Episode 02: Beauty sleep
Warning: this episode contains explicit discussion of sexual violence.
In this episode: Feminist and media scholar and psychotherapist Meredith Jones (author of Skintight: An Anatomy of Cosmetic Surgery and Beautyscapes: Mapping Cosmetic Surgery Tourism) joins the pod to discuss sleeping beauties and beauty sleep! We begin with a discussion of makeover culture, cosmetic surgery, and waking up transformed (3:50), which takes us to two icons of beauty sleep: Snow White and Sleeping Beauty (16:53); we turn next to the way sleeping (or unconscious) bodies are gendered and desired, touching briefly on the recent Pelicot case (21:18) and whiteness in fairy-tales (25:54). Towards the end we talk about how gender and time relate to sleep (34:13) and dreaming (42:41). Don’t miss Meredith and Cressida on being seized by sleep (51:24).
Mentioned in this episode: Thumbnail image is from My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales, edited by Edric Vredenburg, painting by Jennie Harbour. The Beauty Chronicles podcast; Meredith Jones, Skintight; Lolo Ferrari; all the versions of Sleeping Beauty/Sun, Moon and Talia; necrophiliac aesthetic; dead fashion shoots; Gisèle Pelicot; Silence of the Lambs; the 2025 movie Snow White; an example of murder fashion; Alien; Sam Taylor-Wood (now Taylor-Johnson), David Beckham (‘David’); Demolition Man.
Transcript
Cressida: 00:00
Am I allowed to say that you're quite short?
Yes, I'm four foot ten. No…Excuse me! I'm four foot ten and a half.
Okay, well done. Thank you.
And so you were given a big auditorium to present this paper in, and you were standing behind a podium. And I was sitting for some reason very near the front. And it felt like being in the front row at the cinema where you have to sort of crane your head back. And I could just about see your head over the top of the podium as you gave this paper. And then behind you, you projected images of Lolo Ferrari and her enormous boobs. It's almost like she was going to fall down.
Like I was going to be pressed.
Yes, you were going to be squished by the boobs. Oh dear. Well, there are worse dead. Yes, it's true.
Cressida: 01:16
My name is Cressida Hayes, and I'm a philosopher and political theorist at the University of Alberta and your host for this podcast series. I'm often to be found in the middle of the night doom scrolling, I'm terrible with jet lag, and I'm not sure that I ever really recovered from having a baby who wouldn't sleep.
Joshua: 01:32
And I am your co-host, Joshua Ayer. I'm a PhD student also at the University of Alberta, studying post-work and the politics of productivity. I am someone who never quite figured out how to sleep, and only until recently averaged a brisk four hours of sleep a night. So I have a personal stake in this series, I'm sure like many of our listeners, and am so excited to learn more about the topic.
Today on the podcast, Beauty Sleep. Or sleeping beauties. Sometimes we go to sleep and wake up transformed, whether it's the fairy stories of the Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, or contemporary makeover culture. Sleep and beauty have a lot to say to each other.
Cressida: 02:14
And with us on this episode, we have the wonderful writer, life coach, and budding psychotherapist, Meredith Jones. And just a warning that in this episode we are going to be talking about sexual violence. And we mention a case that happened in France last year, was very widely reported, in which a man, Dominique Pellicot, was found to have been drugging and sexually assaulting his wife, Gisèle Pellicot, over a period of nearly 10 years. The case involved not only his sexual violence, but also men whom he invited into their home. There were 51 defendants in this court case, all men accused of sexually assaulting Giselle Pellicot without her knowledge, while she was unconscious. And they were by and large, I think, found guilty and given various kinds of sentences in December 2024. And in the summer of 2025, Giselle Pellicot was awarded the Knight of the Legion of Honour, which is the highest award in French civilian life.
Meredith: 03:34
I'm an Australian, as you can hear, but I live in London, where I'm an honorary professor of gender and cultural studies at Brunel University of London. And I also have a podcast called The Beauty Chronicles. And I am also a consultant and mentor for academics and creatives. And you can find me on www.meredithjonestherapy.com. So that's me.
Cressida: 04:08
Amazing. So there are many academics and creatives out there who need therapy. So they should they should come to you. Um I recommend. Yes.
Meredith: 04:20
Thank you. It's my pleasure to be here on this most gloriously named podcast. Of all the podcasts in the world, this one has the best name. Thank you, thank you.
Cressida: 04:33
So I wanted to interview Meredith on Sleep is the New Sex because she has such an interesting take on the role of sleep in personal change and popular culture. And she's also pretty funny.
So, Meredith, you're a scholar of lots of different things, but um in particular, you work in gender studies and media studies. And you've done a lot of work over the years that sort of touches on sleep and it touches on sleep in oblique ways. So it's about sleep, but it's not just about sleep. So maybe the place to start is with your book, Skin Tights, which was about cosmetic surgery, but it included a chapter about Lolo Ferrari, the sort of minor celebrity and porn star uh who died young, and about her relationship to sleep. So maybe you can start by just telling us a bit about sleep in that book.
