Invited Post: Beauty, Islamic Feminism, and Choice

Muslim feminism and beauty: "The timeless fight for choice." (image via)

"We are not reformists. We are revivalists," writes Nahida of The Fatal Feminist. The "we" she refers to are Muslim feminists, and Nahida's blog is a treasure chest of Islamic feminist thought. Whether she's writing about the concept of modesty, notable women in Islamic history, or giving wit to the question of whether mermaids are halal, the California-based blogger manages to be both provocative and welcoming, instructive but never pedantic. I was pleased she agreed to share her thoughts here about Islamic feminism and beauty. Enjoy!

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"Oh children of Humankind! Beautify yourselves for every act of worship, and eat and drink [freely], but do not waste: verily, God does not love the wasteful!"
—(Qur'an 7:31)

When Autumn invited me to guest post, I thought of two things: (1) whether it is possible to discuss beauty and self-presentation among Muslim feminists without resorting to the tired subject of hi'jab, and (2) overt ways in which modern Islamic feminists present their Islamic feminism. In fact, the rightful authority of woman over her own appearance is connected to the divergence of men who attempt to claim this authority for themselves.

The Qur'an says nothing about veiling: Men and women are both told to lower their gazes in (today, a shallow interpretation of) modesty and to cover their private areas. Feminism is built into Islam, but as patriarchy began to claim the religion over the next few centuries women were once again at the mercy of corrupted men deliberately twisting the words of God in a jealous attempt to seize undeserved power and turn the pursuit of women into degradation through sexual and political weaponry. This was accomplished with familiar methods: first, a deepened wage gap. With the expansion, men unlawfully took slaves, several of whom were women, and who then were unable to make demands concerning the protection and respect of their Islamic rights due to of lack of economic and social status. And then—forgetting their Islamic practice of modesty—men began to arrogantly police the bodies of women and forge their own laws over the word of God, enviously forbidding feminine beauty itself.

In the Muslim world today, feminine beauty is strictly defined as soft-spoken, patient, and obedient: characteristics that express themselves in a meek, humbled appearance. Any woman who confidently and forcefully challenges this, even with makeup and high heels and accessories that we correctly or incorrectly would define as distinctly feminine, is in fact not entirely viewed as "feminine" but is instead associated with unruliness—the opposite of femininity, according to patriarchy. She's already worth less than the value of a man simply for being a woman—and she doesn't even possess the worth of a woman, as she's rejected conformity. In the eyes of men, that is, not God.

In the past few years (or centuries) of Islamic feminism, most writings have focused on simply defying patriarchal standards of modesty. But there's an area that has yet to be explored: women dressing or beautifying solely to appeal to themselves. The closest we have is an example from centuries ago: A'isha bint Talha, a niece of the Prophet through her mother—and a woman of extravagant beauty—who famously proclaimed, "God the Almighty distinguished me by my beauty, and not to keep me hidden from sight! I want everyone to see this, and acknowledge my superiority over them. I will not veil. No one can force me to do anything." And in this it is clear that her only concerns were the will of God and her own desires—that of no one else.

She was a contemporary of Sakina bint al-Hussein, the Prophet's own granddaughter, of whom historian al-Zubairi writes, "She radiates like an ardent fire. Sakina was a delicate beauty, never veiled, who attended the Quraish Nobility Council. Poets gathered at her house. She was refined and playful." Her feminism did not only include refusing to veil: She decided where to live, demanded fidelity of her husband and that he never went against any of her desires, and promptly and publicly divorced men who betrayed her. Sakina was neither afraid of scandal, nor hesitant to let the world know of her wrath.

 Her influence was great: interestingly, not only did women imitate her hairstyles—but men as well! This demonstrates not only her position of incredible power, but power over both sexes, and an absence of the societal perspective that what is feminine must be undesirable for men.

But that was the 7th century. And these were wealthy women. The veil, in fact, was culturally expected amongst aristocratic women. Because the wives of the Prophet were advised against remarrying after his death, they veiled for the primary purpose of proclaiming that they were unavailable. Consequently, this became a societal expectation for their daughters and granddaughters, the first Islamic aristocrats, who promptly refused on the principle that it was their own choice, as God had not ordered them to veil and men could not pressure them.

Women today are told that perfume is a sin. That makeup is a sin. That they may not pray during their menses or show too much skin. That they may only wear nail polish while they are on their menses. That they may not show their faces at all. Women are literally reduced to material: fabric. These political laws and social pressures vary between countries. In reclaiming womanly beauty for women, Islamic feminists must now consider not only the intersections of class but also cultures, a delicate balance between denouncing burkas—and wearing them when they are banned.

It is the timeless fight for choice.

And so Muslim feminists wear lipstick and burkas. We paint our nails to proudly announce that we're menstruating and observe "traditional hi'jab." We wear miniskirts and high heels and jeans and headpieces and perfume. (My personal current favorite is Stella by Stella McCartney...a little thick for summer but a light spray is AMAZING.) We defy stereotypical expectations in every way possible, as fearless hijabis and scholarly femmes. We consider having Slutwalks in which the participants wear burkas. (Because, dammit, women are raped in burkas—in no matter what we wear.) Which naturally prompts the question: If everything about our appearances is symbolically a significant contextual rebellion—when will we be free?

We are choosing, at least, the ways in which we rebel. And despite the claims of evolutionary psychologists, global patriarchy, and a particular type of radfem, women are whole, complete agents in our own lives and can fully grant and deny consent as is our right. It is the rest of the world—men, society, other women—that judges what our actions mean.

In July, I wrote a piece titled "Reclaiming Femininity," which ends with the lines, "Satirists and the patriarchy scoff and say, nowadays everything is female empowerment. And I want to scream, And does that tell you nothing?" Indeed, it is true—for not only Muslim feminists but all feminists—that the very fact our movement involves so many seemingly contradictory angles is evidence of the infliction of enormous damage by patriarchy from every possible direction. Each angle is redemptive. It is a story that repeats for centuries, and yet over and over the point is missed: Let women choose.

Applying Makeup in Public: Preserving the Beauty Mystique

A while ago I was talking with a friend about annoying subway behavior. We covered She of the Unending Cell Phone Conversation, He of Legs Spread Wide Encroaching Upon Your Space, and Dude Who Asks What You Are Reading When By Virtue of Reading It Should Be Clear You Do Not Wish To Be Bothered. And then I got to my personal favorite: She Who Applies Makeup.

"I mean, powdering your face, whatever, that's fine," I said. "But putting on a whole face of makeup! I hate that!" My friend paused. "I put on my makeup on the train," she said. "It's dead time on the subway otherwise; I can sleep in a little bit and still show up to work made up if I just do it on the subway." I made some halfhearted attempt to say it was a hygiene or safety issue--that "makeup particles" could fly everywhere (she then pointed out that was most likely to happen with powder, which I'd already given the thumbs-up to) or that I hated having to worry if She Who Applies Makeup would jab her eye out while applying mascara ("That's her problem, not yours," she said). 

The more I thought about it, the more I realized what annoyed me about seeing a woman apply makeup on the subway was that is was a public handling of private behavior. And not just "private behavior" in the sense of another subway personality, They Who Grope One Another, but private behavior that I, as a woman, have an investment in other women keeping private.

Woman at Her Toilette, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

In theory, I'm all for transparency in government, reporting, and beauty. Preserving the smoke-and-mirrors aspect of beauty upholds the notion that conventional beauty is something accessible only to the chosen few who are lucky enough to be born with clear skin, straight teeth, and balanced or striking features. One of the things I appreciate about the mass beauty industry is the democracy of it: Don't hate me because I'm beautiful; you can be beautiful too. At its best, it levels the playing field (or at least teaches us how to bunt).

So in an effort to be transparent about my beauty routine, I don't pretend like I don't use any of that stuff. My look is rather "natural" (you know, 11-product "natural") so it doesn't scream out that I'm wearing makeup, but neither am I coy about my beauty routine. I use self-tanner! I wear concealer! My eyelashes are not naturally black-tipped, and I did not emerge from the womb smelling like a delicate mix of milk, honey, carnation, and rose.

But when I think of the feeling I get when I see a woman whip out her makeup case and go for it on the subway--an irritability that, if I'm already on edge for whatever reason, can easily tip into something resembling contempt or even anger--I have to admit that I have an investment in preserving a certain beauty mystique. By "beauty mystique" I mean not any particular look or effect, but rather the quality that prompts us to speak of a woman's magic, or her je ne sais quoi, her effortlessness, her aura. Any given woman may, of course, have forms of magic or je ne sais quoi that have naught to do with her appearance, but most of the time we refer to any of those qualities we include the effect of her appearance as a part of the quality we're describing. If we're able to witness the quality's construction, the effect is diminished. And if we witness the construction of any one person's effect--say, a woman putting on bronzer on the subway--we can apply that revealed knowledge to others.

In beauty talk, discussion of the beauty mystique most often comes up in discussion of the irony of how the "natural look" actually requires a zillion products. (Or, in my case, 11.) And that is the clearest example of how hiding one's labor serves to create an air of effortlessness. (Sociologist Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: "In interactions where the individual presents a product to others, he will tend to show them only the end product, and they will be led into judging him on the basis of something that has been finished, polished, and packaged...It will be the long, tedious, lonely labor that will be hidden.") When I'm filled with ire by witnessing a woman putting on makeup in public--doing what I do every day, just in private--I'm taking that idea of hidden labor and turning it into a sort of morality play. What I feel is close to indignance: How dare she let the world know what it takes? Not what it takes to apply makeup, but what it takes to appear feminine in that particular way. 

As much as I'd like to think I want that labor exposed, there's a petulant little part of me that wants to preserve that mystique. I don't think women want to preserve that mystique to control other women's access to it (remember, we're not to hate the Pantene hair model, because "you can be beautiful too"), but because preserving that mystique forms an armor against the performance of womanhood being exposed as a shadow-puppet show. "It is a widely held notion that restrictions placed upon contact, the maintenance of social distance, provide a way in which awe can be generated and sustained in the audience--a way...in which the audience can be held in a state of mystification to the performer," writes Goffman. In other words, the more those of us who engage in the performance of femininity reveal to our audience, the less power we have, even if the power in question is a mirage.

As a feminist, I want the performance of femininity deconstructed so we can examine its usefulness, rebuilding it from its scraps so that we can make a new model that's more inclusive, less constrictive, based on our collective wishes and desires rather than the needs of those with the keys to the castle. Transparency equals access; transparency allows us to find common ground. Transparency helps us form sisterhood: It's the very reason that beauty talk can allow for a greater conversation to begin. Transparency can become subversive. And sometimes I want to make sure that beauty stays as opaque, as filled with mystique, as by-invitation-only--the invitation being womanhood, not genes or money--as it currently is. It turns out I'm fiercely protective of the beauty mystique, and I'm trying to figure out why.

Talking to my She Who Applies Makeup friend was revealing, so I'm curious to hear from other women: Do you try to keep your beauty routine private? Is it important to you to be perceived as not putting as much effort into your appearance as you actually do? Have you ever misrepresented your beauty labor--either playing it down, or playing it up (perhaps to demonstrate the importance of an event, as Rosie Molinary discusses here when talking about beauty transparency in Latin culture)?

Martina Molin, Painter, London

Swedish painter Martina Molin focuses her work on femininity, simultaneously expressing an aspiration toward beauty itself and the desire for a more profound sentiment and existential value. Her subjects—usually women appearing to consciously straddle the divide of solitude and being gazed upon—reflect and filter the inner experience of being seen. She studied fine art in Stockholm before moving to London (where she currently resides) in 2001 to study painting and drawing, receiving her master’s in drawing from Camberwell College of Art in 2008. During her visit to New York for a private exhibition, we talked about the experience of becoming an image, the importance of portraying feminine presence and absence, the Swedish beauty aesthetic, and Falcon Crest. In her own words:

On Beauty and Secrets 
I’m trying to capture what I’m absorbed by, which is in part this kind of beauty ideal, but really it’s a blend of different scenarios and impressions. A lot of it’s coming from family, history, things you see when you’re little—for me it was this admiration of my mother and her twin sister, being a child seeing this grown-up world.

I had access to French Vogue as a child, and just looking at that and seeing my mother and aunt go out to a party was this kind of magic, forbidden world. It was these glamorous, beautiful women—their scent, their experience. It was their sophistication and beauty, with strong charisma, that inspired me. They were like real-life fairy tale princesses.

There’s a secret power or knowledge of your own femininity and sex appeal for women, and I think that’s quite obvious for a child to see, because you look at the other children and none of you have that—and it’s good that way. But I couldn’t help being intrigued by the charms of their appearance. I see women almost doing magic with their looks, with makeup and how they present themselves. And thus I developed an interest in beauty, as a child.

The Awakening of Love

In The Awakening of Love, the girl is nude, but there is a sense of innocence about her. I like to portray the awareness of being seen, and the value of being seen as beautiful. She’s on display but she’s aware of her own worth. It’s about her inner experience and wish to be desired.

Happy Birthday Girls

To me, the mirroring element in Happy Birthday Girls is a reflection of the thrilling sensation of getting older. To be at ease with your own reflection is to realize the potential of each age and not get stuck in what was. They’re celebrating a birthday, but it’s with a certain melancholy as they gaze at the birthday cake, which has been left looking more like a fence. On the one hand it’s a celebration of being alive, about looking forward—yet another part of youth is in the past, so in a way it must be a bittersweet practice of letting go.

Sometimes I like to include in my paintings a feeling of absence, the lack of emotion that you can experience. There are times in life when things go too fast. When you don’t fully realize a moment, it leaves a sense of emptiness, a void. For a while I was almost erasing my paintings from the paintings. There was so much white space, because I felt isolated, living in a different country. It’s important to me to portray absence and presence of femininity. When painting in the studio the artist gets a distance from the self. It is this which is so important, so the art can have its own voice.

Spanish Skies

Though my work is not a direct form of self-portraiture, I am subconsciously included. In my painting there’s is an element of self I cannot erase. Perhaps a moderate degree of reflection is necessary to give an honest approach to a narrative. However, I am most interested in the possibility of a multiple persona, absorbing inspiration from fiction, film, photography, and history. People often comment that some of the women in my paintings look like me, and I can see how a part of me shines through. However, artists can be a little overly critical; for me it can be a bit destructive, to be overfocusing on myself.

