While some women do their best to play by the rules, others find loopholes in social customs through which they can enact a semblance of autonomy. However, doing so is extremely risky, especially for those lower on the social ladder.
This show is wildly good, and Maomao is a fantastic character. My wife and I watch every week. The article draws some of the parallels but in the show it’s even more of a constant theme - the wild excesses of the “inner palace” of the emperor’s concubines versus the red light district outside its walls where Maomao was raised, but foils to each other in that they are both environments where women are kept as objects of desire and pleasure for men. And yet Maomao carves out a path all her own based on her keen intellect, as a sort of Sherlock Holmes type solving matters of palace intrigue. Really, really good.
I’ll generally always upvote animefeminst.com
Yeah, they are great.
I love this anime so very much
After learning about the consorts’ plight, Maomao deduces that their makeup is poisoning them, highlighting both the lengths to which some women will go to meet patriarchal societal demands…
I’m pretty sure that the pasty white makeup had nothing to do with patriarchy. The men were not insisting that women wear such makeup. There was no rule or law that women make themselves pasty white.
That was a rich person thing. As in, the women in the higher classes used it as a tool to separate themselves from the riffraff/poor people who had to work in the sun all day (and thus, got tanned).
So not only was it limited to the rich it was something the women thrusted upon themselves. I’m sure there’s endless genetic evidence that the rich/royalty/noble equivalent men had loads of children with working women who weren’t wearing such makeup.
The society itself was super patriarchal but the pasty white makeup wasn’t even tangentially related to that.
So the society’s power structures were super patriarchal, and the makeup was tied to power, but there wasn’t even a tangential relationship there?
You got a source for that claim that the women thrust it on themselves?
And even if that’s 100% correct, just because some hypothetical woman was an ancient tastemaker doesn’t mean that the women who were sold into concubinage had any say in the way they were expected to present themselves in society.
Patriarchy is the wrong word to describe it. It’s no different than men taking risky jobs in order to make more money in an attempt to be more attractive.
Beauty and attraction have fads and at that time pasty white makeup was the trend for rich women. It had nothing to do with patriarchy.
That society as a whole was super sexist and awful but makeup wasn’t part of it.
