Permission to Flirt

Judgments, Rosea Lake

By now, you’ve probably seen art student Rosea Lake’s photo Judgments, which went viral earlier this month. Unlike, say, videos of children on laughing gas, this went viral for a very specific reason: It does what the strongest images do, namely that whole “worth a thousand words” bit. Judgments communicates the constant awareness of, well, judgments that women face every day we leave the house (and probably some when we don’t), and I won’t say much more about the actual image because it speaks well for itself.

That said, I’ve read commentary on the image that has also struck a chord, specifically Lisa Wade’s spot-on post at Sociological Images about how Judgments pinpoints the constantly shifting boundaries of acceptable womanhood, and then relates that to something women are mocked for: all those darn clothes (you know women!). “[W]omen constantly risk getting it wrong, or getting it wrong to someone. … . Indeed, this is why women have so many clothes! We need an all-purpose black skirt that does old fashioned, another one to do proper, and a third to do flirty....” Wade’s main point is an excellent one, as it neatly sums up not only what’s fantastic about the image but why women do generally tend to have more clothes than men.

But my personal conclusion regarding Lake’s piece was actually somewhat different: To me, it illustrates why my own wardrobe is actually fairly limited in range. The first time I saw it, I was struck by how effectively it communicates exactly what it communicates. The second time I saw it, though, I made it personal and mused for a moment about how save one ill-advised maxidress and one black sheath that hits just above the knee, literally every single one of my hemlines is within an inch of “flirty.” This is semi-purposeful: It’s a flattering length on me, and I’m a flattery-over-fashion dresser, so I’ve stuck strictly with what works. And isn’t it a funny coincidence that what happens to flatter my figure just happens to be labeled as “flirty” here, when in fact “flirty” is probably, for the average American urban thirtysomething woman, the most desirable word on this particular chart to be described as? (Depending on your social set you might veer more toward proper or cheeky, and of course I don’t actually know which of these words women in my demographic would be likely to “choose” if asked, but I have a hard time seeing most of my friends wanting to be seen as prudish—or, on the other end, as a slut.)

Of course, it’s not a coincidence, not at all. I may have believed I favored that hem length because it hits me at a spot that shows my legs’ curves (before getting to the part of my thighs that, on a particularly bad day, I might describe as “bulbous”). And that’s part of the reason, sure, but I can’t pretend it’s merely a visual preference of mine. As marked on Judgments, that particular sweet spot—far enough above the knee to be clear that it’s not a knee-length skirt, but low enough to be worn most places besides the Vatican—also marks a sweet spot for women’s comportment. Flirty shows you’re aware of your appeal but not taking advantage of it (mustn’t be cheeky!); flirty grants women the right to exercise what some might call “erotic capital” without being seen as, you know, a whore. Flirty lends its users a mantle of conventional femininity without most of femininity’s punishments; flirty marks a clear space of permission. Curtailed permission, yes, but sometimes a skirt’s gotta do what a skirt’s gotta do, right? So, no, it’s no accident that nearly all my dresses fall to this length. I wear “flirty” skirts in part because I play by the rules. I’ve never been good at operating in spaces where I don’t have permission to be.

Of course, that permission will change: The lines as shown on Judgments indicate not only hemlines and codes women are judged by, but where women are allowed to fall at any particular age. A “provocative” teenager might be slut-shamed, but she isn’t told to keep it to herself; a 58-year-old with the same hemline might well be told just that, if not in as many words. “Proper” isn’t necessarily a sly way of saying “frowsy” when spoken of a middle-aged woman, as it would be for a 22-year-old.

Given how widely this photo made the rounds, it’s clear it struck a nerve, and I’m wondering what that nerve is for other viewers, in relation to their personal lives—and personal wardrobes. Do you take this as commentary on rigid rules for women, or on the constant flux of expectations—or are those just two expressions of the same problem? Do you dress within “permission,” or do you take pleasure in disregarding permission altogether? Or...?

