Lilith Saintcrow

Yesterday in the New York Times I came across this article, “When Is Thin Too Thin?”, about the gauntness of the current crop of runway models. Going to quote at length, here, giving proper credit where credit is due.

Snejana Onopka, Natasha Poly and Hana Soukupova, models in demand among the fashion designers who showed their collections in New York last week, appeared so gaunt and thin that their knees and elbows were larger than their concave thighs and pipe cleaner arms, and their bobbling heads looked as if a slight breeze could detach them from their frail bodies.

Yet there remains an ideal among designers who seem to prize an ever thinner frame to display their clothes. Some who attended the New York shows question whether acceptable boundaries have been crossed, as when fashion glamorized images of heroin abuse in the early 1990’s. Despite perennial complaints that models are too thin, there is a new sense of concern that designers are contributing to unhealthy and potentially life-threatening behavior among models vying to appear in their shows. (NY Times)

Go on. Take a look at the pictures. I’ll wait. Are you back? Good. Let’s talk.

This, quite frankly, teed me off. What about this is rational, acceptable, or even sane? Yes, nobody is holding a gun to the heads of these young women. But still…many of this crop of models, as the article points out, are “from broken homes or poor countries, speak little English and are conforming to those demands as a means of survival. If he complains, he said, they will simply switch to another agency.”

I cannot even begin to express how disturbing I find this.

Now, I’m not a skinny girl by any stretch of the imagination. But I’m reasonably fit–daily walks on the treadmill, three times or more a week at the track, tango class and running after kids takes care of that. (Not to mention that the DHM just bought moi a heavy bag. Other guys bring their wives roses. I get a 100lb. canvas dummy to vent my aggression. That’s true love.) And not only can I rarely find a pair of jeans that takes my child-bearin’ hips into account, but I have to put up with pictures of starved waifs presented as the cultural acme of elegance and beauty.

I content myself with the thought that if there’s a disaster, I’m a lot better prepared to survive than a fashion scarecrow. But the deeper issue bothers me. Why, when a woman’s place in the world is already so small and precarious, are we seeking to shrink it even further?

Designers insist they’re not to blame. But really, what would happen if designers started using real-sized women on their runways or in their ad campaigns? Seems to me that if the (mostly male) big fashion designers “loved” women the way they say they do, they would find ones that don’t look like malnourished refugees. And what about movie directors and casting agencies serving up anorexia for the camera? I know the glass teat adds a few pounds to anyone, but if we can make an army of a million Orcs onscreen we can manage to put a woman in the movies who doesn’t look made of sticks.

Now, I know obesity is also a huge American problem, due to corn syrup, McDonald’s, and the bloody television. I wonder how much of that is in reaction to the cultural force-feed of thinness? I do know, from personal experience, that food can make an insecure woman feel better in the short term. I struggle every day with the “food as approval” thing, and the image of scarecrows wrapped in high fashion and lauded as beautiful doesn’t help. The DHM, bless his heart, cooks as healthy as we can with two butter-addicted small ones and a growing teenage boy in the casa.

The only answer I’ve personally found is to exercise, even when I don’t feel like it. I don’t want to be thin so I can fit into a Lagerfeld. I want to be fit and strong so I can defend my kids and myself if need be, so I can get the endorphin rush from sweating and gasping on the track, and so I can throw a punch and watch a heavy bag shudder when I’m facing a deadly round of revisions.

It’s just me.

So hey, fashion designers? Cut it out. And to every malnourished model out there: honey, you’re beautiful, but I think you’d be happier and even more beautiful if you ate a bloody cookie now and again. Don’t starve yourself. Please. I’m begging you, as a mom and as a fellow female.

Please. Let’s not do this to ourselves.

First of all, I agree with Truepenny that David Bowie deserves a whole blog post. He’s just simply one of the greatest artists I’ve ever seen. What I love about Bowie is his willingness to try new things, even if they don’t–quite–work out sometimes. That’s what living is all about.

On to my crank for the day. A comment was left on my website journal, which I hereby quote the salient bit of. This was a post where I detailed my five biggest writing sins and why they were peccamus. PJ replied with:

For goodness’ sakes. “Seemed to” is not bad writing. It could make the difference between whether something really happened, or the viewpoint character just saw / heard it that way.

PJ has a valid point, that “seemed to,” or “that,” or passive verbs–pretty much everything I tell my writing students not to do–can in the right frame occasionally be good writing, because it is appropriate to the situation.

The problem arises when a writer uses these common things as a crutch to avoid telling the story simply and directly, or even clearly and directly. You can find an exception to each sweeping rule of writing I espouse (I cannot find Matociquala’s most excellent post on this, but I know it’s there) in the classics of literature. But just because these are exceptions does not mean the rule is broken.

