‘I like your shoes!’ she said. ‘They have red bits at the back!’

‘Thanks,’ I said, beating a swift retreat before she noticed that the ‘red bits’ were in fact open wounds filled with my encrusted blood, patching the backs of my ankles like some kind of visceral rash.

I should have said ‘They’re Christian Louboutin’.

Christian Louboutin's 'Ballerina' slippers, with an 8-inch heel

Vertigo

The shoe designer beloved by female celebrities everywhere (Jennifer Lopez has a whole song about them) is so proud of his trademark ‘red sole’ that he recently took erstwhile collaborator Yves Saint-Laurent to court over red sole copyright infringement. He’s also currently the subject of a career retrospective at London’s Design Museum.

He’s notorious for being one of the first designers to insist, in the early 90s, on a heel that truly towers – his shoes average at about 4 1/2 inches; the highest peak at dizzying 6 (‘but mostly only dancers can wear them‘) and if you’re looking for someone to blame when you survey the heights on the high-street and sigh, you could be more unjust than to point your finger at this foot-obsessed Frenchman.

As a teenager, Louboutin’s eye was caught by a ‘No Stilettos’ sign at the Museum of Oceanic Art, Paris: ‘I wanted to defy that,’ he said. ‘I wanted to create something that broke rules and made women feel confident and empowered.’ He’s stuck to this original image for most of his career: there are very few wedges or block heels in his collections; instead, his heels are thin, vertiginously high and splattered with those red soles.

Earthbound

Where such heights can lead is well illustrated by the fate that meets Little Women‘s sixteen-year-old Meg, who wears high heels to a ball – ‘The stupid high heel turned… It aches so, I can hardly stand, and I don’t know how I’m ever going to get home’.

The sign Louboutin recalls inspiring him as a child

Yet this is the sort of height we’re talking about, for the 1860s. Poor Meg was rather dowdily earth-bound compared to Louboutin’s fantastical ‘ballerina’, whose eight-inch high ‘slippers’ are displayed above left. ‘Isn’t the classical dancing ballet slipper the ultimate heel? The heel which makes dancers closer than any other women to the sky, closer to heaven..’ waves Louboutin, airily, in explanation.

Elevation

He’s predictably fascinated with elevation – the exhibition is full of ‘pedestals’ and ‘birds’. But he’s gone a lot further than previous designers: Meg may have been dowdy in comparison, but even the flappers of the Twenties had modest block heels, and the Fifties heel looks almost mumsy nowadays.

One of the pairs exhibited here is accompanied by an apologia from Louboutin, thus: ‘This shoe is not suitable for walking in. You can only walk from the taxi to the nightclub, and back, on the arm of a man’. When asked about the point that women can’t run in his heels, intended for his ‘confident and empowered’ working women (apparently) Louboutin was incredulous: ‘Who runs at work?‘.

Yet he’s also fascinated by showgirls and ‘classic’ vintage-style women (such as his great admirer, Dita Von Teese, who makes a holographic appearance in this exhibition morphing into a Louboutin pump, in a rather literal appropriation of the fetish we’ll come to presently). Such women, he says, can dance and gyrate for hours at a stretch from atop dizzying heels – Louboutin learned all about this during an early career stint at the Folies Bergere, where showgirls used to put cuts of bloodless meat inside their heels to make them more comfortable.

Perhaps this is echoed in the sexualised red Louboutin sole (originally hastily-applied Chanel nail varnish) – a flash of red as easily representing the raw and bloodied foot itself as the raw and (un)bridled sexuality of the wearer.

Venus in Furs

Helmut Newton's Self Portrait With Wife and Models

‘A good shoe is one that doesn’t dress you but undresses you’, Christian reckons – a statement with which Helmut Newton (left) would undoubtedly have agreed. The short David Lynch / Louboutin collaboration film Fetish (2007), extracts from which are on display here, shows sequences of otherwise naked women wearing a series of ‘unwearable’ Louboutin shoes – following Louboutin’s conviction that the part of the female body most naturally fetishised is (you guessed it) the foot.

He’s even got a mini foot anatomy: one of the pumps on display here has a very low vamp, which was initially unpopular. ‘Then I realised, it’s because of the slit‘, he recalls – an unfortunate word, given that he means ‘toe cleavage’. Too much ‘slit’ apparently makes women feel ‘dirty’, but Louboutin’s well into it, although the instep is his favourite part of the foot, perhaps because of his famous belief that the appeal of the high heel is its approximation of the shape a woman’s foot assumes during orgasm.

