Whose Ideal Was This, Anyway?

As part of my day job I teach media literacy to children in 5th and 6th grade -- just before they go off to junior high school, and hopefully just before they are inundated with the maximum number of messages about who they should be.

One of the things I did recently was to make two slide shows about the evolution of what is considered ideal in both male and female bodies. For the female progresssion, we start with the S-curve styles of the 1900's, with the impossibly thin waist and the "monobosom" pouter-pigeon chest.


The thing I always debate with myself about this kind of image is this: is it better to rely on a piece of corsetry, torturing one's body into shape through lacings and bonings which everyone uses? At least then, no one expects you look that way naturally. Or is it better to be natural, wearing flimsy knitted clothes that give away every lump and bump, and be expected to be perfect with no structural support at all? The former is painful, but the latter can be even more painful, because the only way to gain the correct shape is to starve yourself, exercise to death, and have plastic surgery -- all invasive techniques that actually change your body and affect your overall lifetime health. And even then, after all that, they don't often work.

Within about twenty years after this, however, the fashion changed so much that anyone with those kinds of curves is in big trouble -- which means that all the curvy women who were considered beautiful before probably had daughters who inherited their shape and were now struggling with trying to flatten and narrow themselves so as to fit the new shape.


Within another twelve years, you have Mae West making that flat ideal look entirely silly.


And then come the forties, time of slim hips and shoulder pads, a more masculine look to go with wartime and the Rosie the Riveter ideal of womanhood.


But of course, men who are at war and dreaming of home think about girls like Betty Grable with longing: not so masculine looking here. Note, however, that there is no gap between her thighs. If she were a modern pinup, she would have much thinner legs, often so much so that there would be a space between the thighs.


By the fifties, things had changed back again from the shoulder pads and the narrow hips.


Then, in the sixties, a new phenomenon came to our attention: the new, "modern girl" look of Twiggy. Suddenly all those girls who looked like Marilyn Monroe were doomed. Thin was in (remind you of the twenties at all? Modernness and shapelessness?).


This is, I think, the beginning of our modern supermodel/Photoshop hell.

Curiously, though, this is where I started to notice a thing. It was a kind of big thing, and I'm not certain how I missed it before, except that with the proliferation of media, there are more examples for me to look at. What I noticed was a rift between the ideal woman for men and the ideal woman for women.

The thing is that while Twiggy was strutting her stuff to the women, we had Jane Fonda taking the male world by storm in her role as Barbarella.


So what is that about? When women try to emulate someone such as Twiggy, against the general desire to attract men, what are they doing? My guess is that it's about women trying to impress other women. Which is an interesting phenomenon (Note: I am going to set aside gay, lesbian, bisexual and other preferences here because that is a huge discourse in itself; I'm making a choice to talk about the majority, in the services of a discussion of "popular culture," which is, after all, what the media is serving up. I do think it could probably be said that few lesbians are particularly interested in the Twiggy look, either, but perhaps I'm going out on a limb, making sweeping statements like that).

Another thing I am fascinated by is the incredible strides we've made in the technology of beauty. These earlier examples didn't have the benefits of plastic surgery, personal trainers, and Photoshop. True, the early catalogs are all drawings, so could be as fantastic as you want; and true, they had the soft-focus lens and some retouching in still photographs. But when Ursula Andress walked out of the waves on film, she had to hold it in, to carry herself well in order to look as fabulous as she did. When I compare the photos of her to the apparently effortless beauty of the photos of her modern counterpart, Halle Barry, two things come to mind: "Poor Ursula! She looks so self-conscious by comparison!" --and-- "My word, but Halle looks disturbingly, almost supernaturally, flawless!" And, to be honest, it is supernatural: she has the benefits of all the modern technologies. Whereas Ursula was actually standing there, in the raw, being natural -- no "super" about it.




The thing that disturbs me most about these two images is how our daughters must feel about themselves when they see them. The girls in 1962, seeing Ursula rising from the waves in Dr. No, knew that what they were seeing was a real woman, something they could aspire to (if that was what they wanted). Seeing Halle Barry, above, holds no such comforts, particularly when digital film has so much option for smoothing out those flaws. Such perfection is absolutely outside the realm of anyone who is honest with themselves. They might as well throw themselves against a brick wall, because you can't live, and breathe, and be that perfect. It's impossible, and our daughters know it.