Meredith: 05:33
Sure. So the book is about this cultural paradigm that I call makeover culture. I use cosmetic surgery as just the kind of quintessential example in order to demonstrate the way that makeover culture is enacted and is understood and is represented. And one of the chapters is about anesthetics. And I was obviously very drawn to Lolo Ferrari. She was a French um celebrity, one of the sort of original kind of D E-grade celebrities, a very slight person who had the most enormous breast implants. She featured a lot on the English television program called Euro Trash in the 90s, where she had a segment called Lolo Pops. And she'd always have a chuppa-chup in her mouth, sucking it in a very suggestive way with these big blown-up lips. And is that what you call? Do you know what a chuppa-chup is?
Like it's a I do. Yeah, it's a lollipop that's got a round end, a very spherical end.
Yeah. Yeah. Um, she'd be with a sort of straight acting man. I don't mean straight sexually, I mean a sort of conservatively acting man who would just stare at her breasts the whole time. That was part of the shtick. He also had a chuppa-chup. So they'd be there on screen together. Lolo always stood in profile. So there's this tiny little body, and then these breasts that were at least as probably slightly wider than her body in profile. Uh, and she actually made it into the Guinness Book of World Records the the year before she died. So that was uh in 2000. She was in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the biggest breast implants on record. That's since been topped, um, so to speak. And and indeed, in terms of her aesthetic, it's become a very, very common aesthetic now. There are people all over Instagram, all over all sorts of social media and all sorts of different parts of the world who've embraced that same aesthetic to very similar extreme degrees. So it's no longer a rare aesthetic, but it certainly was when she embodied it. But coming to sleep, obviously I was drawn to her because of the cosmetic surgery, and I read all these interviews that she'd done and watched her a lot. And in one interview, she'd said, I want to be wholly artificial. I hate reality. And then she said, I adore being operated on. I love the feeling of a general anesthetic, falling into a black hole and knowing I'm being altered as I sleep. Wow. And that to me was just extraordinary.
Cressida: 09:06
It is, yeah.
Meredith: 09:07
Yeah. At the time I'd been interviewing people about their own cosmetic surgeries, and um lots of them had said that they loved the waking up into a transformed body or a transformed face, and with that a kind of transformed sense of self. So they lots of people spoke about the waking up into a new me, but nobody spoke about loving the actual anesthetic. That was only Lolo, and indeed the only other person I know who really loves anesthetic is me.
Cressida: 09:51
So there's some complex identification going on there.
Meredith: 09:55
Yes, but my first general anesthetic came after all of my work about Lolo. But I wonder if if it affected the way that I felt about it, that I'd already read all of her stuff. I have felt really wonderful after every general anesthetic I've ever had. So I think, you know, I was lured into it by Lolo. And then I told the first anesthetist I had. I said, I look, I'm really frightened, you know. And um, he actually held my hand and he said, Look, I'm giving you the pre-op now. It's going to feel like you're in the south of France on a summer's day and you've just had a glass of white wine.
Cressida: 10:40
That is alluring.
Cressida: 10:42
Yeah, it was. I did feel like that. And then next thing I knew, I was waking up, was hours later, but I woke up full of this incredible love. And the nurse came and I was shivering, you know, with cold. And the nurse came and put one of those silver foil blankets on me. And she said, Hi, I'm Naomi. I'm your nurse. I'm going to be looking after you in post op. And I took her hand and I held it and I said, Naomi, I love you. And even as I was saying it, I knew maybe it was not really right to, but then it was right. It was the right thing to say. And yeah, and every I hope I never have another general anesthetic, but everyone I've had, I've woken up in that state.
Cressida: 11:40
And and I mean, to be clear, Ferrari had a lot of surgeries. Like she didn't just have one surgery and wake up with the largest breasts in the world.
Meredith: 11:49
No, the breasts were increased over time. Yeah. It's not clear how many operations, but perhaps up to 18 on the breasts, and obviously some on her lips. But it it doesn't look like she had anything else done. That was really all breastwork, but yes, lots and lots of them. And even to the extent where the final set of implants had to be custom made uh and custom engineered because there was no no company making them that big.
Cressida: 12:24
Wow. So so Lolo Ferrari has an important place in my sort of memory of your scholarship. And the stuff about sleep ended up being more uh generative for me than the stuff about cosmetic surgery, although that was also generative. And so this idea that that she loved sleep and and also giving up control, like just surrendering to somebody else's ministrations, I think is a very interesting aspect, not just of general anesthetic, but also of sleep in general, right? That you're just giving something up and leaving this world.
Meredith: 13:01
Yes, indeed. And there were other things that she said in interviews that intimated that she did want to, in a sense, leave this world. So she said she wanted to live her life as if enchanted. Her home was like a fairy story kind of home with a white picket fence and and bright flowers and and you know, pretty pinks. And she really had a wicked stepmother. You know, she had grown up with this wicked mother figure who'd told her over and over again, you're really ugly, you know, you're really horrible and really ugly. She was in many ways like a kind of warped version of a sleeping beauty or a snow white. And one of the myths about her, by the way, which I don't think was true, but there was a myth that, like the elephant man, she couldn't sleep. So the elephant man couldn't sleep because of the weight of his head. Um, and there was this myth that she couldn't sleep because if she fell asleep, the boobs would roll up and suffocate her. And you only have to look at her to see that that wasn't true. She could have easily slept. But it's interesting that one of the sort of cultural punishments that that we came up with for this gross embodiment was that she was not allowed to sleep.
