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The Living Room Relationships On "surrender": Keira Knightley and Chanel
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On "surrender": Keira Knightley and Chanel
At some point Penelope wrote a post about "the impulse, never to be indulged, of complete surrender." She quoted a passage from Margaret Mead which begins

"The first rule of petting is the need for keeping complete control of just how far the physical behaviour is to go; one sweeping impulse, one acted-out desire for complete possession or complete surrender, and the game is lost, and lost ignobly. The controls on this dangerous game...are placed in the hands of the girl. The boy is expected to ask for as much as possible, the girl to yield as little as possible. ..."

That is a rather fascinating ongoing discussion, but I want here to respond to just a small part of it, which I thought warrants its own post. Some people there reacted with a kind of relieved distance --- on the order of 'we're not in the fifties anymore, women are able to express desire in our time.' I think we should put this comfortable conclusion to the test. Here's the recently-released ad for Coco Mademoiselle starring Keira Knightley:


What are we to understand from this ad about the structure of desire in the world we live in? Is age a factor (mademoiselle)? Is culture a factor (but really it only caters to the French myth: the director and the actress are English)?

Is this different from what Margaret Mead was describing, or the same?
All I can say right now is "Damn!  She's hot!!"

In response to Diana Swaney
Umm…what Diana said.

 But back to the topic at hand. A whole dissertation could be written on the topic of how that commercial sells a beauty product by nominally subverting the seduction paradigm into one of female empowerment, while actually validating disempowering memes about beauty and consumerism.

 Also: while China might now be the workshop of the world, Europe still has the market cornered on pretentious banality!
Mother of Jefferson Davis, That is one of a hellava sophisticated perfume ad.

And I didn't even catch all the voice over. The game is afoot. The ad as story starts and ends with her. She arises, presents and goes. I can relate to that. And it is not a story of being a mans world. How can scent be presented electronically? It can't. But an implication of it, power can. 

The notion that a woman needs a man like a fish need a bicycle is not a party to this ad. That men want is. What women might do with that want is only implied. -  Divorced twice with two daughters, I still have no idea what women want. Perhaps they/you only want for me to know what I want, and what  they/you is want  the discretion to choose whether to go along or not. Alternately and perhaps more commonly, men go along with women. 

Alone is a tollerable but not a desirable predicament.
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Latest Post: November 29, 2011 at 10:00 PM
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