And I won't need to say much about the present Photoshop climate, and the overzealousness of Photoshop users that, while making fun of themselves to some extent, are also continuing to propagate the impossible image, one that makes it hard to judge what the real person looked like and so impossible to know what to compare oneself to.


Now, on the male front, there's not a lot of change from 1910 to the 1970s. Maybe a little more muscle, but nothing strange. Male self-image, like male fashion, is one of conservatism and extremely subtle variation, particularly during the 20th century. Sure, there were the Ziggy Stardust exceptions, but very few men actually aspired to that kind of skinny and androgenous look -- or to wearing shiny, colorful stretch body suits and platform heels on the street.










However, in the 1970s, not too long after Ziggy was blowing peoples' minds, a man who everyone had thought rather extreme, crossed over from the bodybuilding subculture into the mainstream media, bringing with him a sea-change as he came.


It's true that his first big role in film was one of extreme caracature, and many people laughed at its comic book qualities.


But the film, and his role in it, captured imaginations too. Arnold made his next appearance in another, more serious role, one in which his physical attributes are used in a much more believable way.


To overcome a comic-book image by portraying a truly frightening cyborg is an interesting entry into "normal" roles; but Terminator had a rippling effect of acceptance for his weird physique: how he looked went from being weird and scary:


...to being impossibly badass, and that, right there, is an entry into the imagination of the male populace. From there it was on to action movies, and before you know it, others were emulating the look. It became de rigeur for action movie heroes to have that pumped-up look; and a whole generation of boys grew up with the idea that it was the ultimate in masculinity.

Just look at GI Joe. In the 1960s he was a regular guy, modeled to look like a grownup version of the boys who played with him.


But by the 1990s, with G.I. Joe Extreme, whose biceps are nearly as big as his waist, it began to get out of control. Boys were being encouraged to play with role models that not only went beyond anything they could achieve with steroids, but would require actual muscle implants to achieve the proportions.


Curiously, women didn't go along with this, just as the Twiggy thing never caught on with men. The Brad Pitt of Thelma and Louise, which appealed to so many women, is not the same one as the Brad Pitt of Fight ClubTroy, an action movie.




And yet, just look at Robert Pattinson, the male star from the recent Twilight movies, who is the romantic fantasy outlet of hundreds of thousands of girls across the world. A farther cry from the Arnie physique I can really not imagine.


I can't save the children I teach from the poor information and misleading imagery they are fed every day, but I can try to make them aware of the visual diet they are ingesting. We work in Photoshop, and they learn to do retouching themselves, which gives them not only a technical tool but a deeper understanding of how these images are remade, so that when they see an image, they can look for the telltale clues.

Hopefully, they learn that there is really no way to make ourselves as perfect as the images we see -- and, in fact, they may even question who we are trying to make ourselves perfect for? As Jean Kilbourne says in Killing Us Softly 3, "We learn from a very early age [from advertisers] that we must spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and above all, money striving to achieve this ideal, and feeling ashamed and guilty when we fail. And failure is inevitable."


Links:

Watch Killing Us Softly 3 (from 1999); very interesting stuff

And here's a nice article on the changing standards of body image for men.

Old Man Bites Tenderly

I came across this entirely by accident, but it's hilarious (if a bit brutal), especially toward the end.



When I lived in Japan, the TV was full of shows like these: people having to put their faces into cages full of live snakes or having to dance on giant slimy inflatable balls, or being dropped in cars from 100-foot-high cranes. Most of the time they didn't seem funny to me, being largely about humiliation and doing things that looked insanely dangerous. This one, however, is made funnier by the inanity of the punishments and by the stricture of having to be quiet in a library. And what the heck is that American guy doing there? No idea, but it's very typical of the genre.

There was also a series of Arnold Schwarzenneger commercials when I was there for what we called a "genki drink" (energy drink), where Arnold behaved like a lunatic, which struck all of us gaijin (foreigners) as extremely funny, in that "Oh, my God" kind of way. Here's one, below: "Bui" is how the letter "V" is pronounced in Japanese, and "Daijobu" means "no problem"; so the "Daijobui" is a kind of play on words for the name of the product.