Cressida: 14:34
There's no rest for her. No rest for her because she's wicked.
Meredith: 14:38
Yeah, she's wicked because she did that.
Joshua: 14:51
So going to sleep and waking up transformed is an element of makeover culture. Should we always be making ourselves over though? Isn't most sleep just not all that transformative?
Cressida: 15:03
Yeah, one of the things I learned from Meredith is that there's a real cultural obsession with the makeover, with becoming different. And my second book was called Self-Transformations. And several people asked me after that was published kind of pointedly, well, you know, are you pro? Like, do you think we all have to completely change ourselves because we suck? It's like, well, we do suck, but maybe we don't have to change. So the idea that we need to keep working on ourselves is a, I think, a distinctively modern idea, but also involves a kind of solipsism that is connected to the sort of individualism in Western culture or even the narcissism that we're encouraged to develop, that we think of ourselves as special individuals. So, yeah, this culture of transformation or constant change or even innovation, I would say that the personal and the institutional obsession with innovation is everywhere. And you have to do it yourself. You can't let it happen, right? You can't just let the world be. You have to act upon it to make it over in some way that is going to reflect on you, whether you're making over your own body or you're showing yourself to be a wonderful institutional leader because you've innovated or whatever the context. So it's uh yeah, I I think that this is a a big question that's not just about makeover culture. Um, and sleep plays a funny role, I think, in all of this because sleep is so passive. Yes. Even if you go to sleep and you wake up transformed, it's still not exactly you that did it. Right. And it happens to you. It happens to you. I mean, with Ferrari, it happened because she was having surgery while she was unconscious. But even if you go to sleep and you have a dream and you wake up and you think, oh, you know, and the dream is is shocking or or transformative in some way, you you didn't do it, you know. Like your brain did it, I suppose, but you you didn't set out to lead, you weren't satisf dissatisfied with the now and developed a strategic plan. You just woke up.
Joshua: 17:16
Yeah, you didn't will any part of that. The will was absent that whole time.
Cressida: 17:21
Yeah, so I think we sort of fetishize will, like with the will and will power, which is an incredibly complicated word, I think. But the idea that I can like strain myself, I can exercise this muscle called the will, and I can make things happen, is a very strange view of agency itself, but also a strange understanding of what it is to be a person in the world where just so much happens to us without us being able to control it. So there are some fantasies of control being developed and undermined.
Joshua: 17:53
Definitely. Yeah, I can see that.
Cressida: 18:06
So you mentioned uh Snow White's sleeping beauty, these fairy tale tropes. You say in one of your articles that these fairy tales feature sleep both as a passive state and as a container for radical transformation.
Meredith: 18:22
In those two fairy stories and in several other fairy stories or fairy tales as we might call them, um, the main thing that happens is that girls in their young teens get to bypass puberty. So they go from being powerless girls who are persecuted by father figures who want to kill them or who are inept and by mother figures who want to kill them and who are uh viciously envious of their beauty. You could read that as, I suppose, as a sort of eatable complex in early adolescence. And instead of living through that complex and working it out and staying with the trouble, these girls get to go to sleep. Yeah. And when they wake up, however long that might take, for some of them it takes a hundred years, the world has changed for the better, and they are now queens. Those nasty parents have gone away. There's suddenly a handsome prince, and they are powerful queens in their own rights. So these sleeps are transformative because they bypass puberty. But that's that's for the heroines, right? They're transformative for us, the readers, or the people who experience them as representations in all sorts of interesting cultural ways that are not so nice as just bypassing puberty, which let's face it, I wish I could have.
Cressida: 20:07
Yes.
Meredith: 20:08
Many people wish they could bypass. Exactly. So culturally, there's a kind of necrophilia in our cultural attraction to these sleeping young women. All of the stories have a strong focus on them when they're asleep. In some cases, it's not really known whether they're asleep or dead. So Snow White is thought to be dead, right? Sleeping Beauty, we know is asleep. And they become objects of the gaze. They're passive, they're immobile. Snow White literally has a glass frame around her as if she's an artwork. It's a 3D frame, that glass coffin. So they become subject to the gaze as these kind of perfect sexual but unavailable specimens. And crucially, they're virginal. And that doesn't just mean that they're sexual virgins, you know, with hymen's intact. They're social virgins too, because they're not going through any of that horrid, grotesque, pimply, angry, hormonal teenage stuff. They go from being 12-year-old perfect specimens into full-blown queens with no kind of loss of virginity involved, if you like. So they're very much made for surveillance and they're arrested in their social and sexual development. And that's, I think, the cultural attraction that they hold. Yeah. Indeed, through centuries.
