Is ‘Chick’ Chic or Retrograde?

In the Swinging Sixties, that magic era of Carnaby Street, Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, free love and the Pill, horny young chaps in stovepipes and mop tops flitted around getting it on with as many cool chicks as they could manage to lure back to their groovy pads. Things got so bad that the chicks went out and created Second Wave Feminism.
 

Of course, everything’s changed now, right? In some twenty-something inner city circles the chick is now the female equivalent of the hipster. She’s easygoing yet focused, joining her brothers in her preference for flannelette shirts featuring obscure band names, fixed-gear bicycles and Pabst beer. She’s got tats, is constantly instagramming and probably spends most of her work day in a coffee roastery, hunched over her laptop.

A distinct yet overlapping demographic – savvy professional women heading micro and small businesses – have embraced ‘chick’ as a marketing tool. The internet is littered with SEO chicks, PR and marketing chicks, legal chicks (as opposed to legal eagles I guess) – even a chicken chick.

And now that older women are claiming their goddess-given right to flaunt their booty at any age, they’re refusing to relinquish the word once the first flush of youth fades. If a chick is hip, contemporary and down-to-earth, who says you can’t be a chick at fifty? At sixty? Why stop there?

Yet whole groups of people would rather guzzle toilet paper than use the word. My seventeen-year-old nephew, when quizzed, mumbled that if one of his male friends used it he sounded – this is my translation of what he actually said – fake, pretentious and trying too hard. My forty-something sister, an English coordinator at a secondary girls’ school, simply shook her head and shuddered when I mentioned the word.

Perhaps this is because the nasty version of chick is always lurking around the interwebs, like the class bully who crashes your birthday party, hits on your boyfriend then trashes your house. The ‘hot chick’ is a woman’s body with the humanity sucked out like air from a balloon. She’s the bad girl in the madonna/whore dynamic of patriarchy, the pin-up girl of retrosexism, a twenty-first century version of the compliant, vacantly smiling sixties chick – just add porn and stir.

You can be repurposed into a ‘hot chick’ online whether or not your pose was deliberately sexy. Type ‘hot chicks’ into Google and you’ll get everything from everyday situations that have been lovingly pornified, eg ‘hot chicks picking up dog shit’ and ‘hot chicks in nerd panties’ to mainstream porn. There are even ‘hot chicks’ next to fixie bikes, which is truly depressing.

The gender politics of ‘chick’ echo in the continuing feminist rage against the term ‘chick lit’ for the way it denigrates women’s literary contribution. The idea of Wuthering Heights being labelled chick lit is horrifying, and there were howls of derision across the internet when Sylvia Plath’s acidic novel The Bell Jar got a disastrous ‘chick lit’ makeover for the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. ‘Chick flick’ is just as suspect, according to Gloria Steinem.

If ‘chick’ somehow survived the feminist revolution, ‘bird’ is one of its casualties. It’s now redolent of sad late middle-aged men with comb-overs who never got the memo that the era of sideburns and sleazy feel-ups at the photocopier was over for good, or the acres of female flesh that romped through Alvin Purple and The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.

Other terms for women derived from the animal world hang on for dear life despite themselves. In 2012 Grahame Morris was forced to apologise to Leigh Sales for calling her a cow after she interviewed him on radio.

What about ‘bitch’? How did this word not only get through to the keeper, but manage to widen its remit? Used to be a bitch was spiteful and overly competitive; now thanks to rap culture you can be someone’s bitch even if you’re mild as a lamb, or just hanging around trying to look cool, as in (’cos you know, I’m so up with these things) ‘Yo! wassup bitches?’ A male friend once congratulated me on being his ‘publicity bitch’ at an event where he was selling his books. He was just trying to express how great I was but I felt deflated.

Even ‘girl’ has the power to offend in some contexts, particularly when male sports commentators use it to describe female athletes who would slaughter them in seconds in any competition. In March 2014, the BBC edited out the word girl in some footage where the male reporter said he couldn’t believe he’d been beaten at judo by a nineteen-year-old girl – who happened to be a Commonwealth Games judo champion.

Maybe words like chick are the same as the derogatory terms for any oppressed group – the group itself can use the word, but woe betide anyone else who does?

Or perhaps our nearest and dearest can fondly call us bitch, cow, girl or even Hornytits to their hearts’ content, yet the random in the street who yells it out at us cops a torrent of abuse.

But I can’t help thinking – why does the word woman sound so odd, so exotic, even sexualised? Is a woman still a mysterious, ethereal being who is unpredictable and perhaps a tiny bit evil?

And is ‘chick’ a sexist term, or should we embrace its changing uses – what do you think?

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Digitally Dumb? Why I Refuse to Buy a Smart Phone

Okay I’ll get it out of the way. I don’t have  a smart phone. There I’ve said it. My penance is the embarrassment I feel admitting it, and that’s plenty.
 

Lacking a smart phone is not just a minor social fail, like being a teetotaller, not having a partner, or not being able to drive (hey at least I can drive). It is a failure far more drastic, marking you as fundamentally irrelevant to modern culture.

If you don’t have a car, you’re saving the environment. If you’re a renter, you can drop everything and hike through Mongolia for a  few years without worrying whether the tenants are trashing your place. If you don’t have a smart phone you’re just pathetic – unless you’re over seventy and then you’re excused.

A dumb mobile phone is outdated while totally lacking vintage charm. While smaller than a smart phone, it manages to be the telecommunications equivalent of those big clunky computer monitors. Even checking it is embarrassing because you can only be checking two things: text messages and the time. Better not to take it out at all.

Nor does it work as a badge of honour that marks me as a struggling garret-dwelling artistic type. Many homeless people have smart phones, and good on them, as without a stable base it’s their only way of being plugged in.

