Here I am, paying my bills again, in a restaurant. I do this every month. People are talking about their vacations in Malaga and Berlin, and I am staring down the barrel of my electric bill. It’s an interesting contrast. I’m wearing a $65 shirt, but it’s 11 years old: something I wouldn’t know without the Facebook-memories photo that popped up yesterday and there I was, wearing it.
In France, the story goes, women spend big money on two or three classic pieces of clothing that will last them 30 years, and then just buy around those things: new scarves, new sweater sets, whatever. A different shade of lipstick. I love the legends about French women. We American females are not exactly “the great unwashed,” but certainly uncouth, country bumpkins, bulls in the proverbial china shop. We’re clumping around in waist-high cotton underpants while they slide their cashmere trousers up over tidy derrières draped in silk.
This, as so much of common life, is fiction. But it both captures and perpetuates something ephemeral. A cliché comparing two cultures, and at the same time dismissing them both. American women, as if so many people could be grouped as one, are practical and unsexy. French women, a smaller group but equally uncontainable, are sexy, sophisticated, and mysterious. Not only is their underwear beautiful, they also know how to tie scarves in intricate unAmerican ways. And once they buy a skirt, they still fit into it 30 years later.
None of this references nuclear physics or national politics, you may have noticed. It’s true that women keep some of these myths going, but you can see the original idea is sexually based and since the lesbian influence on mass culture hasn’t reached critical mass yet, comes from men.
As many of us know from having children, or dogs, or being an older sibling, an effective way to get what you want is to distract the other party, the less powerful one. And a simple way to do that is to pit the less powerful against each other, instead of letting them vie with you directly, or — heaven forbid — work together to gang up on you. Women focused on competing with each other — for affection or sex or tenure, all of which equal survival — are going to have very little time to examine what to do about a massive system designed to keep them from self-determining issues like equal pay and reproductive choice.
I think about this when I watch the Oscars or open a magazine reeking of Chanel #5. The money involved in promoting adornment and allure is astonishing. You can argue about the value of art and how fashion and design — even advertising design — are included in that pantheon of human expression. But c’mon… marketing has taken over large parts of the world, and its purpose — besides making more and more money — is distraction and subjugation of everyone not in the power club. Via French lingerie if not the electric bill.
If I were from Arcturus, looking down on this vast social machine from my spaceship, I’d be deeply impressed at how well it works. But from this café table in Northern California, I’m torn between fury and despair.
About Molly Fisk: Poet, radio commentator, life coach, writing teacher, painter of barns and mason jars full of water, mentor, speaker, feminist with a capital F, political activist, sister, aunt, cousin, godmother, honorary grandparent, not-very-old elder, swimmer, former banker, one-time sweater designer, long-walk taker, rearranger of furniture, color maven, nature lover. The best way to support a writer is to buy her books. You can also support her by becoming a patron of the arts through the grassroots economic model for artists at Patreon. If you prefer one-time donations rather than systems, go here. And thank you!