Women's misogyny

The spate of derogatory comments on Yasmina Rossi's hair and general appearance in the Daily Mail was particularly distasteful as it came from other women. At 57, Yasmina, one of the models in the M&S Autumn/Winter campaign has long, grey hair and a figure that shows that apart from being blessed with good genes, she also cares about her body. She is all natural, no cosmetic surgery anywhere. Her face is not full of botox, she has wrinkles and her hair is luxuriant. The women who left vicious comments were particularly offended by this and recommended colouring and a haircut "to look younger".

Yasmina has been an inspiration to me, I grew my hair long after seeing pictures of her mane. I too embrace grey as a colour and a choice. I am not saying that women who colour their hair are wrong, I am saying that not accepting grey is wrong.

But what is this misogyny displayed by women towards other women?

"I frequently see women react with thinly veiled jealousy when they see other women stepping up and claiming a level of entitlement they can only dream of. An entitlement they either don't know how to, or don't feel entitled to claim for themselves" says Rosjke Hasseldine. This is echoed by Vivian Diller, who observes that "We seem so ready to judge the choices our fellow sisters make, from how we handle our relationships, children and careers, to how we deal with our aging appearance. Remember when we used to question, "Does She or Doesn't She?" Now we wonder, "Has She or Hasn't She?" You would think we would tire of all the scrutiny, maybe even try to stop it, rather than continue the cycle. I plead guilty at times, too"

So do I. I remember being at a lecture given by a woman, which I recently attended. The paper she read was beautifully written and very evocative, yet I could not help being distracted by my own mental notes on her outfit, her youthfulness, the fact she was wearing  red nail varnish and punctuated almost every sentence she read with a flourish of her hands, her  hair neatly blow dried and jet black in colour. Rather than focusing exclusively on her paper, I could not help taking in her appearance and implicitly comparing myself to her. I was suddenly aware that my outfit was not as stylish, I was not wearing nail varnish and I had not just stepped out of a salon. And as I became conscious of these shortcomings  of mine I hated her for being a step ahead of me. And I caught myself out attempting to find faults with her. 

Women internalize the dominant mode of gazing at women's bodies.

"Remember", says Vivian "by comparing, competing and then devaluing others in order to boost our own shaky sense of self, we join forces with the very culture that has created the need to do just that!"

I cannot help thinking here of French psychoanalyst and thinker Luce Irigaray who argued, in her (in)famous Speculum of the Other woman, a controversial book that cost her the expulsion from the University of Vincennes and the Ecole Freudienne de Paris, that women are the other, and only men are subjects. In Speculum, Irigaray uncovers a female subject position and discusses
the predominance of envy in women's mental life, an envy that sustains the cult of "the fetish prototype". She uses the image of the speculum, a curved mirror reflecting back on itself, to claim the position of the feminine, through "mimesis", a process of "resubmitting women to stereotypical views of women in order to call the views themselves into question".



Worth reflecting upon...






(Photos by Stuart Hendry and Antony Crossfield modelled by Alex B)