I like to think not having a smart phone is a form of rebellion. But no-one cares about my tragic mid-life refusal to conform. No-one cares about anything. They are too busy looking at those tiny screens. While they all seem terribly serious and absorbed, everyone knows that everyone else is playing Temple Run, checking out potential sexual partners on Tinder or Grindr, or scrolling their friends’ selfies on SnapChat.

There’s been plenty of hand wringing about how the once-collective public space has been parcelled into thousands of tiny little mind spaces – why can’t iPhones be we-Phones? Being in a crowd feels weird these days, as if everything’s a bit virtual because the people around you are in parallel worlds unknown to you. They’re all off on their own unique trajectory (too often unfortunately into the path of oncoming traffic if the stats can be trusted).

You notice this lack much more when you don’t have your own personal brain extension to retreat to. You notice and you miss the collective ‘we’ even though that might be the most fragile of webs, like three people waiting for a train at a lonely suburban station.  You feel the mental absence of those around you and you want to draw them back into the vaguest of curiosities about who you are.

That public loss is why, when bus or train drivers introduce themselves over their microphones and make corny jokes, everyone seems to enjoy it. One driver did this on the Gardenvale line going into the city on an overcast Sunday afternoon. As soon as his friendly ocker tones ruptured the dull anonymity of the carriage it felt like being on a country train going to some mystery location. ‘We’re expecting to reach our destination,’ he told us, ‘when the train reaches Flinders Street. Have a lovely trip.’ He was never going to get a gig on Saturday Night Live, but he made the whole carriage grin. For a few short minutes we were as one.

Smart phones don’t always successfully keep their owners plugged in. I’ve made the mistake of assuming that my smart phone owning friends would be reading their emails twenty-four hours a day. I’ve cancelled things at the last minute only to receive desperate calls that have put decades-long friendships at risk (‘I’ve just spent half an hour riding here from Collingwood – where the hell are you?’)

Then again I benefit from the giant well of knowledge that is other people’s smart phones. Walking through North Melbourne one day and hopelessly lost, I asked a labourer at a building site for directions, and he got out his iPhone. You don’t really need your own when there are others’ to fall back on.

I already spend too long in front of computer screens as a freelance writer and editor. I’m not exactly deprived of Jack Russell crosses obligingly teaching babies how to crawl, or elephants shedding tears when freed from decades in chains. I even have a PVR where I can store and watch as much television trash as I want. I don’t need yet another screen.

It’s just so uncool not to have a smart phone. But contrarian that I am, the more uncool it is the more stubbornly I’ll hold out against the cultural pressure, like someone who only gets away with not vaccinating their kids because most other parents do. One day, they’ll probably be a legal requirement. Till then, I’ll remain a digital dag.

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Facing Machiavelli: Nicole Kidman’s Botox-Flavoured Success

I’m currently at the tail end of a mild obsession with Nicole Kidman. It started when I watched a DVD of The Hours and realised that there were moments in that film when she transcended Nicole Kidman-ness and became a serious actress.

And even times when it was possible to admit that not only did she successfully portray a fictional neurotic, English writing genius resembling Virginia Woolf but that it was fair to say she successfully portrayed Virginia Woolf herself, despite the double insult of her wildly unsuitable physical appearance and ridiculous fake nose.

If someone in the public sphere attracts your attention it may be because they portray a characteristic you've not developed fully. When it comes to Nicole Kidman, I have no trouble working out what it is – her untroubled, lighter-than-air Machiavellianism. This basic human trait (well, primate trait actually) is something I’ve always struggled with.

It also interests me because the sister just below me, I’ll call her Frances, has always had a very healthy Machiavellianism – perhaps even a bit too developed. And I hated her for it. I thought she was outrageous and I fought her bid for status and attention every step of the way. I have no doubt that my hostility, from the time she was only about two, strengthened that Machiavellianism, hardened it in her and made her see life as a fight to survive in the world.

I wonder whether my own Machiavellianism is somehow stuck at this early stage. Even now competition for me always has a pathological aspect. There is a bitchy, childish side to my dealings with the world that sees success as a zero sum game – I’m still working on the template of: if I win, Frances loses; if Frances wins, I lose. What about cooperation in an environment in which it’s safe to reveal you own skills? Other people seem to be able to do this effortlessly, yet it’s a mystery to me.

It’s not that I was devoid of Machiavellianism in the wider world; at school my social phobia meant that I was ultra-conscious of social hierarchy. I was just incapable of using this knowledge to advance my cause, my life, myself; indeed I used this knowledge against myself: I was low on the social hierarchy at school, therefore counted myself as lower in value. There is such a thing as good, healthy Machiavellianism. This is what I find so intriguing about Kidman: is her Machiavellianism pathological or not?

My sister actually looks a bit like Nicole Kidman. I watch Kidman in scenes with the great actors of ‘our day’ – Jude Law, Shirley MacLaine, Miranda Richardson – and wonder: how does she dare? (How come my sister is so different from me? How come she is, partly due to my early influence, Machiavellian to a fault?)

When I started researching this topic, what I discovered surprised me. Machiavellianism is almost always portrayed as a negative thing, a pathology. Wikipedia reports that it’s now lumped in with narcissism and psychopathy as part of a Dark Triad, with researchers claiming that there is significant overlap between these traits; some psychologists believe it to be a subclinical version of psychopathy. Yet interestingly it's never been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Does this suggest some ambivalence about it on the the part of researchers?

This illustrates what bugs me about the way psychiatrists look at personality. With a focus on pathology, they don't seem interested in character for its own sake. Yes, they talk about 'subclinical' and bicker over what that means. But surely a characteristic such as Machiavellianism is fine within a constellation and only a problem when it gets out of hand? And perhaps insufficient amounts of it could also be a clinical problem? A lack of Machiavellianism – taking everything at face value – could be the very definition of unworldliness. Perhaps mental health researchers need to start concentrating on the factors enabling societies to grow balanced human beings with the right proportion of each characteristic.

