From a tender age, I learnt a huge tension existed between the pressure women and girls were under to attract and maintain male attention, through our appearance, and the shame that was attendant with any expressions of sexuality. This operated according to an essentially lose–lose dynamic, expressed between the perennial polarity of being labelled either ‘frigid’ or a ‘slut’.
Meanwhile you were supposed to be pretty and clever because popular girls were both, but you couldn’t be pretty and clever because everybody would hate you. So you had to be one or the other.
“Just by virtue of being a woman, you were in the wrong; however, you behaved, however you looked…”
All this, bearing in mind that if you were just pretty you ran the risk of being dismissed as a ‘fuckin bimbo’, but if you weren’t, you were an ‘ugly bitch’. And either way, you definitely couldn’t have ‘notions’ (of grandeur). With local flavours – girls and women all over the world are subject to these pressures; in this case ‘notions’ is an expression of deeply ingrained Irish regulatory measures, alongside these shifting beauty standards, to keep people – particularly women – ‘in their place’. But remember, you still had to attract male attention, cos you were hot, but hot without ‘notions’, of course.
Photography credit Stuart Simpson, make up Zoe Taylor
It makes my head spin just thinking about it. Nothing, you could do, seemingly, was right. Just by virtue of being a woman you were in the wrong, however you behaved, however you looked.
Ironically because it was itself entirely contradictory, there was no space to attend to the multiplicities, let alone the complexities or indeed contradictions, of being a human being.
We need to recognise that the attention focused on our bodies – particularly female bodies – is accompanied by a deeply entrenched contempt for them, and that this is the result of specific cultural, philosophical and religious legacies.
As well as a healthy dose of body hatred and misogyny, Western culture has in many ways been determined by a heavily visual paradigm, which has also helped to inform the shallowness of the beauty regime. In Western discourse there is a long tradition of imagining the body and the mind as inherently separate. Accordingly, the body is subservient to the mind. Disobedient bodies sense that there are healthier ways of relating to ourselves and are curious to explore them.
A disobedient body is one that understands the interrelatedness of the two, recognising the body is no less valuable, and viewing the person as a whole, rather than comprised of oppositional warring entities.
By becoming disobedient, my hope is that we can, against all the odds, take pleasure in the experience of our bodies, outside of the restrictions and demands of a system that insists we hate and punish ourselves.
Disobedient Bodies: Reclaim Your Unruly Beauty by Emma Dabiri is published on 5th October 2023 by Profile Books X Wellcome Collection, priced £7.99 in paperback original.