I specifically mentioned “seems to/seemed to” because I was going back through the draft of Night Watch (a yet-unsold book) and I found several places where “seems to/seemed to” could be cut from the sentence to make it tighter and more delicious, where the “seems to/seemed to” was just adding weight and dragging the sentence down, being merely a crutch for me to avoid saying, this is what IS in this story. It’s something I’ve cut in manuscripts I’ve edited until the cows came home and the fat lady took her ovation. It can be good writing–but cubism can be good art, too.

But only when the artist understands the rules of art thoroughly in order to break them with cubism.

This is something a lot of fledgling writers don’t get. They think that because they can speak at the drive-through or in the checkout line, they can write. It ain’t necessarily so. Writing means one has to have a tighter understanding of parts of speech and grammar. The best use of this understanding of language becomes knowing how to flaunt those rules with style. The worst thing about this understanding of language is “if you lack it, nothing will take its place.”

Meaning you don’t have a solid understanding of the rules, so you’re breaking them without knowing. Breaking of the rules in writing should be done deliberately, with full cognisance. With proper cognition beforehand. Not all of us are Shakespeares or Dickens (is the plural of Dickens Dickenses?) capable of getting away with such things. We must all choose our own rules to flaunt.

To get back to the point: the advice I give in my writing classes (and here) is meant to help. You could, I suppose, break every one of those pieces of advice and still have a sellable book. But I give this advice because most of the time when I see the things I give advice against, they are highly detrimental to a manuscript.

There’s also the fact that all these things (passive verbs, that, seems to/seemed to) can function as little ways for the writer to back away from taking responsibility for stating something clearly and unequivocally. Writing is fraught with emotion, and it’s easier if you have that mechanism to separate you from the manuscript. It provides a little bit of distance that helps shield the writer from “OMG what will they think of me? I can’t say THAT!”

Which is fine in the rough draft. But in revision, such things must be mercilessly slaughtered, for they impact the salability of thy manuscript. That little bit of distance such things give the writer in the rough draft may well be an impassable distance to the reader, who may decide not to buy/read/respond to your story because of it. Which is deadly when an agent or publisher is looking at your work, and no less deadly when someone takes your book off the shelf at the store, opening it up to the first page and asking to be wowed.

So one can break those rules and disregard that advice, once one has a clear understanding of the function of those rules and how to properly break them. Which is what makes writing–and by extension, all art–so broad, juicy, and wonderful.

Pontification officially over. Now I must go eat a bagel. Wish me luck. In my uncaffeinated state I might stick a fork in the toaster or something.

Scrambled eggs are difficult to cook correctly, but with the DHM’s help I have managed to evolve a system that does eventually involve them being cooked at one point or another.

And there was much rejoicing, especially since I cannot cook worth a damn. My mother did try to teach me, but nothing much came of it except the ability to bake chocolate-chip cookies and a mean grilled-cheese.

The Princess informs me she likes my macaroni-and-cheese much better than her Daddy’s. Which is gratifying if somewhat mystifying. I suppose my problem with cooking is that I am easily distracted by plotlines. Disaster usually ensues, along with wacky hijinks.

I actually broke the pesky 30K mark on Devil in Love yesterday. It’s slow going, stringing together all these beads I know I have to have in order to get to the Big Payoff. Murgh. The trouble is, I keep getting interrupted by life. Pesky life.

Today I’m already late, and I just got up. Coffee is not helping, and a mountain of work is not getting any smaller. I want to get on the treadmill and RUN AWAY. Especially from the characters in my head.

*mumblemumblemuttermutter*

Some days it’s best to just stay in bed. Despite the well-done eggs and the coffee-making going as planned.

Looking at YouTube has convinced me of one thing: people have WAY too much free time. Including a certain writer who looks at all sorts of Brokeback parodies. When even your husband starts sending you Brokeback MountDoom, you know you’ve gone Too Far.

Bless his pea-picking little heart, too. The newest thing the Dear Husband Muffin is agog over is the Invisible Clock. I married a techno-geek.

Help me.

The new Watcher book is going great guns, and the fifth Valentine book is knocking under the hood like a Corvette with a gas tank full of water. I wonder if draining the engine and flushing it out (a massive operation involving diary entries, interviews with the characters, and blocking out fights in the back yard.) will help or hinder.

Ah. The life of a writer.

In other news, we’ve had some rain here. Enough that the world is beginning to smell green again, and I am heartily glad of it. The dryness was really starting to get to me. And the leaves are beginning to fall, the air has taken on the peculiar crispness of fall.

Enough stupid landscape stuff. Froopy just interrupted this blog post to point out something rare and wonderful I had no idea even existed:

Ask A Ninja!

Go. Click. Watch. Laugh until beverage shoots out your nose. Seriously. It’s that good.

Last but not least, it’s International Talk Like A Pirate Day. If you don’t know HOW to talk like a pirate, relax. It’s very simple. There’s the Five A’s.

Enjoy.

I forgot to mention a couple interviews that are now available: Milady Insanity’s “Seven Questions With Lilith Saintcrow” and Gareth Wilson’s interview with me for his new Falcata Times.

I am also going to see if I can swing Orycon this year. Wish me luck…