On the Swedish Beauty Aesthetic 
I first moved to England when I was 20. I was thrilled to be going someplace new, but concerned I would be perceived as the Swedish-girl stereotype, this happy blond girl there on holiday. To avoid this I initially dyed my hair brown, but it turned kind of gray and it didn’t suit me at all, so I went back to being blond and I just carried on.

As a Swedish woman, sometimes I feel that I get put in a category. While this can be frustrating, this stereotype can also offer quite a nice escape. If I already have others’ ideas projected onto me, then I can relax and be. I can feel quite safe in my little illusion, knowing privately that I am confident and know that I am more than preconceived perceptions.

On Swedish Equality 
We’ve come quite far in Sweden, with equal opportunities for men and women. An interesting spin off of this is that men there have gotten more into their own appearance. Maybe Sweden's equality has allowed men to look into traditionally feminine areas, such as makeup and other parts of the beauty industry. But regardless of how equal society becomes, men and women will strive to have a certain appearances. That is universal and is not going to change. What has become more equal now is the sense that men and women both want to be beautiful. This is not particular to a place or country, just the human desire to be desired.

Perhaps the pressure to be “perfect” is more strong still in some parts of America than in Sweden, where the approach to appearance is a bit more relaxed. I grew up watching Dallas and Falcon Crest. It was magic to me. I remember being mesmerized by the perfectly groomed women—the power they projected onto the viewer was impressive! I’ve always been fascinated by constructed or artificial beauty. In Europe that’s more of a Mediterranean thing; the women in that region dress up more and they’re impeccably groomed. We don’t have that as much in Sweden. You’d feel a little bit overdressed if you wore a dress when you go out; it’s quite casual.

Sweden has a natural beauty ideal. With plastic surgery there is the ideal of eternal youth that you can achieve if you can afford it. But a majority of Swedes embrace aging and beauty—they keep it healthy, exercise a bit, take long walks. Sweden is an earth-bound society. Maybe the belief that a natural beauty is preferable over a more artificial aesthetic might just be in keeping with Scandinavian minimalism—who knows?

Ideally, in a modern society we should be allowed to embrace our femininity and our masculinity with playfulness—whatever makes one comfortable in their body shouldn’t collide with their equal value as an individual or professional.

Anthony Weiner and Self-Objectification

Before I say anything about Anthony Weiner, let me say this: I like the male body. I don’t think we should treat men’s bodies comically, and I think doing so can send negative messages to boys and men. I want men to not feel ashamed of their bodies, and to be able to have positive experiences of feeling desired. Okay? Okay.

In looking at some of the feminist discourse surrounding Weinergate, however, reinforcement of the above points has seemed to almost champion Weiner’s predilection for sending out suggestive photos of himself. (Which, as a resident of the state he represents, I don't care about in the least.) Hugo Schwyzer, who consistently writes interesting feminist work, thinks Weiner’s urges came from “a desperate hunger for a very specific kind of validation.” Meanwhile, Amanda Marcotte, another outstanding feminist writer, is “Personally...glad that we're entering an era where men are toying with the idea that their bodies might have some aesthetic value that women may appreciate.”

I’m left puzzled by these reactions, even as I see their larger points. Both seem to overlook that while men and women are both capable of objectifying themselves, men doing so isn’t just a neat reverse of women doing so. A dirty picture of a man and a dirty picture of a woman send different signals, arguing that men just want to be sometimes seen as pretty playthings discounts the centuries of sexism that have gone into establishing the dominance of the male gaze.
 
Show me a society in which women and men are equal on every level—politically, socially, academically, economically, domestically—and I’ll show you a society in which the objectified gaze is a charming relic. The gaze is powerful to the viewer because it reinforces the dynamic we witness on a more pedestrian level every day. There are all sorts of ways to play with and subvert that, but at its heart the objectified gaze “works” because it’s directed toward women. So we can treat men in the exact same way we would an objectified woman—as Weiner did to himself when he sent a fragmented shot of his underwear-covered erection to a Twitter follower—and we wind up with a totally different result, in ways that have nothing to do with men's bodies being considered comical or worthy of derision.
 

Anthony Weiner's "real-life bachelor" spread in a 1996 Cosmopolitan, speaking of objectification.

Here we have Anthony Weiner (and legions of late-night Craigslist users) sending photographs of himself into the ether, and whatever his personal motivation was, the act did not signal to me that we’re breaking through to some sort of desirability free-for-all in which men can look at women and women can look at men and we're all happily desired and experiencing aesthetic appreciation and damn those pecs are fine! Instead, what I see is a man wanting to opt into the male gaze because he was sad, or lonely, or power-drunk, or bored, or horny, or whatever he was. I see nothing resembling progress toward reconciling men’s views of their own bodies with a true space of joyous desirability. I see a co-opting of ways of looking at the female body, which might have a little more heft behind it if the male gaze were something women could opt out of as easily as men.

How fun for men to get to play in the sandbox of objectification! It must be particularly fun when you can stand up, brush yourself off, and go back into the real world in which you’re not being viewed as an object. Do I sound bitter? I’m not, at least not toward individual men. Many men yearn to feel desired simply for one's essence, and there shouldn't be shame surrounding this wish. Ironically, women may have an easier time accessing this; as many problems as there are with being evaluated for one’s face and body, at least I know that I am being looked at for something that resembles my essence. My face and body communicate something that can't be communicated on paper. I’m not being looked at for my job, my income, my family, my successes, my failures, my cleverness, my social status. That’s one of the problems women have with this whole beauty myth dealio in the first place, right? I imagine Anthony Weiner’s professional success might indeed have something to do with his longing to be recognized in another fashion. I want men to be recognized for their whole, essential selves, just as I wish for women to have the same. Indeed, I consider it one of feminism’s myriad responsibilities.

But, yeah, I’m a little bitter about the idea that poor Anthony Weiner just wants to be told he’s a hottie. I think of this fantastic cartoon on street harassment and the similar conversations I’ve had. “When men look at you, there’s nothing to worry about,” I remember being told when I protested one fellow’s assertion that women were basically potted plants. “It’s when they stop looking that you should worry.” I’ve been told that any concerns I have on this matter will be handily alleviated when I hit a certain age, and that I should “enjoy it while you can.” Championing the idea that men who send crotch shots of themselves are just after validation of their desirability seems like somehow we should be endorsing the whole idea of self-objectification—like maybe I should just shut up and enjoy being whistled at because, hey, it’s a compliment, right? I’ve written before about my complex reaction to street encounters, so it’s not like I’m entirely inured against this iffy line of thinking, and neither Schwyzer nor Marcotte is making this argument. But ignoring the different ways in which women and men are looked at—and then giving a thumbs-up to men who turn the objectifying gaze upon themselves instead of challenging the notion of that gaze in the first place—is unhelpful at best.
 

I mean, does Chris Lee look like he's remotely enjoying himself?

The Jezebel piece that prompted Schwyzer’s response posits that male politician sex scandals are rooted in the narcissism that made them seek out public office in the first place. It's an astute point, but I’m not entirely ready to sign onto that either. I’d suggest that the motivations lie somewhere between the peculiar narcissism of public figures and the peculiar narcissism of taking erotic photographs of yourself in the first place. Part of the pleasure of taking and sending such a photograph lies in seeing a distinct image of yourself. It’s like the narcissism of the mirror, but with the added bonus of bringing something tangible that can then be circulated, proof of your desirability. I wonder which gave him more pleasure: seeing the photograph himself, or knowing that someone else would see it. I’m guessing that without the first, the second would have lost much of its allure.

We can’t treat looking at men and looking at women as parallel tracks along the same path toward desirability. We can’t allow for men’s lockstep with the male gaze to be treated as something potentially beneficial for all of us, because objectifying any one of us has the potential to hurt all of us. I know better than to think dudes don’t care about their sexual appeal, but I do know that whatever feelings men might have about their erotic pull, it’s often less schizophrenic than women’s. Can’t we start there and work forward instead of backward?

Month Without Mirrors Update 5.31: Recognition

I haven’t looked at my reflection for 31 days. No mirrors, no windows, no darkened subway glass. No shadows. The goal, which I went into in greater detail at the project’s beginning, was to loosen the grip that self-consciousness has had on me for much of my life, and to allow that lightened load to grant me better access to a state of flow. Here’s how it turned out.

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You, like me, probably have a mirror face. My mirror face is this:

 

It’s close to my “photo face,” but it’s a separate beast. My face contorts itself not because it will be recorded for Facebook posterity, but because I desperately need to believe certain things about my appearance. My mirror face is an attempt to correct things about my visage I don’t like: The pout makes my lips fuller. The tipped chin minimizes the broad planes of my face. The widened eyes and softened gaze call attention to my best feature. You may even find me ever so slightly sucking in my cheeks. A friend of mine—whose womanly charm lies in her mix of acerbic wit and casual grace—turns into a bright-eyed, prepubescent pixie when she looks in the mirror. Like me, she has no idea she’s doing it, and when she tries to stop, it only gets worse.

So in my mind, I’m fuller-lipped, slimmer-faced, wider-eyed than any of you would actually find me. And my adjustments are virtually uncontrollable. Which is to say: After 35 years of seeing myself in the mirror, it’s possible I still don’t really know what I look like.

Certainly, I don’t know what my face shape is. When I was 25, I decided to find out once and for all. (Round? Oval? Heart? What kind of haircut could I possibly get?!) I used a classic ladymag tip: I took a tube of lipstick and traced the outline of my face onto the mirror. And then I got angry.

I took the lipstick and scribbled over the circle/oval/whatever (I still don’t know what my face shape is). I covered an entire pane of my mirror, and then another, and then I went to the walls. And then I was out of lipstick so I took another, and another, and another. I coated, smeared, dragged, drew, until I had no more lipstick, no more walls, and no more mirrors.

At the time I thought my rage was a combination of struggling with the beauty myth and generalized “quarterlife crisis” anxiety, which also saw me doing things like hacking off a foot of hair with kitchen shears and trading my magazine career for a $10-an-hour gig as a pastry cook. It was an unhappy, confusing time, and my gonzo paint job gave me some anarchic respite from the pressures of that era.

I’m now wondering if my rage was actually stemming from what, if I were a 19th-century German philosopher, I might christen the master-mirror dialectic. G.W.F. Hegel cooked up what he calls the master-slave dialectic, which states that we’re incapable of self-consciousness without being conscious of others, and that once we become conscious of others we’re alerted to our lack of control over our lives. “A struggle to the death” ensues, in Hegel’s grandiose words, and we either become master (which later finds us needing the slave’s services, ultimately giving them control) or slave, which eventually gives us some control over the “master.” In the 1950s, grad-school rock-star psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan introduced the idea of the “mirror stage,” positing that we have this master-slave dynamic with ourselves via the mirror. Lacan compares it to being permanently trapped in a stadium of onlookers composed solely of ourselves, captivated by our own image.

When I traced my face shape onto my mirror with lipstick, I—presumably the master—was bowing to my slave’s needs. I was reaching toward the looking-glass and willing the world contained therein to reveal great gifts: Tell me my face shape so I may never have an inappropriate haircut again, ye mirror. By using her to guide my actions, I was giving her a measure of control over me. The moment incensed me because of its overt supplication to my built-in alter ego. But it was only one of many acts that ceded control to the mirror.

Ten years later: I went a month without looking in the mirror, initially thinking that my constant self-surveillance constituted self-objectification. Now that I’ve abandoned my mirror for a month, though, I see that my image is far too vital to have been an object. I didn’t objectify myself; rather, I treated my mirror image as a grounding strategy, as a divination tool to tell me how I should respond in any given situation, as a part of myself I can control. I treat her as both slave and master, and as someone both more beautiful and less appealing than myself.

 

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The mirror is a quest for control. Control over the image we present to the world, sure; control over fitting the beauty standard, to a degree. Mostly, though, surveillance is an effort to carefully control our ideas about ourselves. When I pulled the plug from the mirror image, she exacted revenge by radically shifting some of those ideas. For example, about a week into this experiment, I had a nagging sensation that my head had become very, very pointy, à la Saturday Night Live's Coneheads.

Less absurdist moments simply found me sort of forgetting what I looked like: How wide is my smile? Do I have freckles? That woman on the street with the dark eyes and high cheekbones—do I look like her? Do I even have high cheekbones? And, most important: Am I pretty?

Except, this month, that question wasn’t particularly important. In addition to realizing that I don’t have to strive to look pretty every minute, I thought far less about looks this month than I normally do. I didn’t feel better or worse about my appearance; I rarely felt pretty or unpretty. I just didn’t care as much.

Makeup held less appeal. I wore my glasses more. My love affair with lipstick dwindled; I wore my hair in a bun instead of the French twist I usually favor. I presented myself to the world reasonably groomed, sure. But pretty? The physical labor of prettiness took a backseat. I always believed I wore makeup for others—not for their benefit, but as a tool to help me feel more comfortable with them. After all, I don’t wear makeup at home alone, so it must have something to do with other people, right? This month I learned how much my makeup use is for my own pleasure. If I can’t reap the joys of seeing my lips turn a bright, puckery red, I simply don’t want to do it at all. If I’m my own harshest critic, I’m also my own most ardent observer—and fan.

Some readers have picked up on this, commenting how nice it must be to look in the mirror and adore my own image so much that I need to take a month off in order to get around to things other than admiring my own visage. Rest assured, I’m not quite that enthralled with my looks. In fact, in The Second Sex Simone De Beauvoir makes it clear that enchantment with one’s image needn’t solely be a reflection of thinking we’re beautiful:

It is not astonishing if even the less fortunate can sometimes share in the ecstasies of the mirror, for they feel emotion at the mere fact of being a thing of flesh...and since they feel themselves to be individual subjects, they can, with a little self-deception, embue their specific qualities with an individual attractiveness; they will discover in face or body some graceful, odd, or piquant trait. They believe they are beautiful simply because they are women.

Okay, so yay us, right? Down with the tyranny of the beauty standard! Every woman is beautiful, or at least has some part of herself that’s beautiful. You’ve just got to find it, sister, and what better way to do that than the mirror? Rock on with your gorgeous self!

