Femininity (24 page)

Limberness and supple gestures are also characteristic of the female anatomy in motion.
Compared to men, women usually are more flexible throughout the spine, in the hamstrings
that control the knee and in the joints of the elbow and fingers. Looseness in these
specific joints is probably an estrogenic effect.

Small, light bones and agile fingers give the female a greater aptitude for fine motor
coordination of the hand. This is useful, interestingly enough, in traditional women’s
work such as weaving, sewing, knitting, quilting and crocheting, in making pottery,
nets and baskets, and in hand-painting miniatures and china plates. In the division
of labor by sex in early hunting and gathering clans, nimble fingers were a female
asset in harvesting roots,
seeds and fruit. In the permanent settlements that later evolved, deft, flying fingers
would help in sowing, planting and weeding, but not in clearing the land and breaking
the soil, where muscle strength in the hands, arms and back is required.

Adroit small motions are useful in routine office procedures such as filing, sorting
and typing, and in the assembly of small parts and microscopic chips on a production
line—jobs that are considered women’s work. Similar skills are an advantage in film
editing, a craft that is popular with women in Europe, though not in America, where
union discrimination has been rank. The advantage should hold for playing the piano—especially
if the keys were narrowed to better suit the female span—and the woodwinds and strings.
Musical instruments were passionately approved of for young ladies in the drawing
rooms, but not on the concert stage. The sole exception has been the harp, for which
graceful plucking gestures are a visual component of pleasure, as they are for the
Japanese samisen and the ancient Greek lyre, also favored for beautiful young women.
Rapid finger motions and graceful coordination are helpful in the varied, exacting
chores of the kitchen. Shelling, plucking, fine slicing and chopping, stirring, whipping,
and kneading bread and decorating cakes and cookies have been traditional feminine
pursuits in the home, but not, however, in the restaurant. And finally, skillful,
fast, light fingers should put many women with diagnostic acumen at the top of the
field in neurosurgery, and in all kinds of surgery for that matter, where the accolade
of “golden hands” stands for deftness at cutting and stitching—aptitudes required
for dressmaking as well.

Grace has subtly entered the discussion, since grace may be defined as an esthetic
value that we place on fluid, coordinated motion. The female hand makes a poor fighting
fist because of small, light bones and limited strength, but it lends itself well
to supple articulation. Fingers that flew over a piece of embroidery sent the philosopher
Rousseau into rapturous praise for the graceful feminine gesture; it was he who suggested
that a dutiful daughter be trained in needlework to best display her pretty hand.
Finger dexterity is probably the basis for the famous, or infamous, arched pinky gesture
when holding a cup of tea that
was once considered genteel when women did it, and so effeminate and unseemly when
practiced by men.

A feminine hand is chiefly admired these days not for its skill at embroidery, or
its grace at the typewriter, or for its heroic service in the kitchen, or even for
its gentle touch on another’s body, but rather for its manicure, the artful shaping
of the fingernails and the daily creaming to banish roughness that creates a look
and feel so different from the strong, blunt hand of a man, or the work-worn hand
that signals a woman’s unprivileged station. Dexterous fingers are relied on to perform
routine functional acts like diapering a baby, grasping a suitcase, dialing a telephone
or typing a letter with the self-imposed handicap of nails that are grown to excessive
length.

Hollywood’s contribution in the late 1930s to the concept of seductive glamour (with
antecedents among Balinese dancers and Chinese mandarins), a set of protruding, enameled
nails transforms the simplest gesture into the contrived, the self-conscious, or in
some cases the impossible or the to-be-avoided-at-all-costs. Seeking an explanation
for their renewed popularity in the Eighties, David Kunzle, author of
Fashion and Fetishism,
suggests that restrictions on manual dexterity imposed by long nails are comparable
in their erotic appeal to the narcissistic transformation of feminine motion imposed
by a corset and high heels. This is not necessarily what women think, for women are
notoriously unaware of how their feminizing effects may be perceived. (No woman seriously
entertains the idea that her lipstick-reddened mouth is a provocative symbol of her
vagina, as the porn magazines suggest.)