Hard to imagine, in those days, that he would become the governor of California.

My closest brush with this kind of silly show was when a TV crew came to the gaijin house (a kind of residence hotel) where I lived for awhile and filmed us all making dishes of our own concoction out of Japanese ingredients. The crew were very polite, but the TV show, when it came on the air, ended up just as sensationalized and inane as all the others. Still, it was extremely interesting to see oneself through the lens of another culture's media.

Venice, part 2

Okay, more pictures. Been struggling tooth and nail with Blogger for two days, but finally got the pics to go up (and also fell down some stairs - the paving here is slippery limestone - so my right arm isn't working too well at the moment). But here we go!

This is my favorite picture - for the actual beauty of the photo, but also, look at those locks! I have some other pictures of wonderful locks from Dubrovnik which I will post soon that are beautiful and beat this out in complexity...These prison photos are from the prison that the Bridge of Sighs leads to, from the Doge's Palace. It's part of the admission to the Palace to see the prison.

Strange to me that they would label the cells and then put the capacity on the label. I can't decide if this was for later tourists or not. It looks almost like a street sign.

Prisoner's graffiti

Non-prisoner's graffiti. I always photograph silly graffiti, ever since I lived in London and never got a picture of the best graffiti ever: on Mare Street in Hackney. It said, "Treacle People: sticky like us" and had these little melty marshmallow creatures. Sigh. I'm sure it's gone now, but it really got stuck in my head. ...What do you think this one used to say before someone added onto it?

The best art store display I have ever seen. It made me want to eat it.

Inside the Great Council room of the Doge's Palace. The room is something like 25 meters long, with a fully carved-and-gold-leafed ceiling over the whole thing. Another illegal photograph.

There are these little walkways that go all around the upper levels of San Marco, less than a meter wide, with stone balustrades on both sides. It's a common Gothic thing, little high-up walkways (see the Hunchback of Notre Dame), but I was struck by these particular ones for being so intensely circuitous and narrow (and because it's rare to be allowed above them, so I really saw them from a new angle). I wish I could have gone walking on them; they went all the way around the inside of the place. They remind me of dreams I have had, of tall and tottering walkways...

The floors of San Marco are a dazzling display of pure Byzantine geometry. Such an amazing place.

As far as I can tell, this actually says "Beware of Falling Stuff."

Soon: more - on the Leonardo Da Vinci mechanism show - plus locks and other oddities.

Pataphysics and Fictive Art

Or: How to Escape Into A Dream


I looked at Chris Palmer's cool blog, KineticWorld, today (thanks Ranjit) and was intrigued with the entry on the Museé Patamécanique: a place, a website, an ideology of, as curator Neil Salley, puts it, "the science of imaginary solutions. It is the underpinnings of our entire society. All words being equal, you can come up with any definition of it you like." The term was coined by the brilliant 19th-century French writer Alfred Jarry (author of the play Ubu Roi), in his fictional Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, describes "the exploits and teachings of a sort of antiphilosopher who, born at age 63, travels through a hallucinatory Paris in a sieve and subscribes to the tenets of 'pataphysics. 'Pataphysics deals with "the laws which govern exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this one". In 'pataphysics, every event in the universe is accepted as an extraordinary event." [wiki]

As Ranjit points out, the Boston Globe did an article on the Musée Patamécanique which they visited, describing the place thusly:

The "Patamechanics Hall, a dark gallery of mechanical oddities designed to spark pataphysical thinking that seem teleported straight from the 19th century. The "Pharus Foetidus Viscera," or "Olfactory Lighthouse," is a cylindrical pedestal topped by a bell jar and surrounded by metal octopus arms. Inside the jar, something Salley describes as a unicorn horn slowly rotates, causing it to secrete green goop that resembles shampoo gel...

"The more you listen to Salley and experience his wondrous contraptions, the more you lose your bearings between reality and fantasy. The Musée Patamécanique turns out to be an intellectual hall of mirrors. It is a museum for questioning museums, and art, and science, and officialdom, and facts, and the world."