Defining Machiavellianism

But what is Machiavellianism anyway? Wikipedia defines it as 'a duplicitous interpersonal style associated with cynical beliefs and pragmatic morality'. I’ve always had a more benign view, assuming it was simply the human desire to advance your chosen interests, combined with the social skills needed to assess the environment you’re in and to use it to advance those interests. That usually means being part of a group, and using the group to get ahead. Even at a non-pathological level, Machiavellian motives have the potential be in conflict with the interests of the larger group.

That all sounds calculating and negative, makes Machiavellianism seem an unpleasant fact of life; perhaps it also demonstrates the gap between the way the world operates and the way we would like it to. Many workplaces are seething hotbeds of the overambitious; the more unequal society gets and the more tears in the welfare net, the rifer Machiavellianism will probably become.

But Machiavellianism is clearly necessary for the complex social groups primates form, and the advances we have made as humans. And we label people who don’t have this ability as having Aspergers, and all too often we let them know in no uncertain terms that they don’t belong.

Machiavellianism is not the same as personal ambition. Someone could have a great deal of ambition, a great desire for success, and be hopeless at using social groups and people to advance those ambitions, or just be average at it.

But nor is it necessarily always about self-interest. If it involves a knowledge of how power works, much depends on what you do with that knowledge, and whose interests you try to advance in using it. Bob Brown, former much-revered leader of the Australian Greens, was and is Machiavellian down to his last pore, but not in a venal way. He wasn’t interested in accumulating money or power. Instead, he cleverly used the structures of power – parliament in this case – to advance the interests of a larger group: his fellow Australians and indeed all the future citizens of planet Earth. Not only that, but he tried to use his position not to consolidate his own power, but to share power around more freely – to make Australia more democratic. So simply a knowledge of how groups work and using that knowledge to advance your cause doesn’t make Machiavellianism pathological.

Perhaps we have to distinguish between the Machiavellianism of a Bob Brown and that of the average, self-interested person who wants their share of power and wealth – let’s call this self-interested Machiavellianism. Even here, it isn’t easily divisible from a healthy interest in one's own welfare and that of one's family. At what stage does Machiavellianism, whether self-interested or not, descend into evil rubbing of palms together and a sinister cackle? At what stage does the calculating type become the stereotypical villain? 

Perhaps this depends on what exactly you’re willing to do with your knowledge of power structures to advance your cause. Are you willing to manipulate others? Pit people against each other? Sabotage their careers? Lie about them? This is clearly Machiavellian behaviour at the unhealthy level, regardless of whether your motives are selfish or selfless. Perhaps a healthy institution is one in which an individual's ability to succeed depends on their ambition, hard work and talent more than it does on their degree of Machiavellianism, whether healthy or unhealthy.

Bob Brown’s version means that his own personal ambitions are not easily separable from those of the larger human group; he positions himself and his struggle as part of the struggle of humanity for a better world. But self-interested Machiavellianism, however seemingly benign and non-pathological, always has the potential to be in conflict with the needs of the larger group.

Botox and self-interest

This leads me back to Nicole Kidman. She is obviously ambitious – nothing wrong with that. She has worked very hard and taken carefully calculated steps to build her career. She has done so to the extent that if you think of her mainly as mediocre, as I do (not in lighter roles – she is perfect for light comedy), her success has prevented much better actresses from playing the fascinating gamut of characters she has portrayed. Who knows what Hilary Swank, Chloe Sevigny, Tilda Swinton or even Cate Blanchett might have done with some of her juicier roles?

This is not something peculiar to her of course. Gwyneth Paltrow did the same thing for many years. Remember her in Sylvia?

Despite her very public breakup with Tom Cruise, Kidman has always struck me as someone who, when compared with a lot of other celebrities of similar prominence, had a high degree of psychological health. Her father is a psychologist, her mother a teacher; the family are close, and Kidman talks about her parents and sister with great warmth. She has never appeared to have a serious drug problem, made inappropriate remarks, or fallen into the traps of celebrity, except in one area – her use of Botox and other ‘fillers’.

And this is part of the question that exercises me – given her apparent psychological health, why has Kidman been willing to distort her face to the extent that she is now the butt of unpleasant YouTube videos? Her balanced personality sits at odds with this extreme.

My answer: Kidman's obsession with Botox isn't the result of some deep-seated childhood emotional deprivation. She's simply Machiavellian enough to know that in a toxic industry that rewards youth and cookie-cutter Barbie Doll beauty, her career will benefit from the regular application of Clostridiuim botulinum. And this canniness has paid off: at 44, she landed the role of Grace Kelly in the forthcoming film Grace of Monaco, directed by Olivier Dahan, a role every female actress in Hollywood was surely drooling over.

I say this not to denigrate her but to acknowledge that Machiavellianism is the ability to judge the particular environment in which one finds oneself and to work out how to succeed within it. That Kidman has judged her level of Botoxification necessary demonstrates that her healthy Machiavellianism is at the upper end of the scale; but also perhaps that the environment she is working in is toxic for women.

Now, bear with, as Miranda would say; this is where things get interesting. As I’ve said earlier, self-interested Machiavellianism is usually in tension with the broader interests of the group. While our toxic societies tend to reward unhealthy Machiavellianism, in our public discussions we applaud those who put the interests of the group ahead of their individual advancement. Not everyone has to make this choice of course, but sometimes a clear choice has to be made. And Kidman, while seeking her own career advancement, is a tiny bit responsible, along with the other legions of the facially adjusted, for making it difficult for women as a whole, and female actresses in particular, to succeed without taking a syringe to their faces.