Cressida: 21:55
Yeah. And as you said at one point, there's still a necrophiliac aesthetic. In my work, I've dug up numerous examples of fashion shoots featuring women who are dead or appear to be dead, certainly who are lying with their eyes closed, could be asleep, could be dead, and who are presented as uh attractive, right, as objects of our gaze, whether it's to showcase the clothes that they're wearing or whether it's because of some artistic purpose, or whether it's simply we're invited to look at them as beautiful objects. And that's everywhere. So I've been thinking a lot about this lately because of the Giselle Pellecall case in France and the media coverage of that, which has been so sort of, you know, oh golly gosh, can you imagine? Wow, I can't even think how kind of like fake, you know, innocent. Um, when in fact the idea that men uh would would get some pleasure out of raping a woman who's asleep, unconscious, without her knowledge, is a huge part of our visual culture, in not just in pornography, but in fashion and in art. And yeah, so it's a completely recognizable. Yeah, not just as a kink, right? But but really is quite a mainstream way of thinking about women and women's sexuality, that her consent, I mean, consent is even too sort of legalistic a word, her kind of subjectivity, her engagement is irrelevant to a sexual encounter, right? Yeah. And so I've just been thinking about that case and in particular the way it's been covered as another example of the sexualization of the unconscious woman.
Meredith: 23:37
Indeed. And I think it is very closely related to the sexualization of the dead woman. You know, the the number of times, if I ever have to see another police show where there's a shot of the raped and murdered woman who, of course, is young and traditionally beautiful, laid out on the autopsy slab nude in order for us to all look at and gape and feel sexual attraction. You know, it's just terribly boring. Yeah.
Cressida: 24:11
Yeah, yeah. You said Snow White is purportedly dead, but we know that she's not dead because she's not decaying. And so when I was working on this, I started thinking about those kind of crime scenes as opposed to Snow White, because the idea of being in a in an enchanted sleep and beautiful is actually very different than what a real crime scene photograph would look like. So nobody really, except for perhaps people who really are at some extreme of a kink, would be interested in having sex with uh a decaying body, right? That's right.
Meredith: 24:47
So the police procedurals is another uh sanitization. It is a sanitization, and there's a nice um antidote to that sanitization, actually, that you've just reminded me of in the silence of the lambs, when Clarice uh sees the first dead body, and it's a young woman, and everyone has to put stuff under their nose because of the stench, so we know it's bad. But then when they take the cover off, and there's the nude young woman, Clarice says to the room full of gawking men, she says something like, Okay, let's give her some space. And really gives a little bit of a tiny, tiny bit of agency to that nude, ruined, rotting corpse.
Joshua: 25:48
In that context, you would think, or you'd expect, that the traditional fairy tales that we've talked about, like Sleeping Beauty, like Snow White, would be really unattractive in our contemporary culture that places such a high premium on productivity and using the will. And yet, that trope of the sleeping woman seems to have a lot of staying power. I mean, they just redid Snow White this year.
Cressida: 26:17
That's right. I haven't seen it yet, the new one.
Joshua: 26:20
Neither have I. I wanted to in preparation for this, and I just couldn't bring myself to do it.
Cressida: 26:25
It's on it's on one of the streaming services.
Joshua: 26:28
It's out there, and it has received an enormous amount of blowback for I think many different reasons. I would assume, just given our culture, that one of those reasons is that it's too woke. So I was curious to watch it just for this context.
Cressida: 26:45
Yeah.
Joshua: 26:46
But I didn't, so I have nothing to contribute on the current state of Snow White.
Cressida: 26:50
Well, I followed the debates that there were right before it was released.
Joshua: 26:53
Right.
Cressida: 26:54
And there was a lot of criticism about the the use of dwarfs who and I think in the final version they're animated.
Really?
Yeah, or they're sort of CGI'd in some way. So that was one thing, the representation of little people slash fairy tale dwarfs.
Joshua: 27:10
Yeah.
Cressida: 27:10
But the other is that the actress who plays Snow White is Latina, and that this this is not in keeping with the original, which is true.
Joshua: 27:20
Sure.
Cressida: 27:20
And it is actually in a fascinating way, it is kind of the point of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. Yeah, it is kind of the point that they have um alabaster skin. Um, skin as white as snow. That's why she's called Snow White.
Joshua: 27:36
Of course.
Cressida: 27:36
So the whiteness of these girls, really, young, very young women, is actually, I think, integral to the fairy tales. Of course, they're originally medieval European fairy tales, so you know it would have been unlikely for them to have protagonists who were anything other than uh white. Sure. Or this word that we use now, white. But I think it's uh it's interesting that there was so much resistance to the idea that Snow White could be something other than white.
Joshua: 28:06
Yes, definitely.
Cressida: 28:07
But not very, not very thoughtful. Like, why might race be integral to the story rather than just oh Disney's gone woke because they've picked a an actor who's not you know the right colour. And it seemed to me that the debate sort of got a bit stuck at that sort of dopey level.
Joshua: 28:25
Um isn't that one of the dwarves?
Cressida: 28:26
Yeah, that is what I know that was a reference.
Joshua: 28:28
Yeah. But yeah, the the whiteness of the princess actually is important integral to the story, it doesn't mean you can't change it.
Cressida: 28:37
Of course you can change it, but the analysis is not just about, you know, this is some banal diversity move, but what what racial identity means in those stories.
Joshua: 28:48
There's a there's a deeper subtext underneath that that the analysis in sort of the the cultural reaction didn't quite hit at.