Here’s the problem with that: When we look in the mirror, we rarely see ourselves. We are forever seeing a projection—what we wish to see, what we fear seeing, what we used to see. “The ego [as accessed through the mirror] is a product of misunderstanding, a false recognition,” Lacan writes. (And unless you’re the rare creature who doesn’t have a “mirror face,” how could what we see be anything but a misunderstanding?) I’ve heard some women say mirror abstinence would rob them of a hard-won acceptance of their appearance, and I don't wish to diminish that. It's hard enough to make peace with our bodies without some writer yakking at you about Lacan. But if what the mirror gives us is imagined, I wonder how far its affirmation can take any of us.

Case in point: Try as I did to avoid it, I caught a few glimpses of myself in unanticipated mirrors. And people: I am 35, and I learned that I look it. There is nothing wrong with looking 35, or any age. But, like the majority of women, I believed I looked younger. Mathematically, the majority cannot look younger than our age. We just think we do, because we see our ego, not our selves. When I caught unexpected glimpses of myself, I saw bags under the eyes, flaccid skin. I didn’t feel bad about this per se—35 can look good, yo!—but it revealed how much I’m subtly controlling what I see when I purposefully look in the mirror as opposed to when I stumble upon myself accidentally. I am preparing, however slightly, to see the face I’m presenting. And that face—the imaginary one—looked about 28 years old until now.

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I’ve had a couple of friends tell me they’re surprised, reading my blog, to find I think as intensely as I do about beauty. “You’re not one of those beauty-robot girls,” said one. She’s correct: My physical beauty labor is pretty minimal. My emotional beauty labor is another story.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not thinking every second about positioning myself so that my “good side” is showing, or whatever. By emotional beauty labor—a term borrowed from writer and licensed esthetician Virginia Sole-Smith’s "beauty labor" and sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s "emotional labor"—I mean a sort of low-level, frequent, and unconscious acting that might, every so often, land me a plum role as a nice-looking woman. You know how when you’re wearing a nice outfit, you’ll carry yourself differently? You’re aware of being looked at, you’re aware of how your body might appear in this piece of clothing that is signaling a certain occasion. You’re not lying, but you’re acting, in a small, naturalistic way. That’s the sort of labor I’m talking about: When you are conscious of the potential of being looked at, and when your behavior is altered as a result, even if you don’t intend to do so, you—I—are working.

When beginning the mirror fast, I kept turning to de Beauvoir’s 1953 work The Second Sex, particularly the chapter called “The Narcissist.” But throughout the month, another section of the book called to me: “The Independent Woman,” or the woman who creates her own living. That is, most of us today.

[The independent woman] knows that she is offering herself, she knows that she is a conscious being, a subject; one can hardly...change one’s eyes into sky-blue pools at will; one does not infallibly stop the surge of a body that is straining toward the world and change it into a statue animated by vague tremors. [The independent woman] will try all the more zealously because she fears failure; but her conscious zeal is still an activity... In all this she resembles those actors who fail to feel the emotion that would relax certain muscles and so by an effort of will contract the opposing ones, forcing down their eyes or the corners of their mouth instead of letting them fall. Thus in imitating abandon the independent woman becomes tense. She realizes this, and it irritates her; over her blankly naive face, there suddenly passes a flash of all too sharp intelligence; lips soft with promise suddenly tighten. ...The desire to seduce, lively as it may be, has not penetrated to the marrow of her bones.

Sounds exhausting, right? It is.

Ridding myself of the mirror didn’t cure me of the push-pull of emotional beauty labor. (Not that I would know, because much of this labor is unconscious. Measuring physical beauty labor, like time spent on a manicure or money spent on tanning cream, is simpler.) But the mirror is key to its recognition: What film profiling a female performer neglects the ubiquitous shot of our heroine, in front of a mirror, looking herself squarely in the eye as she prepares to play her part?

Clockwise, from top left: All About Eve, A Star Is Born, Les Enfants du Paradis, Black Swan.

Taking away the mirror took away my mirror face, which is, in essence, privately performed beauty labor. So when I found myself approximating the labors of my mirror face in the presence of others—be still, chin down, be pretty—I was acutely aware of my efforts. Times I recognized I was performing emotional beauty labor: volunteering with an ESL student who has confessed a small crush on me and who looks to me for affirmation of his language skills; having drinks with someone who talked over every word I tried to utter; meeting with an acquaintance who is extraordinarily self-conscious herself and kept adjusting her makeup. In each of those situations, I was “performing”: attempting to grant the other person some comfort, or struggling to maintain some presence when my other forms of power were being ignored. I did this by appearing attentive, widening my eyes, fixing a smile that’s probably close to my ever-false mirror face, cocking my head to make a small show of my quizzical nature. This was all unconscious. The only reason I was able to detect my actions was because I hadn’t had my usual warm-up with myself in the mirror. My privately emotional beauty labor, in other words, is a hamstring stretch that gets me ready for the sprint of uncomfortable interactions in which I feel I must “perform”; without the warm-up, the effort of the race became illustrated in sharp relief.

One of the harshest, and truest, criticisms I’ve received from people who know me well is that I’m not always as emotionally present as I should be. My response is usually that I feel so drained by other people’s needs that I have little energy to expend on being as present as I’d like. What I didn’t realize until I was unburdened from some of my self-imposed (and likely invented) expectations was exactly how much of my energy was going into appearing. Appearing to be interested, appearing to be womanly, appearing to be a professional lady, appearing to be pretty.

No wonder I’m exhausted.

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My goal was to liberate myself from self-surveillance, allowing me to better access a flow state. So, was I able to enter a flow state more freely?

I did not waltz through the month writing Great Literature, or having shamanistic visions, or even organizing my bookcase. What did happen was that I was more in tune with myself. I felt more aware of my needs, and I took steps to allow myself to do what I needed to access flow, even if I didn’t get there often. I’m guessing this would have happened regardless; setting a goal of engaging more fully with the world prompted me to create opportunities for that to happen, mirror aside. I was on alert for blockages to flow, and some of those were mirror-related—like the emotional beauty labor I recognized in uneasy moments, or the phantom “flinches” I had about reprimanding myself for having looked in a mirror when I hadn’t.

A greater victory was my diminished self-consciousness. Yet we need self-consciousness, and its accompanying ability to shift our persona, in order to function in the world. I fall into the trap of thinking that there’s some “authentic self” I have a responsibility to, and that any manipulation of it constitutes a betrayal. But there is no one “authentic self.” It shifts according to time, place, and company; indeed, we all rely on one another’s signals to let us know what to do with this mess of humanity.

When I’m performing emotional beauty work, I’m letting you in on how I’d like to be seen: as a thirtysomething woman who, every so often, might want to be viewed as a pretty lady. If I make total removal of that labor my goal, I sign away certain expectations. Not expectations of human decency; expectations of, say, you understanding via my low-level obsequiousness that I want you to feel valued, or that you’ll treat a transaction with a bit more humor than you might otherwise because clearly I’m here for a good time. Or—why not?—an expectation that, every so often, you’ll hold the door for me. There’s a lady coming through. If I want to experience a certain form of femininity, with all its rituals and fleeting rewards—well, that’s what the persona and its accompanying labors are for. I’m giving you permission to respond to my portrayed self in an appropriate manner. If that sounds presumptuous, take it from sociologist Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: “Information about the individual helps define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what he will expect of them and what they may expect of him. Informed in these ways, the others will know how best to act in order to call forth a desired response from him.”

I missed the private joy of observing myself in a certain light. I missed the pleasure of, just before I leave the house, giving myself a final once-over, smile—yes, with my mirror face—and confirming all is well. My flowered dress that makes me feel like a gracious 1950s hostess, my hot pink number with orange piping and oversized collar that makes me feel like a creature from Alice in Wonderland—I took less pleasure than usual in wearing these, because I couldn’t observe myself partaking in the ritual of playing dress-up. I missed witnessing myself slip into a persona. Liberating myself from personae was also a relief—a big one at times. And it’s not like this past month was drudgery; far from it. Still, the sense of play I normally carry with me was muted.

"How nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I'm sure it's got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let's pretend there's a way of getting through into it somehow. // Oh, what fun it'll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and can't get at me!" —Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll, illustration by John Tenniel

Which brings me back to being master, or slave, to the mirror. Hegel’s theory that we’re forever wresting control from each other—or, in the case of the mirror, our own image—indicates that the way out is for each party to recognize that they need one another, and from there, dissolve their differences. In the case of the mirror, that could be interpreted to mean unification—a genuine recognition of the mirror as solely a handy tool for making sure we don’t have stray ink on our cheek. Not an oracle, not someone with control over us, not something to turn to as an emotional divination rod.

Yet I’m under no illusion that I can somehow unite with my mirror image to become whole. (And—shall I state the obvious?—there’s nobody there to unite with. Coneheads trickery aside, I’m the only one who actually exists. Twist ending!) I’ve tried to rid myself of my mirror face and failed; I understand that I can never be an objective viewer of myself. But I can recognize differences between myself and my image, the first step toward dissolution.

I can recognize that my mirror face is not how I appear to the rest of the world, and honor that perhaps my mild self-delusion is the adult version of the child who wonders what she’ll look like when she grows up—fanciful, woefully inaccurate, but bringing minimal harm as long as its falsity is understood. I can recognize that my beauty labor—emotional and physical—is largely for myself, and evaluate what purpose it’s serving, allowing me to see what I can keep and what I should discard. I can recognize that the mirror allows me access to a part of my femininity that’s tucked away otherwise, and be thankful for that key. And maybe, with practice, I’ll come closer to recognizing myself. 

Charlotte Shane, Prostitute, East Coast

Now in her late twenties, Charlotte Shane has been a sex worker for nearly a decade; she started out in the web cam world, then moved on to fetish and escort work through an agency. She currently works as an independent prostitute with a roster of regular clients. Her compulsively readable blog, Nightmare Brunette, came to my attention after she penned a fantastic piece in Salon. “We’re taught from an early age to keep an eternally vigilant (and critical) eye on our appearance, and it takes a strong, studied will to refuse to pose the questions many of us have had running in our head since puberty,” she writes. “There’s something almost merciful about finally having the clarity of a number, and once you’re an escort, you’ve quite literally put a price on your sexual powers.” She also contributes to sex worker blog Tits and Sass. We talked about what her clients see when they look at her, the similarity between prostitution and the military, and why it might not matter what she looks like. In her own words:

Alone, Toulouse-Lautrec, 1896

On Looking Closely
The way someone usually becomes dear to you is not because of how they look, and that’s true for me and my clients as well. It could be I’m just lucky, but my clients love imperfections—they pore over them. I have a huge scar, and they’re always like, “Oh, I love your scar.” They’ll kiss it. They love it because it’s human. I’m sure there are men who hire escorts and they just want the most attractive thing they can find. They want things, and a person is a thing for them, and they want the thing to be announcing its attractiveness. But I don’t think most men want that. You know those articles that are always so hysterical about men watching porn who don’t want real women now? Do you know any men like that? The men I’ve spent time with usually genuinely love women. There are some neurotic guys with strict preferences, or they’re afraid or women or whatever. But usually they seem really delighted to be around a female. They like the way bodies naturally arrange themselves, and they like finding out about how our bodies are different from one another. But the idea that a man is going to get between your legs and see your labia and be like, Eww, I’m outta here—who does that? Why would you ever want that person around you? I’m sure that if I had particularly large labia that I’d have men poring over that.

There are certain signifiers that people look at, and they won’t look too closely beyond that. That’s one of the sad things, actually, that people don’t look very closely at other people. But if you’re in a situation like I often am, where I’m the only person they’re looking at—just by virtue of asking for money in that situation, you’re kind of asserting your appeal. Sometimes that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: Most of these men are not coming in thinking, I can’t believe I spent so much, she’s obviously not worth that, I’m going to be disappointed. They’re excited; they’re happy to be there and they respond positively. Part of that is the context: If I were wearing dirty jeans and had a messy ponytail, those guys are not going to be walking by me on the street going, Oooh!

Kelly was my stage name when I was working on web cam, and when I’d see myself on camera and I’d be like, Kelly looks really hot! She was another person. I’d have massive amounts of makeup on, because under the lights and on a camera, you have to wear a lot. And I’d be wearing a wig—not a particularly nice wig, either. But I thought she was a total babe. My most astonishing moment was going to the bathroom in the middle of the night and taking off the wig. I looked like a transvestite: melted amounts of massive makeup, my hair all flattened out because of this wig. That was instructive in terms of understanding that whatever the dominant aesthetic is at the time, you can approximate that. Lots of people are going to respond positively, whether or not it’s a look being performed by someone I would say is actually beautiful or actually sexy.

On How She Looks
When I was thinking about this interview, I wanted to say that how I look is irrelevant. But obviously that’s not true. If I were considered conventionally ugly that would not be irrelevant. It’s more like there’s a base level of attractiveness, and if you satisfy that, what you bring beyond that becomes irrelevant. I don’t think what I bring to the table on a date is my looks; I don’t think that’s what I’m there for. Maybe if I were better-looking, I would be there for that. I’m attractive enough for my looks not to be a disappointment, but I don’t think that anyone would see me for how I looked alone and want to pay me just for that.

I’ve only had one client who regarded me in that way, when I was working at an agency about five years ago. He and I just didn’t get along. It wasn’t that he was mean or that I was rude—it’s just that sometimes you connect with somebody, and sometimes you can’t. The third time I saw him, he told me something like, Well, the only reason I’m here is because of how you look. He didn’t put it in a cruel way; it was like he knew we weren’t connecting on a deeper level, but he liked the way I looked anyway. It made me like him more, because it was clarifying, and in some ways it let me off the hook, because I wasn’t doing a very good job with him—I wasn’t my shiniest or brightest. And that idea of being liked solely for the way you look can be true for anyone. One of my friends—who has been doing this much longer than I have—is a firm believer that no matter who you are, what you look like, and what your asking price is, there’s somebody in the world who will pay it. There’s somebody who will find you irresistible. Which I think is absolutely true.

This will sound terrible, but sometimes when I’ve met other women who do this work I’m surprised that they’re not better-looking. That sounds like this really terrible judgmental thing—but really it’s that in my mind, everyone who would do this is basically a supermodel, and that I’m a visitor to this world. I always feel like a woman who’s in this line of work is not me: I have stretch marks, I have scars, I could rattle off all the things that are wrong with my face. But when I meet other women who do this type of work I’m always anticipating to be blown out of the water, even though that’s not really what this work is about.