So, while her Machiavellianism is not pathological in itself, the decisions she has made to appease it are the result of her immersion in a toxic environment. If we still insist on seeing Kidman as part of a community, part of a society, she has failed us. Not only by making an ironed face the norm, but by providing a poor example to the millions of young women who consume Hollywood gossip. Stars are role models, whether they choose to be or not; Kidman has put her career above this consideration.

This is not to say she makes decisions any different from a number of stars. Kate Moss posed topless in a blonde wig for the December 2012 issue of Vanity Fair, in photos accompanying a long  article exploring her career longevity; now that we're saturated in porn culture, it's simply what you do to stay ahead if you're a supermodel. In 1994, Kylie Minogue went raunchy in the video clip for her single 'Confide in me', and stripped naked for the follow-up single, 'Put yourself in my place' (below, looking uncannily Kidmanesque). Unfortunate choices, but plenty of men would have done the same if facing the same constraints; women are no more Machiavellian than men, we just make choices within more difficult circumstances.

Yet these are choices, albeit made in misogynist environments. I don't want to give the impression that you need to do bizarre and antisocial things to succeed in life. Some people are strong and talented enough to carve out their own niches simply by being very, very good at what they do. Australian comedian Magda Szubanski has had a self-admitted weight problem since the year dot, yet through sheer talent, and probably a healthy dose of Machiavellianism in other areas of her life, this aspect is part of the charm she brings to her most memorable characters.

So why was Kidman so damn good in parts of The Hours, I hear you ask? Ha! That's another story and another blog entry.

And, no, my sister Frances doesn’t use Botox – as far as I know.

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Long Live Pippi Longstocking: Appreciating the Larger-Than-Life Friend

Friendships, like life partnerships, are not always simply about similar goals, values and shared interests. Sometimes they’re about complementarities. There’s a category of friend many of us make in our formative years, and sometimes maintain into adulthood – the larger-than-life, or LATL, friend.

The larger-than-life friend is usually fearless – not always completely, but in areas where we may quail. The larger-than-life friend is louder, sometimes physically broader or taller, and more daring than us. When it comes to her background she is a creature of extremes: her home life is likely to have been either more loving and nurturing than ours, or dramatically more dysfunctional; her parents are either poorer or wealthier than ours. The LATL friend may be simply warm, outgoing and exuberant, but she may also have a brilliant comic streak, a sense of the absurd that we aspire to, and a willingness to challenge authority. She is often a youngest child.

The key to a successful LATL friendship is not to try to emulate her, or put oneself down for being lesser in any way. The LATL friend will be drawn to us for what we are not as much as what we are. She may appreciate our average families, our more settled and boring lives. She may gain a degree of emotional stability from our company. She may draw from us strains of humour and brightness that we did not realise we possessed, and appreciate them more than we realise. We do not have to try to be like her, but simply continue to be ourselves.

LATL friends are not always real. I have no idea whether the average imaginary friend of childhood is a LATL friend, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Sometimes imaginary friends are created by skilled storybook authors. For me Pippi Longstocking, created by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren in the late 1930s – early 1940s, was the quintessential LATL friend who set the standard for the flesh-and-blood ones that came after her.

The beauty of Pippi is that she is entirely free of authority figures. In contrast to her next door neighbours, Tommy and Annika Settergren, whom she befriends and shares adventures with, she does what she pleases. She doesn’t go to school, cares nothing for social graces and is always breaking taboos.

Pippi (full name Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Efraim’s Daughter Longstocking) is a virtual orphan, living happily alone in a home she calls Villa Villekulla in a small Swedish village. Her sea captain father disappeared in a storm but according to Pippi is living as a cannibal king on a South Sea island. She has two pets, a monkey called Mr Nilsson and a horse called Little Old Man. She is said to have the physical strength of ‘ten policemen’ and often picks up Little Old Man and carries him from one place to another. Happy and exuberant, she is a shameless liar and truth-stretcher and is always manipulating adults into doing her bidding.

Pippi’s bizarre appearance declares her eccentricity: her tight orange plaits stick out from the sides of her head, her stockings don’t match and she towers above Tommy and Annika. Although she protects the weak and encourages rebellion she is never violent. She owns a suitcase of gold pieces so is financially independent. I’m sure reading about Pippi’s many adventures (there were three books in all) helped me handle my early LATL friendships.

Real-life LATLs, while lacking the freedom and physical prowess of Pippi, often have so much life-force that they bestow a degree of friendship on the siblings of their primary friend. I was friendly with more than one of my elder sister’s LATL friends, but it is Philippa who stands out the most. Philippa and my sister went to school together then shared an Edwardian house in groovy, inner-city Prahran in the early 1980s, playing host to a regular stream of artistic friends and boyfriends.

I idolised Philippa. Of solid build, with huge blue eyes and golden blonde hair, she had a country exuberance and friendliness that were increasingly tempered by arty sophistication, a vibrant, anarchic laugh that could be heard above the loudest party music, and a private-school accent that was inexplicable yet charming. She had a romantic history that would have filled volumes and a nurturing, motherly side that I flew towards. Philippa’s drawcard was not that she was the funniest or even the most intelligent young woman. It was her ability to extract the maximum from those around her, delighting in the humour of others and the quirks of human existence. She was studying psychology and as her social and love lives became busier she tilted dangerously between chaos and order, seeming to know instinctively where to stop the seesaw so that chaos never managed to gain the ascendant.

