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Women make better friends, they said
Nails bite like incisors into soft, warm flesh
Women are fluid
Then I took
A man with big hands and enormous feet
Whose hair tickles parts of me
About which my Mother didn’t tell
Fingers that sing tricky tunes of love
The bee’s sting of desire
I know women
But I love a man
I am not a traitor to my sisters’ cause
Punching my fist in the face of ideological rejection
I am the projection of
Purity
Love
Truth
Merely human
Louise M. Hart
Every time I open my mouth
You rip out my womb a little further
I become as barren
As a November Sunday afternoon
My words severed
By your blade of silence
Your gaze reduces woman
To form of a symbol
Like a child bride
Groomed to perform
Acts against her nature
Or a virgin suicide
Wrought
By the penetrating power
Of men’s inequitable ideology
Tied to our conjugal bed
Your fist of masculinity
P
L
U
N
G
E
S
Into the clenched behind
Of my heart unbound
But, no one hears my cries
For my mouth is gagged
And my tears are invisible
To all other empirical, “I’s”
Thus, I bleed for womankind
For Magdalene, Christ’s castigated lover
For Malala
Awarded a prize
For surviving
Her own attempted homicide
-A trophy voice
Which, of course
She possessed, anyway
I bleed and plead
But no one sees or hears me
For like a maiden aunt
I have been castrated by mankind
Left to rot on the shelf
With the other unconsumed
Unconsummated perishables
Past my sell by date
Putrefying with middle-age
And disconnected femininity
I am Van Gogh’s emasculated ear
Severed to diminish feeling I died before I became real
Comprised of stories no one wants to hear
And rendered out of print, like an old fashioned picture book
Disproportionate in words and imagery
When I speak, the herd turns its heedless back
I blame them not, for my voice sounds sweeter when gagged
By those who hear only sounds
Transcribed by waves that are fluid, loud and clear
Shedding emotions, like translucent onion peel
I try to moo aloud
But no one answers back
Thus, as I sit alone in a crowd of crushing pain and fear
I raise my hands to my head
But find that it has disappeared
This poem was inspired by circumstances I experienced only yesterday. I joined a writers group because I wanted to improve my writing. But, when I sat passively listening to the group’s critique of one of my poems, I realised that I perceived my writing as not a projection of my consciousness, but as myself in a textual form. Thus, whilst I fully accepted, even welcomed, feedback about my use of language and how engaging they found the poem, I felt crushed when the critique disintegrated into an attack on the ideology and thought processes behind the poem. In a sudden revelatory flash, I realised that it matters not whether my writing is, “good” or, “bad.” I write for myself and if other people like it, I am blessed. To what extent the critique constituted a personal attack on me, I do not know. But, it saddens me to think a group formed to encourage people to write, should conduct itself in such a manner. If this situation had happened to some one else, I would have felt the same. I shall not go back to the group, but I shall always write.
Through my ups and downs, the highs and lows, many people have come and gone from my life. However, 20 years ago, my feet befriended a pair of Dr Marten boots and thenceforth, I rarely wore shoes, again. Thus, in tribute to the noblest of boots, I present my lament to Dr Marten and the issue of the loins of his creative mind.
A symbol of rebellion, since the 1960’s 3 generations of women have worn Dr Marten boots, with confidence and pride. A statement fashion, Dr Marten’s cross the boundary between functionality and style, and the women who wear them speak with their feet, the squeak of leather enunciating a desire for autonomy from the ideological hold of the masses.
Doc Marten boots have always been synonymous with countercultural identity. Originally, worn by working men, subsequently skinheads (pre-National Front allegiance) adopted them; their dress code reinforced their outsider status and estrangement from bourgeois culture. Thenceforward, representatives of most of the significant movements in popular culture, also, wore them, often as signifiers of their associated music taste. Although their popularity has fluctuated over the years, like a true classic Dr Marten boots have never become completely outdated, and to this day sooth the feet of millions who wear them.
In 2013, fashion designers may have once again appropriated notions of androgyny in their collections, however, wider society is yet to catch on. Men and women are still expected to dress according to rigid ideas about gender. The symbolic power of the woman wearing D.M boots reveals the primacy of the concept of an essential self. Posited against individuality is homogeny, the women who battle pain caused by their six-inch heels and the men who design them to fulfil sexual fantasies. Ultimately, however, individuality means being true to oneself, six-inch heels possess a language of their own. Maybe we should listen more carefully to the women inside the footwear.
