A Rose a Day No.13

This rose-themed brassiere is a distant relative to the ‘bossom rose’ worn by Manon Balletti, illustrated in A Rose a day No. 1. They even look like the same rose - Rosa Centifolia, the Cabbage Rose.

It’s Valentine’s Day lingerie merchandise, and I will be posting on this rose-oriented event later. It’s also a reminder that the symbolic hybrid ‘rose-woman’ is still alive and well. But while the rose continues to be a symbol employed to celebrate feminine beauty and sexual allure, we are increasingly troubled by the stark and imbalanced asymmetry of routinely comparing a woman to a rose, and decorating her with them, while a man is compared to an animal like the lion, bear or wolf. Here is Naomi Wolfe in The Beauty Myth (1991):

‘Beauty’ is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. In assigning value to woman in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves, ‘Beauty’ is not universal or changeless, though the West pretends that all ideals of female beauty stem from one Platonic ideal woman.