Cressida: 28:58
Yeah. I'll tell you, Joshua, what I think it is.
Joshua: 29:02
Yes, please.
Cressida: 29:04
And that is that these are stories about the passivity of femininity. And passive femininity in the world that we're in now is associated with whiteness. So who is this passive woman? She is a white woman. And conversely, there are stereotypes of Latinx women, especially as being aggressive or angry or hot-headed, similarly with black women, right? Yeah. And so those racist stereotypes, I think, are played against a kind of usually tacit understanding of what it means to be a good white woman, which is somebody who is quieter, more mindful, more demure, at least in one sort of weird trad wife instantiation. But of course, there's always competing understandings of femininity. So when we talk about makeover culture and wanting to Take charge of your life, that's competing with the passivity that's associated with traditional white femininity. And you know, they're both all the way in the culture, so it's not like one of them has dominance really over the other. But I think the idea that this beautiful young woman goes to sleep and everything happens around her really evokes a sort of passive relation to the world that is first of all, it's very sexual, like it and it's not a coincidence that she's woken up by sex. She's woken up in the sanitized Disney version by a kiss.
Joshua: 30:40
I was going to say, yeah, I don't remember that from my Disney animated cartoon.
Cressida: 30:44
No, no, but in the original medieval versions, she's raped. Like that's what happens to Sleeping Beauty is the prince shows up, rapes her, leaves, she's pregnant, she has twins. She somehow manages to have have be pregnant for nine months and give birth to the twins without waking up. And she only wakes up because one of the twins is trying to suckle and sucks on her finger where the thorn is and pulls out the thorn. And so she wakes up and is like, shit, you know, I went to sleep and I was 13 and a virgin, and now I seem to be somewhat older, and there are these two kids crawling around. I wonder what happened.
Jeez.
I know, right?
Cressida: 31:27
It's a dramatically different story, but in a way, only a more extreme version of the story that we know. And the prince comes back, like because he thinks, I wonder what happened to that girl I raped.
Joshua: 31:39
Right, whatever did happen. Yeah, whatever did happen.
Cressida: 31:41
He comes back, he's like, Oh, I seem to have two children now. And so he marries her. Right. Because she's of course down with that. Yeah. So, and the wicked fairy is punished in Snow White, it's even worse. The wicked stepmother is uh punished with all in all these ways that Meredith talked about in briefly. They're much longer stories and they have much more violence in them, basically.
Joshua: 32:04
Yeah.
Cressida: 32:05
And so I think yike. You know, yikes. But we're gonna talk at some point about sexual violence against unconscious people. And I've heard a lot of jokes about sleeping beauty, you know, like, could the prince be charged with sexual assault for kissing her? How funny. Yeah. And it's like, yes, in fact, he could in Canadian law, you know. And in a way, I feel like we should embrace that conclusion because it's an clearly non-consensual sexual act. And so the idea that it's romantic to be to be pulled out of this period, out of time, out of this coma by a sexual advance from a stranger is a super weird idea.
Joshua: 32:51
Yeah.
Cressida: 32:52
And actually should disturb us, but it doesn't at all because we're completely inured to the myth and to the symbolism of it. And so that I think is the telling thing that indicates that we are still we're still captivated by this idea of passive femininity.
Joshua: 33:10
Yeah.
Cressida: 33:11
Because we're not shocked at the fact that she has to be woken up by the prince.
Joshua: 33:16
Yeah, and the availability as well of that female figure.
Yeah. Yeah.
Cressida: 33:21
And there's so much in our visual culture that is about passive women being sexualized. So I wrote in my last book about how there are just so many images of women who are dead or might be dead, sleeping maybe in high fashion, lots and lots of fashion shoots. Um, interesting. Including women who've been hypothetically murdered.
Joshua: 33:47
In the fashion shoot. In the fashion shoot. Interesting.
Cressida: 33:49
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I found several examples of murder being used as a a vehicle for shoes and clothes.
Joshua: 33:56
Wow.
Cressida: 33:57
Yeah.
Joshua: 33:58
Like you want to look good when you're dead.
Cressida: 34:02
Yeah. And as I point out, they don't look at all like crime scene photos because those are ugly and not something that you want to dress up for. Dress up for, yes. So and not something that any fashion brand would actually want associated with their product.
Joshua: 34:17
No.
Cressida: 34:18
So there's lots of visual imagery that is associated with women being asleep slash dead, available, sexually available because unconscious or dead. Right. And it's sort of everywhere. And it's been called a necrophiliac aesthetic in other scholarship. So we've got a kind of mixture here of ideas of the very passive feminine as sexy, basically. And then the idea that all of us, including women, should take charge of our lives and make ourselves over. And both are happening.
Joshua: 34:57
Yeah. There's a tension there.
Cressida: 34:59
Yeah.
Joshua: 34:59
Yeah.
Cressida: 34:60
Yeah. They both they're both norms that we that we sustain, but in different parts of the culture.
Joshua: 35:06
Yeah. That women have to negotiate.
Cressida: 35:09
That's right. And you can screw up both ways. Like you can be too pushy, and why aren't you more demure and cuter? Or you can also be insufficiently take charge. And you're not actually making over your own life. You're just kind of slumping and letting it happen. And that's bad too.
