The Femmes Invisible Database:
Frequently Asked Questions
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Am I imagining things?
Well, technically, I suppose you are, since no one seems to have figured out a reliable system by which women may become invisible. If what you meant to say is "Did someone really put up a page like this?" the answer is yes.
Why "FI", and what do the variations mean?
In the beginning, the late Dennard Summers first established a Web presence for the fans of invisible women as an adjunct to his television series. Femmes Invisible, or FI for short, was the term used by Mr Summers — mostly at the instigation of Mike B. — when he went public with his Web site, and everyone who followed in his wake adopted his terminology. Mike B. went on to further distinguish two types of FI: the Fading Femme Invisible, or FFI, whose clothes disappear as she does, and the True Femme Invisible, or TFI, whose clothes remain visible while she vanishes.
Shouldn't that really be "Femmes Invisibles"?
Oh, so you're the guy from l'Académie Française.
Did you say "television series"?
I did. Mr Summers created a series for PCTV21, the cable-access channel on the Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) cable system, called Chroma Dreams, which featured a number of young women in varying states of vanishment. In an effort to boost the show's audience, he welded his blue-screen technotrickery to the burgeoning interest in music videos to produce The House of Yes, in which his mostly-unseen hostesses introduced current tunes and cut up. His last such effort was Steel City Video, which ran right up until his death in 2005.
But I don't live in Pittsburgh.
That's not really a question. And anyway, Mr Summers did make an effort to make tapes of his programs available for distribution.
Why would anybody want to see a bunch of invisible women, anyway?
Well, actually, we're not seeing them.
You know what I mean. What's the appeal?
One person's jaw-dropping anomaly is another person's heart-stopping fantasy; this is the way the world works. While it's hard to generalize about daydreams (or their nighttime equivalents), it's probably safe to say that the FI upsets the traditional power relationship between male and female, and that while some people find this distressing, many others find it refreshing.
Is this a fairly recent phenomenon?
Actually, no. People have dreamed of invisibility over the centuries, and every once in a while, someone would claim to have achieved it. In post-revolutionary France, a burgeoning interest in the supernatural — and a heightened willingness to challenge established religion, which had always sought to corner the market on things occult — brought forth a number of public spectacles billed as Scientific Experiments, and one of the most startling of them appeared, or failed to appear, in 1800: La Femme Invisible, occupying a seemingly-empty glass ball in a locked room, who was happy to speak to the spectators, to comment upon their appearance, and generally behave in a manner at once frightening and fascinating. The exhibit was a substantial success, to the general consternation of that era's cultural watchdogs.
So what happened after that?
Uh, you've been reading it.
No. I mean, how come there is all this FI material on the Web now?
The facile answer is "Because none of us have lives," but that's not the issue either. Despite the best efforts of hucksters and Hollywood, the World Wide Web is now the central repository for bits and pieces of the human experience, both commonplace and crazed; one man blazes the trail, and others inevitably will follow. The FIdb was the second page to appear. Fan fiction and artwork started showing up. The Yahoo! clubs sprang into existence.
And the Database itself?
This project began in the late 1990s, as a supplement to Mr Summers' work: while his own material concentrated on the visual, so to speak, the FIdb was intended as more inclusive, if less specific, an overview of the topic. The most remarkable aspect, so far, has been the sheer quantity of available material. (The expense to acquire said material has been considerable as well.) It is also hoped that writers and visual artists and filmmakers will be inspired to create their own characters, which will duly be included herein.
What do actual women think about this sort of thing?
There's no extant poll of which I'm aware, but I have discussed the topic with a number of women of varying ages, and rather a lot of them wish they could actually disappear — temporarily — for one reason or another. My own thinking runs like this: "It didn't matter what grandiose plans [H. G.] Wells' Griffin had made; once he became invisible, he began losing control — of his environment, of his destiny, of his very mind. But while the Invisible Man is diminished by his condition, the Invisible Woman is empowered by hers: where he finds bondage, she finds release." [source]
Have there ever been any, you know, real invisible women?
I've never actually seen one, so to speak. However, F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre (Vanessa Steele of The Woman Between the Worlds is his creation) told me about one:Lee Miller (1907-1977) [was] a Yank photographer who came to Britain during WW2 as a war correspondent, where she became the mistress of the artist Roland Penrose. (And later his wife, after they'd had a child together.) During the war, Penrose led a group of civilian artists who — as part of the war effort — tried to develop for the Home Guard a greasepaint that would make human flesh less detectable through a rifle scope. Miller dutifully stripped naked and spread-eagled herself face-upward in some weeds, while Penrose and his assistants covered her body with matte-green paint, and concealed her most interesting bits with some moss, lilies and camouflage netting. She was then photographed (in colour) by Life photographer David Scherman. As Penrose had anticipated, this photo received much closer scrutiny by the Home Guard than if he had presented his brainchild more conventionally. This photo is now in the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth ... which, coincidentally, occupies the site formerly occupied by the Bedlam insane asylum.
This seems, I don't know, um, kinda like a fetish, doesn't it?
To the extent that it's viewed sexually, I suppose it could be. Of course, most of us who subscribe to this particular dream started long before we had any measurable hormonal activity. Are you having fun yet?
That's enough. Take me back to the Database.
Done.
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