Book Review: Swooning Beauty: A Memoir of Pleasure by Joanna Frueh - Page 2

Although there’s little overt theory, this is also a passionately feminist book: one of its conceits – not as developed as I might have liked it– is her feeling that at this point in life she is “becoming a man”. I came away from Swooning Beauty without being entirely clear what she meant by this – sometimes it seems she is appropriating traditional male prerogatives and powers, sometimes it is a bodily sensation of the phallus as a symbol of power, but perhaps non-traditional male power, what she calls the “fairy phallus”. Frueh nods to Susan Bordo’s The Male Body and its definition of “the masculinist phallus as delivering conventional male force”, but indicates there can be others, one of which she finds, somewhat curiously, in Mel Gibson. This is not really Mel Gibson the actor (perhaps luckily in light of recent events), but a fantasy character created by viewing his movies, particularly Braveheart.

She ties this to the writing of 12th-century European mystics – the linking of the language of love and prayer. But Frueh is determined grounded in the body, denying that it is possible “that one’s fantasy of sleeping with someone is better than reality… My disagreement rested in the experience of flowering rather than falling when I fucked someone I loved, or rising rather than falling in love, of melting, opening, and lifting the heart.” As that suggests, Swooning Beauty might be read as a manifesto for sex-positive feminism, indeed beyond that “body-positive” feminism. For Frueh tells us that she is going through menopause, and this is something she embraces, not fears: “... having decided that if indeed the curative had become ineffective, then I’d live with the flushes for a while. I never timed their appearance, but I think it sometimes may have been every thirty minutes: heat in my face, neck, and shoulders, moistness on my arms, belly, back, buttocks, and legs, especially at night along with cold sweating and removing bed linens so that air could cool my naked body, encumbered by fabric as much as by heat.”

The references are wide-ranging and frequently thought-provoking. How, Frueh wonders after watching the “corporeal masculinity” of a group of working-class American males, did Hatchepsut (the only known female pharaoh of Egypt) walk? Did she incite the same visceral dislike as Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton? Another book I reviewed taught me something about the “Father of Modern Gynecology”, J. Marion Sims, but Frueh added more, quoting from his autobiography in which he wrote: “If there was anything I hated, it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis.” But the author of Swooning Beauty offers an alternative view of the vagina, as an “articulate organ”, as portrayed in Carolee Schneemann’s performance Interior Scroll of 1973.

Article Author: Natalie Bennett

Natalie is the editor of My London Your London, an independent cultural guide featuring theatre, gallery and museum reviews, and also blogs at Philobiblon, on history, culture, Green politics and all things feminist. …

Visit Natalie Bennett's author page — Natalie Bennett's Blog