Joshua: 35:27
No, you can't. It’s a double blind. So it seems like the sleeping woman is a part of aesthetic culture. It's a visual trope, but also a way of expressing something about time. If this is a gendered analysis, what about men?
Cressida: 35:44
Yeah, I mean, I think masculinity is doing some work in these stories too. I think that the idea that the sleeping woman is out of time and that time passes while she sleeps is contrasted with the way that the prince brings time along. Okay. That that he advances time through his actions. And so I think that there is various ways that masculinity figures back in to the stories through the trope of time, really. Yeah, so the sleeping woman as the object of the gaze, but we've also got sleep as offering the possibility for transformation. So there's two things here that seem to be kind of a bit different.
Meredith: 36:48
Yeah, well, anesthetic offers transformation, whether it's to be free from disease or or healed in some way, or to be made beautiful. Yeah. You know, that's the transformation we get there. And in fairy stories, we get the transformation that skips puberty. So all the between stage is gone. And that's very, very gendered, of course. We've only spoken about women so far. But there used to be lots more stories about sleeping men, and we don't hear them anymore. Some of those were uh King Arthur, Barbarossa, who was a German hero, a Jewish character called the Gollum of Prague, and sleeping armies of warriors. Oh, yeah, yeah. In Welsh stories. And of course, Jesus Christ, who went to sleep for, what was it, three, four days, only to be resurrected. And they're all heroes who are trapped in forms of enchanted sleep or death-like sleep, but who rise again. And when they do, they bring drastic change and often they bring some sort of justice. But they don't really come into our storytelling anymore, unless you know of one, Christina.
Cressida: 38:18
Well, I I think that they come into our modern storytelling through science fiction.
Meredith: 38:23
Yeah.
Cressida: 38:24
So, you know, the uh the space traveler who has to be put to sleep in order to get to some distant galaxy, right? That's the trope of a few science fiction movies. And so that can happen to men, the sort of heroic entrepreneur who risks a medical sleep in order to be able to achieve some feat.
Meredith: 38:45
Yeah. But the the best and most famous and most beautifully spectacular one of those is not a man. It's Ripley. It's Ripley, yes.
Cressida: 38:60
Yes, Alien is unbeatable. Stands out in the genre. Yeah, for sure. It's interesting to think about those kind of medieval examples of sleeping armies and King Arthur Will Rise again and all of that stuff. It doesn't have the same contemporary resonance except maybe through through this kind of science fiction lens.
Meredith: 39:20
I don't know if you've ever seen the um the Sam Taylor Wood portrait of David Beckham sleeping.
Cressida: 39:28
I have, yeah.
Meredith: 39:29
Yeah. I don't know if it's still at the National Portrait Gallery here in London where it was first shown, but there were cues round the gallery when it was first shown of swooning people watching David Beckham asleep for I think 12 minutes.
Cressida: 39:47
Yeah.
Meredith: 39:48
But of course, he he was sleeping immediately after a match. Yeah. And he at the time especially was, you know, the Uber example of an active man.
Joshua: 40:11
You and Meredith talk about how the theme of the sleeping man being re-awokened has sort of faded from our culture. Yeah. But I was thinking, reflecting on the interview, that there have been some fairly significant examples of the man uh who either leaves and then comes back to life that aren't just in sci-fi, but there's an example of in Game of Thrones, the person who ends up being the hero of the series, I would say Jon Snow dies and comes back to life. Very similar for Harry Potter, uh, but Harry Potter also character who dies and comes back to life. Superheroes often have the like death and coming back. Yeah. Uh, which each of those examples in pop culture are also uh death and rebirth as opposed to going asleep and reawakening. And I wonder if that's significant even. The idea that the male has to die, like isn't just asleep, but is dead and not just passive, I guess. And as soon as uh that temporary stasis is broken, comes back into action, I guess.
Cressida: 41:37
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I do think that heroism is kind of a key term that you can be put to sleep and then like the King Arthur legend is that King Arthur was a great king and that he'll be reawakened when when he's needed. When he and his armies are needed to defend England, he'll reawaken. So he's been put on ice, but he hasn't been put on ice just so that other people can do things around him, or so that we can look at how beautiful he is. He's been put on ice so that he can come back when his heroism is going to be most valuable.
Joshua: 42:12
That's what I was thinking of. And my favorite example is the 80s action movie Demolition Man.
Cressida: 42:19
I haven't seen that 80s action movie.
Joshua: 42:22
Are you familiar with the plot?
Cressida: 42:23
No.
Joshua: 42:24
Okay, so yeah, let me let me let me delight you.
Thanks
It’s uh, a story about Sylvester Stallone, who is really good at fighting terrorists, and for some reason is put into cryogenic sleep so that he can be re-awoken to fight terrorists in the future when we need him again. I believe it's Wesley Snipes, is the like arch nemesis who also goes into cryogenic sleep and is awoken in the future. So they have to wake up Sylvester Stallone to fight Wesley Snipes in the in the future.
Cressida: 43:01
Wow.
Joshua: 43:02
Yeah. Just a really excellent film.
Cressida: 43:05
So they need the a hero of sufficient caliber to fight another hero. So they have to time it using sleep.
