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Drenched in milk and holy water.
Jan. 9th, 2007 02:02 pmThere are a great many reasons to distrust today's furs. However, I'm rarely in favour of prohibition. Criticism should not mean that we stop doing a thing altogether, but that we should find a better way to do it. In short, as always, I trust hunter-gatherer societies more than I do agrarian ones, and everything must die, but nothing should be made to suffer. That, however, is not the problem.
The true atrocity being committed is that people are wearing fur without possessing taste or personality enough to warrant it. I, for one, am enraged.
First and foremost: do not wear ugly furs. Just don't.
Wearing a coat as if thirty dead rodents happened to fall on top of you and you did not bother to take them off is really not acceptable. Because they are dead. Rather than ignoring the fact, or being crass about it, I would encourage those who wear fur to treat each fallen beast as a martyr to the cause of aesthetics. The coat is a grotto, a shrine to their memory, and you enter it to worship. Owners of furs, if you cannot convince me that you are a god for whom the sacrifice of several unspotted, perfect beasts was necessary and deserved, I really must insist that you stop wearing them. Kali-ma does not slump in her skirt and necklace. She dances.
I've been researching this. I've been looking at photographs of the old film stars, queens of the Harlem Renaissance, fat whorehouse madams. What I've discovered is that fur is meant to help the wearer in demonstrating that they look nice, and that they feel nice, too. I think, then, that the problem may be one of class. The bulk of the population to whom fur is accessible at this historical moment is not one that generally looks as if they want to be touched. They certainly wouldn't allow this impression to be made in public, which is, alas, where they insist on wearing their coats. In fact, since I've begun musing on this subject I've only seen fur being worn properly in person a handful of times, and on more than one occasion the coat in question was fake leopard print.
I'm saddened by the blatant misuse of fur because we castaways upon the shores of modernity should really be much better at it. We have tools available to us that our ancestors lacked. Mae West actually, truly, had to be the most desirable being on earth. Imagine the impossible concentration such a thing would have required! She was enlightened to the world of the flesh. Directing her energies towards other goals, we would have called her a mystic. But we young things can achieve more and less than her pure being. We are postmodernists! We should wear our furs accordingly! If one has the opportunity to deconstruct class, gender, power, and sexuality all in the way that one wears a coat while shopping for groceries, shouldn't one really do it?
The true atrocity being committed is that people are wearing fur without possessing taste or personality enough to warrant it. I, for one, am enraged.
First and foremost: do not wear ugly furs. Just don't.
Wearing a coat as if thirty dead rodents happened to fall on top of you and you did not bother to take them off is really not acceptable. Because they are dead. Rather than ignoring the fact, or being crass about it, I would encourage those who wear fur to treat each fallen beast as a martyr to the cause of aesthetics. The coat is a grotto, a shrine to their memory, and you enter it to worship. Owners of furs, if you cannot convince me that you are a god for whom the sacrifice of several unspotted, perfect beasts was necessary and deserved, I really must insist that you stop wearing them. Kali-ma does not slump in her skirt and necklace. She dances.
I've been researching this. I've been looking at photographs of the old film stars, queens of the Harlem Renaissance, fat whorehouse madams. What I've discovered is that fur is meant to help the wearer in demonstrating that they look nice, and that they feel nice, too. I think, then, that the problem may be one of class. The bulk of the population to whom fur is accessible at this historical moment is not one that generally looks as if they want to be touched. They certainly wouldn't allow this impression to be made in public, which is, alas, where they insist on wearing their coats. In fact, since I've begun musing on this subject I've only seen fur being worn properly in person a handful of times, and on more than one occasion the coat in question was fake leopard print.
I'm saddened by the blatant misuse of fur because we castaways upon the shores of modernity should really be much better at it. We have tools available to us that our ancestors lacked. Mae West actually, truly, had to be the most desirable being on earth. Imagine the impossible concentration such a thing would have required! She was enlightened to the world of the flesh. Directing her energies towards other goals, we would have called her a mystic. But we young things can achieve more and less than her pure being. We are postmodernists! We should wear our furs accordingly! If one has the opportunity to deconstruct class, gender, power, and sexuality all in the way that one wears a coat while shopping for groceries, shouldn't one really do it?
