a person happier. However, I feel very strongly that capitalism has slowly drained away much of what made life more than a rat race; that through the individualisation and atomisation of society something has been lost and so we reach out for what we are told will ensure happiness; material possessions. 

In my experience this takes two forms: buying more and more things to make that ‘buzz’ last a little while longer, and looking for meaning in inanimate objects because on some level we are aware that the chances are not good for our life experiences and relationships to be lasting and meaningful; things that remind us of a happy time should be held on to like grim death because happy times quickly disappear in a haze of work and money worries and deep loneliness even when surrounded by people.

 To paraphrase George Orwell (somewhere in 1984…the book is in a suitcase somewhere…I’ll add a reference later): ‘everything seemed like it was right, but there was a feeling deep in your own bones that something was very wrong, that things had not always been this way’.

---

[1] Wirth, L., (1964) "Urbanism as a way of life" from Wirth, L.,  On Cities and Social Life   pp.60-83,

Chicago: University of Chicago Press

[2] Weber, M (1925) “Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft”, p.514. Tuebingen

Summer projects.

I have decided that my aim for this summer (up to September) is going to be three/four completed projects. I have a really bad habit of learning to do something new (like Fair Isle knitting or a picot edge), doing about five smallish samples of whatever I’ve just learned, and not actually finishing anything that involves doing it as part of a pattern. Unfortunately all my wool and needles are packed away (sob) and I’m not going to get them out again until it’s Monday night and I’m 300 miles south of where I am now, so in the meantime I’m deciding what those projects are going to be. I’ve got one on the go just now, but it’s a present so I’m not going to post it up here - I’m hoping to be finished this week anyway.

But anyway, so far I’m almost sure that four things I definitely want to get done are:

1) This saxophone motif as part of a scarf:

I'm thinking about doing it black and white, but instead of working it as part of the scarf, doing two separate panels with the saxophone motif and stitching them on afterwards as 'pockets' at the bottom of the scarf, as I really like scarves with pockets. 

2) These hand warmers, because gloves annoy me and because I've never knitted anything with a thumb-hole before:

3) A beanie hat with an R2D2 picture on it. I can't put a link or a picture up because it's not a pattern I've found anywhere, I'm going to attempt to add the chart into a pattern for a plain beanie that I sort of made up myself (fancy, I know!).

4) A pair of socks using a Fair Isle pattern. I've never knitted Fair Isle in the round, which I'll need to do for the R2D2 hat, so I might use the socks as a way to practice this before I start on quite a complicated chart. 

And that should keep me going for a while at least! I'm moving to a house with no internet access for three months so I'm hoping to come back with lots of nice new woolly things for winter (which will probably have arrived by the time I leave in September...ach well).
We'll see if I stick to it though!

Chick-lit. And Gaelic prose.

I do know what point I'm trying to make here, honest.

For those of you who don’t know, I have recently managed to plough my way through a fairly horrific diet of university exams. For roughly a month I was in a state of fairly constant panic (which still didn’t motivate me to do anything), trying frantically to learn for the first time the things I should have learned back when i was lying under a duvet – occasionally my own – promising Jesus that if he only would kill me now, I’d never drink again. Rubble piled up in my bedroom, library fines piled up online and I suddenly developed a keen interest in dozens of subjects completely irrelevant to what I would have to answer questions on that nevertheless had to be satisfied NOW. However, somewhere in the midst of the mess that was my life a couple of things seeped through and stuck. One of these was that the town where I was born held the record for highest number of back-to-back houses in the mid-nineteenth century. Another thing that crept into the recesses of my mind and started itching was a question; one of the more general essay questions on a literature past paper: “Do you think that the publishing of ‘chick-lit’ is a worthwhile endeavour in Scottish Gaelic literature?”.

My initial reaction was “Of course – Gaelic is just as capable of providing a wide range of literature as any other language, chick-lit is light reading, good for learners, good for young people, probably be a good seller, might encourage new young writers and help native speakers whose literacy is poor” followed swiftly by the slightly less well-thought out “But chick-lit just seems so rubbish next to something like Moladh Beinn Dobhrain ”. As I thought about it, though, I realised that the question itself was inherently loaded (although I will try and answer it). To me, ‘chick-lit’ actually has some quite offensive implications. 

I should say now that this is not my way of criticising the state of modern literature. My argument is with the designation of these aspects as female, not with their very existence; but I take the term ‘chick-lit’ to generally mean some or all of the following:

• -          a book which is not particularly difficult to read
• -          a book which has a heavily female influence, either through female authorship or mostly female characters
• -          some sort of romance involved (with an inevitable happy ending)
• -          not a great deal of action
• -          concentrating on the female experience at any stage of life
• -          description of emotion, constant presence of emotional variation
• -          quite a ‘transitional’ book, one which is never going to be a seminal work of literature but will do for the beach

The first point that springs to mind is a fairly practical one: why would women and men enjoy reading different things to such a huge extent that their books have to be kept apart from each other, as if for fear of cross-contamination? Even if indeed there are (natural or socialised) differences in taste between men and women,  what’s wrong with dividing books by subject  or author and allowing people – shock horror – to read the back and decide for themselves if they want it?

The concept of 'chick-lit makes a linguistic distinction between ‘literature’ and ‘female literature’ – what de Beauvoir referred to as the ‘othering’ of the female; the setting apart of domains where women are allowed or expected to roam.  The distinction carries an idea of inferiority along with it. Chick-lit is books dealing with ‘girly stuff’, written (largely – although there are notable exceptions to this) by women, for women, about things that concern women.  