The weird thing about this work is that you start to think that every single male is attracted to you. Which is not a good way to operate in the world. I take male attention for granted, when a lot of times it might not be there. But I’m not that type of woman who thrives on keeping that kind of attention. I think for a lot of women it’s unwelcome, but for some it’s a part of how they navigate their life. It’s how they relate to and play with or use public space. I’m not like that. But I was in the airport yesterday, and I was thinking, “Oh, everyone’s looking at me,” because that’s how I feel after meeting a date. It’s sort of in a cocky way; it’s not in an ashamed way. Then when I would break my avoiding-eye-contact stare and start to look at other people, I’d see, “Oh, he’s not looking at me,” or maybe I’d see he was looking if I wasn’t looking too closely at him. And that’s a weird attitude! That’s not how I am all the time. But when I first started interacting in person, I did feel very powerful. It was this knowingness I had, this new boldness that might attract attention.

On Quantifying Appeal
In our culture, the majority of messages directed at women or created using women say: You’re valuable for how you look. So of course you want to feel like you have value in the world. I think it’s natural for most women to say, “I want to know how much I’m worth in this world”—and that means, “I want to know how much my looks are worth.” There aren’t as many messages that are like, “We need you right now to be curing our diseases and protecting our environment. We need you for defense.” I think a lot of men join the military not just for money for college but because they feel like they need to contribute something, and that’s where they’ve been told their value might be. So for women, we’re told we contribute by being attractive. How attractive am I? Am I attractive enough? Should I be more? Could I be more? There’s a desire to quantify your appeal.

I don’t like to talk too much about money because I worry about glamorizing this work—but I charge a lot. It’s ridiculous, given that I’m just basically a normal person.  The pricing isn’t particularly logical, and it’s certainly not like I did a rigorous calculation of my value. I mean, I’ve made a list of where I think I’m strong and where I think I’m weak, in terms of giving somebody what they want. Even then looks aren’t a part of it—I mean, I might say, “I’m too careless with my makeup,” but usually it’s more like, “I’m not as punctual as I want to be.” But I always charged more than the average—not a whole lot more, just a little. You can tell from your volume of business if you’re undercharging; some women don’t mind undercharging because they always want to be busy and have a lot of options, but if I find myself really busy I’m like, “I’m undercharging.” That’s why I kept jacking up the price—and curiosity, too. Like, would somebody actually pay this for me? Seeing what you can get away with, I think that’s really what it is.

Thoughts on a Word: Sexy

"What is a sexy woman? Very simple. She is a woman who enjoys sex," wrote a woman whose most famous product many mistakenly blame for our occasionally uneasy relationship with sexy—the godmother of Cosmopolitan, Helen Gurley Brown. I'm with her, though: I like sexy. Sexy can be innocent; sexy can be democratic; sexy can be deliberate or unknowing or shared or solo. Sexy has little to do with appearance. It has to do with sex, which most of us can do, and all of us can think about. If I'm feeling terrifically unsexy, I can dance around to The Troggs in my living room wearing a BUtterfield 8-style slip for a 10-minute cure. When I don't feel beautiful, however, the remedy is more elusive.

We started using sexy to merely mean "engrossed in sex" in 1905, a mere four years after the official end of the Victorian era. It inched closer to meaning erotic with its broadening use: Feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman used the term when discussing the "perverse dress practices" of Ourland, the gender-dystopia she created in 1915, placing her among the first to apply the word to how we style ourselves.

With this early semi-endorsement from a feminist, then, it's no surprise that from its inception, sexy has been used unisexily, describing men as well as women. Etymologists point to Rudolph Valentino as the first person to be described as sexy, in 1923. Women still took the lead, naturally—but looking at literary sexys from the first half of the century, sexy people were still relatively rare. References to sexy things abound during this era: questions (Vanity Fair, 1930), books (The Nation, 1908), eau de toilette (Consumer Reports, 1940), cartoons (Finance, 1947), plays (H.L. Mencken on Noel Coward, 1928), voices (Billboard, 1943), dreams (Psychoanalytic Review, 1919), films (New Outlook, 1924, and songs (The Unitarian Register, 1938).

For more pictures of the world's first sexy person,
check out this beautiful photo book, curated by Donna Hill.

Still, sexy people popped up now and again, notably in the works of authors Myron Brinig (1941, describing a man) and Meyer Levin (1933, describing a woman). Even Gertrude Stein was described as sexy in The New Yorker in 1936—but these three are some of the only literary instances I found of sexy being used to describe individual people, not situations or things; the common thread here is that all are Jewish Americans. Which makes sense: Generally speaking, sex itself is treated more liberally in Jewish culture than in Christianity. After all, rabbis may marry, priests cannot; Talmudic literature endorses marriage while frowning upon celibacy, whereas until relatively recently, Christian marriage was viewed as a sort of second-best option to celibacy ("Renounce marriage and imitate the angels" wrote John of Damascus—or, hey, imitate Jesus, the original bachelor). It only makes sense, then, that the application of sexy to people might have originally gained traction from Jewish culture.

Sexy may have been the verbal word on the street, though, because critic Gilbert Seldes sure came down hard upon sexy in 1950's "The Great Audience," his takedown of the Hollywood Production Code. "The word commonly used in describing movies and movie actresses is sexy; the word commonly used to describe living people of strong sexual enterprise is passionate. Since the movies are forbidden to display sensuality, sexy is a proper adjective; it implies an as-if state, not an actual one," he writes. "Sexy refers to the superficial and the immature aspects of the relations between men and women, to the apparatus of seduction and not to the pains or pleasures if seduction succeeds; to provocation, not to satisfaction." It's a fair point—more chat, less kiss!—but from a contemporary view this is amusing, given that the Code yielded material we now reference as incredibly passionate, if veiled. (Sleeper car in North by Northwest, anyone?)

"Only one bed...that's a good omen, don't you think?"

It's around here, then, that sexy might have begun to lose its plot—it hasn't unraveled completely, but I'd argue it may be inching toward misappropriation. Like many a word with potential for a generous application, sexy often takes on a narrowed meaning. (You will not be shocked to learn that a Google image search for sexy brings up a bevy of big-breasted white women in bikinis.) So Allyson's take on sexy at the excellent style blog Decoding Dress rings uncomfortably true. She examines sexy through the lens of Plato's Forms: What the essence of sexy is versus what our senses tell us are reasonable approximations of sexy. By seizing the essence of sexy—which is, after all, sex—instead of its avatars, one is able to have agency over sexiness, which explains the realization Allyson comes to about her presence as a woman who felt sexy in a particular outfit: "[The connection between feeling aroused and having an appearance that arouses another] is about power. The man who whistled at me, my spouse, and any other observer who experienced arousal were the objects of that power. My own experience of feeling sexy was that of being power's subject, the wielder of power [emphasis mine]. That power connects our experiences and is, in fact, the substance of them; without the power to arouse, sexy isn't happening." I've argued here before that the power of pretty is a false power, but Allyson successfully illustrates here how appearance can subvert the traditional subject/object relationship. In other words: A miniskirt, worn with the right intention, can be powerful.

Which brings us to the second half of the 20th century, and Helen Gurley Brown. The chapter "How to Be Sexy" in Sex and the Single Girl is part concrete advice ("Being able to sit very still is sexy") and part democracy of the sort I champion (see introduction). Her take on sexy is notable because Cosmopolitan was instrumental in making sexiness seem both normal and compulsory for women. (I once went to hear Cosmopolitan editor Kate White speak about coverlines, during which she addressed two of my personal favorites: "Sexy Sex" and "Erotic Sex.)

Cosmo's in/famous sex tips generated alongside tips on being sexy, which led to the now-ubiquitous sexy tips in the unlikeliest of places. We now know how to be sexy doing yoga, getting cancer, designing websites, becoming a better Christian (why let Gertrude Stein have all the fun?), motorcycling, visiting New York, upping your FICO score, knitting, being a dog, and being the daughter to a former presidential candidate.

Of course, Dirty Sexy Politics has little to do with sex (I hope/assume; I haven't read it), which begs the question of our contemporary application of sexy to things that have nothing to do with sex. Once sexy became the norm, its scope expanded indiscriminately: A 1970 issue of the journal Nuclear Industry "introduces tough, non-sexy questions about nuclear power," and everything pretty much went out the window from there. Sexy began to mean anything generally appealing; Webster's now recognizes it as such.

I have no problem with this, except: The more we continue to divorce sexy from sex, the further we stray from its essence—or, as Plato-via-Allyson writes, its Form. Instead of broadening sexy when we apply it to McCaindom or nuclear power, we narrow its application to people. Just as Paris Hilton's rendering of hot has made me turn away from the word and see it as the province of the tanned and hairless when it needn't be (as commenter Nine recently wrote on my "hot" entry, "I find the word pretty egalitarian in terms of not being tied to mainstream beauty standards"), the more we make sexy meaningless, the more we allow it to become seized by those who lay the loudest, splashiest claim to it. When Victoria's Secret hinges a campaign on issuing an annual list of "What Is Sexy," we push sexy further away from its essence and more toward its signals. Then, suddenly, instead of anyone being able to be sexy, we have to qualify certain people as "ugly sexy" (or "Sexy Ugly," if you're Lady Gaga), not plain old sexy. People like Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, Sandra Bernhard, Steve Buscemi, all of whom made Nerve's list of the uglysexiest people around: These are some downright sexy people, folks, even if they're not what we think of as pretty (though in my estimation they're hardly ugly). Why do we need the nasty little qualifier of ugly?

Don't get me wrong—I'm glad that we have a term for people whose magnetism and inner heat, not their perfectly crafted features, is what draws us to them. It's just that we had a perfectly good word already.

Thoughts on a Word: Foxy

Foxy is assertive, even aggressive, maybe ready to run her claws down your back. Foxy is canine, vulpine; foxy is active, not passive. You can't quite trust a foxy lady; she's cunning, sly, a trickster, and she might just outfox you. Silver foxes aside, chances are that if you are foxy, you are a woman. More specifically, you are—ooh! a foxy lady.

Women are usually likened to cats, not dogs; from pussycats to cougars, the idea is that coy feline elusion is in keeping with the supposed essence of woman. Still, we choose a member of the Canidae family—the fox—to describe women. We like woman-as-fox so much that we assign both sexes of the Vulpes genus to her: She is both fox and vixen. Both connote a sexy trickster, but the vixen is less playful than her male counterpart, more apt to bite than to merely wink. Foxy is the only way we can refer to a woman as a dog and not be out to wound her.

We started using foxy just before the turn of the 20th century; its first recorded use is in 1895 as African American slang, though it jumped the color line in the early 1900s. It's notable that it took Americans to describe women as foxes: For centuries, cultures around the world had hinged their myths on quick-witted, cunning foxes, and much early American culture sprang from people who then hunted foxes just for kicks. But once we started using foxy, we didn't look back. It became widespread in the 1940s—curiously enough, at a time when women were wearing foxes around their shoulders—but is most associated with the 1970s. Yet it lingered beyond that: A study of top slang terms at the University of North Carolina from 1972 to 1993 reveals foxy as one of the top 40 slang words used. Its enduring appeal may be a testament to Pam Grier's blaxsploitation template Foxy Brown (1974)—or, more likely, to that perennial college-dorm favorite, Jimi Hendrix's "Foxy Lady."

From the first psychedelic twinge of that off-kilter note, we know that Hendrix, not the foxy lady, is the predator. Its plodding, mid-tempo guitar riff tells us he's not exactly in a hurry to come get her, even as the lyrics indicate that she is soon to be possessed. She may be a wild animal—but he knows she's just a cute little heartbreaker, a sweet little lovemaker. In the end, the foxy lady isn't a fox at all, or if she is, her cunning wit is no match for this bigger, badder wolf. He's coming to get her—and what's more, when we listen to the creeping, aggressive discord that creates the song's magic, we're rooting for him to win. After all, he won't do her no harm, right? Carmen Borrero, a girlfriend who required stitches after Hendrix hit her with a bottle, and Kathy Etchingham, who endured a beating from Hendrix with the handset of a public telephone, might disagree.

We like foxy because of its mix of sly power and potential to be captured, if only you're quick enough. Foxy implies a certain amount of action, even aggression, from the person labeled as such. Foxy cannot be icy blonde or a next-door innocent; foxy knows there's a hint of musk about her. At the same time, it's no accident that we call women foxy and not wolfy—a fox might even bite you, but she won't do that much damage. Foxy gives us a knowing, smoldering trickster, not a domineering destroyer. And we return the favor to foxes: High-class Brits of yore aside, we didn't really shoot foxes. We preferred to trap them.

Foxy is a bit quaint now; even Megan Fox yields a surprisingly anemic number of puns in the press, while Michael J. Fox adopted a false middle initial in 1980 in part because of the inevitable headlines his real name, Michael Andrew Fox, could invite. We have Foxy Brown, of course, but even her handle is a callback to the 1974 film. Foxy gives us a retro appeal of an era that too many Americans remember for us to fetishize the way we do the old Hollywood broads, dames, and bombshells. In fact, I'd bet that many women known as cougars were, once upon a time, merely foxy ladies. And unlike the fox, the cougar is a bit too powerful—a bit too moneyed, a bit too sophisticated—for even someone with the prowess Jimi Hendrix to simply come get.

Feminist Reactions to Street Harassment

American Girl in Italy, Ruth Orkin, 1951 

The construction crew building the school across the street from my old apartment stayed all summer. And though the notion that construction workers spend their days ogling and wolf whistling is overplayed—I barely flinch when walking by a site most of the time—this group lived up to the stereotype. Nothing vulgar, nothing over-the-top, just: One day, a sudden silence when I'd walk by, and out of the corner of my eye I'd see heads turning; the next, a chorus of knowing "Hello there, where you going?" would follow me down the gauntlet. It was tame; still, even though there was only one direct route from my apartment to the subway, on days when I just wasn't up to it, I'd walk around the block in order to avoid them.

But one day I'd had enough, and as I walked by and heard the chime of "lookin' good"s, I snapped. "Do you think women like hearing this every day?" I asked. "Do any of you have daughters?" Several of them did, including the foreman. "What would you do if you saw someone talking to your daughter and looking at her the way you do to women?" His face got red; his cheeks puffed out. "I'd teach him a lesson," he said. "I'm somebody's daughter," I replied. A shocked look crossed his face, and another worker said, "My daughter's eight." I told him I was 11 the first time I was hollered at on the street, and by this time a small crowd had gathered and they were nodding and looking at me with respect. They asked my name, I gave it, and from then on every time I walked by the site, a couple of them would say, "Hi, Autumn," and all was well.

