Frida Kahlo, Disney Princesses, & Toxic Love

Warning: rant ahead contra a certain strain of modern feminism.

I saw this meme on Facebook today, and it really pissed me off. I understand the desire for female role models who aren't Disney Princesses, but goddamn it, whoever slapped this together seems mind-bogglingly unaware that Frida Kahlo was all about Toxic Love. To a much greater extent, I would argue, than Snow White or Belle or Cinderella.

This is not to belittle Kahlo or attempt to devalue her as an artist. On the contrary, I think her value comes from how powerfully she was able to transform her suffering, romantic and otherwise, into art. But she and Diego Rivera had an extraordinarily tempestuous relationship that pretty much epitomizes Toxic Love, and this attempt to portray Kahlo as a Strong Female Artist Who Don't Need No Man does no one any favors. 

Truth be told, it is easier for me to relate to Kahlo knowing that she loved not wisely but too well,  that she was incredibly strong in many ways and yet incredibly vulnerable at the same time -- that she was a complex human being, in other words, not an invincible and perfect superwoman.

Everything's Coming Up Rosie: Overthinking My Halloween Costume

For Halloween this year, I dressed up as Rosie the Riveter. So did a lot of other young women in San Francisco. There were two other Rosies at the Halloween party I attended on the Potrero Hill edge of the Mission; two other Rosies on the subway platform as I was coming home from work. (This embarrassed me so much that I quickly scooted down the platform so we wouldn't all wind up in the same subway car.) I was filled with a mix of pride at having successfully embodied the Zeitgeist and shame at realizing I was less clever and distinctive than I thought I was. And, naturally, I began to over-think the larger sociological forces that might have led to this spate of Rosies in San Francisco this Halloween. My conclusions:

• Ease of putting the costume together. The day before Halloween, I wasn't even sure that I would dress up -- and then I realized that I had all of the components of the "Rosie" costume already in my closet.
• Applicability to women of all ages, races, and sizes. Unlike many costumes, you don't have to have a certain body type or hair color to be recognizable as Rosie the Riveter -- all you need is the red bandana and blue work shirt.
• It's an explicitly feminist costume that enables you to demonstrate how you're not into the whole "Halloween as an excuse to wear lingerie in public" thing, but it still allows you to look attractive -- wear red lipstick, show off your muscle.
• Millennial-generation nostalgia for the "Greatest Generation" 1940s. Think about it: we fetishize handicrafts and the artisanal; we name our Etsy stores after our grandparents; we put up "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters. I also saw a lot of A League of Their Own "Rockford Peaches" this Halloween -- a costume that occupies a comparable place in our cultural iconography to Rosie the Riveter.
• Amy Poehler's character on Parks and Recreation dressed up as Rosie the Riveter in 2012. I don't watch Parks and Rec, but you can't underestimate the influence of pop culture.

I also thought about how, when I moved to San Francisco six years ago, it seemed like every young woman dressed up like Frida Kahlo for Halloween, but I didn't see any Fridas this year. Could there also be a cultural significance in the shift from Frida to Rosie over these six years?

• Dressing up as Frida Kahlo does require you to possess certain physical characteristics: you've pretty much got to have long, dark hair. And, if you are brunette but not Hispanic, you may also worry that dressing up as this iconic Mexican artist constitutes cultural appropriation. At least when you live in a city that is so consumed with debates over gentrification.
• There was a big Frida Kahlo exhibit at SFMOMA in 2008, which might have contributed to all of the Fridas I saw that Halloween.
• Frida and Rosie are both feminist icons, but they represent two different kinds of feminism. Kahlo's art often depicts the female experience as one of pain and suffering. (My most-read post of all time is called "Must a Female Artist Suffer?", written in response to the 2008 Kahlo exhibition.) Rosie the Riveter is about rolling up your sleeves and getting shit done. Which seems in tune with the forcefulness that feminism has attained in the last half-decade.
• Six years ago, fashion was much more in tune with Frida's boho style than with Rosie's utilitarian workwear. But now, the tide has shifted. Clothes have gotten more minimalist, more tomboy. Call it a shift from Anthropologie to J. Crew. I didn't own a "Rosie the Riveter" blue button-down six years ago, but now it's one of my favorite shirts.

Mostly, though, I'm amazed at how a pop-culture character, intended to boost home-front morale in a war that happened 70 years ago, can resurface in 2014 and embody current cultural trends. This autumn has been marked by intense, Internet-fueled anxiety over various aspects of feminism and an even more fraught anxiety over the sociological category of the "basic bitch." If feminism (a radical ideology) is the thesis and basic-bitchness (the unthinking acceptance of feminine tropes) is the antithesis, a Rosie the Riveter Halloween costume is the synthesis. She's the feminist icon that everyone can embrace. A basic costume for basic, feminist girls like me.

