Language and the Modern Woman
la Femme et le Chien

Kofi Fosu Forson

Titian’s Venus of Urbino begot De Kooning’s Woman 1. The purpose was to deconstruct the female. Much is due the fault of evolution given the propensity in philosophy, gender structure and an overall development in sexual politics.

Fashion invariably known as style has been given an awareness all through history. That the fig leaf covering the pubic area on Adam and Eve’s body should leave no doubt in questioning the system under which much of who we are is reconstructed and never given a true enhancement.

There is however a notion which defines the personal sense found in how we dress and accessorize. It’s reflective of an inner curiosity to impress another, startle the public, mask our feelings or reveal a cultural and formative code.

Understandably and with semiotics, we are all privy to the same circumvention that which stimulates our need for clothes. The written text as in Vogue helps one surmise what is the day’s trend. It has carried over through to other fashion magazines where haut couture and present day wear are systematically given a form of articulation making known by pattern and design fashion designers and their catalogue.

Mention of a name and one is made familiar with a designer’s truest sense, Gautier and Valentino. On the Red Carpet a woman expresses her nature given her choice of gown and by what designer. This has carried over into society where celebrities inspire women on what they wear.

It once was that the word and style of the street channeled into the fashion industry what was marketed and sold. This was heavily due to street culture as in graffiti, early hip hop and singularly the voice placed upon individuals.

Women were at an advantage when they took from and helped inspire each other on accessorizing, making use of color and texture. Cinema and pop culture would later be interchangeable with how these clothes were marketed to the general public.

Gender politics would therefore determine how men and women coordinated a lifestyle and reaffirmed the commonality or differences between what is accepted as courtship or “meat market.”

Over the years a particular certainty has been divulged in the roles women play, from frontier women to activists, mothers to porn stars. When women like Cicciolina and Candida Royalle are given a voice in sex and politics, a pattern is determined whether women are re-establishing themselves circumstantially as libidinal or have yet to reinstitute the definition of what is sex.

Dismissably, that very act ingrained in the mind has undergone a manifestation and however sensitized we are as a culture, we’ve been desensitized and somehow 9/11 brought to fore circumstances pertaining to love and death, the equation of which is sex.

What sex is now has become a celebration or crowing glory of ones psychological and sexual abuse, intellect and power or gender warfare. Love doesn’t exist in its intimacy. It’s manufactured. If by two people in a human representation most see it as exceptional. Otherwise a lot is done to secure false notions and perceptions.

Clearly enough, the sexual personae within the modern woman has reached an explosive point. What can be estimated from this bears more relevance to female orgasmic pleasure than what suffrage did for women.

A woman and her multiple lovers doesn’t express love and romance as it gives off the notion that the physical male body thrusting perhaps trivializes what love means and is in actuality all a foregone conclusion.

The exaggerated perception in what leads to marriage or good sex is all expressed in the faces of men on Sunday afternoons escorting their significant others as if they were dogs walking the streets, through cafes and shopping malls, expressing to the world that they have survived. They have managed to find a woman.

Given the existences in the virtual and real, most men know for themselves who they are and what they want. The playground that is love, sex and romance continues to be represented by an exceptional crowd; mostly those secure financially and are at a wherewithal to claim a role as lover or future partner in marriage.

Women have found an awakening within themselves as sexual dynamos. Evolution played a part, although it was unfortunately misguided by politics, pornography as an everyday topic, also found in the nature of a bored housewife or teenaged girl or the subtexts revolving around race and generational conflicts.

If a woman is to be president of the free world, much of her profile would eventually be relegated to her role as sex symbol.

Hillary Clinton or Carla Bruni?

Nuff Said.