At least, that's how it went in my mind. Yesterday I read M. Brenn's questioning, reflective post on a sudden flash of jealousy she felt when she saw a distasteful episode of unwanted attention: "Mostly, I was outraged that he so clearly saw the girls as nothing more than objects," she writes. "But there was also a part of me that was oddly jealous… It's such a hypocritical thing to be outraged by someone's actions, yet be hurt that they weren't toward you." It's a thought-provoking post. (Thanks to Virginia for pointing me toward it.) She solicited readers' experiences, and only when I started to really reflect on the complex reactions that harassment prompts within me did I remember: It wasn't me the construction workers were hollering at when I told them off. It was the woman ahead of me on the street.

Now, these workers had indeed been making me wary for weeks by the time I melted down: Again, nothing lewd, but I'm not so naive as to think that their words to me were strictly neighborly. They were claiming my block—the block I'd called home for years—as their own space. But I dealt with it internally, either by ignoring, or playing neighbor, or taking the long way around. I never confronted them—until the day that another woman was walking maybe 30 feet ahead of me and I heard them get to her first. When they started in on her, I saw her head bow ever so slightly as she shuffled past the site. And in that moment, I snapped. The dialogue I gave above happened as I described it, but it wasn't me they were talking about.

I've told the story a few times—with me as target—as an example of a way to call out street harassers on their actions, because it did have what I consider a happy ending. (Some women may have preferred that they never say hello to her, but that would have made me even more tense; really, all I wanted was to feel at ease in my neighborhood, and for me this did it.) I never consciously rewrote the story in my head to eliminate the actual target of their attention; in fact, telling it in that way was so seamless that I honestly had forgotten it wasn't about me, until I read M. Brenn's post.

I don't know how much of my reaction was about jealousy; I'm loath to admit when that particular emotion strikes me, but I didn't feel that hot flash of jealousy that I'm plenty familiar with. (Though I can't pretend it was simple mama-bear protectiveness on my part either; the truth is probably a little of both, plus a nasty mood and opportunity to at least feel like I was speaking up for someone else instead of myself, which I'm not great at.) But my hunch is that my accidental revision was about embarrassment. I'm pretty sure that instinctively, I feared seeming jealous if I reported that I'd finally told off the workers after seeing someone else get the treatment, not myself—and that if I then tried to make it clear that, Well, no, you see, they'd also done it to me too, it was just this one day, no really!, I'd seem a little thou-doth-protest-too-much. I've often braced myself for walking a stretch of sidewalk that's populated with men I believe will bring me trouble—and heard nothing. And sometimes that feels like a relief or even a victory, but other times I merely feel foolish for having assumed that I would elicit that kind of attention.

I don't want to be harassed—ever. But we're steeped in a culture where objectification is treated as a prize for women, and in New York City, the objectification of street harassment is a fact of day-to-day life. It's a constant reminder that we are being looked at. In a culture that breathes objectification down our necks, being looked at can satisfy an itch that wasn't ours to begin with—even as it annoys us. Objectification is an unnatural state, but even women who fight against objectification—mine, yours, J.Lo's, anyone's—live in a world where it's the norm, and we may sometimes internalize its absence as a remark on our appeal. I think of one of Beauty Redefined's catchphrases: You are capable of so much more than being looked at. It's a powerful, truthful statement, and I believe it.

But fighting that all day, every day, becomes exhausting. We've become programmed to find street objectification the norm, and deprogramming ourselves from that takes constant work. If we had a unilateral way of rejecting street harassment, it might be easier, but it's not a neat trajectory: Sometimes we have interactions with strangers that are pleasant, life-affirming, and joyous, and sometimes those encounters might even make you feel pretty (if objectified). Unlike sexual assault, in which a woman saying no or being unable to consent marks the beginning of the crime zone, the target's feelings are part of what delineates harassment from a simple encounter. I feel harassed when I received unwanted attention on the street (and for the record, most of it is unwanted)—and the person who decides what's unwanted is me. There are plenty of external factors that push an encounter to the harassment end of the spectrum: Is it one man, or a group? Is it daylight, or night? Is he drunk, am I? Does he start to follow me, does he call me a bitch when I don't answer, is there a menace in his voice? Is he saying good morning, or is he commenting on parts of my body? Is he smiling, or is he whispering, or is he making that hideous hissing sound I'd never heard before moving to this city, or does he keep on talking after I've indicated I don't want to engage with him?

But street encounters are complex, and so are our reactions to them. I know I'm not alone in occasionally feeling genuinely pleased at a nice comment from a stranger. Of course this can only happen when the fellow is following common sense; it's daylight, he doesn't linger, he's brief and kind and smiling and not ogling—basically, he's a gentleman about it. Yet at its heart, even an encounter with the hallmarks of pleasance is left up to me to define as an amiable human interaction or as a gnat of a moment I wish hadn't happened. Not that I can—or should—welcome all polite comments on my appearance; it's more that, frankly, my mood has a lot to do with whether I smile back, ignore it, or cast an annoyed look. I try to always to ignore it, but my instincts don't always let me.

Listen: If I could, by decree, rule that nobody would ever comment on a stranger's appearance—both harassment and genuine compliments—I'd do it. Ultimately I want my block to feel like mine, not like I'm on a canvas and the patriarchy holds the paintbrush. But I also feel like with that decree, I'd be losing small, occasional gifts that have entered my life as a result of a stranger saying something nice to me. I have to acknowledge my contradictions as a part of my complex reaction to being looked at.

Jealousy, anger, pride, relief, apprehension, hatred, satisfaction, dread, numbness, fear, stress, thrill, shame: These are all legitimate reactions to these sorts of encounters. But notice that these are all reactions. That may be the greatest loss this particular form of objectification signifies for women. It keeps us in a constant state of passivity and self-examination, whether in the end we applaud our own responses or doubt them. And this examination diverts us from the larger point: It's not our response to actions that needs a thorough questioning. It's the actions themselves.

Kelli Dunham, Comic, New York City

“Yeah, I get called for beauty blog interviews all the time,” quips Kelli Dunham, comic, author, queer organizer, and ex-nun. “I’m turning them down now.” But with a CD titled Almost Pretty (watch the hilarious story of the CD's title here), is it any wonder we connected? Cohost of LGBT storytelling series Queer Memoir and round-table comedy-talk show Juxtapositions, Kelli has entertained audiences from the legendary Stonewall Inn to Citibank corporate headquarters, always keeping her vibrant, savvy humor on edge. We talked about the masculine privilege granted to butch women, the time renowned gender theorist Kate Bornstein called her handsome, and where a woman can find a decent barber in this town. In her own words:

 

On Desirability and Handsomeness
After my mom saw me perform for the first time in a long while, I remember her saying, “So, Kelli, I have a question—” you know that when you preface a question with a question, it’s never good—“in your subculture, are you considered...desirable?” I didn’t know she knew what a subculture was! She was genuinely confused; it was the first time she’d seen me perform in so long. But I think she’d noticed the kind of girlfriends I’d had over the years, and what they look like, and I think it had never occurred to her that how I look actually has some social currency in “my subculture.” So I said, “Yeah, Mom, actually I am considered desirable in my subculture.” And she said, “Oh! Oh. Oh.” People have an assumption that since femininity must be the default of beauty, that to not be what’s considered feminine must be ugly. It becomes the logical conclusion. So when she was presented with new information by seeing me interact with people, perhaps by observing sexual agency—she has eyes, she can observe social patterns—she realized, “Wow, it seems like my daughter is desirable in some way.” She was checking for facts against her assumptions. I think when she heard me say that, yes, I actually am attractive to others of my species, then all the things she’d been observing kind of clicked.

I don’t really identify with the term beauty. But Kate Bornstein was the first person to call me handsome. I had a very short buzz cut at that time—it was seven or eight years ago, she rubbed my head and said “Oh, you’re just such a handsome boi.” And I remember being shocked—in addition to it being Kate Bornstein saying it, it just made me feel like...Wow, I’m handsome. That was very life-affirming, and I think it gave me a level of hope. I had a lot of good experiences growing up focused on what I could do, but as far as, Hmm, I’m really enjoying looking at you—that hadn’t really been the kind of experience I’d had. So I felt like, Okay, if Kate Bornstein finds me handsome, I bet there are other people who do. As it turns out, I am desirable in my subculture.

As I’ve become comfortable in my gender identity, I’ve become okay with the word beauty, but I think it was challenging to me before—in part because it was always used as a measuring stick, as in, “You could be really pretty if you _______.” I was a fat kid, and growing up as a fat kid people would compliment your face, the whole “Oh, you have such a pretty face” thing. But as a fat kid, you definitely don’t want to hear anything about your face, because it’s a backhanded compliment. It’s possible now that there are all sorts of ways that people interact with me because I’ve got these sort of delicate features—I never liked my nose, but my girlfriend says “That’s the kind of nose people pay $10,000 to get”—instead of looking rougher. If I was wearing what I’m wearing now—a sweatshirt that’s seven years old, completely inappropriate shorts, old tennis shoes—but had irregular or asymmetrical features, maybe people would be interacting with me differently. I wouldn’t really know, though—that’s what privilege is, when you have something you don’t recognize.

On Boi Couture
I’d always thought that dress-up clothes were feminine clothes, and therefore uncomfortable and not really me. My mom loved dressing my sister and me in matching outfits, and it was the '70s so there are all these pictures of me in bright pink with a bow and a silk collar. I felt like I was wearing a bear suit or something. When I started realizing that wearing masculine clothes was an option for me, the idea of dressing up became positive. I like nerdy accessories—I have these cheap tennis shoes shoes that have pink laces, and the uppers look like the front of a composition notebook, that speckled black. They’re cute as hell, but because they cost $15 there’s no support at all, so sometimes I just put them in my bag and wear them at an event. My girlfriend makes fun of me, saying they’re my equivalent of spike heels.

When I get dressed up, a tie is one of those things that makes me straighten my shoulders. The first time you put on a tie, it feels amazing. It’s a gender marker that people find very confrontational. There are ties in traditional women’s clothing, but you’re not really trying to wear a tie. I imagine that’s something to do with male privilege, specifically the kind of man who wears a tie. It’s like, “Are you trying to be that kind of person? You couldn’t possibly be that kind of person.” Some masculine women specifically stay away from traditional men’s power wear when they go to job interviews, because they feel it’s too confrontational. But my girlfriend [who presents as feminine] has a power suit that’s just like a dude’s suit! She had a tailor for it, but it’s just a dude’s suit. It works much better for her than it would for me.

I wrote a couple of children’s books, and my publisher assigned me a publicist. She was trying to book me on The Bonnie Hunt Show to talk about kids and their bodies, and everything was going great. The producer loved me and we’re all three on the phone, and they said, “Oh, do you have a video you could send us?” I said, “Absolutely.” The producer hangs up and I’m just talking to the publicist, and I say, “You’ve seen a picture of me, right?” And she says, “No, but I’m Googling right now...oh my!” Needless to say, I didn’t end up on The Bonnie Hunt Show. Anyway, one of the videos that I had was me performing in a tie, and they said, “You have to lose the tie.” I said, “You need to understand, if you want me to wear a dress, I’m going to look more uncomfortable.” Forcing people into a different gender presentation than what they identify with generates awkwardness for all involved. The hilarious thing was that at that point my hair was completely close-cropped, almost shiny on the sides, and I had piercings. But the tie, the tie! She’s wearing a tie!

On Barbershops
A new haircut is a butch accessory. I have to go to a barbershop to get my hair cut, and trying to get it short enough is always an ordeal. I usually go for a 1 or a 2 on the clippers, but I used to say I’d like a 0 when I was in suburban areas, because then they’d actually use a 1 or a 2. They’re scared that they’re going to cut off your hair and you’re going to be like, “Ahhh! It’s too short!” They think that a woman wouldn’t really know the barbershop vocabulary, even though I’d memorized it. And actually, you can’t really do that in New York, because in New York they’ll listen to you. When there’s some kind of language barrier, I’ll just go in and say, “Fleet Week.”

Going with another butch to the barbershop is definitely less intimidating than going by yourself. There are certain places where it feels totally cool, and other places where it’s not cool at all, so you have to figure it out. And it’s always a different experience if you pass, if the person thinks you’re a guy or a kid. I look for something that doesn’t say “Barbershop for men” or something like that—some places will actually have that. I don’t know if they could refuse the service, but the person is gonna have a razor in their hand, so it just makes sense to not push too much. If I see both young and old guys in there, that’s a clue, and if I see a mixture of straight and gay guys working there, that’s another. Once I found that I could navigate that stuff myself and develop the skills to judge a barbershop from the outside, and once people could see that I know the vocabulary, that was satisfying. It feels like a rite of passage, and it’s such a simple thing. Your boyfriend probably doesn’t come home and tell you, “Wow, I finally went to the barber, and it was awesome!”

On Butch Privilege
A friend of mine who transitioned said, “Wow, being a fat man is so much easier than being a fat woman.” When I had longer hair, I definitely got more “fat-ass” insults on the street, and since I’ve had a spectrum of body sizes I’ve had an interesting exercise in how people react to body sizes. There are ways in which there’s a protective space formed around masculinity. I can’t even remember the last time someone tried to engage me in diet talk. Like in that split second of someone being, “Hey, let’s talk about Atkins!” they look at me and are like, “Well, maybe she’d rather talk about baseball...” Which is a toss-up. I don’t really like to talk about baseball either. Butch women have some masculine privilege. I mean, we’re also liable to get beat up or knifed on the street, but there is some masculine privilege. Even when people think I’m a 15-year-old boy, there are benefits to that.

With comedy, I might have run into more appearance-related issues if I’d stayed in mainstream comedy. When I get onstage in mainstream clubs, people don’t know what gender I am. I almost always have to address it up-front because otherwise they’ll be like, “Oh, she looks like a 12-year-old boy.” And they laugh throughout the gender stuff, but I think that’s because I’m so deliberately addressing it. If I just got up and said, “Hey, I’m gonna tell some jokes about my cat! Men and women are so different! Say, what’s up with hats?” perhaps there would be more resistance to it. I do think there’s a lot of pressure on female comics to talk in a self-deprecating way about their bodies, but because I look the way I look it’s different for me. I’m addressing it directly, and some people will say, “Oh, that’s a great schtick you have.” I’m thinking, This is a schtick?

