Pursuing something I have long been interested in, I went to observe a belly dance class at a studio near my work. I wanted to see if I liked the way the teacher moved, and how she interacted with the students. The class assembled, some in standard dance practice attire and others with bejeweled skirts and extravagantly long hair. Women from the advanced class were already warming up, an hour early, lazily rolling on the floor with swords balanced on their heads.
The music was mostly what I had expected, Arabic pop music of the kind that is often played at my ex-boyfriend’s coffee shop. The teacher started to move, showing how to isolate muscles in the back to move the chest forward and out without a corresponding jerk of the shoulders. She demonstrated very exaggerated hand gestures followed by a more liquid motion of the same kind. It was beautiful, and the exaggeration made some of the surreal fluidity I associate with belly dance a little more understandable. Isolating each joint and then moving them, the teacher transformed what seemed a simple set of gestures into a boneless wave.
This is a dance you can’t watch without thinking about sex, even if it isn’t in a pornographic way. The gestures and movements are so profoundly, archetypically female.
Sometime toward the end of the class, the teacher was demonstrating a hip drop, one of the fundamental movements in belly dance. Locking her eyes on the mirror she advanced slowly, the whole class following behind her, torso and hips undulating and head and shoulders strangely still, the fixed eyes hypnotic.
And I don’t know what it was, the music or that crowd of stares, the confidence and unabashed sexiness of what those women were doing, but I began to feel rage. Female power is so often achieved through men. Where they have been the actors in history, we were reduced to these bodies, objects of desire, the rocks they wreck themselves on. Watching those women I wanted that power for myself, wanted to be Helen of Troy, to have beauty that is terrifying. And at the same time, I felt ashamed by the smallness of that desire.
As Mary Wollstonecraft said: Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
1 comment:
rebuttal from dave, via e-mail:
Several assumptions propel the logic of this post, which on further examination might lead to a different conclusion than posted.
Most immediately, the post postulates that sexiness is a tool disempowered females use to balance power with culturally dominant males. But sexiness is not limited as a power balancer between females and males alone; it also extends within genders, too. Dominant females and males within their gender peer groups tend also to be sexually powerful. Lyndon Johnson boasted about this size of penis and uttered this great quote: "I never trust a man unless I got his pecker in my pocket." If manifestations of domination by sexy females among their gender peers is less gratuitous, it still exists. Of course, there’s the question of cause or correlation – do dominant members of gender peer groups become dominant because they’re sexy, or are they considered sexy because they’re dominant? I would bet both, especially because there’s no perfect correlation between sexiness and power. But the salient point is that sexiness as a power tool is not limited in the direction of from females to males.
Going deeper, the post seems to intimate that males don’t make similar efforts at cultivating sexiness. But in any given gym, consider how many men are there for the sheer, unadulterated cardiovascular joy of it all. Not many. They’re there to beef up their secondary sexual attributes – in order to be better able to attract mates. In other words, deliberate cultivation of sexiness is not limited to women. Men do it, too – and once everybody does it, its cultivation can’t be a tool limited to the disempowered.
Finally, what about the positive aspects of sexiness? The fact that power in general is associated with sexual charisma is disillusioning. But sex is a universal human condition nonetheless and often a force for good. Separate out academic theories of sexuality from the act, and what are we left with, except that we all want it, think about it, fantasize about it, and do it. It is capable of creating much pleasure; why not extol sexiness as a human good? What’s wrong with cultivating sexiness? Keep in mind that sexuality is an aspect of humanity, not an all encompassing thing. Reduction of human beings to nothing but sexual objects is, I agree, wrong. But the prescription is to keep sexiness as part of a well-balanced personality. The only other possibility is Taliban-like repression, and neither men nor women benefit from that.
“People forget the brain is the biggest sex organ.” – Jackie Treehorn (The Big Lebowski)
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