The fetish

Of course, Sigmund Freud uses the shoe and foot as an illustration for his writings on the fetish – the mother’s shoe, says Sigmund, represents the penis the child originally assumed she has, and to fixate on it assuages castration anxiety. But symbolic castration via the foot pops up in Louboutin’s favourite fairy tale (whose centrepiece shoes he’s working on for an upcoming film):

‘[The eldest step-sister] could not get her big toe into it, and the shoe was too small for her. Then her mother gave her a knife and said: “Cut the toe off; when you are Queen you will have no more need to go on foot.”

The maiden cut the toe off, forced the foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the King’s son […] He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe, and how it had stained her white stocking quite red.’

– Cinderella, The Brothers Grimm

The mad but occasionally insightful Bruno Bettleheim sees the stepsisters here attempting to make their big feet more dainty, ‘and therefore prove their femininity’ through a symbolic castration (with a literal twist in stage versions, where they are usually in drag). The problem of the shoe being too dainty is one surprisingly near to Louboutin’s methods: although the average female foot size is a 5, he designs and constructs his shoes in size 4 ‘because I prefer to work on a small thing’.

‘He understands women and makes them feel like Cinderellas’ purrs Diane von Furstenberg on the designer. Indeed, it feels appropriate that stilettos, whose c20th renaissance is credited primarily to the 1950s couturier Roger Vivier (for Dior) owe their name to the Italian ‘dagger’ (hence their unpopularity with parquet flooring).

Domination

For me, the images in Fetish of these women crawling and sidling about in painfully unwearable shoes sums up this retrospective rather well: a fascination with immobility, and a craving for Fabulous Female Domination that suggests more power than it would actually have were it being negotiated from atop a pair of Louboutin pigalles.

But you look like you could walk down the treacherously lumpy terrain of my naked back, make me lick your Louboutin boots…

‘I declare, it really seems like being a fine young lady, to come home from the party in a carriage, and sit in my dressing-gown with a maid to wait on me,’ said Meg, as Jo bound up her foot with arnica.

– Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

• Christian Louboutin, Retrospective at The Design Museum, London SE1. Until 9 July 2012.
]]> /2012/06/13/when-you-are-queen-christian-louboutin-at-the-design-museum/feed/ 0 11145 /2012/03/21/fairytale-princes-discover-the-cinderella-life/ /2012/03/21/fairytale-princes-discover-the-cinderella-life/#comments Wed, 21 Mar 2012 13:26:55 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=10372 I was very excited to hear of the five hundred ‘new’ German fairytales from the 1800s which had been found in an archive in Regensburg. Team BadRep love this stuff – we’ve previously had a Fairy Tale Fest series of posts on how awesome folk tales can be through a feminist lens.

New sources are always interesting, because they show just how different some of the versions were back then. This article in the New Yorker gives some examples:

Schönwerth’s Cinderella is a woodcutter’s daughter who uses golden slippers to recover her beloved from beyond the moon and the sun. His miller’s daughter wields an ax and uses it to disenchant a prince by chopping off the tail of a gigantic black cat.

Even better, that linked article suggests the collection might go farther than just focussing on princesses:

Just as girls became domestic drudges and suffered under the curse of evil mothers and stepmothers, boys, too, served out terms as gardeners and servants, sometimes banished into the woods by hostile fathers. Like Snow White, they had to plead with a hunter for their lives. And they are as good as they are beautiful – Schönwerth uses the German term “schön,” or beautiful, for both male and female protagonists.

We commented previously on how fairy tales were often warnings to young women that they should be passive and dutiful. In a society where girls had the power to cause chaos if they ever stepped outside the extreme social restrictions, families wanted children to see these dangers on a mythic level. We still do it – even in Star Wars, those who seek personal power are bad and will fall to evil. (It has also been pointed out that Governments, the Church and other authorities all promoted this mindset throughout history, and that it’s an incredibly good form of population control. The idea that niceness and power are incompatible has been socially useful, but remains untrue at least on a small scale.) Star Wars champions those rebels who seek agency for themselves against a dark Authority, but many of its other messages would fit right in with the warnings in folk tales.