Thoughts on Three Words: Obese, Anorexic, Fat

My eyes are so keen on eating disorder talk that I mistakenly thought our culture had been talking about eating disorders with increased frequency. Oxford English Dictionary proves me wrong: Mentions of the word anorexia in the English canon have stayed fairly steady over the past decade. Unsurprisingly, though, we've been talking about obesity more than we used to:

The entire entry at OED is worth reading, and it prompts a few thoughts on my end:

1) We love anorexia riffs. Obesity, not so much.

OED notes that even though anorexia was dwarfed in mentions by obesity, during this time period the number of "spinoff" words based on anorexia was manifold. Obesity gave us diabesity and globesity (which I'd never heard of until this article); anorexia, on the other hand, gave us orthorexia, tanorexia, manorexia, permorexia, bleachorexia, bigorexia, and bridorexia. Some of these are terms that may be adopted into legitimate medical language; orthorexia (obsession with a healthy diet) and permorexia (chronic dieting), though not widely used by the medical community, would both fall under the umbrella of ED-NOS, or eating disorder not otherwise specified. Some are a misunderstanding of eating disorders: Men can be anorexics, making manorexia superfluous, even a mockery of men who wrestle with an eating disorder. Others co-opt medical language to create a problem where there isn't any: I'm sure there are people who are obsessed with whitening their teeth, but it's not a disorder, is it?

Why the casual co-opting of anorexia while leaving obesity alone? It's not like we as a culture shy away from poking fun at fat people. I think it's because even as our culture pities the anorexic, we're also more eager to identify with her—and diminish her. Developing an acute case of "bridorexia" sounds better than developing "bridesity," though certainly it's not unheard of for women to gain weight before their wedding from stress-related overeating. We may cluck at the former, but we ignore or shame the latter; we can't glamourize it with a sweet little suffix. A better term for tanorexia might be willful path to melanoma, but tanorexia is adorable and sort of harmless. As seriously as we take anorexia, we're also eager to belittle it by making it seem as optional as teeth-whitening. We affix the -orexia because that signals that it's a compulsion—but a cute, girlish compulsion. It's the -ette, -ina, and -trix of disease suffixes.

2) Our bodily attentions are fickle.

Notice when mentions of both obesity and anorexia dropped? Right around when the stock market did. This makes sense, of course—the economy was in crisis, and frankly it felt more important to focus on what was happening with the S&P 500 than with our bodies. (In an oddly refreshing twist, I remember losing my job in October 2008 and suddenly realizing that after a week of mourning, freaking out, and drinking, for the first time since 1983 I'd gone seven days without giving the size of my body a single thought.) But it also points to how much "obesity crisis" reporting boils down to a trend piece. I'd wager that, ironically, eating disordered behavior—both the kind that results in obesity, and the kind that results in anorexia—increased during this time, as stress of any kind is a primary trigger for eating disorders.

3) Obesity comes in His & Hers colors.

The Oxford English Dictionary graph got me thinking about the relatively sudden shift from fat as an appearance issue to obesity as a health issue. I see the relatively recent emphasis on body size as a marker of health—as opposed to simply a marker of hot-or-not—as being designed in part to create a fact-based path to reprimand heavy people for their size. There's no doubt in my mind that this is gendered: We as a culture love to examine women's bodies, and having a "legitimate" reason to do so—I'm just worried about your health, honey—gives us carte blanche. Look at the incidence of the term "fat women" and "obese women" as opposed to "fat men" and "obese men", as charted through uses in all Google Books published between 1950 and 2008:

If this were truly a case of reconsidering the term fat, or of the heightened cases of the medical term obesity (which only means "excessively fat," after all), or of a shift in the way that we report and record these terms, the charts would look roughly similar for both sexes. But they don't: We suddenly found a lot more "obese" women to write about (she-besity?) compared to steady numbers of "fat" women, whereas in the mid-'80s, we started writing about "fat men" and "obese men" as if they were one and the same.

Regardless of how you feel about the term fat—or obese, big, heavy, plus, zaftig, or slender, trim, thin, or skinny—data like this points to how what we're describing with these terms often isn't really a body at all. We're judging our fears and desires alongside the target's shape and size; we're evaluating our cultural attachments to bodies, not the bodies themselves. Once we're able to step back and see that, I'm guessing we'll be one step closer to not judging one another's bodies at all.

Why Aren't More Beauty Companies Led By Women?

Estee Lauder has been getting some nice press lately: Between a NYTimes business profile treatment and slideshow and the launch of Aerin Lauder's luxury lifestyle line, the cosmetics empire is aglow (reflected in its strong stock pricing). Quieter is the news about its layoffs after a $250,000 raise for one of its top executives. Business as usual, but in looking at Estee Lauder we see a reflection of America's contemporary beauty history: a push-pull relationship between the joys of treating yourself with care, and the world of hard commerce.

Estee herself successfully married capitalism and the essence of beauty: She knew that part of the fun of beauty was trying on a new look, pioneering the idea of the gift-with-purchase by giving away lipstick with every sale. She also understood that beauty was a lingua franca among women, hence her "telephone, telegraph, tell a woman" marketing technique, which placed a premium on word-of-mouth over conventional advertising. And she made it a personal rule to touch every single customer who came into her stores, and encouraged her staff to do the same—this might sound creepy or manipulative from a distance, but the literal laying-on of hands is one of the beauty industry's biggest gifts to us. As makeup artist Eden DiBianco pointed out in our interview, "It's the only non-medical profession where you're licensed to touch the public."

"Sex, Lies, and Advertising," Gloria Steinem's must-read essay on advertising in women's magazines, presents another side of a major company player. In it, she recounts meeting Leonard Lauder (Estee's son and then-CEO), hardly the thinking woman's corporate leader, whom she was courting in order to get Estee Lauder ad dollars in Ms.

"Over a fancy lunch that costs more than we can pay for some articles, I explain how much we need his leadership... But, he says, Ms. readers are not our women. They're not interested in things like...blush. If they were, Ms. would be writing articles about them. ... He concedes that beauty features are often cococted more for advertisers than for readers. But Ms. isn't appropriate for his ads anyway. Why? Because Estee Lauder is selling 'a kept-woman mentality.' ... He knows his customers, and they would like to be kept women. That's why he will never advertise in Ms." 

She goes on to note that Lauder insists to this day that the conversation never took place.

Why should we care about a conversation that took place 20 years ago with a man who isn't CEO anymore? Because it's illustrative of the disconnect between the people buying the products and the people making decisions like how they're marketed, what they cost us, what techniques they use to hook us, and where they can cut corners. Beauty is a business, and they don't have a responsibility to fix whatever issues individual women have with our appearance. But I'd like to think that the decisionmakers at least don't have disdain for us and think that we enjoy being "kept women" simply because we like a quality moisturizer. So much of the beauty industry is built upon the illusion of it being at least cursorily pro-woman that it's a peculiar disappointment once we see the contempt a CEO has for his customers. Were it not for the woman-friendly potential offered earlier by this particular company, the fall wouldn't seem as crushing.

Seeing the business tactics being used by the Estee Lauder behemoth makes me sort of sad for Josephine Ester "Estee" Mentzer, who tinkered with her chemist uncle's face cream formula to come up with her unique formula. Where are the female CEOs of cosmetics companies? Sephora, L'Oréal, Unilever, Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson—all men at the top. Women hold creative and "soft" business positions (communications, human resources), but Andrea Jung at Avon is the only big lady kahuna at a major company. I don't think that women make better (or worse) CEOs, but it seems peculiar that a bunch of people who have never used the products in question are the ones major major decisions. Major decisions like saying their customers prefer to be "kept women." As beauty editor Ali pointed out, "Some of the big companies treat lipstick the same as diapers; they move their CEOs around and it’s always some dude who has the MBA calling the shots and treating all the products the same." Women are involved in product development and marketing, of course, but at the end of the day they answer to someone who fundamentally sees the product as a line item, not a face powder.

I'm thrilled that green beauty is getting more attention. But since we're making a push for earth-friendly ingredients, I'd like to see us all be just a little more aware of who's up top—and who's at the bottom. For the latter: Good Guide is a fantastic resource that measures the social impact and responsibility of hundreds of cosmetics, separate from their environmental and health measures (thanks to the Beer Activist for the tipoff about the hefty cosmetics portion of the site). Paying attention to this directly affects women: It measures responsibility in corporate governance (how do they settle, say, fair pay disputes?), measures of consumer safety (that's you, milady), philanthropy (are your dollars eventually going to go toward helping other women?), and workplace conditions (pink-collar workers in many cases).

As for who's up top? Besides Avon, in the big leagues, I'm at a loss.

Beauty Blogsophere 4.1.11

Uncle Sam's nephew Frederick wants YOU to report bad makeup reactions to the FDA. (Scroll down.)

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe.

From Head...
 No, I am not done talking about Elizabeth Taylor: Rundown of Ms. Taylor's influence on beauty trends. I can't pull off the eyebrows (is it mink oil? shellac?), but the look is amazing.

...and the most ridiculous product name of the week goes to...: Nars Super Orgasm Blush. Am I a prude, or is this just too much? That color is private, thank you.

Word choice: Allure asks readers to weigh in on whether it's "appropriate" to go to work without makeup. Now, I get asking if readers feel comfortable showing up bare-faced (here's my workday-with-no-makeup writeup)...but appropriate? I just cringe a little at that word choice because it basically agrees with the Ninth Circuit Court when it ruled that certain employers can indeed force a woman to wear makeup to work. Not work appropriate: sniffing the White-Out, stealing someone's string cheese out of the pantry fridge (sorry, this wound is fresh), forcing interns to do body shots. Work appropriate: looking clean, well-groomed, and bare-faced if that's how you roll.

Feel pretty without makeup: And it's always appropriate to do just that! Courtney at Those Graces gives tips on how.

No-airbrush ad campaign dissected: I'll take a no-airbrush ad over an airbrushed one, I suppose—but I've been suspicious of the Make Up For Ever ad campaign since it launched. It is breaking exactly zero barriers: Their point is that you can look Photoshopped by wearing their product, not that Photoshopping to create the perfect look digitally warps our perception of beauty. The folks at Partial Objects get into this more deeply.


...to Toe
Beware the permi-cure: Long-lasting lacquer pedicures apparently can mask symptoms of health conditions. Short of something seriously funky (fungus? fur?) I wouldn't know what my nails were telling me, but a podiatrist said it so it must be true! (Though am I alone in not thinking that two weeks can't really be called "semi-permanent"? That's my normal pedicure polish duration, though manicure requires weekly.)

Most squeamish health news of the week: Toenail clippings indicate lung cancer risk. I'm picturing an ersatz oncology lab at my corner nail salon.


...and Everything in Between
Hey, Mamí: Mexico isn't known for being terribly progressive on women's rights, and street harassment both in Mexico and in the United States is a major issue for Latinas (well, and everyone else, but the machismo ethos ensures that it takes on a particular tone for Hispanic women—here's a video on street harassment and women of color). The Mexican interior ministry has developed a handbook on preventing sexist language (example: Don't say "You are prettier when you keep quiet"). Of course, a lack of street power doesn't mean Mexican women don't have purchasing power—I'm not sure what to make of L'Oréal's telenovela campaign targeting Latinas.

But let's not leave out men: Interesting that according to Latino men's self-reported take on grooming, vanidad is more important than machismo, spending more money than non-Latino men on hair styling products, moisturizer, and fragrance.

Hog balm!: It's old-timey beauty's week, apparently, between the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's podcast on 18th-century beauty tricks (the historian makes recipes from centuries ago, and reputedly her hog's lard balm is the shiznit) and a Scottish university's day of re-creating 15th-century Italian cosmetics. Finally, a way to make my body hair grow faster: bear fat!

Sustainable beauty: As nontoxic beauty products grow in visibility, more aspects of "green" beauty come to the fore. Sustainability is the new thing: The Union for Ethical BioTrade's upcoming conference will focus on cosmetics; palm oil—used in about 70% of cosmetics—isn't yet available in a sustainable form, and Thailand is hoping to get in on the action with its wealth of natural, sustainable ingredients.

The real problem with "baby Botox": Great takedown at Beauty Schooled of why we might not want to gawk and point at the "baby Botox" stage mom who reputedly gives her 8-year-old daughter Botox injections. Doing that makes it about that krazy mom and lets us off the hook for our ever-growing roster of extreme beauty standards. Remember: It wasn't long ago that pubic hair waxing was considered kinky, not mainstream. (Still, let's hope it's an April Fool's hoax.)

What up, Dove?: Love it or leave it, you can't ignore the Dove Real Beauty Campaign if you're a body-positive beauty-lover. But between last week's ad featuring white skin as "after" and black skin as "before" and their new deodorant designed to make your underarms prettier, their commitment is questionable at best.

Devil's deal?: A British survey reports that 16% of respondents would trade a year of their life for the perfect body. And while this is disturbing, it also seems alarmist. You know what? I might trade a year of my life for the perfect body too, and no, I don't hate my body. I plan on dying OLD, people, and if this fairy godmother would take away a year in a nursing home in exchange for a "perfect" body that function perfectly and looked it too (and that would forever set my mind at rest) for the next 50+ years leading up to that, hell, sign me up. The problem here (besides lack of fairy godmother) is that this isn't hypothetical. So many women have already given years of their life in pursuit of the perfect body.

Globe-trotting beauties: A guide to what international products are worth toting home. (I am at the very end of my Czech hand cream after spending last spring there. Quelle horreur!)

Uncle Sam wants you: Maybe not Uncle Sam, but his little brother, or maybe a nephew—let's call him Frederick? FDA Frederick wants you to fill him in on bad reactions you've had to cosmetics. As a reminder, there is virtually no regulatory oversight on cosmetics, which explains why there is lead in things that you put on your lips and why it's totally legal. This is your chance to contribute.

Do Other People Determine What We Find Attractive?

A recent study suggests that people could be likely to adjust how attractive they find a face based on how attractive other people say that face is. There have been studies before saying that people will adjust their reporting of attractiveness based on the opinions of others—which held true here—but this study has the added gee-whiz factor of measuring reward centers of the brain, which correlated with the self-reported shift in attraction.