Photo of me as Rosie at my office Halloween party taken by my colleague, Abdul Bassa.

Bleedin' Frida

One of my favorite guilty-pleasure pop songs of recent vintage is Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love." It always amuses me when a song with such morbid and disturbing lyrics becomes a mainstream hit... and I'm not trying to imply that that's a bad thing, since I love over-the-top music (opera, Broadway, girl-group melodrama, The Decemberists).

So, well, maybe I have more of a taste for the macabre than the average person does, but I am very disappointed in the two music videos Lewis taped for "Bleeding Love"--they're so tame! Not a splash of blood anywhere to be found! In the UK version, Lewis writhes around in a jeweled gown, her sultry eyes an incongruous fit with her sobbing vocals; in the US version, her boyfriend leaves her and she's sad, but it doesn't come near the crazy, obsessive, bleeding love described in the lyrics.

Personally, after seeing the Frida Kahlo exhibit last month, I think the music video should have gone for a Kahlo-inspired aesthetic:


"My heart's crippled by the vein that I keep on closing / You cut me open / And I keep bleeding / I keep, keep bleeding love" indeed.

Frida and Lee: Must a Female Artist Suffer?

When I went to the SF MoMA last week, the Frida Kahlo exhibit occupied the most prominent gallery space (and it was crowded, even at 11 AM on a Thursday!) but I also looked forward to visting the exhibition of Lee Miller's photography. I first became interested in Miller's work after seeing this photograph last summer at the Maryhill Museum of Art--one of the most striking photos I have ever seen.


Miller, though less famous than Frida Kahlo, is also an interesting character: a blonde American beauty who started out as a model, became an acclaimed Surrealist photographer, and then was the only female combat photographer in World War II.

Seeing the Kahlo and Miller exhibits on the same day made me think about the different perspectives they provided on the life of a female artist in the first half of the twentieth century. There's a number of rather striking similarities between these women: both were born in 1907, both produced work associated with the Surrealist movement, both had romantic relationships with famous male artists, both were little-known during their lifetimes and then rediscovered circa 1980. Kahlo died in 1954; Miller lived till 1977 but gave up photography by the mid-1950s.

After seeing the Kahlo exhibit, if I had to pick just one word to describe her art, it would be "suffering." Her famous self-portraits have a mildly grotesque air, what with her emphasis on her unibrow and mustache, but many of her other paintings are less often reproduced because they are so viscerally disturbing.

Indeed, it has been suggested that our present-day adulation of Frida Kahlo and other women who suffered (Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf) leads to thinking that a woman must suffer in order to be a great artist. (See this very interesting article by Stephanie Mencimer.) As a woman with artistic ambitions, I say this had better be just a pernicious myth!

And the work of Lee Miller seems to offer a more hopeful alternative. Here I will have to disagree with Robert Zaller, who wrote that Miller lived with "a wound perhaps no less painful than any of Frida Kahlo's." I'm not saying that Miller had a hunky-dory life: she was sexually abused as a child and suffered post-traumatic stress disorder after photographing World War II. But in contrast to Kahlo, whose physical and psychological pain emanates from every brushstroke, the tragedies of Miller's life seem incidental to her art, not an integral part of it. "Suffering" is not the first word I think of when I consider Miller's work.

As a war photographer, Miller took it upon herself to observe and record the suffering of others. She could have refused to look at the horrors of the concentration camps, or turned back when it got too grisly, but she kept on nonetheless--out of a sense of a higher duty. Whereas Kahlo used the suffering of others as a metaphor for her own pain, constantly reinscribing her own emotional turmoil even when she wasn't painting self-portraits.

Here is Kahlo's A Few Small Nips, ostensibly based on a news story about a man who stabbed his girlfriend--but Kahlo chose this subject because she had just learned that Diego Rivera was cheating on her with her own sister, and felt stabbed in the gut by the news.

And here is Miller's photograph of a young German woman who killed herself upon her country's defeat in the war. This image is also disturbing, but in a quieter way than Kahlo's. It's almost an example of the "banality of evil"--at the same time we register the girl's death, Miller also wants us to notice the button that's hanging loose from the tufted couch, or the position of her pale hands in the light.

And most of Miller's 1930s work doesn't have to do with suffering at all--just studies of light and shadow and how everyday objects can look strange when you view them from a different angle, such as this image of a nude woman bent forward.

Frida Kahlo looked into herself, while Lee Miller looked out at the world. Of course, this might have something to do with the artistic media they chose--Kahlo smearing colored fluids onto a canvas, Miller looking through a machine made of metal and glass. Is painting, by its very nature, more emotional than photography? And, if more emotional, more stereotypically "feminine"?