Once, home alone at my parents’ place, I thought I heard a burglar and got spooked. Philippa answered the phone when I rang Eleanor in a panic. She immediately ordered me over to Prahran despite the fact that Eleanor was out. Dressed in her white bathrobe she made camomile tea for us both. ‘Things can feel really scary when you’re on your own,’ she offered as she tucked her feet under her, sat down on the other end of the couch and gazed at me in sympathy. Her large eyes shone as she clutched the steaming cup and I read in them two motivations, and was perfectly happy with both: the desire to be supportive and a hunger for drama, for a heightening of life’s ordinariness.

At the time I had my own LATL friend, who could not have been more different than Philippa. Geraldine was physically taller and broader than me but it wasn’t just her size that enabled her to dominate the space around her. She was thirsty for attention, would court it and suck it up from wherever it came. She was the youngest child in a dysfunctional Irish Catholic family dogged by the twin curses of mental illness and alcoholism. Like her siblings she was brilliantly comic; for many years I kept a tape we made on one nothing-to-do summer afternoon at my place when we were about fifteen.

In the background, a telephone starts to ring. ‘The phone rings’, Geraldine pronounces in an ominous male narrator tone as she lolls on the bed. ‘Who will answer it?’ She then begins riffing on a hysterical middle-aged reaction to a dodgy television program playing in front of an imaginary child: ‘Turn—the—television off! Turn it off!’

Geraldine is long gone, taken by the evil, self-hating sprite who dwelt within her and waited to claim her at a weak moment. Like me she grew up with undiagnosed mental illness but unlike me she forged a path to adulthood for herself, having a baby in an early relationship and then meeting the love of her life with whom she was living when she died, it’ll be fourteen years ago this year.

There’s just one other LATL friend I want to pay tribute to in this blog entry; she died young too, of breast cancer. In the last year of secondary school, most weeknights I walked home from the tram terminus with my younger sister Simone and our mutual friend Kathy; boy that girl was wild. Or so it seemed at the time: in hindsight, not all the wild girls were acting out; some of them just grew up more quickly.

Kathy was fearless and from an early age she drank and smoked dope and partied and had lots of illicit boyfriends. It would have been futile to even try to emulate her but she was a few years below me at the Catholic convent we all attended, so I never felt that I had to. Neither Simone nor I would have mucked around with her at school if we had been in the same year, yet the three of us got on like a house on fire on those walks home.

I picture her walking between Simone and me, skipping slightly ahead as she relates something outrageous she’s done or cackles about some dippy teacher. I see now that her main function was to keep Simone and me from tearing into each other; she held each of us at bay, neutralising our mutual animosity, our unceasing grappling for space and attention. She never would have played this role consciously but her optimism, warmth and fearlessness did the job.

She couldn’t have cared less how she looked; she had uncombed straggly black-brown hair, a sweet creamy lightly freckled face, wild, gesturing hands, very light-coloured eyes and a body that was always curving into a dance of exuberance at whatever brazen act she had done or was about to do. Like many young women who grow up quickly she ended up marrying young, having kids, and working in unskilled jobs; and then the breast cancer claimed her. But she crammed lots of life and laughter into those years.

The LATL friend can lead our adolescent selves into frightening new territory if we let her; if not she may leave us behind. Sometimes, if the LATL friend is too reckless or self-destructive, this is inevitable. It didn’t happen with Kathy, because she was secure enough to accept Simone and me as we were: a tiny bit prissy but witty enough to keep up, and always willing to offer our admiration and sympathy.

If you have LATL friends in adulthood, treasure them but never feel that you are inferior for being less attention-getting or having more mundane problems. You and your friend may be mirroring in each other the qualities that are undeveloped in yourselves. As long as you appreciate and enjoy these complementarities, your friendship will continue to flourish and nurture you both. We can’t all be Pippi Longstocking, but that’s all the more reason to relish her company.

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There’s something about Cate

‘Our Cate’, as the Australian media love to call Cate Blanchett, has well and truly made it. She’s been in countless successful films, and is regularly on the red carpet at opening nights. But she’s one of the few stars who will always be first and foremost seen as a practitioner of the actor’s craft rather than an empty-headed celebrity. This blog entry is a little treatise of admiration for her – well, sort of – and a meditation on acting styles.

The other night I watched a great documentary on ABC 1, In the Company of Actors, that featured Blanchett. It’s a fly-on-the-wall study of the process of taking a successful Australian production – the Sydney Theatre Company’s Hedda Gabler – to New York.

The original season, directed by Robyn Nevin, was performed in 2004. It starred Cate Blanchett as Hedda, who agreed to the project because it was to be based on an adaptation of the original Ibsen play written by her husband, Andrew Upton. The cast would include actors of the calibre of Hugo Weaving, Aden Young and Justine Clarke.

We watch the cast rehearsing the play in Sydney, in a huge high-ceilinged studio, where they’re dressed casually and horseplay around in between finetuning scenes. Next thing they’re in New York, working out how to buy subway tickets, carrying out a technical rehearsal, experiencing their first taste of New York snow, and taking part in a Q and A with local high school students.

Despite the stellar cast, it’s Cate Blanchett who stands out in the doco, even in the rehearsal room. Cate can’t help but always be acting. In this doco, sometimes I swear she responds to the camera (despite herself, I reckon) and plays the part of an actress rehearsing a role. Not that she’s not actually rehearsing the role as well, of course.

Which leads me to the thesis of this blog entry. Forget the bad actors, I’m not talking about them, the ones who are stars first and actors second. (I’m also talking about film rather than the stage, as the latter necessarily involves exaggeration of movements, voice projection and so on.) When it comes to good film actors, I think there are two kinds – those who overtly dramatise the role, perhaps are in danger of overdramatising it, and those who disappear into it. Blanchett is definitely in the former category.