On men and women the cared-for hand is a sign of money, vanity and social refinement,
but modern feminine psychology goes further. Growing long nails is a proud achievement,
proof that a woman has triumphed over her personal shortcomings and the realistic
odds. Cultivating a uniform set of ten individual nails is a project akin to the propagation
of tender seedlings. One needn’t be a horticulturist or a nail-biter to understand
the hazards or to seek out professional aids: the emery board, the cuticle stick,
the gelatin packet, the liquid hardener, the creamy softener, etcetera. Other women
manage to grow beautiful nails,
why can’t you? The feminine competition of nail-growing, woman against herself, woman
against nature, and woman against other women, is so absorbing that accounts of the
struggle, which read like the triumph over polio, have been written by Shirley MacLaine
and Helen Gurley Brown, among others.

And the results are indeed a tactile sensation. Thumb against nail, nail against palm,
finger against doorbell, the merest gesture gives reassurance of the feminine difference,
while a jagged, broken end is evidence of public failure and a stern imperative to
begin again. Gaily enameled fingertips tap out a romantic desire for a life free of
drudgery and manual chores. In an extraordinary inversion of the function of hands,
the improbable nails are flourished aloft as sophisticated symbols of feminine labor,
for hard work, vigilance and creative care go into the maintenance of each forefinger
and pinky. Even when they are glued-on fakes. Fakery may not be chic but nevertheless
it is a permissible resort. The House of Revlon was built on the legend that a woman
of glamour possessed long, perfect nails that never broke, chipped or cracked. (In
an embarrassing repudiation of the Revlon myth, Suzy Parker once lost a false nail
during a presentation of the new fall colors.)

The buffed and manicured feminine hand is admired for its sparkling conveyance of
material status: the engagement diamond that flashes a husband’s financial worth,
the plain gold band that signifies marriage, the trinkets and baubles that trill a
love of wealth, fun and drama. Once kings and popes laded their fingers with jeweled
rings that were kissed as symbols of absolute power. In the age of democracy it is
a woman’s hand that bears the encrusted brilliance to convey the message that manual
labor lies whimsically beyond its reach, while protruding fingernails and jewels on
men are shunned as signs of decadent effeminacy.

A pliant wrist is supposedly another sign of grace in women and effeminacy in men,
but laboratory tests show no difference between the sexes in ability to flex the wrist
joint. Yet the limp wrist has been caricatured so often and so wickedly that it has
become the defining gesture of swish and the woman. Heterosexual men seem to guard
against natural wrist flexibility, except when throwing a ball or swinging a racquet,
in the interest of
preserving a forceful, dynamic, straight-line masculine gesture (as evidenced in a
vigorous, manly handshake) while women and gay men, in the interest of expressing
emotion, practice less constraint in their gesticulations. In
The Homosexual Matrix,
C.A. Tripp expounded, “A hand movement which may be gracefully soft when done by
a woman can gain so much energy and speed when done by a man that it becomes swish—the
very word denotes the rush of air around a high-speed motion. The exaggerations of
swishy effeminacy … that can make it look like caricature … are the result of rounded,
highly animated motions being transposed into the more muscular and aggressive repertoire
of the male.” In any event, biologically speaking, a floppy wrist has no gender-related
basis.

Authentic limberness in the female may be demonstrated in the ability to bend from
the waist and touch the palms to the floor. Trunk and hip flexibility, which includes
lateral motions, and loose elbow joints and hamstring muscles are an advantage in
certain physical pursuits that girls traditionally have shown a preference for, and
have been directed toward by their parents, such as ballet and figure skating, and,
more recently, gymnastics and yoga. The splits, bends, arches, twists, leg extensions
and elbow rotations that a limber female body can coax itself into with less difficulty
than the male have led much of the world (Nureyev and Baryshnikov might disagree,
but Balanchine, I gather, would not have) to consider woman the more graceful of the
two sexes. Beyond flexibility, there is something about a small, light body revolving
through space that seems to be an esthetic delight to the eyes. Sports journals have
noted that winning gymnasts of both sexes are small for their gender—judges are favorably
disposed to slender, light frames, which the popularity of little Cathy Rigby, Olga
Korbut and Nadia Comaneci bears out.