While the GOOD = PHYSICALLY BEAUTIFUL trope is still ironclad across most tales, it looks as though this latest find of stories will show the rules about behaviour and the tales of young people needing rescue being applied to men just as much as women, which could be VERY badass.

One hundred of the new stories were published in German in 2010, but there’s no news on when any will be translated into English. We’ll keep an eye on this, and keep the good readers of BadRep updated! (If there’s a version where a princess kills a dragon with a sword, radio stations scanning the outer galaxy will be confused by how loud my cheering must have been to have reached them).

And if you think that we’re hoping for too much, that the tales might not be that different from the sanitised Victorian versions, read that first quote again. Cinderella – in so many versions a figure so passive that she doesn’t announce herself even when the Prince enters her house, right up to when he puts the slipper on her foot – is here the heroine who uses magic items and travels impossibly far, taking action to rescue her beloved.

Imagine if Disney had sold us that version in 1950.

]]> /2012/03/21/fairytale-princes-discover-the-cinderella-life/feed/ 1 10372 /2011/05/04/fairy-tale-fest-fairy-tales-in-context/ /2011/05/04/fairy-tale-fest-fairy-tales-in-context/#comments Wed, 04 May 2011 07:05:39 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=5214 Okay, it’s probably not a hugely shocking revelation to point out that stories are influenced by the social conditions surrounding their writing. As a general principle this is pretty obvious. However, more specific examples and details may be slightly less obvious, so what we’re going to do here is take a look at the differences in the role of female characters between 15th and 16th century fairy tales, and the changes in society at the same time. Hopefully this will be both interesting and illustrative.

Begin the Béguinage

In the late middle ages (and please note that I am by no means suggesting the late middle ages were a good time to be in, I’m just covering some things that would become unavailable in later centuries) there were several avenues by which a woman might live independently. Béguinages offered something akin to the male guild systems, a community by which women might live collectively and pursue a trade, functioning much like convents but without the whole “retiring from the world to pursue a life of spirituality” element.

Many small industries were dominated by female crafters at the time, particularly the production of votive candles, and the brewing of beer (which, prior to increases in production scales in the 1500s was mostly a home industry).

Lastly, at the opposite end of the scale to the beguinages, there was the sex industry. (This is not to suggest that independent woman meant prostitute in the late middle ages, as some people often imply. See above for counter-examples.) Disclaimers aside, municipally sanctioned prostitution was both common and acceptable in the latter part of the 15th century, and provided one route to an independent life.

…the courtesan was not a phenomenon on the margin of society, but one of its essential components… and constituted an important stage in the diversification of social roles and of labour.

-Achillo Olivieri, Eroticism and Social Groups in Sixteenth-Century Venice

By the mid-16th century, much of this had changed. Economic conditions had all but eradicated the béguinage; the production of goods had switched to a male-dominated large scale industry; the rise of Protestantism had seen the closure of many convents; and socially acceptable sex-work was done away with by changing religious mores and the increasing prevalence of syphilis (the “French evil”) and other STDs as public health threats from 1493 onwards. The Renaissance may have improved overall quality of life, but in many ways it proved a step backwards for the opportunities of Western European women.

Meanwhile, in the world of fiction…

So, that’s how society changed; what do we see happening in fiction over the same time period? In pre-16th century work we find heroines taking on roles the Grimms would later depict as “bad for a girl but bold for a boy”. We see, in an early Catalan variant of The Waters of Life, an adventurous princess succeeding where here brothers have failed, winning out through bravery and compassion to restore her home. In the fabliaux of France and Italy we see female characters taking the lead in stories that range from the bawdy to the obscene, which reflect the assumption that of course women will sometimes take the initiative.
Even moving away from the fantastic and magical tales we find similar characterisations in more serious works such as that of Madonna Lisetta in Boccaccio’s Decameron.

By the mid-16th century the characters were beginning to take the forms that would be most recognisable to most modern readers. Here we see the shift from the active, protagonistic female character to the passive, receptive object to whom fairy tales happen.

Straparola’s magic tales, dating to 1553, deliver a mixed message on sex and gender. The older tales in the collection stay fairly true to their roots, but the newer ones show female characters who must fear men, who must fear the consequences of associating with them. No longer do they take the lead, instead they are there to be won, as with the story of three brothers who rescue a princess and fall to arguing over who should wed her. She doesn’t get a say in the matter.

