Gender and the Web: Couched in Ideas

To: anemone@sprynet.com References: 1 Gender and the Web: Couched in Ideas

Paglia in Vamps & Tramps: "I'm bringing, like Madonna, a sense of beauty and pleasure and sensuality back into feminism. ...feminism's main problem for the last twenty years has been that it is incapable of appreciating art, okay?... Art is made a servant to a prefab social agenda."
(p. 247)

Solo mit Sofa, coreografia e danza di Reinhild Hoffmann, 1977. German dancer, choreographer. Image of endless cloth extending from a sofa—clinging to a woman pulling away. Is she tied or simply timid? ~~ Seeing a sofa abandoned in a wooded lot, I want to pose there, voluptuous as the nude in "The Dream." by Rousseau.

The polemical Ms. Paglia. Absense of aesthetics is not just a female problem. Men, too, have lost their aesthetics and their ability to discern. This loss tends to make people cross and, ironically, judgemental! I think of Alice Walker who could speak of purple and her mother's garden. Yet she knew she had to leave rural Georgia. Appreciation of beauty didn't render her dim, maudlin or elitist, it made her strong.

Jan Hanford's elegant Doris Lessing site makes me want to read more Lessing. Jan's use of html and the page prove that literature can be presented beautifully on the web. I love to work with her codes. They never look the same when I'm finished, but I am profoundly changed by her ideas and use of clean lines. I love spareness next to the overwrought.

Sofas on the side roads. Not an omen, more like a message. A sofa inserted into the landscape gives me pleasure, fantasies, suspense. A white leather sofa with carved, white wood feet—speaking to me from a yard. Who seduced whom on this slick seat. It came from a home with many chihuahuas.