Tuesday, 18 February 2014

Drawing a Line under Lady China.

Warning: Serious post, but not terribly earnest.

OK, this is my bottom line on the subject of Chinese women dancers. Ready?

What so impresses me about them is that they’re not obvious. They’re sensual, but subtle. Sensuality is built into the spectrum of feminine attributes, unlike what appears to have become the default western position these days, which is:

‘Hey, big boy, I’ve got a huge pair of zonkers and somewhere nice to put your equipment when you’ve finished fiddling with them. Look. See? What do you think of that?’

Forgive me being a bit graphic, but that isn’t sensual, is it? It’s coarse, and I don’t like it. I don’t.

(I could now take this into questions about comparative social and cultural mores, about a possible effect of feminism that was never intended by my heroes, the suffragettes, and about the erosion of finer values by a soulless corporate mentality. But I won’t, because then I’d become earnest, which I don’t want to be any more. I just want to state my personal view.)

So, enough said about Chinese dancers. I would, however, like to close the post with a video I showed before. At the time I was having a bit of a rant about the fact that they smile through it all, but I see it differently now. They’re supposed to smile like that, apparently, because it’s a traditional Chinese wedding dance. I’ve grown very fond of it. It embodies grace, beauty, power and scintillating movement, and isn’t that what femininity should be about?

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