:: The Wendy House ::

Not natural,  arguably not beautiful and definitely not with a feather as implied by the imagery in this advert.  According to this advert natural beauty without surgery can be achieved by the injection of long lasting stuff.  Surely this is an abuse of even the 1968 trade’s descriptions act? 

To achieve naturalness you need injections?!

If the woman pictured in this advert is an exemplar of naturalness you also need lots of product such as dark eye-shadow,  mascara, lipstic, hair-dye, with some additional refinements in the form of eyebrow plucking, dental adjustments and airbrushing.

Burn me as a witch for saying it, but I’d much rather wrinklefest without layers of product on my skin and hair however ‘unnatural’ that might be.

Sunday Times and  online Times article ‘Sex and the Sixities’  by India Knight includes the following rousing calls to womanhood:

“the essence of modern womanhood, the one hard-to-define component that makes us all want to cheer the loudest…“  is  “…possibility that we may, at 62, perhaps look like Helen Mirren in a bikini”

“a 62-year-old woman looking hot – properly hot, not “hot for her age” or hot as in “fanciable, even though you know you shouldn’t” is a thing that simply can’t be celebrated enough.”

‘Mirren in her red bikini says more, more succinctly, about what women want and can achieve than any amount of turgid feminist preaching ever could’

Gosh, I don’t think I know people who think spending time and skill to dress for the occasion is shallow,  but India thinks that view might be held by some Times readers because she considerately quashes it “if you think that’s shallow, I would humbly posit that you understand nothing at all about real women’s hopes and ambitions.”  Trying to following India’s humble reasoning,  leads to the suspicion that if I don’t want to look like Helen Mirren in a Bikini then I may not be a real woman,  Ooops!  I think I may have fallen over.

Apparently the social construction of ‘woman’ once meant “no longer being “a girl”, which translated into bad clothes, bad hair, bad make-up and, if you were especially unfortunate, a bad figure.”  and “Worse, having reproduced meant that in the eyes of society you no longer existed as a sexual being“. It seems that India believes promoting yourself as a ’sexual being’ , sexbot, should be an aspirational goal for real women and it is equated to looking young. If you don’t look sexy you look old.  Whhhooooops!  I definitely fell over this time.

India’s view also implies that, normal, aspiring real women have no financial or legal obstacles to not looking youthful and sexy because ‘deregulated’‘ ‘minor surgical procedures’ are ‘nothing that is outside most people’s league’ .  It is all part of the groundwork for achieving ‘a triumphant assertion of easy, carefree femininity’.  While fake women should embrace the freedom and “life-changing power of hair dye“.  As a self-identified, terminally-fake, woman I  ”might know better if they [I] made an attempt at living in the real world“.  Maybe downtown Reading is actually a figment of my nasty, demented, Ivory-tower, imagination?  Deary me,  I  must get out more and take my zimmer-frame.

If ‘looking good’ is primarily equated to looking youthful and sexy I have no intention of developing an interest. or skill, in it.  When looking good is constructed to promote wrinkles and twisty silver hairs ideally with a dash,  or spring, of surrealist creativity,  then I’ll be swinging my funky-stuff with the melting clocks but not with the people who aspire to portray themselves as sexbots.

For now,  if I place myself in India’s analytical framework I find that I am:

• Preaching (turgid?) feminism.
• intelligent, a blue stocking.
• a frump because I don’t pride myself in being fashionable.
• Living in an ivory tower (in Reading). 
• not recognising the equivalence of the value of having a face-lift with the right to paid maternity leave.

At least India has clearly given me the escape route to achieve real-woman status that luckily I can choose not to aspire to,  I must

• maintain my already abundant confidence.
• promote my sexual potential. 
• develop and interest in whatever the current fashion defines as looking good.  
• have minor surgical procedures so that I can look good in a bikini. 
• Die my hair.

Unlike Alan’s outstanding advice I wont be aligning the value-set outlined in India’s article.

* the sound of me and my zimmer-frame colliding with the ground when dropping out of our Ivory tower.

Fifty-seventh in an unfeminised Wednesday series of posts ironing out the reasons for my singleness.

Reason #57: wrinklefest

YAY

It’s official,   I’m a wrinkly and proud of it.  Looks like I have what TV advertising calls ‘aging spots’  or are those subtle skin tones summer freckles?  I squidge my wrinkles at the organisations that attempt to sell anti-wrinkle cream and loudly chant

YAH-BOO TO YOU

My wrinkles are exuding rather-adorableness at twice the normal rate of a 43yr old to an audience that may not yet recognize their fundamental beauty.

forty-third post in a Wednesday series detailing the fluffy contributions to Wendy’s singleness.

Reason # 43:  natural fluffines

I was 17 when I realised that some adult females shave their legs. 

It was a hot summer day in the sixth form between classes.  A new girl in the school had almost transclucent skin and bleached hair cut to look like Kim Wilde whom she resembled.  Her legs were covered in  black stubble,  like George Michaels permanent 5 o’clock shadow.   The hair on my legs was more sparse than her stubble.  Being unshorn rather than root-stump,  my leg hair was soft in a downy fluff,   pleasant to touch.  My fluff gently faded in the summer sun.  My leg, armpit and head fluff coincidentally resembled that of another fabulous adult female,  Patti Smith.

I remember the moment clearly because I felt so stupid for not having known that this is expected in some constructions of feminity.  Maintianing an illusion of pre-pubescent, child,  hair levels.  I wonder if any USA post-pubescent females, other than Patti Smith, dare demonstrate this natural fluff in public.

bottles of food supplements, pills, with strange scientific sounding names,  to replace what?  Eating food with silly names like ‘potatoes’, ‘carrots’ and ‘oranges’ of course!  It’s much too complicated for me to work out what I am supposed to buy. 

I think I’ll stick to the ‘produce’.

but DON’T PANIC,

With this product I can actually rediscover the skin that I was born with, that should clear up the red sticky mess nicely.

Now I just need to get the required ‘natural sun kissed look’.  Maybe I could try going outside. 

What do you think? 

Moving south to sunnier climes is too expensive and dramatic as a solution.  The idea of finding someone called sunny to kiss me is an appealing challenge.   Choosing to be my natural, pasty-white, skin colour as oppose to artificially constructing an unnatural, natural, look is also an option.  The default option.  Too many decisions!

Help

Happiness and Sadness. 

Hand in Hand.

On my birthday mumzie’s eldest brother was found dead (heart attack) in his flat, several weeks after his death.  He had lived alone ever since leaving his parents home in his late teens.  Mumzie, his little sister, provided his family since grandma’s death (1980).  Every Christmas, Easter, Bank Holiday, long weekend, he would move in with us.  The old uncle chuckling in the corner,  entertaining himself or completing the cryptic crossword with Dad.  Liberal lashings of witty,  dry and sarcastic comments all round. Interspersed with simply snoozing in his chair. 

Death happens. 

Old people are particularly prone to Death. 

At the moment I’m angry becasue, for various unpublishable reasons, the best thing I can do to be supportive is nothing. 

I’m going to line the dining room chairs up in front of me,  like naughty school children,  and give them a STERN telling off for being dining room chairs.  Then I’m going to spank them with a fluffy pillow because I can’t imagine doing such a bizarre thing and remaining angry.