I have created a questionnaire about periods for both men and women to answer filtering them for each gender. I have tried to have questions that are personal for women and question how much men really know.

FEMALE QUESTIONS

Age:

1.How does your period make you feel?

2.What are the first three words that come to mind when you hear the word period?

3.What age did you get your period?

4.What is your first experience of a period?

5.Do you speak openly about periods with friends/family/partner?

6.What’s your worst experience of a period?

7.What do you call your period?  my period

8.What is your opinion on period sex?  

9.Do you feel uncomfortable talking about periods?  

If yes, why?

10.Do you think society should be more open with talking about periods?

MALE QUESTIONS

Age:

1.What is a period?

2.What are the first three words that come to mind when you hear the word period?

3.Roughly what age do girls get their period?

4.What is your first experience of a period?

5.Do you speak openly about periods with friends/family/partner?

6.What’s your worst experience of a period?

7.Would you buy sanitary products for a girlfriend/ friend or female family member?

8.What is your opinion on period sex?

9.Do you feel uncomfortable talking about periods?

If yes, why?

10. Do you think society should be more open with talking about periods?

I think it’s really interesting how many words we use al over the world instead of saying period as people are too scared to say it. I think some of these words are quite offensive and make periods seem as if they are something you should be scared of.

Quotes for Dissertation:

Hitchcock Style, Jean-Pierre Dufreigne

1. “She spies,lies,steals,scolds men,and now and then kills them.With the help of a pair of scissors or a bread or carving knife, or a poker, which are all utensils befitting a good housewife. A good housewife, the Hitchcockian blonde?” pg.68
2. “The view from behind reveals the nape of the neck….created by the fashion designers of those respectable years, designated strands of hair clinging to the neck.” pg.69
3. “Short hair, bare necks and shoulders- very important, the bare shoulders to highlight the fragility of the neck and above all the chignons”. pg.69
4. “The fact that his actresses wore nothing beneath their gowns tailored by Edith Head and other great Hollywood costume makers was, for Hitchcock, a feverish preoccupation, …. in his book of interviews with Truffaut,…..he leapt at the chance to point out that Kim Novak boasted that she never wore a bra”. Pg.80
5. “He always more readily imagined that they were Scandinavian, distinguished, subtle, and as lacking in earthiness as they could possibly be, often old-fashioned, with pearls and black velvet, or looking like school marms. Vacant, lost and remote, their eyes suggested a state wavering between menace and nightmare. With Hitchcock’s heroines it’s never very far from the Van Cleef salons to the mental asylum”. Pg. 80
6. “ For beneath their bleached blonde, pallid, and ash-blonde, crowns, these young ladies are frigid and/or teases, alcoholic, depraved, kleptomaniac, and forever surprising in both their decisions and behaviour”. P.g 80
7. “Hitchcock gets around and beyond this guilt: “I was very fascinated,” Hitch confessed to Truffaut, “by the key scene of Vertigo where the colour of the woman’s hair is changed; it had so much in common with a sex scene”.” P.g 81
8. “according to Hitchcock this is the standard female type. Ice cold tea, piping hot sex.” P.g 81
9. “Did he even desire all those blondes he idealised film after film? He kept himself in check, at least until Marnie , and was careful not to give away too much”. P.g 84
10. Kim Novak on Hitchcock “ I think i disappointed Hitchcock. I didn’t fit his image of the ideal blonde. In my opinion, he was well aware that he’d made a mistake in choosing me, and he decided to go along with that mistake. It’s as if he had wanted to put himself in the skin of the James Stewart character, who discovers Judy when he’s hoping to find Madeleine and doesn’t…Hitchcock was hoping to find in me a Grace Kelly- like blonde, which wasn’t the case, all along hoping he could change my nature”. Pg. 85
11. “ Melanie Griffith …. would tell Telerama at a later date, “Ive always thought thought that Hitchcock stole my Mother from me. She obsessed him and he shattered her career because she didn’t want to let him have his way”. P.g 88
12. “ There were flowing dresses revealing with each and every move the dangerous elegance of Grace Kelly and Kim Novak. Dangerous for the person wearing them that is. As well as for the men eyeing them.” P.g 106
13. “ Among the finery sported by his blondes, Hitchcock never over looked jewels. Objects embellishing their beauty, as well as objects of fetishism revealing their personalities.” P.g 132

Hitchcock Truffaut: The Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut

1. “Sex on the screen should be suspenseful, i feel. If sex is too blatant or obvious, there’s no suspense. You know why I favour sophisticated blondes in my films? We’re after the drawing room type , the real ladies, who become whores once they’re in the bedroom. Poor Marilyn Monroe had sex written all over her face, and Brigitte Bardot isn’t subtle either.” P.G.224
2. “Sex should not be advertised. An English girl, looking like a school teacher, is apt to get into a cab with you and, to your surprise she’ll probably pull a man’s pants open.” P.G. 224
3. “Cinematically, all of Stewart’s efforts to re-create the dead woman are shown in such a way that he seems to be trying to undress her, instead of the other way around. What I liked best is when the girl came back after having had her hair dyed blonde. James Stewart is disappointed because she hasn’t put her hair up in a bun. What this really means is that the girl has almost stripped, but she still won’t take her knickers off. When he insists, she says “All right!” and goes into the bathroom while he waits outside. What Stewart is really waiting for is the woman to emerge totally naked this time, and ready for love.” P.G. 244
4. “In Truth Janet Leigh should not have been wearing a brassiere. I can see nothing immoral about that scene and i get no special kick out of it. But the scene would have been more interesting if the girl’s bare breasts had been rubbing against the man’s chest.” P.G.268
5. “ I realised that Vertigo was even more intriguing in light of the fact that the director had compelled a substitute to imitate the actress he had initially chosen for the role.” P.G. 325
6. Hitchcock was never the same after Marnie….This was not so much due to the financial failure of the film, but rather to the failure of his professional and personal relationship with Tippi Hedren. In casting Tippi Hedren in two of his films, he entertained the notion of transforming her into another Grace Kelly.” P.G. 327