To me, the idea that a book would be written about something that mostly affects women is not inherently offensive. In society there are gender divisions, whether we think those are justified or not, and it would be strange if art and literature did not mirror these divisions. Such a book (for example, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) could act as an exposé and a political statement – or serve the equally important purpose of making a reader feel that they are not alone. It is also not true to say that every book authored by a woman or concerning women is designated to the ‘chick-lit’ category – however the existence of such a genre risks this happening on both an individual and general basis; that the sight of a female name, a  watercolour cover, or a recommendation from Jodi Picoult will result in a conscious or unconscious categorisation as ‘girly’.  

Chick-lit is typically often emotional, because as we all know, women are essentially walking bags of tears and angst, usually hormone-related.  The effect of relegating most emotionally-charged literature to the ‘chick-lit’ shelf is twofold. Firstly it reinforces the idea that expression of emotion is exclusively female – something that I believe is as harmful to the men keeping a stiff upper lip as their mental health crumbles as it is to the women who are written off as inhuman for being strong. Again, I should clarify my position here – expecting every book, no matter the genre or subject, to be a tear-jerking emotional roller coaster would be ridiculous and restrictive of character constructions and artistic expression. However it should equally not be the case that books which do contain emotional exploration are designated as ‘female’, or that books which do not are ‘manly’. 

Secondly, emotional literature (when done well) has always served me as a form of empathy; the next best thing to having been through it yourself to enable you to start to understand what someone else is feeling .The gendering of literature therefore removes one of the best ways in which the issues of one gender can be shown and described to the other (note: the best way is just to talk to each other).

As ‘chick-lit’ is quite a derogatory term it also removes the idea from people’s minds that these books might actually have something important to say. This ties in with the point made above but can also move away from the idea of emotional empathy and into a more ‘public’ political point; if at least half the population would feel a vague sense of shame at buying the majority of books authored by women then what will follow is female disempowerment.  Yes, if you have a burning political agenda to put forward then publishing a novel might not be the best way to go about it. But social commentary has long been a spark for social change; and for obvious reasons – how is consciousness to be raised of an issue if nobody’s talking about it? You might not start a revolution with a fiction book, but you might make a few people think, which is a good first step. But essentially writing off a huge corpus of female-weighted literature is removing any power that this literature might have to provoke thought, or to be taken seriously. I remember before the 2010 general election a woman who worked in a hairdresser’s was being interviewed on the news. She was putting forward opinions which wouldn’t have sounded out of place at a Socialist Worker’s meeting and I remember being quite surprised at how radical she was. My mother, on the other hand, said to me “Well of course she is. She listens to women’s problems all day long.” Just as being a fly on the wall in a hairdresser’s might, chick-lit could provide valuable insights into social issues - power balances in a relationship, the social standards women (and men) are expected to conform to, economic issues, power balances in the family, etc. etc. But it’s written off, designated as trashy; ‘chick-lit’ books might briefly flash on the bestseller list but rarely if ever make it into Modern Classics. 

The label and associated stereotypes take away much of the power of female expression and ensure that the products of this expression will probably only ever make it into the hands of other women, who are conditioned to view it as rubbish.

The original question, though, is also interesting. Scottish Gaelic is a minority language and one in which prose has traditionally played second fiddle to poetry, song and the oral tradition. For a long time only religious books were published but recent decades have seen a greater output of less traditional literature, perhaps epitomised by the Ùr-Sgeul series.

To oversimplify, prose is still the ‘poor relation’ of poetry but it is becoming more popular. In my view, this means that Gaelic literature is in a fantastic position to be able to structure production and classification of prose in a new way – for a variety of reasons it has potentially escaped from the constraints imposed on English-medium literature; a simple lack of production of prose means that trends in this area have not changed so much in Scottish Gaelic as they have even in Irish. While the song and story traditions do have more traditionally ‘female’ spheres, these generally do not suffer the same relegation as they might in English – we potentially see a genuine example of ‘equality through difference’. Issues of class have traditionally been less important in the production of Gaelic literature; or rather, important in different ways. Different social strata could be expected to produce different types of poetry and song, but the largely oral transmission of this work meant that levels of education were not used, as they were in English medium literature, as a barrier for the lower classes to compose poetry or songs; even the highest classes of bard did not write poetry and much of the corpus of work surviving today was not composed by an ‘upper class’.  We see the interesting paradox of an obviously patriarchal society, but a more egalitarian output of music and culture.

I believe that whether or not Gaelic prose starts to include ‘chick-lit’ is one aspect of a bigger question; will Gaelic culture and literature maintain older traditions, or will it adopt the parameters of Western, English-medium literature, culture and society; just using different words to express the same values and social norms? The answer to that question could provide us with a significant (potentially terrifying) insight into how far capitalism, patriarchy and cultural colonisation can actually reach.

Testing, testing, one two three

Me.

I’m Erin and i’ve heard from a few people now that I should start a blog (although I have my suspicions that they’re just trying to restrict my ranting to a cross-off-able medium). It will probably be a not so healthy mix of observation, sharing things I think are awesome, knitting-related chat and attempts to assemble the chips on my shoulder into informed academic argument.

If you don’t know me personally, I’m twenty years old and from Huddersfield, a small-ish town in West Yorkshire, although I currently live in Edinburgh (and will be relocating to the Isle of Skye for three months in not too long – eek!). I moved here two years ago to study for a politics and history degree but switched fairly early on to study Scottish Gaelic instead, which has sort of taken over my life ever since and will probably be related to a large proportion of what I post on here.

I have a younger brother (free to a good home) and an iPig named Satan, I love woolly jumpers to such an extent I’m always a wee bit depressed when it heats up, and I have a really bad habit of laughing at my own thoughts without explaining them to anyone first. I like being near water and away from lots of people, and if the world is ever unfortunate enough that I reproduce, I have promised myself that my children will never have to wear shop-bought socks.

That’s probably all you really need to know. Oh, and I’m completely unqualified to talk about anything. 

Artist's impression.