In the doco, the camera takes advantage of this quality in Blanchett. We see her dressed for her role as Hedda Gabler, hair up in a severe bun and wearing a very fitted Edwardian gown with a high collar, set to make her first entrance on the first night in New York. (We find out later that the audience has included luminaries such as Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep.) In the moments before she goes on stage she stares nervously around, breathes, drinks some water, waits. The camera at this point shows a quick series of stills of her performing these actions, rather than obvious motion. Blanchett’s whole persona lends itself to this beautifully. Again, she’s unconsciously acting being an actress waiting to go on stage.

You can’t fake this kind of, well, fakery. It has to be there, in the litheness of your movements as well as your intelligence, and the way that the two work together. That’s why Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow will never be great actresses – they’re reasonably intelligent but they can’t communicate their characters through their bodies that effectively. When Kidman tries too hard to do this, she’s ludicrous. Blanchett's lanky body, in contrast, drips affect, no matter what she's doing.

This category of actors show off their craft – you know they’re acting, you can see it, but does that matter if the acting’s good? I don’t think it does, mostly, in the same way that you might be able to see the machinations of a favourite writer but still love their work.

The other classic example of this style is, of course, Meryl Streep. Think of the mannerisms she employed in Sophie’s Choice, or the exaggerated accent in Evil Angels. Streep is always on show, always being seen, yet she’s mesmerising. Recently I watched her being interviewed by British talk show host Jonathan Ross about her role in Mumma Mia. She draped herself on the couch and smiled just a little too magnanimously, and she was stately, dignified and actorly. But she was also funny, ironic, willing to laugh at herself.

Emma Thompson’s another obvious example of this category – her style was just perfect for a classic melodrama like The Remains of the Day.

The danger with this kind of actor is that if they are let loose they may ultimately overdramatise, so it’s very important that the director reins them in. One of the few of Blanchett’s performances I didn’t like was her role as Katie Hepburn in The Aviator. A drama queen playing a drama queen? It was way too much (and she was too old for the role, I thought).

I sympathise with this kind of acting because I think I can understand it. It’s fuelled by a particular kind of sensibility that always needs to add another layer to life, to either send it up, ramp up its emotional volume, or both. It’s born of a compulsive need to comment on things, to reflect the world back at itself, through the medium of the body. It runs in my family – my uncle was an amateur thespian and my sister’s a drama teacher, and as a frustrated non-actor I’m always wanting to mimic people and dramatise the stories I tell others. I don’t think it’s necessarily an exclusively feminine tendency, but I think women add to it a further layer of culturally installed self-consciousness that men don’t tend to have.

There is a very different kind of actor that, as I said, inhabits the character so entirely they disappear into it. It’s not a matter of underplaying the role, but of letting one’s ego disappear altogether. Samantha Morton stands out in this regard, for example in her role as Deborah Curtis in the film Control.

At her best Kate Winslet does this too and Aden Young is simply brilliant at it, as he demonstrated in the role of Nat in the recently released film Lucky Country. And let’s not overlook Anthony LaPaglia: it’s been said of him that you can see him thinking. Finally, there’s Russell Crowe, bless his cotton socks, who despite his huge ego and the dramatics he gets up to with telephones in real life, is never afraid to play men of every stripe and character, and to ‘become’ them.

Ultimately neither acting style is innately superior to the other. Both styles remind us that no matter how obscenely rich and ridiculously feted they are, and even how absurd their private lives may become, good actors are first and foremost artists.

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What I see when I look in the mirror: ageing, body image, feminism and psychoanalysis

I often assume I suffer from mild body dysmorphia, which means that I supposedly have a distorted view of how I look. It’s much worsened by the fact that I have rosacea: the degree of horror varying with how pink the cheeks are at any one time.

But I’m not even sure about whether it is dysmorphia. For a start, my face is simply never the same each time I look in the mirror; with the rosacea affected by my food intolerances, I sometimes have ‘egg eyes’ (pinched and defeated looking); ‘tuna eyes’ (red and shrunken) or ‘oil eyes’ (same as previous). Usually there is some degree of swelling on my cheeks. The menstrual cycle complicates this further and I literally appear to age five years just before my period.

I suspect what actually afflicts me is hypervigilance coupled with an unhealthy narcissistic streak!

As a coping strategy, I go for long periods where I don’t do mirror close-ups. Everything except eyebrow plucking is done from a distance and even then I just focus on the relevant area, not the whole face.

It hasn’t always been like this. There was a time, before the ageing and rosacea started their ghastly double act, when I could gaze into the car rear view mirror and see my plumped-up, pale, glabrous skin and believe, momentarily, that I was beautiful.

So what happens when I allow myself, after a long interval, to edge closer to the mirror, to witness all the flaws – most of them identifiable as age spots, milia, broken blood vessels, enlarged pores, but some of them inexplicable, indeterminate markings, as if someone had smeared a tiny piece of non-removable charcoal on my forehead?

I got a close-up look the other day after perhaps a year of being too scared to. I was in the four-lane highway of Dandenong Road, in the Saturday morning traffic, waiting for a red light to change, and the face had gone. I mean the face as a whole, the face as an idea, as a unified concept. The new face was defined by its irregularities: the uneven vertical wrinkles on each side of the nose bridge, the deepening labial folds, the tiny crimson paths under the left eye socket and on either side of the nose. The expression in the eyes one of distaste. Not scared exactly, not quite horrified but somewhere close.

I almost stopped the car to check again. It’s unbearable, the desire to check. You check once and are shocked and then when you move your eyes from the mirror your imagination makes a monster of what you have witnessed, so you check again to reassure yourself. And in between the first and second checks you compose the expression on your face, you adjust your hair, you point your chin upwards, you civilise and arrange yourself.

You’re okay, your mind finally decides, overriding that first visceral reaction. Barely.

P.S. I’ve just done some basic internet research on dysmorphia and I probably do have a mild version!