Hitch: Alfred the Auteur, Hitch: Alfred the Auteur, 00:45 03/03/2009, BBC4, 55 mins. https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/00111E59 (Accessed 19 Oct 2017)

1. “Glamourous and glacial, the Hitchcock’s dream woman is usually brought down to earth with a bump.”
2. Tippi Hedren “He always used to take women who were very in control of their lives,and put them in a situation of great upheaval and see how they come out”.
3. John Russel Taylor “It’s always been assumed that Hitch was some kind of Misodgynist. I have the impression from a number of things they told me later on, that if you’re thinking of his films, he wasn’t identifying with glamour and the glitz of the male characters….but with the suffering heroine. In fact he always enjoyed the company of women.”
4. “Vertigo remains as one of Hitchcock’s most enigmatic and to some revealing films. The story of a man who tries to make over a woman in the image of one who is dead, is said to echo Hitchcock’s own efforts to recreate his ideal actress.”
5. Hitchcock “She was in bed three days at the end of it.”
6. Tippi Hedren “ He was trying to control who I saw, you know all those kinds of things, so that became a very difficult time for me. I think he became obsessed with the character he created called Tippi Hedren, he felt he had created Tippi Hedren.”
7. Jay Presson Allen -Marnie screenwriter “Hitch was very possessive of the women in his life, he was possessive of his own daughter and Alma was ‘his’ and he even tried to do that with me.”
8. T H “He would not take his eyes off me, he may be talking to somebody over here but he was watching me all the time. It became very difficult.”
9. Evan – Marnie Screenwriter….. “ He said Evan when he sticks it in her, I want that camera right on her face.”

Creating the Illusion:

1. Helen Colvig on Psycho: “ We didn’t make clothes for Psycho because he wanted Marion to wear what she could have afforded in real life. It was all off-the-rack. Hitchcock had an authentic real estate office photographed in Arizona. Then he went home with the employees and photographed their clothing in their closets. He showed us the photographs and said, ‘This is how I want my Principles to look.’ In the beginning of the film, Janet Leigh wears a white bra and slip. But after she steals the money from her employer, Hitchcock wanted her in a black bra to show how she has fallen.” P.g. 353
2. “For To Catch A Thief (1955), Head accentuated Kelly’s glacial qualities through a blue chiffon dress with spaghetti straps, and then a white chiffon dress. As Grace’s character thaws, her clothes become brighter until finally at the end, she wears a gold ball gown, which Hitchcock had requested to make her look like a fairy princess.” P.g. 239
3. “Hedren arrives in a fur with out-of-place formality. For the scene where she is attacked by the birds, Head resurrected the eau de nil suit worn by Grace Kelly in Rear Window to give Hitchcock the chaste, cool quality he sought.”  p.g. 240

Film List:

1972 Frenzy

1964 Marnie

1963 The Birds

1960 Psycho

1959 North by Northwest

1958 Vertigo

1956 The Man Who Knew Too Much

1955 To Catch a Thief

1954 Rear Window

1954 Dial M for Murder

1950 Stage Fright

1945 Spellbound

1941 Suspicion

1940 Rebecca

1938 The Lady Vanishes

1935 The 39 Steps

1929 Blackmail

1927 The Lodger

These are all films I feel will be relevant to my topic as they feature Hitchcock blondes, however when I come to write it I will try to slim down the list of films to make it more concise.

The tampon tax applies not just to tampons but also to sanitary towels, panty liners, moon cups (reusable devices that collect menstrual flow internally) and anything else women buy in relation to their period. Most governments around the world add on a consumption tax when customers purchase these items, just as they do for the vast majority of goods and services. I feel very strongly about this and feel that this could be a topic I want to focus on for my project. I also feel that it is a very current issue which needs more campaigning to be done for it.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3437204/Superdrug-tampon-tax-customers-loyalty-points.html

Activism has been used in fashion multiple times already but this is usually not to a strong enough extent. Designers from Dior to Westwood have created T-shirts with slogans relating to social and political issues, however there is still no change being seen in the Fashion industry. All these examples have been used but purely to get more media attention. I feel in order to make a real difference you need to go beyond the surface and tackle the issues in more depth.

“Here in the UK, we have seen countless examples of sexism and bigotry. From the ‘Legs-it’ tabloid headline following Brexit talks between Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon to bosses forcing female staff to wear high heels to work or the Conservative government partnering up with the anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ DUP party, hatred and intolerance have been on the rise and civil rights that generations of men and women have campaigned for are being threatened. This is a pivotal time in politics, culture and our country’s history. This is a time to stand up and be counted, to speak out against intolerance in all its forms and to amplify the voices of those that go unheard. This is the time to proclaim that you too are a ‘Nasty Woman’ and create powerful, positive identities”.

I love the way that art has been used to promote female identity and raise questions on what it means to be a woman and how women should be treated. The Nasty Women campaign has been extremely successful in turing a negative comment into the promotion of females. It has also created a community of support through collating work from an enormous amount of female artisits.