If Straparola’s collection shows the transition, Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone (1636) gives us the conclusion. By this point all the stories reflect the new order of things. Female characters are there now almost entirely to receive the actions of the male leads, without much choice in things themselves. A large portion of Basile’s tales revolve around unwanted and involuntary pregnancies. This tone continues all the way through to at least the early 19th century, and provides the link to the next point of this post.

And now, speculation!

Right, this next bit is somewhat more speculative: There is some research suggesting that up until around the start of the 16th century women had a good deal of control over their fertility (check the further reading section at the end here for more details). Between 1500 and 1700 this ability substantially declined, leaving women far more susceptible to the consequences of sex. We can suggest a few reasons for this decline: Firstly, there was the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum in 1487, which branded midwifes who provided abortifacients as witches, and lead to witch-hunt panics through Western Europe. At the same time there was the rising tension caused by the Protestant Reformation, which saw increased conflict between Reformers and Counter-Reformers, and lead to both the Protestant and Catholic churches being increasingly zealous in order to demonstrate their own faithfulness.

There are arguments (see particularly Ruth Bottigheimer’s essay Fertility Control and the Modern European Fairy-Tale Heroine available in this anthology) that the change in the role of the fictional woman and the change in real life control over fertility are utterly bound together. The real dangers of sex became the over-arching dangers of the fairy-tale plot, the imprisonment in towers, the kidnappings, captivity, and general disempowerment. Thus the tales of the Grimms, in which “men act, women are acted upon.”

…old concepts took on a new force and came to dominate… Women in tale collections no longer survived by their wits… Instead, their bodies became vehicles of “honour” and “dishonour”.
– Ruth Bottigheimer

So yes, the overall point here is that considering the representations of gender in fairy tales is not quite so simple as just going “Cor, Disney/Grimm/Perrault were a bit crap at gender, eh?” There are myriad other factors that go into the formation of a story, as hopefully this (incredibly brief) overview of some has demonstrated.

Other stuff on vaguely related notes that’s worth reading:

• John Riddle’s Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West
• Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale
• Patricia Hannon’s Fabulous Identities: Women’s Fairytales in Seventeenth Century France
]]> /2011/05/04/fairy-tale-fest-fairy-tales-in-context/feed/ 2 5214 /2011/05/03/fairy-tale-fest-is-it-really-disneys-fault/ /2011/05/03/fairy-tale-fest-is-it-really-disneys-fault/#comments Tue, 03 May 2011 08:00:49 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=4223 Disney princesses have a BadRep with feminists, and let’s face it, it’s easy to see why. Even the recent ones have waists which are about as thick as their wrists, and the individual life lessons from each could be perceived as so warped as to have become an internet meme.

But is this really a case of “Disney-fication”, with the studio taking fairy tales and imposing ruthless mainstream norms on them? There is a huge body of work which looks at folk stories from a feminist perspective, and I’m not so qualified to talk about that. What I do find interesting is how incredibly polarised much of the source material was in the first place.



Witches: warts, not waifs. (Source: Wikipedia.)

In the European fairy tales which made it big in England and the US (mostly Grimm and some French romances), good people are Beautiful and bad people are Ugly. This is true whether you’re a stepsister, a witch or an ogre; physical ugliness goes along with agressive or dangerous behaviour every time. Good = Beautiful, and this is not negotiable. (Try the reverse: try finding anyone ugly who you’re meant to cheer for. You’ve got maybe a 1% chance. Less if they’re female.)

It gets better though, because that “bad” behaviour is very specific: it is always an act against the interests of the Heroine or Hero. Being a female magic-user doesn’t make you a witch; you could be a fairy godmother. No-one asks the Godmothers what they spend the rest of their time doing, they are entirely defined by whether they bless or curse the Heroine. In some tales, it’s only because one out of thirteen of them is not given an invitation that she decides to curse the child – would the others have acted similarly if it had been one or more of them instead? We don’t know. But once the curse is given, that Godmother is fair game for a horrible death and probably had a secret hooked nose all along. The Disney versions of Fairy Godmothers may be tittering clouds of pink benevolence, but they aren’t often described as “kind” in the tales – they are only judged as “Good” or “Bad” by whether they’re currently on our side or not.