Stuck in the mirror
Like many women before me, the ageing process has made me question my identification with what I see in the mirror. In the way I’ve written this blog entry so far, I have refused to identify with ‘the face’, distancing myself from it. It is no longer me. (In certain mirrors, with a bit of make-up on, it becomes ‘me’ again – for the moment.)

Could the discipline of psychoanalysis shed some light? Sigmund Freud explored the unconscious through psychoanalysis, and Jacques Lacan basically developed and elaborated on Freud’s theories. But other theorists of early child development such as DW Winnicott have extended and challenged their work.

I studied a little Freud and Lacan at university. I’m no expert on either of these controversial thinkers, but my obsession with the mirror made me think about a stage in infantile development that Lacan posited. It supposedly occurs between the ages of six and eighteen months and is called the ‘mirror stage’.

I wondered if I was going through another kind of mirror stage, a kind of de-identification with self.

Psychoanalysis, so often discredited these days, can be incredibly useful in explaining aspects of human behaviour that social theorists might struggle with. For example, like me, many Western women have long been crippled by a form of narcissism that sees them invest way too much in their body image. The fallout from this is obvious in eating disorders, as well as excessive time, energy and money spent on appearance.

Perhaps body dysmorphic disorder is some extreme manifestation of this?

Naomi Wolf wrote her feminist classic The Beauty Myth almost two decades ago. In it she posits a trenchant and disturbing thesis – that current standards of beauty came about as a backlash against second wave feminism. According to Wolf, when the popular media such as women’s magazines could no longer control women’s actions after feminism sent them scurrying out of the home, they introduced the body as a site of feminine guilt and preoccupation. The perfect woman, a 20-something, underweight blonde with translucently clear skin, is the uber-woman that none of us can ever measure up to (Twiggy was, of course, an early major prototype).

This is a compelling argument, one that is still useful in the twenty-first century to explain why women are willing to risk disfiguration and ill health to explore ever more invasive anti-ageing procedures, so ‘raising’ the standards that apply to all women.

But I think we need psychoanalysis and related theories to explain why so many of us are so invested in the beauty myth and our own appearance in relation to it; and why the ageing process threatens our self-image so gravely.

Feminine narcissism – not just a metaphor but a psychiatric condition, albeit mild in most – is one reason why feminism was spectacularly unsuccessful in luring the mass of women into checked shirts and overalls, and convincing them to bare their faces (another, of course, is that in an unequal world women feel compelled to compete via appearance).

Thus, women are not lying when they say of the face lift, the botox injections, the face peels, ‘I did it for me’. Advertisers encourage this: ‘Because you’re worth it’.

A word of warning: narcissism is often used as a term to denigrate women, to imply that we are foolish and frivolous to be obsessed with our bodies and appearance. This is the double standard of patriarchy: set up an impossible ideal, then complain when women spend all their time and energy trying to live up to it.

A recent article in The Age’s Good Weekend would have horrified many readers. It featured four women of various ages who spent what most would agree was excessive amounts on their beauty routine – the average was $16 762 a year, but two of the four spent more than $19 000 annually. These sums were for beauty and hair products and treatments only, not clothes, shoes or jewellery.

Before looking at how these women justified their spending, let’s take a very condensed journey through some of the theories that consider how we look at ourselves.

Lacan’s mirror stage
What happens at the mirror stage? Basically it takes place when the child sees its reflection in the mirror, and recognises itself as itself, for the first time.

At this point the very young child is a bundle of drives and experiences, with little control over its needs and bodily functions. It doesn’t experience itself as a unified being and it does not see itself as separate from the world.

When the child recognises itself in the mirror for the first time, it’s thrilled – the self that looks back at the child appears to be far more unified than the child feels itself to be.

The mirror stage supposedly helps the child develop an ego. But there are two sides to this. The child rejoices in this image of the unified self it sees in the mirror. But the child also becomes aggressive and angry towards the image in the mirror because unlike the image, it is still stuck with the reality of its uncoordinated, helpless body.

Feminist academic Elizabeth Grosz describes it thus:

The child invests the [mirror] image of itself … with all the hostility directed towards its own lack of satisfaction … The … internalized image becomes an … object of aggression (for example in narcissistic self-deprecation). [my italics].

Therefore, a huge split takes place within us in this important stage of becoming ‘ourselves’ – of developing an ego. Just as we are becoming ourselves, we are also alienated from ourselves.

All about my ‘other’
Before we get on to the bit about narcissism, we need to know that the mirror stage has another important function. It sets up the distinction between the self and the world, the self and the other. This is because for the first time the child sees itself as a kind of double being – reflected back at itself in the mirror – so it’s then able to recognise other people, and other objects, as being separate from it. The child is no longer merged with the world.

The mother is an important part of the mirror stage because she is the child’s main ‘other’, reflecting the child back to itself.

The mirror stage is associated with narcissism because it takes place in the state that Lacan calls the Imaginary – a closed system where mother and child continually reflect each other. In growing up, the child moves from the realm of the Imaginary into that of the Symbolic. What brings about this move is the oedipus complex. (Freud refers to the end point – the resolution – of the oedipus complex as the development of the superego.)

For Lacan, this process is represented by the presence of a male who brings the larger world into the closed system of mother and child. He believed it takes place when we start talking, when we enter language. Similarly, the superego described by Freud represents authority figures that we internalise.

Before I go any further, I have to say that the mirror stage has long been howled down as a developmental phase. Why, other theorists have asked, does it make a material object – a mirror – more important than the role of the primary carer, usually the mother? And how do blind kids develop an ego? Lacan himself later said that it wasn’t a stage at all but a state of being.