My recent preoccupation with thoughts of how I have wasted the last 20 years of my life, has led me to consider the plight of those who have been unable to pull themselves out of the abyss of despair. Like approximately 1 in 4 people, I am affected by mental health issues. I would argue that principally I am not a survivor of illness but a mental health system which, from its inception, has consciously appropriated and promoted misogynistic ideas and practices. Whilst men are equally oppressed by the tools pf psychiatry, differential narratives about sex and gender have determined differences in the nature and outcome of the treatment of women and men psychiatric patients.
Any discussion about women and mental health should be framed in a historical context. The concept of “mental illness” is the historically specific conceptualization of the notion formerly known as madness; lack of reason is re-defined by science. Men prescribe, whilst women eat the pills of their labour.
Hippocrates, the Father of medicine, first associated the notion of hysteria with female psychology. Women were perceived in relation to our biology, we were beyond the pale and out of our minds. Ironically, the first practitioner to extend the definition of hysteria into the male domain, was Freud. The founder of psychoanalysis who, correlated female hysteria with sexual dysfunction, also differentiated between neurotic and psychotic disorders, establishing the prototype for the contemporary diagnostic model of mental ill health. Whilst history indicates that features of psychotic illness have always existed, the nature of neuroses has changed in relation to socio-historic and cultural changes.
In 2013, studies in Britain and America indicate that mental health issues are more prevalent among women than men. Do wombs dictate moods? Is anxiety the product of menstruation? Why, if this is the case, do cross-cultural studies reveal that there are many societies in which mental health conditions, like anxiety and anxiety, affecting so many in western capitalist society are virtually non-existent.
I would argue that, although gender roles and expectations may nowadays appear more fluid, the contradictions and complexities of life in the western world have complicated both our social roles and the way in which we perceive ourselves. Anxiety is a reaction to life in the 21st century, the metamorphosis of hysteria and counter-point to self actualization. Thus, it is fear, that gnawing worm in the mind, that impedes our will to become. Realizing that we all have the ability to re-define, not only our own reality, but the entire social realm is the first step to recovery. No one is mere body, we are possessed of the consciousness to discover and appropriate our own hidden power.
In the year 2013, a hundred years after her birth, Virginia Woolf remains one of the most misunderstood and influential writers in the British canonical tradition. Generations have deconstructed her essays and novels, in an attempt to better understand her feminist aesthetics and many have questioned the ambiguity of the ideology encoded in her work.
For me, her feminist credentials are not explicit in her texts, but are affirmed in the recorded details of her life. Her involvement in the suffrage movement, estrangement from the traditional heterosexual archetype and frequent retreats into mental distress, highlight her rejection of patriarchal authority. One could argue, however, that more interesting than her endorsement of feminist ideas is an exploration of the extent to which her feminism was a conscious political decision to challenge the prevailing social (patriarchal) order. Was her feminism really given to textual primacy of her aestheticism? Arguably, it is the aesthetics of her texts which live on, but Woolf’s feminism which makes her seem more real.
Right now, at this moment when life seems too short for prostration, I do not feel happy. I am not ill or depressed, I have merely looked into my soul and perceived a gapping hole of unrest. My mind is uneasy with thoughts of failure and the ridiculousness of my vanity. As I write my blog, a platform for self-expression transforms into a confessional-an occasional table at which we all have sat. I ask myself, if we do this is in pursuit of redemption or merely as a cover for the desire for affirmation. For, I self-affirm daily and subsequently tear myself to pieces, like a piece of paper on which I have written a poem of bathos with allusions to my own feelings of distress.
Why do I blog? Because I was advised to. In these days when social networking is essential for all struggling writers I have entered the twenty-first century and, strangely, it feels good. However, goodness, lies in the hands of derision and darkness is forever near. Where there is good, bad threatens to invade. Thus, I have entered the blogging realm and uncovered an ego so fragile that it breaks in the wake of potential rejection. Does that render me any different from others? No. I am woman, if you do not like me, it is okay-I am not about to change.
