Friday, August 12, 2011

Molly

the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.


Ulysses by James Joyce- last chapter. Read yesterday in the train, with the sunset on my window. It's the end of a holiday. I'm happy :)

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

A good observation- and a few question for future research

Found at Sociological Images (specifically- here)
Finally, Cheryl S. noticed that J. Crew decided to market some of their boys’ clothing to girls. Rather than designating the clothes as unisex, or listing them as boys’ items in the boys’ section and girls’ items in the girls’ section, they instead created a section in the girls’ part of the website called Borrowed from My Brother:


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As Cheryl points out, there is no “borrowed from my sister” section for boys. We accept the idea of women wearing men’s clothing, even seeing it as potentially sexy, in a way that we don’t tolerate or condone men crossing gender lines to wear women’s items or take on other aspects of femininity. J. Crew simply applies this wider cultural acceptance of women taking on some aspects of masculinity (as long as they balance it with enough signs of femininity), which we see in the marketing of “boyfriend jeans” to women, and applies it to kids.


Interestingly, J. Crew are also the ones who featured in an add a boy with pink painted toenails:



Scandal ensued, with media comments outraged about how the ad is "“blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children.”- or about how it would make the child gay (no kidding!).

So, why is it that we as a culture are OK with girls wearing guys' clothes, yet we are terribly appalled by guys wearing girls' clothes? Gender-egalitarian masculists and feminists argue that the idea that it is "wrong" or "abnormal" for a guy to wear female clothing is detrimental to men, as it limits their choices, and to women as well, as it is based on the assumption that male-specific things are somehow "superior" to female-specific things, therefore a woman acting like a man is to be admired while a man acting like a woman is to be ridiculed.

I wonder how far can the comparison go between men in our days who are attracted to clothes/objects/activities/habits that are deemed specifically female by our society and women who were trying to take up more "manly" roles in the XIXth or early XXth century.

On the same note... I wonder why popular culture associates so strongly crossdressing with homosexuality, while actually the percent of gay crossdressers is not higher than the percent of gays in the population.