Hooray for that! It is always refreshing to hear about people playing around with more magical (or even downright fun and silly) interpretations of reality:

"The Musée Patamécanique is part of a growing body of art that adopts the language and trappings of officialdom. Examples include Los Angeles's Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Center for Tactical Magic from Oakland, Calif., and, locally, the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, the National Bitter Melon Council, and the Institute for Applied Autonomy. In the world of pop culture, such adoption of fake authority can be found in parodies such as "The Daily Show" and "The Onion."

"For artists, adopting official-sounding names -- along with convincing-looking websites and other packaging and marketing -- can be a way to question authority, frequently humorously, while often doing what the organization's names say they do."


This kind of art isn't that new. Marcel Broodthaers created, the Museum of Modern Art's "Department of Eagles": an elusive exhibition from 1968 to 1971 of found objects with eagles on them and eagle-related art that he made, though the exhibition was really about appropriating the language and structures of museums and authorities, using the eagle, a symbol of power, as a metaphor. The cool thing about this was that he created an institution with many wings, for example, the Finance Section, which tried to sell the museum "on account of bankruptcy."


Packard Jennings, someone I met while on a residency at Djerassi Residence Artist's Program, is also one of these people. He made the most hilarious video I've ever seen about a Mussolini action figure he created and put on the shelf (shopdropped) in WalMart, where someone is trying to actually buy the figure, and the store clerks are completely flummoxed, except they know who Mussolini is! (Watch to the end, that's the best part.)

Antoinette LaFarge, at UC Irvine, has created a whole site, unfinished as of yet, on the idea of Fictive Arts, "...a term I started using in 2001 to describe a particular form of aesthetic production that doesn't belong to any one field. Fictive artworks have clearly fictional elements but extend outside the realm of the purely fictive in various ways, principally through the creation of realia. A working definition of the term might be: credible fictions created through production of real-world objects, events, and entities."

The thing I find fascinating about the whole Fictive Art movement, and its bevy of predecessors and spin-offs, is the combination of dreamlike logic and official phraseology, as if some half-remembered story has come true and is being promulgated by Those In Charge. The sales clerk in WalMart is surprised and pleased to see they are selling Mussolini action figures. Wandering through the Museum of Jerassic Technology - one of my favorite places, and an inspiration for the Museé Patamécanique - one finds oneself surrendering, dreamily, to the dim and scholarly exhibits which carry that slight air of delapidation and poor construction one finds in so many small, old museums. One begins to believe what one is told, only to emerge, blinking, onto the bright and unforgiving streets of Los Angeles, wondering which reality is preferable.


Links:

- The Centennial Society, which seems to be associated with Packard Jennings in some way (but clearly not with WalMart).

- The Museum of Jurassic Technology, which I hope someday to write about in further depth. Its owner, David Wilson, is the subject of Lawrence Weschler's Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder.

- Fodor's reviews the Museum of Jurassic Technology!

LilyPads and Wearable Electronics

This evening I accidentally came across the website of one Leah Buechley, a woman who may change the face of clothing as we know it.

Long ago, I got a BA in Art, with dual emphases in Conceptual Design (read: early computer graphics and concept follow-through) and textiles. I tried, in every way I knew how, to combine the two: I made weavings out of wires, adding LEDs and plugs; I learned about their new computerized loom, I thought long and hard about how to get computerized technology into fabric. But it was too early, the technology was too clunky, and everyone was looking at me like I was a lunatic, so eventually I gave up.

Imagine my pleasure at coming across Ms. Buechley's wonderful DIY site, where she shows you how you, too, can create amazing interactive clothing with the LilyPad Arduino, a washable, flexible fabric circuit system you sew together with conductive thread, so that your whole body becomes circuitry, and, for example, if you move your arm quickly it sets off LEDs in your clothes. Or: if you put your coat on, your clothes go dark. Take it off, your clothes light up. Best of all, you can use things like snaps to keep the circuitry going when you attach things together.

The RGB LED chages color in response to motion and tilt from the accelerometer which is sewn to the right wrist.

I'm telling you: this woman is smart.

The Arduino is "an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators" (See more here).