Joshua: 43:14
Yes, exactly.
Yeah. I see.
And in the future where Wesley Snipes is reawoken as the sort of violent criminal, uh, crime has been eradicated from society. Oh. And so Wesley Snipes is reawoken into a society that does not know violence. And so they need Sylvester Stallone.
Cressida: 43:34
Right. He's the only one who can...
Joshua: 43:36
He's the only one who can fight crime. So they put him to sleep.
Cressida: 43:39
I see. So they need his knowledge, which is now historical knowledge.
Joshua: 43:43
Yep.
Cressida: 43:43
Yeah.
Joshua: 43:44
Yep.
Cressida: 43:44
I'm sure it's it doesn't feel like he's been awoken for his historical knowledge, but
Joshua: 43:45
yeah, it doesn't have that vibe.
Right.
Joshua: 43:53
But when you say it, it is definitely his historical knowledge. It is just a specific knowledge of hurting people that they have awoken him for. Yeah. Yeah.
Cressida: 44:04
Huh. Okay, well, that's on my list.
Joshua: 44:06
Just add it to the Sleeping Beauty sort of mythos, counter mythos. Yeah. Yeah.
Cressida: 44:12
Okay.
Joshua: 44:22
I did have one question about the uh fairy tale heroines and uh princesses, sleeping beauties, and whether it's important that they are or are not dreaming as well. I was curious about that, whether Sleeping Beauty, Snow White ever dreams in those stories. And uh with regards to the sort of transformation and sort of being completely absent from the world that they are going to sleep in, whether dreaming or not dreaming is significant to that story.
Cressida: 45:02
Whoa. Fantastic question.
Meredith: 45:06
I think it's quite important that in fact they don't dream. It's the sleep of the dead, it's the dreamless sleep. It's the sleep where nothing happens. You know, Snow White is is almost dead. So I I don't think I've ever read any version of the story where where she dreams or any of them. But Sleeping Beauty, it's not just her who goes to sleep, it's her whole environment. The castle, even the flags stop waving in the castle, the wind disappears, the mice fall asleep, the dust stops falling, everything goes into a state of stasis. So I think it is what we might call the sleep of the dead or the dreamless sleep. And so the fact that there isn't dreaming is important.
Cressida: 46:03
There is an interpretation of those fairy tales that is to do with the gendering of time. So there's a long tradition in philosophy where the forward passage of time is masculine coded. Men advance time, men are the agents of civilization and progress. And so then you know it's also men of a certain culture, right? So colonizing men, really. Um, and the function of the feminine or what women do, again, slightly different claims, is to kind of hold time, to act as a sort of container for time itself. And so one interpretation of those fairy tales is that the figure of the sleeping woman contains time, while the only way that you know that there is time that's moving on outside of the castle or the dwarf's house or whatever, is because there's a guy making it happen. Right. Yeah. So it's quite important because of that philosophical point that she not dreamed, because then she would she would be in time if she were dreaming. Yes, exactly. Yeah.
Meredith: 47:13
Exactly, yes.
Cressida: 47:14
So, you know, that sort of goes back a long way, that view. But it's got all of these funny little contemporary manifestations, you know.
Meredith: 47:24
Yeah. It's also the reason she can't rot, because then she'd be in time. Then she'd be in time, yeah.
Cressida: 47:31
But she also can't rot because she has to remain beautiful to piss off her stepmother, at least in Snow White.
Yeah.
Because the evil stepmother is like, how come I'm not the fairest of them all? Well, because this, you know, there's this girl in a in a hut somewhere who's still the fairest of them all, and she couldn't be decaying because then she probably wouldn't for long be all that fair. It's another way of sustaining that tension between the wicked stepmother and the the virginal beauty. Yeah.
Meredith: 48:02
They're so rich, those stories.
Yeah, they are.
The wicked stepmothers are horribly, horribly punished. Yes. The end of the grim tales. You know, they're tortured to death. One of them's made to dance in shoes that are made of iron and they're heated to be red hot in the fire.
Cressida: 48:20
Yes, I remember that.
Meredith: 48:21
Gives new meaning to red dancing shoes.
Yes.
And all of those end-of-story torture scenes are written out of the contemporary retellings.
Joshua: 48:42
So to recap, sleep turns out to be very key to understanding time and the self, but also how we understand femininity, how we understand masculinity, how we understand sleep in culture, its representation in the stories that we tell. And those stories have these much deeper layers than we're used to attributing to them.
Cressida: 49:07
Yeah, and I think that that's why they are so enduringly popular, is because they're subject to retellings, but they also have ways of tapping into the culture that even if we don't self-consciously know them, even if you couldn't run an analysis like the stuff that we've talked about in the episode, it still resonates. You still see it, you still recognize the analysis. So we started from sleep being a kind of withdrawal, a kind of checking out, but also providing an opportunity for transformation. And so Meredith's work on makeover culture shows that tension. We're supposed to be turning ourselves into something wonderful all the time, but going to sleep starts to look really good. And of course, the idea that the world changes around you while you sleep is a part of lots of these stories and lots of real lives as well. So Lolo Ferrari liked general anesthesia because she went to sleep and the world became different. She became different. And then she woke up and she was a new person, if you like. So I think sleep has this very distinctive sort of relationship to time. It's both a suspension of time, but time continues while you're asleep. And gender is shaping how we think about those things. The passive white femininity versus masculinity as a kind of heroism is all wrapped up in the same paradigm, really.