I and others have found it compelling, though, because it dramatises so beautifully that split from the self that also separates us from the world. And it uses the mirror, that non-place in which women so often get caught, as a site of self-becoming.

An important aspect of the mirror stage is what Lacan called ‘the desire of the other’. This means that at this point the child comes to see itself as an object of the mother’s desire – it is seeing itself through the eyes of an other, the mother.

For Lacan, then, narcissism might become pathological if we get stuck in the mirror stage, stuck in the Imaginary. And we can see, too, how, if we did get stuck in the mirror stage, we’d continue to feel aggressive towards that mirror image.

But here the concept gets confusing – when we start to age there’s no idealised self to falsely reflect back a unity we don’t feel. Instead, at this point in our lives, shouldn’t we feel more unified on the inside, so that the outer image, which is falling apart, isn’t so important? Shouldn’t the mirror stage be reversed? Perhaps that’s what actually happens when mentally healthy people age – perhaps they begin to detach from the image in the mirror. If so, this would surely be a healthy development.

But what happens if we never get to feel unified and whole on the inside, and the outer image starts to fall apart as we age? Perhaps as we try to detach from the outer image we're also feeling panicky and scattered inside. Or perhaps we simply can't detach – that’s when all hell breaks loose and we seek the two-hundred-dollar face cream, the knife, the injections.

These are speculations only (sorry about the pun). In his discussion of the mirror stage Lacan wasn’t overly concerned with narcissism as a pathology. Indeed, he seems to think that narcissism is the normal state, and goes on to portray conventional heterosexual relationships as narcissistic.

The mother as mirror
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief (not really but it sounds good) when the famous paediatrician and psychiatrist DW Winnicott replaced the mirror with the face of the mother.

It's significant that, just like Lacan and Freud, Winnicott believed that the newborn didn't see itself as a separate being and couldn't distinguish itself from the world. The newborn gets hungry, cries, and the world -- which appears to be part of itself -- feeds it.

According to Winnicott, as the mother tends the child and gives it her attention, the mother’s face literally reflects the child back to itself – in ideal circumstances, ultimately giving the child to itself.

This is very important. If the mother is not in a state where she can reflect the child back at itself, she will not be the mirror the child needs to become itself.

If she does not mirror the child, the child develops a ‘false self’ to protect the ‘true self’. Instead of having its ‘true self’ mirrored in the face of the mother, it searches her face in order to anticipate her moods, and responds accordingly.

The child is in danger of never being able to move into the transitional phase (the phase where kids have an object, like a blanket, they can’t be separated from). In this vital phase the child is slowly coming to terms with the fact that its mother (and others in general) is a separate being with her own interests and autonomy.

It’s not hard to relate this theory to a woman’s relationship with the mirror. Perhaps when we look at ourselves uncritically in the mirror and can accept our ageing process, we act the part of the approving mother who responds to our true self.

If we haven’t had that positive mirroring, perhaps when we see our ageing face we worry only about the reactions of others, and fear they will reject us.

But I think it's worse than that. If we don't get mirrored properly we can't move onto and through the transitional phase. So basically if our parenting's been poor (and there might be a thousand reasons for this, many of them social or economic) then we may still believe on one level that we are merged with the world. We may therefore wait indefinitely to be properly parented by a world we expect to bend to our needs, and we may grapple with the idea that those around us have interests and indeed existence totally apart from us.

Back to the superego
I wonder, though, whether the disapproval some of us experience when we look in the mirror is even more complicated. Is something else going on at the same time, something to do with the wider world beyond the bond of child and mother?

What makes us care about what the rest of the world thinks of us? What makes us subscribe to the beauty myth as an exterior standard by which we measure ourselves? This is where Freud’s idea of the superego and Lacan’s related idea of the Symbolic could prove useful.

I think we really need these ideas when we think of how some women might view their faces and appearance in general. If I think I look bad it’s perhaps partly my superego telling me I no longer measure up to an external standard that the world has imposed on me – the ideal of feminine beauty. I have internalised a disapproving larger world that is telling me I don’t measure up.

Thus, in the Good Weekend article I mentioned earlier, 28-year-old Canna Campbell justifies the $17 754 she spends a year on beauty with the words ‘People say that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression’. Head of a company that offers financial advice, she’s talking about how prospective clients will view her – seeing herself through the eyes of a larger world. Similarly, 50-year-old Wendy Snyder declares: ‘I want [people] to see a groomed, efficient person’ and 39-year-old Vina Chipperfield believes that ‘People judge us every day on the basis of our appearance’.

Beyond the mirror?
These remarks are very much just possibilities based on my limited knowledge. Not all women are narcissistic and overly invested in their appearance. Not all women have conventional upbringings with father and mother playing traditional roles. Parents vary enormously in their ability to love and nurture children. It would be fascinating to see qualitative studies on how aspects of upbringing affect female narcissism, body image and attitudes to ageing.

But again, let’s not forget Lacan’s idea of the larger Symbolic, the wider world, that we enter through language (but that also includes visual symbols). However loving, parents can’t protect their girls from the saturation of media images that portray society’s ideal of feminine perfection.

But perhaps even perceiving all this gives me choices. If I look bad in my own eyes I now have a choice: I can stay in the world of Winnicott’s false self, or instead play the part of the loving mother/mirror, reflecting a positive image back to myself: ‘I love your true self, and I’ll give you the structure you need to bring it into the world’.

Perhaps I can also realise that in judging my own appearance, my over-active superego is playing the part of a potentially disapproving world. And while I can’t necessarily dismantle the impossible standard of beauty I’ve internalised – how can any one person hope to do that? – I can detach from my image a little bit: if I don’t necessarily like what I see in the mirror – viewed through the eyes of the wider world – that doesn’t mean I don’t like me – the me I feel from the inside.

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