It's hard to describe how this is different from previous interactive clothing. For one thing, she has come at it from a textile person's perspective, redesigning the whole circuitry thing to look like...well, parts of clothes. For another thing, all the pieces in the group of items (she calls it a "kit", but they are all sold separately) seem to be made as patches, with iron-on circuitry; and there are no wires or weird bits that you have to hide or otherwise deal with (Though the picture of the LilyPad for sale seems harder than the one above. I'll have to find out about that - still, it's not much bigger than a quarter).

Ms. Buechley helps you access the materials, and shows, in clear step-by-step instructions, not only how to use the LilyPad and attendant bits, but things like how to use needle-nosed pliers to turn a regular LED into a decorative sew-on bead, so you can have as many LEDs flashing across your clothing as you want. And she has lots of Flickr pics to look at, too.

She says:

"I am interested in integrating "feminine" activities like sewing with computer science, mathematics and technology. I think that social issues more often than lack of talent discourage women from entering math, technology and science related fields, and I hope to help create environments where women's interests are explored and represented."

Her kits for kids are available for only $15 to make little wearable LED items for themselves (with a little help). I have been trying very hard to find ways to make the robotics curriculum I teach at the local school into something more exciting for girls; their interest, always fickle, waxes and wanes depending on the personality of the students. Not only could we do the kids' kit, but then we could move on to real programming, using the LilyPad itself. This is a sure-fire technological way to get girls' attention, for those of you out there with smart daughters or sisters. In fact, this is a sure-fire way to get my attention. I can't wait to start making stuff.

Finally, after all these years.


Buy the LilyPad development kit from SparkFun

Merkins and Kotekas and Codpieces, Oh My!

This is a silly post. Or rather, about things which might seem silly: genital coverings.

I was sewing a pair of trunk hose for my Significant Other, who has wanted a pair for years. I'm a Faire brat (as in the Renaissance Faire), but not the usual kind. My parents were what is considered the stodge of the Ren Faire: the craftspeople who sell their wares there. A subtle difference from the outside, but important in the social world of the Faire, because the craftspeople were mostly hardworking folk who busted butt all week to create enough of their wares for the weekend, and then sat all day in their booths waiting on people; to them it was a life-saver, a money-maker. It was work. Whereas the actors (the colorful and flamboyant staff) were people with day jobs who came to the Faire to cut loose and be someone else for the weekend. So you can imagine the personality types are very different.

My memories from very young are of taking naps in the top of the booth, with the sounds of the Faire all around, and of running around after dark among the booths where people crouched over camp-stoves or Coleman lanterns, talking quietly, while in the distance musicians sang and drunken people laughed loudly. You could buy your dinner from the sausage place, who served up food for the locals after hours, or cook your own; and there were madly obscene plays held in the theatres for anyone who wished to see them. In any case, despite the fact that I'm not an actor-type, and I am no longer allowed into the inner world of the Faire, I retain a soft spot for the costumery and the general air of the place.


So here I was, sewing trunk hose and trying to fashion a codpiece. The pattern I had, when sewn up, seemed designed to be this terrible thrusting thumb-shaped thing which I found difficult to believe. It was certainly not something designed to actually contain any anatomical parts in a useful way. Looking at the pictures from history that the pattern people provided, I did not see anything like it. Eventually, I designed my own version, but along the way I looked at lots of pictures of codpieces; and began to be really interested in the whole phenomenon of genitalia coverings.

We all know about loincloths. The need to cover one's nether regions, while not ubiquitous, is nearly so. Every land mass in the world has some version of this garment, whether it be called a fundoshi (Japan), a sirat (Borneo), or a breechcloth (Europe). In many cultures, it is the sole garment worn, historically, by both sexes.

Gollum, gollum: loincloths are seen, in Western culture, as primitive and showing a lack of social or cultural development, rather than a simple, comfortable garment

Otto Steinmayer, at the Universiti Malaya, has some interesting things to say about the wearing of loincloths; rather than a modesty issue, he says loincloths are a way to decorate our bodies, a humanizing element to distinguish ourselves from animals. The fact that the genitals become the site for creative expression is related to their social importance - ie, the importance of sex as it relates to marriage and other customs and taboos - and to the fact that restriction of copulation is one of the major points of any civilization. Therefore, loincloths and other genital coverings become important for their expression of that consciousness, that restriction. As Mr. Steinmayer says, " Some South American Indians have expressly said that they ornament themselves because if they wear no ornament they feel there is no difference between themselves and animals." He goes on to make this beautiful statement: "A loincloth is something put on the body. Western clothes that cover everything reshape the person entirely."