But the study needs a closer look—any study does, especially one that might seem to confirm insecurities, particularly women's insecurities. (Am I alone in the insecurity bit? I quote from a fellow I was unfortunate enough to go out with: "The rest of the world doesn't know what it's missing by overlooking you. You're beautiful!" Is it just me?)

1) Not only was the grand total of study participants exactly 14 people, all 14 of those people were men, and all of them were between the ages of 18 and 26.
What would the study have found if it had tested women as well? Certainly I don't think women are more immune to society's sway than men—and contrary to what some women (and men) have told me, neither do I believe that women have a broader spectrum of what they find attractive, nor that we're better able to find a man's "inner beauty" than they are ours.

What I do think is true is that women's looks are often spoken of in terms of currency, as though every woman begins with value X and that certain features incrementally add to that value. Now, this study wasn't about those features; it was about what others supposedly thought. I'm pretty sure that even people (men and women alike) who don't view women in terms of market value have been pretty well trained to think that there's a currency attached to women's appearance, like it or not—and currency is worthless unless we know that others around us assign it value. As a culture, we're more easily able to separate a man's value from his appearance; had women been asked to rate men, would we be so eager to change our number based on what others think?

2) The experiment measured neural pathways connected to financial rewards, not pathways connected to sensual pleasure. This experiment doesn't measure response to beauty at all; it measures calculated value.
(The researchers made this clear in their writings, but as so frequently happens, the journalists who wrote up the story morphed it.) And the study sample—men between the ages of 18 and 26—isn't exactly a population known for shying away from financial risk, you know? We don't know if the participants intrinsically changed their mind about whether a particular face was more or less beautiful; we only know that the perceived value increased or decreased according to other people's input.

3) Hot-or-not studies are sort of gross, right?
We can all agree on this? I mean, in college I did all sorts of shit for money in the psych lab, but I'm really icked out by the thought of being paid to sit there and rate faces on a 1-7 scale. But damn if people don't love to read about them! It validates our more shameful moments of being judgmental, and simultaneously serves to keep us wondering where we'd fall in the mix.

4) Attractiveness is not the same as beauty.
Of all the maxims about beauty, the only one I fully believe to be true is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder—that is, we really can't help what we find beautiful. The crowd might nudge us one way or another, but…if you're not a Gisele kinda lady, you're not a Gisele kinda lady, knowwhatimean? And this study, at first glance, flies in the face of that.

But attractiveness is something that is a little more generic, a little more across the board—and a little more easily agreed upon. Of the women I've talked with, many of them have said, unprompted, that pretty much anyone can be attractive with the right sort of effort; beauty, on the other hand, is a more elusive quality, one that might be easily mimicked but not easily faked. We find what is rare, beautiful; we find what we can agree upon, attractive. That's not to say we're all attracted to the same things (we'll save evolutionary theory for another post!); in general, there are certain things we all find attractive, but what we find beautiful tends to be more individual, in my definition of it. It's less easily packaged; it's even less easily rated, and it's not something that we could change even if we wanted to.

The Unreal Power of Pretty

Disclaimer: My landlord is not John Belushi. I repeat: My landlord is not John Belushi.

"The apartment is yours," says the man who would become my landlord. "On one condition—that you call me before you go sunbathing in your bikini so I can come over and watch."

He's got mottled skin and moves in this way that makes it clear that he's in an old man's pain, but he's got boyish features and occasionally wears overalls, giving him this bizarro-world Peter Pan schtick. His tired Queens accent makes everything he says sound like it’s a low-effort put-on, like he’s playing a bit part as a jokester in a film he doesn’t particularly want to be in.

But he's willing to rent me a junior one-bedroom with hardwood floors, butter-yellow walls, ample sunlight, and a backyard—a New York backyard, consisting of 90 square feet of concrete and a view of my neighbors’ garbage, but a backyard nonetheless. So when he raises his eyebrows and makes this stupid joke about seeing me in a bikini, I wave it away with a sort of laugh. Everything he says is a put-on, right?

In the weeks that follow, his comments keep coming, and I keep laughing them off like I believe I should. My legs, my hair, how stunning I look when awoken at 8 a.m. for temperature control checks. He frequently mentions how harmless he is, a comment I think is designed to put me at ease. It doesn’t work, but then, he makes me feel merely uncomfortable, not unsafe. Harmless? Yes. I believe he is that.

I think that we’re in on some kind of joke together, even if it’s a joke that I didn’t script and don’t really find funny. He’s twice my age, married, and harmless, after all; I’m the thirtysomething lady tenant who wears sleeveless minidresses with my sunglasses up flipped atop my disheveled updo. We’re in a middling 1940s screwball comedy, and he’s supposed to come around with his toolbelt every so often to help out his lady tenant, and then he’s supposed to say something about how fetching I look and wiggle his eyebrows, and I’m supposed to lightly swat him on the arm and say “Oh, Mister Smith!” And then he’s supposed to prune my hedges, or paint the stoop, and tra-la-la, plot resumes.

So I tell him that my back porch light went out—the first time I’d asked for anything—and instead of setting up a time for him to fix it, I hear how he isn’t legally required to have a light back there, he just has it there as a courtesy, but it’s too much goddamned trouble anymore, and I don’t have a right to it anyway, so thanks for calling but no.

And I am furious. Furious beyond reason. I’ve had bad landlords before—I once stepped over a bowl of water on my bathroom floor for two months because of a leak one refused to fix—and have handled it appropriately. Not now; my ire is matched only by my blood pressure as I look up housing codes, vent to anyone who would listen (any many who would have preferred not to), even as I just stay at home and think about it. I feel a swell of tension begin in my solar plexus and creep up my chest, my neck, my face, until I’m talking out loud to myself like a madwoman, red-faced, cursing at a man who isn’t there. My heart rate rises, and at one point I come dangerously close to throwing something across the room because I want the satisfaction of hearing something in that apartment break. In other words, I am being terrifically unreasonable over something that, while inconvenient, really doesn’t matter. (Tiki torches turned out to be the solution. The highly glamorous solution.)

It’s only several days after his refusal that I realize why I’m so unreasonably, and uncharacteristically, pissed off. I’d believed that we’d entered an unspoken bargain together, and that he’d broken it. My end of the bargain was that I’d shut up and smile while he lasciviously commented on my appearance, and his end of the bargain was that he would fix my fucking porch light. And I’d held up my end of the deal perfectly. I’d played my part, my oh-gosh-Mister-Smith lady tenant part, with a pert flair, only to find out that the script was rewritten halfway through.

There was, of course, no such deal, no such script. In his mind he could say whatever he pleased to me, a particular privilege given to him by being a man from a certain generation who probably felt that as long as it was clear he didn’t really mean anything and that he was being what he might have considered complimentary, it was all fun and games. And there are all sorts of reasons why he’s in error there, but that’s not what was making me flush through my throat.

What was making me so angry was my complicity in—nay, my invention of—this bargain. I’ve never consciously exploited being a young-enough, attractive-enough woman for personal gain. But that’s just it: I’ve never consciously done it. How many times have I told myself that I’m just being friendly—and meant it! I am a friendly person!—quietly knowing that on the back end there’s a small reward that I might not get if I weren’t a young-enough, attractive-enough woman? That I’ll get drinks a little quicker if I go to the bar myself rather than send my boyfriend; that the guy who makes my salad every day doesn’t charge me for all my toppings? I really do think it’s because I’ve got an open expression and a quick smile, an easy laugh. It might be. Or is it that I'm sailing through life expecting that if I play a certain part—the part assigned to pretty-enough women, which really just means any woman willing to play the role—that people will give me that drink quicker, or give me a discount, or fix my back porch light?

Some women blithely say that we shouldn't give up any of our power, even if that power is merely a genetic accident or a bit of trick grooming, and in certain moments I'm inclined to agree. But that only works when both parties play by the script: The power of pretty only works when the person with the real power gives it to you willingly. And other people's power can be taken away on a whim. On their whim.

So I showed up with my ace in the hole, the few things I had that he didn’t: youth, femininity, charm. I played my hand—the only hand I believed I had, besides simply being a good tenant who pays rent on time and possesses neither a mouthy pit bull nor a nagging meth habit—and then felt cheated when he trumped my best hand with his real power over me. He didn't want to fix my porch light, and he doesn't have to. My polite, eyes-averted giggles, my ingratiating tolerance of his speculation about my nightwear—no matter, those. My hand had been worthless all along.

I can't blame him, not entirely. Much feminist discourse on this sort of thing tends to point toward the one making the comments as being at fault. Which he is. But the fact is, I was complicit in all of it, because I was expecting perks for playing my part. I didn't have to laugh when he said that allowing him to watch me sunbathe was part of my monthly dues. It was a joke, of course, but it wasn't funny; it was gross, and to laugh showed that I thought it was the other way around. He’s my landlord, not my boss; all I would have risked by letting him he know he was being a dirty old man—or just not played along, even as I didn't invite his attentions—was some uncomfortable moments here and there. Yes, he should know that he’s wrong. But he'd know for sure if I told him.

A week or two go by after he tells me he won't fix my porch light. He calls to say he's coming by to do something in the backyard. I come home and see a bit of pruning done, and a new, fully functioning porch light.

"I know you didn't have to do that," I say to him. "But I appreciate that you did."

"No problem," he says, and continues working. I let him be. He knocks on my back door when he's finished, to let me know he's leaving. I open the screen door to see him off. He takes a step away, then stops, turns around, and looks at me. "By the way, you look sexy as hell in those pants."

"Scram!" I say, and close the screen door. I say it with my voice lilting, my pitch raised, the corners of my mouth upturned. I have no excuse other than habit. I watch him scurry off, exaggerating the hunch of his shoulders in mock defense. We're back to our parts, in a way. But he doesn't know that my choice of word is a beginning for myself, a way of finding language I can use with humor and grace but still keep my dignity in a script that I have an equal hand in writing. It's not perfect. It's just a start.

Beauty Blogosphere

What's going on in beauty in this week, from head to toe. And ending with some older-gentleman NSFW material! (Fear not, it has nothing to do with Donald Rumsfeld.)

From Head...

Say "Airbrush!": Panasonic has a new camera that Photoshops you without Photoshop. I get toning down shine and even putting on blush, but there's a function that can make your eyes appear larger in proportion to your face. Call it the anime function. (From Jezebel.)

Me as captured by the Lumex FX77 camera. (Or me as anime character, by Svetlana Chmakova, who manga'd the CosmoGirl staff back in the day.)

Say "Glamazon!": The ladies at No More Dirty Looks are hosting another beauty challenge—all you have to do is put on some fabulous makeup (preferably with natural beauty products), snap a picture of yourself, and send it to them. The idea is to examine the spectrum of beauty (they'd earlier hosted a no-makeup challenge) and to showcase that clean beauty is just as glam as the toxic stuff. You could win a $100 gift certificate to Spirit Beauty Lounge, too.

Whitewashed beauty counter: It's hardly news that makeup companies are a source of dissatisfaction for women of color, but to see it laid out graphically at Those Three Graces shows how difficult it really can be.   

Smart girls: Nice insight on the differences between high-achieving girls and boys: Girls are less likely than boys to persevere through mentally challenging tasks, and in fact the higher the IQ, the less likely the girl was to stick with it. Heidi Grant Halvorson speculates that girls are likelier to view their talents as something innate, not something that can be developed. I wonder how that intersects with beauty? On one hand, your face is your face; on another, there are all sorts of enhancing measures we can and do take.


...to Toe:
Fish pedicures are under investigation. Which is sort of a shame, because it's the extent of what I know about the offerings of Malaysia (that's where they originated as far as I can tell), and it got me set to go visit. Is it an animal rights issue? Exploited labor?

...and the Things In Between: 

Never Say Diet! Virginia of Beauty Schooled is now the iVillage body image expert, which means that her smart, sane, and critical (but still fun!) eye on beauty is officially expanding. Check out her Never Say Diet posts there!

It's still OK to talk "Black Swan," right?: Claire Mysko's interesting take on how people reacted differently to Natalie Portman's and Christian Bale's weight loss for recent roles. (Neither of which could compare to Bale's frame in The Machinist. Yikes!)

Feeling worthy after ED recovery: I know Eating Disorders Awareness Week is over, but I found this essay on what you really give up when you recover fascinating. Sometimes it's difficult for ED patients to acknowledge what their illness gave them--the things that were cleverly disguised as benefits--and this is a frank take on it. (From a raw foodist, at that! My knee-jerk reaction is that raw foodism is a quick veil for an ED, but Gena seems to have a genuinely healthy philosophy on it.) Thanks to Cameo at Verging on Serious for the tipoff!


Bonus: Men!
Rouge rogues: What's up with men stealing cosmetics? Lipstick is sort of the teenage-rite-of-passage shoplifting for women who might be prone to such behavior (ahem) but some of these are pretty big hauls. I don't condone thievery, petty or otherwise, but it's interesting how there's sort of a perverse inequality here: I couldn't find any police reports of women stealing more than a pocketful of cosmetics, presumably for personal use, but some of these dudes were clearly taking large amounts for illegal resale--sort of the difference between having money and being wealthy, but in the criminal element. Where my big-haul ladies at? (Um, stay where you're at, please.)
 
Male skin care is a booming business in China. The most frequently cited reason for delving into the skin care world is job-related, but the male-female ratio is so skewed in China that I wonder if being forced to compete so heavily with other men might be a factor too? 

In defense of body hair: Kate at Eat the Damn Cake implores us to leave hairy men alone. For all the scrutiny of women's bodies, overall people feel much more free to comment negatively on men's bodies--especially when they're furry. And why do our tastes in body hair change so frequently? What happened to the Burt Reynolds love?

Male Gaze X ≠ Female Beauty Y

Interesting study (PDF only) on how being objectified affects women's math performance. Female and male participants answered math questions after being given objectifying looks by a faux study partner of the opposite sex. The female participants who'd been gawked at scored more poorly compared with the control group. (Men answered the same in both conditions.) Thoughts:

1) The headline of the PsychCentral article sent to me by an alert friend reads "Are Good Looks Problematic for Women?" But the study literally had nothing to do with whether a woman was good-looking. It was a study about the objectifying male gaze, not a study about women looking so fiiiiiiiiine that the poor fellows couldn't help but stare. You could attempt to argue that conventionally attractive women are logically the object of that gaze more frequently--but A) you'd be wrong; any New York City woman can attest that simply by possessing a vagina and being roughly between the ages of 12 and 85, you become the object of that gaze, and B) that's a leap that wasn't explicitly made in the writeup. It's a case of erroneous reading of the study or erroneous reporting of it, and in either case it not only grossly misrepresents the intent of the study but effectively turns the ideas presented into women's own fault for being so damned good-looking as to affect our math skills. 

