John Berger and Ways of Seeing

This morning I was having breakfast with my collaborator Marc Roberts, the insanely prolific cartoonist. It turns out that Cantankerous Frank has a grand-daughter (when we dreamed her up, she was a daughter, but there's been some generational slippage). She's named after one of the people I most respect- Judi Bari.

Anyway, we were discussing what Judi would look like, and how hard it would be for her to have a family resemblance to Frank, who is, well, fugly. Because then it would MEAN something. And Marc went into this very intricate riff about another of his characters, Wendy, and her back story. I am hoping he will blog about that (I asked him to).

Anyway, I mentioned to Marc a quote from John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" which I have now tracked down. I think it is a corker:

"Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated.

"To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room, or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually."

And Frederick Raphael, what has he done except provide the occasional morsel of amusement for the editors of Private Eye?