Metal codpieces

It is interesting, therefore, that codpieces became such a fashion statement in Renaissance times. Beginning as an easy way to cover the awkward space between the legs of men's hose, codpieces continued to be popular long after those same private bits could be tucked easily into trunk hose or other forms of baggy wear. And the styles were awfully strange. As in my "historically correct" pattern, an erect shape was common, even if it wasn't to my modern taste.


Henry VIII of England began padding his codpiece at some point, which caused a spiraling trend of larger and larger codpieces that only ended by the end of the 16th century. The fact that he may have done it to bandage over the medication of syphilis symptoms did not stop it from becoming a trend. Eventually, the trend died out, interestingly coinciding with the more modest styles of Protestantism/Puritanism. Nowadays, of course, you can still see them in any place where people wear skin-tight, manly apparel, such as in science fiction movies and on rock stars and superheros. Otherwise, all other attempts to bring them back have failed.


In New Guinea, by contrast, the wearing of Kotekas, or penis sheaths made from specially-grown gourds, is still {according to Wikipedia} going strong. "Campaigns by the Indonesian government to suppress the koteka in Papua occurred in the 1970s. The campaigns have been largely unsuccessful in areas such as the Baliem Valley.
"In 1971-1972 the government launched "Operasi Koteka" ("Operation Penis Gourd") which consisted primarily of trying to encourage the people to wear shorts and shirts because such clothes were considered more "modern." But the people did not have changes of clothing, did not have soap, and were unfamiliar with the care of such clothes so the unwashed clothing caused skin diseases. There were also reports of men wearing the shorts as hats and the women using the dresses as carrying bags.
"Missionaries in the 1950s attempted to alter the local customs by forcing locals to wear shorts. Many of the Dani of the Baliem Valley felt exposed without their kotekas and could be seen wearing shorts with their kotekas sticking out of them. Eventually the missionary effort and the Indonesian government's campaign were abandoned. Nevertheless, western clothing is required in government buildings, and children are required to wear western clothing in school. Kotekas are still considered acceptable attire in church, however."


I love that! I love how strong the people's attachment is, but then I always cheer when attempts to "modernize" a culture fail. Kotekas are interesting, being a social construct only; they hide so little and yet are so necessary to the men's sense of self and modesty. Contrary to Western belief the size and shape of a koteka are not indicative of anything other than practicality and situation. Different tribes wear differently-shaped ones, and size and elaborateness are usually a function of ceremony rather than an individual's social status.

All this is very well, what with penis-sheaths and codpieces, but what about women? We tend, in American culture, at least, to denigrate our nether regions, see them as something to be deodorized and sanitized. The recent cult for shaving and waxing is an example of how we would like the whole part to just stop being so messy. The "landing strips" that you can see on porn stars and, probably, in any women's locker room are a mere nod to the more natural state of affairs, as much a social construct as a penis sheath. The sense of taboo about women's genitalia, the desire to make them vanish or dwindle, can be seen in many cultures, in many guises: the genital mutilation still being practiced in some countries, for example, or the traditional Romany taboo against exposing objects or animals to the underside of a woman's skirts (as in stepping over things), because it will pollute them. And look at how our own Freud describes women as embodying "lack".

Thanks to the Barber Blog for the image.

Into the lines of debate about the size and luxuriance of your patch, there comes that marvelous 17th century invention, designed to hide the signs of syphillus in prostitutes: the merkin, or pubic wig. Not so common these days, except as sequinned mock-merkins in bulesque costumes (to go with pasties, instead of a g-string), merkins are on the rise in Japan under the moniker "Night Flower". Apparently underdeveloped young Japanese women turn to Chinese-made, hand-woven human hair merkins in order to "normalize" their appearance.


And then there are the fun merkins which are making their appearance on the scene. These are the postmodern interpretation of pubic hair which, curiously, does not read as obscene, even while leaving everything looking much the same shape and size as one's natural state. I think my favorite is the one, above, from Burning Man, called the "merkinlight": a merkin with flashlight. It may be silly but damn, it's cool.