Now, plenty of news outlets accurately represented the study: "Ogling by Men Subtracts from Women's Math Scores" (LiveScience); "Women Subject to Objectifying Gazes Show Decreased Math Ability" (Science Daily). But PsychCentral and New Beauty both took this it's-cuz-they're-purty angle. Funnily enough, New Beauty is a plastic surgery magazine—do they want their readers to think they're bad at math? I'm guessing that New Beauty has some weirdo agenda about beauty and ability, but in any case this is a textbook example of reporters needing to check their assumptions. This study has nothing to do with how the women looked and everything to do with how the men were looking.

Yes, it was tempting to dot the "oo"s to look like nipples, but I am a lay-dee.

2) Lowered math skills aside, the study had some other fascinating angles: Objectified women were more likely to interact with their ogling partners, suggesting that there's higher motivation for a woman to engage with someone who is sexualizing her. I don't think this means women secretly want to be objectified (that varies by woman and situation), but rather that we internalize the position of being sexualized as our responsibility. 

And boy, do we ever. There's plenty of feminist rhetoric on girls and women being trained to be polite even in objectifying situations and how some men prey on that--and yes, some do--but there's something else at work here, which The Hairpin (via Beauty Schooled) makes a funny about, and which I will drain the humor from!: 

It's not that pretty girls aren't good at math. Or that pretty girls think they don't have to do math because they're so pretty. Just, when you notice girls are pretty and look at their prettiness, all they can think about is feeling pretty and there's no room in their brains left for math. Or something like that. I can't think straight when you're staring.

And, you know, I am capable of having my cleavage ogled and being competent at my work and patting my head and rubbing my tummy at the same time. But I also know that when I'm aware of being looked at in a sexualized manner, it can feel like the air is being sucked out of me. Whether that means I'm feeling adored by a man I want to adore me, or that I'm freezing because I know the dude halfway down the block is going to give me the treatment, when I'm the object of the gaze it is indeed difficult to stay in a state of flow about things other than my appearance—like, say, math problems. And even as I try to resist it, I find myself engaging in it, even if my engagement is also supposed to be a deflection. I often think that if I just engage more and make it clear that, oh, I have a boyfriend or husband, or just that I'm not looking for a pickup, I'll maintain my nice-girlness but get my point across. So yes, being objectified can make me interact more, much as I wish it didn't.

3) The most surprising part of the study for me was that body awareness and body dissatisfaction wasn't affected by whether a woman was ogled. All women in the study—objectified and the control group—had higher rates of body dissatisfaction during the study than men did, but that was due to their femaleness, not to whether they'd been stared at.

Honestly, I don't know what to make of this. The researchers hypothesized, based on other studies, that body shame would increase with being objectified. So other studies have found that there is a correlation. Now, I try not to get too into any individual study because a lot of it doesn't mean anything; at the same time, I'm writing this post, so clearly I give some credence to it. Personally, my body awareness does increase when I know I'm being sexualized—I may not feel worse or better about my body, but my consciousness of it increases tenfold. Maybe the women in the study were focusing so heavily on their assigned task that between calculating x plus y and interacting with their assigned pair of wandering eyes, they simply forgot to think about their own bodies?

If that's the case, I find that encouraging. Ideally, someone objectifying you should make you think about that person and what sort of interaction you'd like to have (or not have) with that person, not about your body and what signals you fear/hope it might send by its mere existence.

Personal Care Spending, Happiness, and the Young/Single/Fabulous Woman

I'm baffled by the results of this survey on personal-care spending, ranked by city. By "personal care," the study included dollars spent on fitness, cosmetics, toiletries, salon/spa visits, and the like.

The study was aiming to see if there was a correlation between dollars spent on personal care and levels of fitness among its residents. For the top and bottom cities, that was true: Austin spends the most money per person per month on personal care ($143) and is one of the fittest cities in the U.S.; Detroit spends the least ($18) and is also one of the unhealthiest cities. But then, as pointed out by The Hairpin, Portland, OR (always Portland, throwing a kink in the system! viva la revolucion!), is one of the healthiest cities in the U.S. but spends about the national average on personal care items.

Really, they couldn't have come up with colors other than red and blue for this?

How does this relate to beauty and women? A few ways:

1) The study's very premise is that spending on cosmetics and fitness are in the same category. And sure, they both fall under "personal care," but there are about a zillion reasons people work out (mental health benefits, lower cholesterol, stress relief, medically directed weight loss, rehabilitation--plus, sure, "those last five pounds" and the glow that working out gives you) and not that many as to why people wear cosmetics (my dissection of lipstick subtleties aside, but of course). I've always been sort of irked by the connection of beauty and health departments in women's magazines, even though the skin, after all, is an organ. And in this survey, in which both men and women responded, it skews the results: A man or woman buying, say, rock-climbing equipment isn't in the same headspace that a woman buying eyeshadow is.

2) No secret that self-esteem and happiness are complementary, right? Looking at the personal-care spending in the light of the happiest and unhappiest cities in America reveals that the people who are spending more money on personal care are also happier. Not all of the cities in the happiest/unhappiest cities rankings are listed in the personal-care spending chart, but of the top 10 cities that are: The happiest cities spent an average of $86.50 on personal care; the unhappiest, $68.70. And this is where I really wish that there were a demarcation between cosmetics/spas/salons and fitness, because of the antidepressant effect of regular exercise. But I wonder if happier people are also spending more on self-care that might relate to their happiness in less scientific, more aesthetic ways?

3) Four of the top 12 cities for personal-care expenditures are in Texas. Texas women also earn 81.4 cents on the (man's) dollar. I can't find all the data to bear this out, but I wonder if there's an inverse proportional spending on personal care to women's earning power--that in places where women earn considerably less, they need to increase their "net worth" by investing more in their looks. It's possible, but in looking at the cities where young, childless women outearn men, the average spent on personal care is actually slightly higher than the national average ($68.50 for these cities as compared to a national average of $60 on personal care).

Thanks to Beauty Schooled for the initial tipoff!

Jessica Obrist/Jo Jo Stiletto, Burlesque Dancer/Roller Derby Queen, Seattle

I first met Jessica Obrist in 1997, when we were both involved in theater and magazine journalism at our university. But I first met Jo Jo Stiletto—her alter ego—in 2005, when I saw her gender-bending burlesque act involving a auto-work chassis, coveralls, and, of course, pasties. Jo Jo/Jessica performs and leads burlesque workshops in Seattle, and also has a heavy presence in the Rat City Rollergirls team, winning 2008 Alumni of the Year for her fairy-godmother-like dedication. She talked with me about beauty personae, self-exposure, the allure of athleticism, and drag-queen rash. In her own words:

 
On Having a Persona                        
If you gave me two words to choose from—beauty or glamour—I’d choose glamour. Beautiful, pretty…maybe I’m like—that’d be boring. Give me moxie, give me glamour. Would I describe myself as beautiful? Probably not. Fabulous? Yes. I consider myself a faux queen—like a drag queen, but, I mean, I’m a woman: taking this persona and making not even a real woman, but this crazy, over-the-top woman. I like the heightened reality of burlesque, and part of me thinks there’s nothing wrong with that heightened reality—this woman with no imperfections, with 10 pairs of pantyhose on. It’s fascinating to me. There’s the everyday Jessica who wears what I call my uniform: leggings, American Apparel skirt, T-shirt, sweatshirt. Jessica hates glitter. But this other person, Jo Jo, is the glitteriest person anyone seems to know! I want to wear wigs, wear the glitter and the fabulous makeup. It’s me putting on my clown face. And I kind of like to put on my clown face.

It’s for fun, this sort of exaggerated beauty, this fake beauty. It’s not real. I don’t have to do this to feel better about myself, and sometimes I do it in unflattering ways too—really gross-looking eye makeup, the "I cried myself to sleep" look, for dramatic effect. Why not? In some ways I don’t want to attract the male gaze. Maybe I want to be the center of attention, but it’s not about being the beautiful center of attention. It’s about—Oh, look at that wig, where did she get those shoes, that’s ridiculous! It’s the idea of making art. Being myself is expressing myself in these ways, and it’s okay to express yourself by wearing fake eyelashes and way too much glitter.

Right now I have drag rash, this rash on my forehead from a wig. The first time I experienced drag rash, I wasn’t on a show; I was just on this party bus as a fundraiser for an LGBT nonprofit benefit. It was a bunch of drag queens and regular people going on a pub crawl. The theme was “back to school,” and I was the best substitute teacher I could be—beehive wig, pencils in the hair. Could it have been as fun in jeans? Maybe. But every so often it’s fun to put on a dress and have a persona. It certainly makes it more fun to hang your cleavage out in the wind—that’s not me, not Jessica, but that might be my persona.

I feel beautiful if I perk myself up a little bit, put myself in drag. But a part of me also feels like I don’t have to have any of that to have that same feeling. It’s hard to remember that sometimes, especially for people who have a persona: If I take that away, I’m still the same person. Look in the mirror without all that and you’re the same girl, you’re still beautiful. Hearing it without that persona feels strange, but it’s true.

There are these girls with the perfect shoes, the perfect makeup. It’s who they are, from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed. I cannot put that effort in. I just can’t! And you know what? I feel fine. I feel fine if I put on leggings and a frumpy outfit. Because tomorrow I’m going to wear a vintage pinup dress and put on fake glasses and do something else, and I’ll feel a little pick-me-up. But then I’ll be back to a sort of frumpy outfit, and it’s okay. I mean, those people who feel like they always have to look perfect—I don’t know if that’s a persona. Is that a persona? I hope so. They’re wearing their game face for work, for everyday. But to me it just seems exhausting.

I was getting a dress for my wedding reception. Honestly, the idea of going to stores is horrible, because I hate trying on clothes in traditional stores. The idea of being fussed over sounded horrible. I go into these stores and have a miserable experience, buying cookie-cutter clothes for cookie-cutter body types and having people fuss over me. I guess I like making my own persona instead of being told who my persona is. The persona of a bride—maybe I’m not comfortable being what other people might define that as. Going anywhere and having someone call me a bride—I’m Jo Jo! I’m Jessica! I’m not going to play that role, that bride role.   

 Jessica as bride: at her wedding reception, November 2010

On Changing Faces
The public image is that I’m pretty happy with myself, but, I mean—my hair is matted down and I’ve got this rash on my head, and my skin isn’t perfect. I’m having my wedding reception this weekend and I’m thinking, I look awful. And then I’m like: You hired your friend, who’s a fabulous photographer. All you have to do is just look in the mirror again, and your face is going to look different. What’s in your brain is going to be what you see. Look back in the mirror and change that. I have that hating voice, and then there’s the good voice. It’s all in your fucking brain.

On Changing the Rules
Roller derby was theatrical at first. Girls in fishnets and lipstick hitting each other—wow, it’ll be crazy! [Laughs] From the get-go there was definitely a lot of sexuality at play, but it wasn’t supposed to be that we’re doing this for dudes. Early in our history we were offered pictures in German Playboy and we were like, Fuck no! There’s this idea of the hyperfeminine, but there’s this athleticism too. If you went to a bout today, there’s no difference between this and any other sport. They’ve trained for hours—it just happens that they wear lipstick. Why are they wearing fishnets? Because it’s fun! We write our own rules. Anyone who changes the rules, it’s not like the rest of the world just catches up to you. I always tell the girls: If you want to keep the fishnets and lipstick, wear it, do it—hey, sure, wear a push-up bra. If you want to wear an athletic jersey and pants to your knees, do it. It’s women being athletic and strong, but still having a wink and nod to something that’s not accepted into any other sort of sporting world.

With burlesque, it’s about accepting that there are many different types of beauty, that it’s not just the type of beauty that we see in magazines. For me it’s the world that I love, the world that people are creating that’s sort of free of what society is telling me is beautiful. I’m seeing what these artists are telling me is beautiful. When we do these burlesque classes, it’s your idea of sexy, and the person next to you is probably really different—let’s explore that. They’re both beautiful and sexy, let’s engage with that. 

On Self-Exposure
Burlesque is fun, and it is petrifying. It’s terrifying to expose yourself, whatever that means. Burlesque can be done without exposing any part of your body, but you’re exposing yourself creatively. Will I be accepted? Will people scrutinize me? You judge yourself more harshly than anyone else. So stand in front of a group of people, take off your top with confidence. Watch the audience, watch their faces change. You have this expectation that you won’t be accepted, and it’s the exact opposite. It’s beautiful and fascinating to watch. You’ve got different bodies, breasts, bottoms. You’ll find that the girl with the big tits hates her big tits and loves the girl with the tiny little boobies and thinks they’re awesome. It’s about finding what you appreciate in other people and what you appreciate in yourself. If a girl walks in and is all, “I hate my butt, I’ve got the biggest butt”—okay, okay, I hear that. But part of my thing is: Well, bend over. Bend way over. Now bend over all the way. Now bend over all the way with your legs straight. And it looks amazing, and that person is owning their giant bottom—everybody loves it!

In my world, it’s very much a bunch of women—I hardly ever think of men. But I do think of gender roles. It’s playing with sexuality, playing with gender roles and who you’re appealing to—or do you even want to appeal to someone? There was a man in the show this year, and I found myself trying to rewrite statements in my head. It’s so much focused on women for me, and I felt totally biased. How do I tell a man that he’s beautiful? How do I make him see that he’s dealing with what we all deal with?

Anyone stands on that ledge, exposing themselves, and you have to take that step. Burlesque and roller derby both happen in a room. It’s not filmed, it’s not recorded. It happens live, for an audience, an audience who will experience it, and then they will leave, and they can’t ever perfectly re-create that experience. It’s truly unique. Something is happening. And there’s a lot of beauty issues there, a lot of issues relating to self-image, to how women are perceived, and sports and art and sexiness, and all these things are being explored live, in front of an audience. You’re going to find that falling off the cliff is a thrill. It’ll be amazing, and people are going to love it. It’s the same for everyone, it’s no different for men, women, tiny women, big women—we all have the same fear. But if you actually step off the cliff, they’re going to love you.