There are as many
kinds of female beauty as there are of male attractiveness. This seems obvious,
but like a lot of things which at first seem obvious it bears investigation.
Men can have dad bods. Men can be
attractive in spite of what they do. Men
are allowed to age well. Men are
allowed to be monsters.
Women are not
accorded the same aesthetic dignity. Being a MILF is not the same as having a
dad bod. The dad bod is in the possession of its owner; MILFery is in the eye
of the (usually male) beholder. And as to aging well…
And being
monsters?
I don’t mean
murderers. I never had a thing for Myra Hindley. But I did have a thing for the tough girls at school, the girls who did
what they wanted and weren’t afraid to fight and who, yes, sometimes beat me up.
There is something attractive about female toughness, about women who don’t
mind a scrap. A friend and I have been rewatching Ab Fab on Netflix, and we agree that one of the best things about
Joanna Lumley’s Patsy is her willingness to turn to violence as a first resort.
Ditto Bridget Everett’s Dagmar in Lady
Dynamite, and Steven Universe’s Amethyst.
Anna Konda is a
beautiful monster. In the photographs taken by Katarzyna Mazur for Dazed and Confused we
see her standing, squatting, having her face wiped between bouts, and wrestling
– shoving a smaller woman up against a wall, pushing against a woman’s thighs
to stop her wrapping those thighs around Anna, getting her in what Brazilian
Jiu-Jitsu practitioners and MMA fans call the
guard.
The guard looks
like a vulnerable position. You’re supine, and your opponent is above. But if
you can get your legs around them, and your arms are free, you can control a
lot. For one thing, if they’re on their knees – which is likely in this
situation – wrapping your thighs around their midsection forces them to rely on
their arms, much weaker than the legs. If you can tie their arms up as well,
and if your thighs are sat just right on your opponent’s floating ribs…
Fans of the more
brutal sports and spectacles invoke chess so often that it seems, at times,
like special pleading, but looking at a still from a fight can evoke the same
thoughts as the illustrated diagrams of disposed pieces in newspaper chess
columns. We can (or like to kid ourselves we can) extrapolate the course of the
fight from this one frozen moment. She has her in the guard, she has one arm
locked up – her opponent can only attack with the free arm, but if she twists
just so…The pleasure here is that of watching things play out. There are, of
course, other kinds of pleasure at play too.
One reason for the
popularity of scissor shots – the bodyscissors, with the thighs wrapped ‘round
the torso, and their head variation, in which the thighs pressure the skull and
the neck – is their similarity to the sexual act. We may as well admit this to
begin with: but we ought perhaps to admit alongside it the fact that this
resemblance can be found in many forms of ‘legitimate’ sport as well. The guard
is a jiu-jitsu basic; boxers’ shining bodies clinch; track athletes race each
other in what the rest of us call underwear. There is an erotic charge in
watching bodies strive against each other, however they do so. In one of
Mazur’s pictures, a wrestler leans over the body of her opponent, her hand
almost caressing the prone woman’s face, lips close enough to whisper in her
ear. The whole thing looks post-coital.
When some
gallery-goers, shocked at what they saw as the obscenity of Francis Bacon’s
1954 work Two Figures in the Grass, appealed
to a policeman to have it removed, the law officer replied ‘Why? It’s just two
fellows wrestling in the grass.’ I like to imagine he smirked when he said
that, challenging the prudes to provide an alternative interpretation. Honi soit qui mal y pense.
Being Bacon, the
subject is buggery, we’re tempted to say. But in fact, being Bacon, the subject
is ambiguity – we see one body mount
the other but are they fighting, fucking, fondling, fellating? We can’t know.
Bacon liked to mix his sex with violence: watch Love is the Devil. He had his lovers beat him up, and loved to
stand so close to the ring at boxing bouts that blood would stain his face.
Bacon called love two people destroying
each other. When asked to explain whether his paintings picture acts of sex
or acts of violence one wonders, sometimes, if he’d be aware of the difference.
That there is a difference is something we must
often assert. Excepting professional performers (themselves practitioners of a
craft historically associated with sexual deviancy), for most of us, fighting
and fucking represent the most intense times we will spend at close quarters
with another human being: even the most prolific hugger must admit that a
friendly squeeze of the shoulders lacks the intensity of pitched battle or
animal rutting. But where to draw the line? Sex can be aggressive; when two
technicians fight, the hold which makes one tap might be executed almost
tenderly. Which act is violence?
In my novella Incidents
of Trespass, there is a moment when the protagonist, Ruby Street, is
raped by another woman. Her rapist orders Ruby to jerk off in front of her, and
Ruby collaborates, but in order to do so she finds herself having to resort to
her fantasies of a different order of intimate violence, imagining various tough
women beating on her rapist. But Ruby’s fantasies of strife are masochistic:
she identifies most with the victim, not the aggressor. For her, this is perhaps the worst part of the
ordeal: that she is forced to recruit her dreams of one kind of erotic violence
in the service of another. Or, rather, in the service of a violence which is
sexual but unerotic. Rape may involve the sexual organs but it isn’t making
love. A rapist might punch you in the face, as Ruby’s does, but it isn’t a
fight.
It’s not a fight,
sure, but you can still lose.
Fights have
referees. Even ‘catfighting’ videos, in which women tussle in their underwear
in living rooms, supposedly privately, are watched over by a camera operator at
the very least, who can stop things if they get too heated. Producers take
pains to ensure their workers aren’t injured. Fights can be stopped. Referees
in the bedroom might be one way of enforcing consent culture, but I suspect few
would take such a modest proposal all that seriously (and anyway, refs can be
bought). The ‘real fight’ videos that litter YouTube and Worldstar are far from
private. For better or worse, there are bystanders. They might film. They might
intervene. But they’re there.
By contrast,
unless we’re orgiasts, when we wind up having sex with someone else we’re
usually alone, except for them. Alone, and naked, with a person that we can’t
be sure we trust. There’s a reason it took Judith to kill Holofernes: she could
get close enough to do it. In the bedroom, no-one is on hand to remind
participants to protect themselves at all times. Indeed, the opportunity to
spend time with another without having to
protect ourselves is part of the appeal. The risk, too.
Some of us take it
further, that’s all. It’s not enough to know that we don’t have to keep our guard up: we like not being able to, knowing our partners will give us back that control when
we ask. We enjoy feeling helpless safely. And that’s why we need them, the
tough girls. The beautiful monsters. The women who could crush us, if they
wanted to. They might not be conventionally pretty, but so what? They have what we want: big thighs. Musclefat. Take-no-shit expressions. Bodies confident in their ability to take on other bodies, and to best them. That beats pretty any day.
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