On that note, you really should take a look at Merkin World, for a taste of custom merkin shopping...and a fun history of merkins.


Other links:

Nice, and very complete blog post about the merkin by The Capital Letter blog.

A Short and Curly History of the Merkin, from the Guardian archives

Electricity: the Road to Health

One of my friends just went to an acupuncturist for a back complaint, and came home buzzing (so to speak) with the fact that the acupuncturist had used electricity in the needles that were attached to her. She said it felt strange, and rather unpleasant, and made her feel tense. But then, she said, the acupuncturist went away and left her there, and before long she became so relaxed that she fell asleep, despite the weird zipping sensation in her back.

Looking this up, I find there are two fields of thought on this method: one is that the electricity takes the place of hand-manipulating the needles, allowing constant stimulation without tiring the doctor or becoming less accurate. The other gets into a whole discussion about the energy flows which are such an important part of Chinese medicine, and which apparently can be measured now through the use of electricity, since they are clearly related (according to my admittedly limited sources).

This reminded me, suddenly, of something that had been in my grandfather's stuff when he died: a strange instrument which delivered electricity to your body via a thing that looked like a little purple florescent light. And a friend of my parents had another one, even weirder and more, sort of, industrial, with this odd 1930's bandaid-pink asthetic which reminded me, unaccountably, of old ladies with lace-up shoes and baggy stockings. That one had two metal phallic-shaped hand wands with wires going to the main box. When you held them and turned it on, the horrid crawling of electricity traveled down your arms. I didn't forget that feeling in a hurry.


Later, when I was living in Japan, the Sento (public bath) that we frequented, which I found out later was famous for being clean and modern, had an electric bath you could get into, with a mild current running through it. I stuck my arm in once, and shuddered, preferring the lemon bath or the refrigerated bath any day. They also had a steam room, a sauna (wet vs. dry), and a twin stream of warm water which fell, thick as fat ropes, inside a little booth, where you could stand and have their weight pound your shoulders. And of course, you had to scrub before you were allowed into any of those other things, and often wanted to scrub again afterwards... so when you got on your bike and rode home, several hours later, you could feel the hairs on your arms riffling in the breeze, as if three tons of dead skin had been sloughed away.

But I digress.

4th Century BCE platter decorated with a torpedo fish (electric ray)

In A.D. 46, the Roman physician Scribonius Largus said:

"Headache even if it is chronic and unbearable is taken away and remedied forever by a live black torpedo placed on the spot which is in pain, until the pain ceases. As soon as the numbness has been felt the remedy should be removed lest the ability to feel be taken from the part. Moreover several torpedoes of the same kind should be prepared because the cure, that is the torpor which is a sign of betterment, is sometimes effective only after two or three."

Black torpedos are a kind of electric fish. They have a 50 volt discharge and a peak power output of 1 kilowatt, and if you imagine pulling one from the sea, wet with saline solution, you can see touching one would be a low-resistance electrical connection. Just like electroshock or TENS (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) for pain -- both of which are still in use after 2000 years.


Several different people throughout history have discovered the efficacy of electricity in reducing the pain of toothache, beginning in the mid-1700's, when the discovery of the Leyden jar - a way of storing up static electricity - allowed shocks to be delivered in forceful amounts. After Luigi Galvani discovered that his unintentional battery made the muscles in frog's legs jump (believing himself that the electricity was inherent in/created by biological creatures), the belief in electricity as a life force was unstoppable. Not only toothache, but back pain and other ailments were felt to be improved by the administration of electricity; the craze became so intense that it was even promulgated that electricity could help the conditions of the poor (which might be true, but I suspect not in the way they were imagining). Electricity was life, the source of regeneration and animation.


In 1817, Mary Shelley used this belief to her advantage in the case of the unfortunate Victor Frankenstein, animating his philosophical monster with the latest research in Natural Philosophy:

" With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."

By Victorian times, electrotherapy were common in all the best spas. Electric baths or thrones, or smaller, more direct devices, were being used as "health cures" in places like Bath and Harrogate (for a wonderful example of a holdover of this fad, check out the movie Agatha, about the eleven days that Agatha Christie went missing in 1926). All sorts of electric devices were for sale, with wild claims to health-improvement (see this article on American Artifacts for a wonderful example).