In his brilliant essays on esthetics, Friedrich Schiller defined masculine beauty
as energetic strength and grandeur, and feminine beauty as gentle harmony and grace.
Schiller did not doubt which of the sexes was “essentially in possession of true grace,”
although he railed at the artifice that was thought to enhance it. Perceiving that
a woman’s gestures were more supple and less
percussive, he wrote, “Woman is a reed which bends under the gentlest breath of passion.”
Of course he had no idea that the bending reed might be shot through with estrogen,
or that muscular energy was related to testosterone. Consequently he was quite poetic
in his observation: “The more delicate structure of the woman receives more rapidly
each impression and allows it to escape as rapidly. It requires a storm to shake a
strong constitution, and when vigorous muscles begin to move we should not find the
ease which is one of the conditions of grace.”

The idealization of gender-related movement is romantically expressed in the
pas de deux
of classic ballet, where certain conventions are never broken. A ballerina does not
give physical support to her partner: she does not lead him through bends, arches
and turns or lift him into the air; and her partner does not strap himself into satin
toe shoes and balance himself on pointe. A male dancer proudly exhibits his upper
body strength by lifting, catching and steadying his partner; he exhibits his graceful
leg strength through the high jump and the leap. A female dancer uses her arms for
balance and expressive motion; and although we know that she must have strong legs,
that her calf and thigh muscles have been arduously trained, and her feet are thick
and strong and can hold a tough grip, the entire force of her lower body musculature
is directed toward an illusion of exquisite, unearthly fragility as she raises herself
on her toes.

A ballerina must not be overly tall, or else she might tower over her male partner
on pointe. Her breasts and hips cannot be large, for this would spoil the sylphlike
illusion. Her feet should not have thin, elegantly pointed toes, however, even though
such toes conform to the delicate body preferred for dance. Delicate toes would cause
a dancer unbearable pain when compressed and jammed against the hardened, square tip
of her toe shoe, and a fine, thin foot is no good for gripping and balance. A thick,
stubby hoof is best for a ballerina, not a thin, slender pedestal. Mindful of the
feminine contradiction, the great Pavlova insisted that for photographs her feet be
pared down to ethereal points by a skilled retoucher. So did Maria Taglioni, Pavlova’s
idol, who invented the toe shoe in 1831 for her role in
La Sylphide.

A professional ballerina’s body is not typical in any sense.
Her knees must be capable of hyperextension, in order to tuck away the bony kneecap
when she is on pointe to create a soft, swanlike curve that extends to the arch of
her foot. To execute the classic positions she must have hip sockets that give her
extreme natural turnout in the thighs, and a characteristic duck-footed walk when
she is not performing. As a rule she should have “general ligamentous laxity” combined
with muscular strength, and she must be a lot thinner than in the days when Degas
painted her. If she is a Balanchine dancer she will have long legs and a short torso,
in contradiction to the usual female body. “Ballet is woman,” said Balanchine. Well,
sort of.

One doesn’t need to have been an Imperial Russian ballerina, or an Imperial Chinese
empress, or Greta Garbo in her size nines (the clunker in her feminine perfection)
or Susan B. Anthony in her seven and a half (large, for her day, as gleefully reported
by a hostile press) to have anguished over the natural size and shape of one’s feet.
The historic role of footbinding is well understood, but “emancipated” women still
cramp their toes into shoes that give their feet and legs an illusory delicacy and
snaky, seductive charm. Like Cinderella’s stepsisters, who chopped off a big toe to
fool the prince and fit the slipper (“Don’t worry, my dears,” said their mother. “When
you are Queen you won’t have to walk”), they risk calluses, corns, bunions, the deformity
of hammertoes, a twisted ankle, a strained back, shortened tendons and torn ligaments
to wear high heels, for the naked foot is seen less frequently than the shod foot
anyhow, and physical comfort matters less than the psychological reassurance that
comes from surmounting the feminine challenge. “But I
can
walk in them,” goes the refrain.