I am always looking for art which captures the feeling of your hair as both a piece of you and disembodied. It comes up from time to time in feminist art (embodiment blah blah blah) as well as in representations of women in Catholicism. More often, though, you’ll find that sort of thing represented through teeth. One of the reasons that I’m so into tooth iconography is because I think it’s the only thing that really comes close to manifesting the way it feels to have trich. To rip parts of you out of yourself and suddenly realize that you needed that piece so bad and there it is laying in front of you and you feel like you’ve died with it and it’ll never come back and you’ll never be whole. And, of course, the violence-relief of the yank of a tooth. The half-second where your only sense is a stinging darkness and that sound that doesn’t come from your ears but from inside of you. Like what happens when you get in a car wreck. The pain of pulling manifests itself like a bludgeoning, and I experience it through sounds and colors. The sound is whole-body and the color is black. I imagine it’s not unlike a compressed version of getting your wisdoms ripped out with plyers, except that you want more more more of it immediately.

Saints often pulled their teeth out as a sacrificial, punishing, embodied act. Then, the way I stare at pulled hairs, laid out in front of me, for what feels like hours; the teeth of self-mutilating saints are venerated in tiny reliquaries that stand in as symbols for their whole bodies, their whole gods, and their whole faith. That’s why I bought this bloody tooth necklace, but I hate having to explain it to people so I usually tuck it into my shirt.

I love it most when I pull a hair out and it bleeds.

I know these photos are mostly about how ladies are fake or whatever re: capitalism, but this one is too familiar. I’ve never pulled from my lashes (though one of my greatest anxieties is the fear that I might), but those hairs could be any hairs, in piles on white ceramic.

I might buy this.

(via Bloody Tooth Necklace by nappyhappy on Etsy)

marieyall:

thanks jezebel for talking about something i care about, even a little bit. orthodontics is some extreme huge bullshit. i got braces for an overbite. two point five years later, they came off, and soon after that, my orthodontist recommended i have cosmetic jaw surgery to fix the problem that braces created. she said, “actually, if you hadn’t had braces, it turns out the problem would have corrected itself.” needless to say, i didn’t have fucking jaw surgery, but ever since then i’ve been pretty bitter about it. obviously i do not blame my parents, because they were just told to do this and that it would be best for me, and who can blame them for that? but i blame the industry for being there to fuck people’s teeth up and make a fortune off it.

that being said, of course i think it’s fine if like, your teeth are majorly fucked up to the point of not being able to eat or something, or if you have some kind of accident and your teeth are destroyed — just like i’m cool with cosmetic surgery in those cases. there’s no reason to suffer like that if it can be fixed with minor pain and whatever. but when it’s there — like cosmetic surgery — to profit off telling moms and dads their kid’s smile is going to be FOREVER RUINED if you don’t slap some braces on their teeth (or to profit off telling people that cellulite isn’t something EVERYONE has or that it’s not natural to age or something), i think it’s pretty foul and disgusting. and yeah, i was getting at the point that i think orthodontics is as foolish and vain as cosmetic surgery, except in those extenuating circumstances.

i also hate how self-conscious they made me. while wearing them i was embarrassed because i looked like a robot, and i only enjoyed straight teeth for about a year before my teeth started sliding around. i was given a plastic invisalign type retainer to wear at night, and of course i couldn’t sleep with it. since i already had insomnia, it had to go. it was never really wearable. but they just kept telling me to deal with it, which never worked, and they wouldn’t give me a different kind. i wish i could somehow reclaim all the money my parents spent on braces and subsequent visits to the ortho and like put it in their retirement fund or something. jesus. anyway, the message my ortho and her staff sent always was THE WAY YOU LOOK NATURALLY IS WRONG, which hurt way more than the braces themselves.

anyway, what i mean to say is, this shit is terrible. where else do people care this much about TEETH? it’s just teeth. it’s UNNATURAL for them to be perfect. if people were supposed to have perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth, most of them would. but they’re not. obviously. some of my teeth were discolored from the start, so they’re not all white, and at this point in my clumsy, accident-prone life, they’re not even all real, and i’m glad i no longer care about how straight they are. i have to concede that bleaching teeth isn’t that much (though still very much so) different than dying your hair — which is something i don’t do either. but straightening for aesthetic reasons? hopefully no one i know actually gives a fuck about this, but if you do, please get over it immediately. it’s just as ridiculous as foot-binding or some other torture-for-aesthetics bullshit.

oh yeah, and same goes for judging someone on how straight their teeth are and acting like it’s some kind of good quality indicative of anything besides how straight their teeth are, which is what this article talks about. it’s huge bullshit. get over it. the end.

I have always had a lot of teeth angst, because I don’t have good teeth.  A lot of it was class-related, growing up, because where I went to high school you basically invested thousands of dollars in your teeth regardless of how okay they were to begin with.  That’s just what moneyed people do.  I could not do that.

When I grew up, and developed more neuroses, I knew I could never get my teeth fixed because I can’t handle change on my body without freaking out about it.  And also, my shitty teeth are cooler than everyone else’s, so.

Mitchell Lichtenstein, director of Teeth, is the son of Roy Lichtenstein.

I have Complicated Feelings re: Beirut, but I never realized this song was called “St. Apollonia,” she of plying pincers and wrench-toothed body metaphors, body martyrdoms.  She, my second or third or fifth favorite saint who was boring except for getting her teeth yanked out for believing in Jesus (though, more likely, for being a woman).  She, who I think about every time I pry parts of my body off with my own tweezing pincers.

All these saints that I move without
I lose without a name
All these saints, they move without
They moved without again
Well, all these places will lose without
They lose without a name

“She ended up decapitated.”