San Francisco's wonderful, but lost, Sutro Baths

Scott's Electric Flesh Brush, 1880s: note the motto "The Germ of All Life is Electricity"

The turn of the twentieth century was a moment of great belief in the power of electricity, not only physically but philosophically. Henri Bergson's Elan Vital was a "hypothetical explanation for evolution and development of organisms, which Bergson linked closely with consciousness" [wiki], an extension of the Victorian idea of Vitalism, which is essentially the dressing up of a soul in science clothing. The trickle-down effect of people like Bergson, along with widespread electrification of cities, only served to further this fascination of the surging populace with electricity and its wonders. My parents have a bar of "Electric Soap", for example, which used to sit on the knick-knack shelf in our kitchen like some kind of odd brick. It looked like completely ordinary large scale bar-soap, similar to Lava Soap in its brick-ishness except white, and I used to wonder how it was electric; eventually my mother enlightened me, saying it was from a time when it was fashionable to be electric, whether or not you had anything even remotely to do with actual electricity. In a way this was my very first introduction to hyperbole; it had never occurred to me that anyone could name a thing as something it was not. It proved to me that the ways of grownups were indeed strange.


Even into the 1930's machines were still being created (like my parents' friends' machine) to promote health through electricity. It fit hand-in-glove with that same idealism, the desire to improve the lot of regular people, which inspired an interest in socialism, organic architecture, and personal health during the 1920s (Jack LaLanne, the fitness guru of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, said that attending a Bragg crusade in California in 1929 changed his life. Bragg advocated pure water, organic food, juicing raw fruits and vegetables, deep breathing, and exercise to extend one's life, an unusual philosophy in those days).


Curiously, as with the pure water, organic food, and exercise, we're now making discoveries that seem to uphold some of these claims. After a 50-year period of disbelief - where anyone advocating electricity as a cure-all was deemed a quack or a freak - some studies are discovering the depths to which our physical well-being is tied in with electricity. Synapses, for example, were long considered entirely chemical, but in the latter part of the 20th century electrical synapses were found to be abundant in the cerebral cortex; and current (har har) research has shown that electricity flows from the edges of a wound as soon as an incision is made - and not only that, but increasing the charge around a wound makes it actually heal faster.

I don't need to mention defibrillators to show how electricity can save lives. And then of course there's ECT, which is supposed to be a wonderful modern invention: electricity has been used for years to "heal" people's who are mentally ill, though it is still not understood what the mechanism is that makes it work. It does have its weak points, however. We are all familiar with stories like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, or Frances, where a beautiful mind is lost through the misunderstanding of the Establishment (Ursula LeGuin does a really beautiful job of this in her short story Diary of a Rose, from The Compass Rose), so there is not much surprise when we find that recent studies show an abnormal blood flow in the cerebral cortex after ECT. And, well, we know what happens to you if you commit murder in some states; so in some instances, too much life force can be a little overwhelming. As with all medicines, a little is good for you: too much is simply poison.


In this vein, great deal of talk is going around right now about electromagnetic radiation, and the possibility that we are living with too many electrical devices. The theory is that our bodies, so sublimely configured to live with a constant universe of solar radiation, global magnetism, and other natural sources of electromagnetic or other radiation, are not used to alternating current, and certainly not used to the levels to which we expose ourselves nowadays; and so the levels we do experience change our cells in unforseen ways, and this can cause cancer. The "life force" is thrown off-course and goes berzerk, and here we are again, trying to figure out what all this means.

I'd be willing to bet that within a few years we'll all be carrying little hand-held EMR meters or some kind of device that calms and straightens the electrical forces within our bodies so that we do not have to worry anymore. Perhaps those of us who are so inclined will even take the time to ornament theirs, so that it looks like a Victorian version, with scrollwork and brass fittings.

Sigh. La plus ca change, la plus c'est la meme chose.



Interesting links:

An interesting, look at electricity and health, with great pictures.

The Bite of Pain, the history of electricity and pain management, from (I suspect) a dentist's viewpoint.

A fun bunch of fun writing by Sarah Bakewell, one article of which discusses some of the background to Mary Shelley's imaginings.