#on womanhood
“For women, only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl. The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life-cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks — heavier, rougher, more thickly built. A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another: the darker skin of a man’s face, roughened by daily shaving, showing the marks of emotion and the normal lines of age. There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat. No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to continue wanting to look like girls.”— Susan Sontag, “The Double Standard of Aging”
“Imagining crawling inside them, she fantasized the feeling of the bugs that would cover her arms and legs, burrow inside of her, and how the tree, strong and thick, would embrace her inside its darkness. Weeds and vines and flowers sprouting from her flesh as she pushed her fingers outward toward the warmth of the sun, becoming one with the tree, ancient, beautiful, mysterious. There was a hollowness in Blossom’s chest. As if someone had dug a hole into her sternum in preparation to plant something where her heart was supposed to be before getting distracted, allowing for worms to dig deeper into the soil, for spiders to lay eggs into the crevices of her flesh, and forrot to take place.”
BLOSSOM(2020); an original novelby kate winborne;available as paperback, hardcover, and on amazon kindle
Emily Skaja, from Brute: Poems; “Philadelphia”
[Text ID: “I wasn’t delicate.”]
