In the company of wolves

Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedastal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur. (Margaret Atwood 1993)



This is what we do best: we give you what you want. How would you like me? I can put on my glamour skin and strut. I can drink too much, take too many drugs, paint on some heroin-chic and sit crumpled in a corner. Or how about independent, career woman? Or else the virginal sheltered girl with sunlight and hay-sticks in her hair? Or the Goth – the vampire or the victim – or the Surfer/Skater Chick – as girls who choose to be boys because they cannot be men – unlike Man-Woman who might just take over the world, if that didn’t scare He-Man too much. We do what you want, in the name of what we want. We look the way you want us to, in the guise of self-expression. But there’s only so many ‘I’s we can be: ‘Unique’ is divisible into distributed and limited figures designed for us to step into (for a price, of course) and carry out of the shop in a plastic bag with patriarchy’s label emblazoned upon it. But that’s ok, isn’t it, because we’re doing it for ourselves (as They like so often to tell us!).



We're slick and we're smooth, and it's all in the name of fashion and irony anyway. It's not doing any harm, it's a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun. We all need to chill out. It doesn't mean anything, does it: this is the sexy postmodern. We're all just having fun, because that's what's really important, isn't it: whether we're all having fun or not. And there's no such thing as misrepresentation, only misinterpretation.



And don't think for a minute that we can escape through lesbianism. Lesbian-chic - just another commodity. For, guess who? The usual suspects. They want it all, and they want it even more if they're not supposed to get it. And if they can't get it? Doesn't matter - they'll just watch - it's good enough.



And violence, provided it isn't explicit, is just art, like everything else - like anything else - and that's sexy too, isn't it? - The suggestion - the merest hint - of violence. Because we're beyond all that: all that hysteria about sexual violence. That was messy and irrelevant. We're far too knowing - too sophisticated - to face it now. We've moved on, assimilated it, ironed it out, and made it ironic and made it cool.