Joshua: 50:34
Right. Okay. I also think it's interesting that like when you go to sleep, your body is repairing parts of your body. Yeah, yeah, I was thinking about that. So there is, even in everyday sleep, there is this activity that we aren't willing, but is happening. And I'm thinking that in light of what you've said in the past, with the tension to make sleep productive, it is productive, but we're not necessarily willing that production. Yeah, that's right. And at the same time, we wake up somewhat transformed from how we went to sleep. And again, that can be negative and positive, the same way that other examples of uh self-transformation can be and makeover culture can be negative and positive. I can wake up sometimes feeling more tired than when I went to bed, but I can also wake up feeling really well rested. And that is sort of a uh a rejuvenating that comes from sleeping.
Cressida: 51:36
Yeah, or people are always saying sleep on it.
Joshua: 51:39
Right.
Cressida: 51:39
The idea being that if you have a problem, you don't know what to do, you're facing a dilemma or a decision, if you go to sleep, there's a chance that when you wake up in the morning you'll have better judgment or a clearer perspective. I think that's true. I think that doesn't always happen, but I think it can happen. So the idea that something, something, who knows what, like is it in your unconscious? Is it just because your body has had some opportunity to physically repair itself or rejuvenate? I don't know. But the idea that you wake up in a better position to make a decision or solve a problem seems real. And so sadly, not always, because I have tried sleeping on it and I've woken up thinking, oh, this is just as much of a nightmare as it was before. But that I think is evidence that there are things happening while we're asleep, whether we know it or not, and whether we've intended them to happen or not. And that's the trouble with a lot of what happens during sleep is you can't will it.
Joshua: 52:42
Yeah.
Cressida: 52:42
You can't make it happen.
Joshua: 52:44
You can't control it.
Cressida: 52:45
You can't control it, but we keep trying.
Joshua: 52:47
Yeah.
Cressida: 52:48
Yeah.
Meredith: 52:60
When I was a kid, I had an infection once, and walking home from school, I felt incredibly hot. My face was burning, and I just knew that I had to go to sleep. I think I was about nine. And I went into a house. I went into their front path of this terrace house. It was on the front path was only two meters long. It was the afternoon, and I lay down on the path and I went to sleep.
Cressida: 53:31
Whoa. Yeah. That's a weird little riff on sleeping beauty. Nine-year-old Meredith asleep on some Rando's front path. On the path, yeah. Did you just wake up and then carry on your way?
Meredith: 53:43
Yeah. I don't remember anybody waking me up. Wow.
Cressida: 53:47
You couldn't even get home to go to sleep. No. Wow. I remember when I was pregnant at the beginning in my first trimester, I would be seized. It was always at three o'clock, exactly three o'clock in the afternoon with the desire to go to sleep. And I would usually, I was having a sort of, it was in the summer, and I was having a leisurely summer. And I would, and I was quite ill, so I wasn't venturing far from home. So I would almost always be at my desk in my study, which was on the attic floor at the time. And my bedroom was on the one floor down. And there was one day in particular, I remember when it hit three o'clock and I was overwhelmed with a level of tiredness I don't think I'd ever experienced before. And I thought, I have to go to sleep. And I got up out of the chair and I looked at the stairs that led down directly to my bedroom. And I thought, I can't get that far. And I just lay down on the carpet next to my desk and just fell suddenly asleep. And my then husband came up those stairs a sort of couple of hours into it and was like, he thought that I had passed out and I was unconscious on the floor. I had got up from my desk and collapsed. And he was like, Are you okay shaking my shoulder and everything? And I was just like, I just had a nap, you know.
Meredith: 55:07
And so that level of tiredness was really But there is something glorious about it, isn't there? Yeah. Just giving in pointing out, yeah, and having no choice. Yeah. You just have to lie down wherever you are, and that's it, and falling asleep.
unknown: 55:26
Makeover, makeover, makeover, makeover, make over, makeover, make over. For you and me.
Cressida: 55:43
I don't know how to leave. You just press the button that says leave. Oh there, I see.
Cressida: 55:50
Bye. That's classic.
That's it for today. Thanks, Joshua, and thanks to our audience for listening. Next time on Sleep is the New Sex, we'll be talking about sleep coaching with Janique Tucker.
This series is recorded at the University of Alberta, which is located on the territory of the Nehiao, Nitsatapi, Metis, Nakota, Dene, Hodnoshone, and Anishinabi lands that are now known as part of Treaties 6, 7, and 8 and homeland of the Metis. As we talk about the history and meanings that sleep, rest, leisure, and productivity have for us, we also want to recognise the way each of these ideas participates in the history of colonialism that has shaped and continues to shape relations between settlers and First Nations. Our sound engineer is Tom Merklinger, who also wrote and performed our music. To find our first season, please see the link in the show notes. And for more information on this project, visit sleepisthenewsex.ca