It’s also problematical if we use behaviour to judge who the “good girl” is. The modern versions of Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are all very similar: beautiful, virtuous daughters who get into trouble and need rescuing. It might be a fall into poverty, or danger from an outsider (new stepmother, hot men a wolf) but there’s one critical element to being the Good girl and that is passivity. Red Riding Hood doesn’t kill the wolf. Cinderella runs away and is found (hunted down door-to-door, really) by the Prince, without announcing herself even up to the moment that the shoe goes on. He and her fairy Godmother are the ones taking all the action to save her. Snow White / Sleeping Beauty are unconscious/dead.

We already saw in Markgraf’s movie review of Red Riding Hood that a young woman choosing the wrong man could derail society’s plans (in a time when arranged marriages to a virgin were crucial). All these messages are saying that you need to be compliant, dutiful and passive. If you are a woman who is aggressive, demanding, loud, insists on her own needs or has control over her life, chances are you’re a wicked stepmother and only a few days away from the awesome kind of ending Disney oddly decided to leave out:

“That she should be thrown into a cask stuck around with sharp nails, and that two white horses should be put to it, and should drag it from street to street till she is dead.”
The Goose Girl – Brothers Grimm

The destiny of the Hero is often no less automatic. He is invariably given a beautiful Princess as a prize, to be his wife. Winning her hand is sometimes the only reason he takes on the quest in the first place. The task is often set by her father, who expects the Hero to be killed instead of succeeding, and at no time does the woman have any say in this arrangement.

So given the source material for the stories which Disney decided to take on, if they remained roughly true to the spirit of the tale, is it really fair to bash Disney as much as we do?

Oh hell yes.

First of all, they have a choice on which ones to produce. Chrissy Derbyshire in her essay “Toads and Diamonds” for the anthology “Vs” (which looks at Duality in magic, mythology and religion) points out that there are tales where the magic is entirely neutral, such as a Genie granting wishes. If the person making the wish is bad, sucks to be them. If they are altruistic and peaceful, they’ll probably be okay. There are plenty of tales Disney could have gone with which say “a person’s actions define them”, not “poverty and an evil stepmother can only be solved by marrying the right guy”.

Now okay, not all of the stories which deviate from the “good gets rewarded” trope would make great movies. I think it’s a Brothers Grimm tale which reads roughly (and I am not making this up) “Little Erik was a good boy and never did anything wrong, but one he died anyway because that’s just how it goes sometimes.” I can see how choosing your targets for conversion to animation is a valid excuse.

Even within that though, there’s still the question of the famous Disney poetic licence. They have a history of sanitising and whitewashing these stories for maximum profit, and it’s very rarely to inject any feminist ideas. Sure, in the 90s the women such as Belle in Beauty and the Beast became Independent and Argumentative… but only in strictly approved mainstream ways, to entirely fit the current belief of what would be PC. There are no lesbians in Disney, no women who don’t want a lifelong relationship by the end. It may be that the Victorians had already santised the tales by the time Disney picked them up, but that only works as an excuse for so long.

Okay, Sleeping Beauty physically can’t save herself – there’s no way Disney could have got around that – but even when they try to be PC in recent efforts it is only ever in a way which won’t scandalise the lowest common denominator of American audiences. The source material may praise beauty, passivity and rescuing, but Disney have never hesitated to edit other aspects of the stories to something more palatable. Even in recent times when the female characters actually have, well, character, the one aspect which apparently mustn’t change is the straining of credibility that their tiny bodies wouldn’t collapse under the weight of their own organs. (Check the link in the first paragraph. Look at Jasmine’s waist and wrists. Or Ariel’s. Sleeping Beauty is presumably wearing a corset, but I’m not sure if that’s an improvement when you’re marketing at six year-olds.)

Now, I’m a guy who hasn’t seen many of the Disney Princess movies more than a dimly-remembered once, I haven’t read the reconstructed feminist versions of fairy tales, and my love of Angela Carter aside I’m much less qualified to write about this stuff than… well, most of the rest of Team BadRep.

So we’re going to town on this one. Oh yes.

All this week we’re having a Feminist Fairytale Fest here at BadRep. We’ll be looking at the incredibly brutal original versions which became censored, at modern reworkings, and at comment from feminists on how to find amazing nuggets of self-agency and adventuring by women in well-known classics!

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