Here Come The Girls

Don’t know about yours, but my weekend was an all-singing, all-dancing girlie extravaganza. It kicked off – literally – with Ladies’ Day at the rugby which rather curiously included something described as a burlesque performance, followed by a quick dose of my current addiction, Strictly Come Dancing, and an extraordinarily entertaining evening of sensual Arabic dancing. Are you sensing a theme here?

Understandably, none of us seemed particularly interested in the rugby – unless there was any promise of a player being stripped, washed and brought to our tent – so we concentrated on the entertainment to hand … that being a fashion show and a pair of pole dancers masquerading as burlesque queens. Now, there’s quite a difference between sporting an overdose of silicone and patent leather whilst gyrating lasciviously and truly being a diva of the burlesque scene. Everything about Dita Von Teese – the poster girl for the burlesque renaissance – says class, while everything about the sideshow we witnessed said low-rent.

What really brought it home, though, was watching the beauty and sensuality of Arabic dance. The female dancers had a sensuous confidence in their bodies that was mesmerising and the audience revelled in it, showing their enthusiastic appreciation of an incredibly seductive art form. The array of different body shapes on display was vast, yet each had their own unique beauty and power. And there was so much joy in the room, so much pleasure in creative performance, that it just made the rugby strippers look tawdry and cheap.

While the pole-dancers were claiming to teach women the art of seduction as a form of empowerment, it was still just about writhing around trying to get a man’s attention. For the Arabic dancers, though, it was clear that they took great pleasure in their own sensuality and their artistry, and felt very comfortable with their bodies, whatever their shape. Who needs Gok Wan to help you love your body when there’s a belly-dancing class near you? Find a good one where the teachers have a real love of the dance and you’ll be shaking your money-maker with joy and real abandon in no time!

In the sacred traditions, the feminine is associated with dance and from earliest times, that dance has been sensual and seductive. In India, sacred sculptures venerate the goddess Shakti, whose name means life energy, carrier of the sacred art of female sexuality, of transformation through sex. She has been known and served as sacred prostitute and temple dancer, uniting the physical and the spiritual, and is embodied in all women. In the Middle East she arose again as Ishtar and in Sumeria, as Inanna, she inspired erotic poetry. The Greeks called her Aphrodite and she was known as Venus in Rome. This archetypal feminine energy is still with us, but these days our goddesses appear more on the silver screen than in spiritual worship. Sadly, we’re a little short on cultural icons who are permitted to embody both spirituality and sensuality in our current worldview.

Yet the stage is set for a resurgence of a more powerful feminine sensuality that doesn’t exclude any aspect of life. We’ve separated ourselves from our own innate feminine wisdom to fit a cookie-cutter model of feminine behaviour for long enough to realise that it really hasn’t served us – or men, or the planet – well at all.

Jane Fonda, the radical feminist of the 70s, wrote recently “Before I turned 60, I thought I was a feminist. I was in a way – I worked to register women to vote, I supported getting women elected. I brought gender issues into my movie roles, I encouraged women to get strong and healthy, I read the books we’ve all read. I had it in my head and partly in my heart, yet I didn’t fully get it. See, although I’ve always been financially independent, and professionally and socially successful, behind the closed doors of my personal life I was still turning myself into a pretzel so I’d be loved by an alpha male. I thought if I didn’t become what he wanted me to be, I’d be alone, and then I wouldn’t exist.”

That’s quite a statement, and a brave one at that, to realise that despite all your achievements, you were still turning yourself inside out to please someone else. It just goes to show how we delude ourselves with outer appearance and mistake validation from the outside world for true confidence. Anything worthwhile must come from within, if you want it to stand the test of time.

Fonda is now promoting a feminine agenda that doesn’t seek to polarise masculine and feminine, but to carve a new path that honours both archetypal energies. She adds “So, as Eve Ensler says, we have to change the verbs from obliterate, dominate, humiliate to liberate, appreciate, celebrate. We have to make sure that head and heart can be reunited in the body politic, and relationship and democracy can be restored. We need to really understand the depth and breadth of what a shift to a new feminine paradigm would mean, how fundamentally central it is to every other thing in the world. We win, everything wins, including boys, men and the earth. We really have to understand this and be able to make it concrete for others so they will be able to really see what Feminism is and see themselves in it.”

This week, take a look at your own body politic – how is heart shaping up, versus head? Are they both getting a look-in or is calculating head winning over instinctive heart all the time? How comfortable do you feel in your own body? Been twisting yourself into a pretzel trying to get anyone’s approval lately? Time for a girlie MOT – how feminine do you feel and what would it take for you to feel that sensual life force alive in you?

Get your body moving – try something seductive like a salsa or a rumba if belly-dancing feels out of your comfort zone. Though quite why you’d want to hang out too long in a comfort zone is an issue in itself. This week get girlie and get fabulous, whatever femininity means to you. Explore it, mull over the concept of feminine power, spend an evening at a burlesque club … do whatever it takes to find that sacred feminine alive and well within you.

Click through to the Coach Fabulous advice column archive by going to http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com. For alert emails on new postings, email subscribe@iamfabulous.co.uk. The I Am Fabulous archives can now be found at http://fabcentral.blogspot.com. All material ©2008 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author.