(Source: youtube.com)

If I could have anything in the whole world it would be a charm that was a tiny gold pair of pincers with a tiny tooth in them.

Horror Show: Faux-feminism and Horror Films | Bitch Magazine

Okay, so that’s a really good point, and a really important point.  (But remember that each dynamic, even in female-created works, carries political baggage:  we would be asking a similarly weighty set of questions if it was a Diablo Cody Blockbuster wherein women kill other women, or men kill women [duh].  That’s not to vindicate Diablo Cody or anything, I’m just saying.)

And yes, Male Fear Gaze is a problem.  It’s like the Male Gaze, except with murder, and it rests on the assumption that men are the audience and maybe, ultimately, a victim (or maybe Michael Meyers himself).  And therefore murder sequences and rape scenes and predatorcams and all of the flotsam and all of the trappings are constructed to be consumed by men.  And consumption in horror is maybe more complex in meaning than in most genres:  to consume horror means to buy a ticket, to be scared, to be aroused and titillated and grossed out, to file New Ways to Die and New Plot Twists into your brain-basement of horrorfan bullshit, to drag this baggage into every other horror theater you buy a ticket for and compare, contrast, and compile.  Horror, like every nerd and genre field, is cumulative and consumptive.  Sometimes we forget that the very low is in fact as collective, competitive and cultic as the very high—that horror fans are just different kinds of Lord of the Rings nerds.  And, because of this, consumption in horror means consummating all of these male-gazey moments, and watching the sequels, and buying the Raimi boxed sets, and probably owning some stupid figurines and shit, too.  I know.  This is my world.  So then, in the horror world the Male Fear Gaze dictates the content (the politics of blood, boobs, and scares) and the practice of horror films and horror culture. 

So if you consider that matrix as a major feature of the Horror Film Patriarchy, then of course I Spit on Your Grave isn’t a feminist film.  Like everyone else has said:  giving a girl an icepick isn’t a feminist act, it’s just another male gimmick to be compiled in the brainboxes next to treerape and babyzombie and Argento Girls’ Left Tit in the Bloody Shards of a Broken Mirror.  And that’s what horror is. It’s a cumulative, competitive bloodfeast of tropes and oneupsmanships and gimmicks which were all forged in the image of the Male Fear Gaze a long time ago.  We have a set of visual and narrative tools, and they were constructed patriarchally.

And anytime we use them, we are nodding in some way to the patriarchy.  Dead sluts!  Everywhere!  But we are horror fans because of that language.  If I wasn’t interested in sluts and chainsaws on some level, I’d be off reading, I dunno, fucking David Foster Wallace like everyone else.  I am interested in the culture of horror which is inarguably misogynistic and patriarchal.  So, how do we make it, you know, not misogynistic and patriarchal?

I don’t know, fuckers, I’m just a consumer.  But, for real:  as a horror fan I’m not going to pretend that a Powerful Woman Character in horror is somehow progressive and feminist.  I mean, look at the genre:  as much as it’s constructed for male consumption, it builds into its philosophy ideals and archetypes for women.  As a result, there are actually a lot of powerful women in horror films!  We know this, right?  Virtuous Woman Makes it to the Sequel, stepping on the bodies of slaughtered sluts.  Of course this is misogynistic!  So, then, why are we looking for feminism in, well, more Strong Female Characters?  (As an aside, and related to this:  I would argue that horror films probably pass the Bechdel test more consistently than any other major genre, which just proves that the tools we’re using to talk about horror maybe aren’t so useful.  Lots of girls!  With names!  Talking to each other!  About things other than men!  And then getting slaughtered because they’re too mouthy!)

But, seriously.  Teeth is not a feminist film, necessarily, because she cuts off dicks.  It’s a blatant and obvious and cheeky commentary on sex ed in America.  Like, the stickers over the vulva diagrams?  The purity parties?  Really?  This isn’t hard.  Teeth is not feminist because it “turns the power dynamic on its head,” or whatever.  Teeth is feminist because it uses the tools of horror and the conventions of horror to obtusely comment on an aspect of gender in society. 

But yes, I agree:  the public at large tends to call anything wherein a woman holds an axe a “feminist film.”  Which is lazy, obviously.  But I also think this is lazy:

So next time you want to call a horror film “feminist”, make sure it espouses gender equality

That’s not cultural criticism.  Teeth isn’t a feminist film because it Vindicates the Rights of Women to have the exact same power in society as men.  The Slumber Party Massacre has nothing to say about equality.  And yet!  The both have lots to say, if in a lowbrow kind of way which still relies on masculinized and patriarchal conventions, about womens’ positions in cultural circuits, about control of our bodies, about sex in general.  And that?  Sounds feminist?

And what the fuck would a horror film look like if it “espoused gender equality”? WHAT, IT’S SO SECOND WAVE, I CAN’T EVEN.

That’s another interesting thing, especially in terms of Teeth.  Sure, Dawn basically immediately went from “terrified of sex” to “vengeful dickslicing cunttress” pretty quick.  (Alright, so there were a couple of orgasms, a crisis of faith and a betrayal somewhere in there but whatever.)  But, like, what was she supposed to do?  It’s not like she got raped and then suddenly was, like, completely aware of all feminist power theories!  And knew exactly what to do!  She was manipulated by her culty religion and her school education and scumbaggy dudes her whole life, and then she gets raped and discovers she has TEETH IN HER VAGINA. 

TEETH IN HER VAGINA.  Your argument is invalid.

TEETH IN YOUR VAGINA.  Try harder at understanding horror films.

I have one really damning confession, though:  I’ve never seen I Spit On Your Grave.