Hosed: Conservatism and the Return of Pantyhose

I love pantyhose. What’s not to love? They add a little warmth, they even out splotchy skin, they give a hint of support if you’re into that (or a lot of support if you’re into that), they keep you from sliding around in heels, and, most important, they make you look just a little more polished. I buy the cheap drugstore kind—to my chagrin I can no longer find the kind that comes in a plastic egg—but given how often I wear them, I have probably spent hundreds of dollars over my lifetime in pantyhose. I love pantyhose.

Which is why I was genuinely confused—to the point of being surprised by my own naivete on the matter, given my years working in fashion magazines—to find out that plenty of people don’t. Somehow I missed the spate of articles in 2011 on the matter, which tended to focus either on Kate Middleton’s apparent fondness for them or on the L’Eggs campaign aimed at getting the 18-to-34 set back in the control tops. (Of course, I turned 35 last year, so perhaps I overlooked the articles because I was just too old to notice that pantyhose had become unfashionable over the years, along with scrunchies and sanitary napkin belts.) Pantyhose naysayers find them dowdy, old-fashioned, stuffy, stuck in the ’80s (see the Night Court reference in this pantyhose face-off), even sexist, which, given that they’re not necessarily the most comfortable things around and have no equivalent for men, is understandable. (“Meggings” don’t count.)

But just one year after Slate pondered whether it was “too late to pull nylons back from the brink of extinction,” it seems I needn’t worry. The very same industry expert quoted in that Slate piece from November 2011 was quoted a year later in the Times, saying that with the continued popularity of the dress (and the obligatory nod to the economy, which might make women want to “dress for success,” as though that’s new), pantyhose was seeing a resurgence. Which it really is: Hosiery sales increased from $900 million to $1 billion in 2011, with sheers “definitely leading the legwear pack in terms of increases,” according to a vice president at Bare Necessities. Pantyhose is back.

Except it’s also, like, not. Reading comments on any article about pantyhose, you’d think we were talking about the Gaza strip, not flimsy tubes of nylon. Trends come and go, and people find themselves wearing things they thought unimaginable to don only months earlier (I have yet to buy a pair of skinny jeans, but I’ve tried them on, this despite being a vocal opponent during their initial resurgence in the 2000s). But there’s something about pantyhose that’s oddly divisive.*

Part of this, I think, is that unlike skinny jeans, pantyhose isn’t about fashion; it’s about lifestyle. It’s one of the few wardrobe items that definitively is or isn’t in people’s wardrobes—punks and preps alike all have jeans, skirts, and sweaters of some sort, but pantyhose? If you work at a smoothie joint in Oregon, you might not have ever worn them; if you work for the federal government, it might not cross your mind to not wear them. In fact, depending on your workplace, you might have to wear them, as this Wall Street Journal post points out. Geography comes into play too: In the Northeast and Plains states, pantyhose never really went out of fashion for dressy events, whereas I’m guessing most famously casual Californians would likely only wear them if it’s a part of a dress code. This can be mighty baffling if you operate in separate spheres: “Like many women, I found our ‘liberation’ from pantyhose terribly confusing,” wrote Margaret Hartman for Jezebel in 2011. Between her Senate internship (hose!) and working in ladymags (no hose! I never got the memo, obvs), “Suddenly I had to review my personal pantyhouse policy on an event-by-event basis to determine if I'd be committing a fashion faux pas.”

It can also be mighty baffling if you find yourself straddling generations. At 36, I consider myself a Gen-Xer, as are most of my friends. But I also have plenty of friends in their 20s, and it’s interesting to note the little things that mark our age difference. Remembering a world with East Germany and without MTV is one; pantyhose is another. For even if women my age choose not to wear pantyhose now, we grew up with it—I distinctly remember a period when it was fashionable to wear shorts over black pantyhose, obligatory flannel shirt wrapped around our waists, and I can’t imagine that any of my classmates went to prom bare-legged. But women in their teens and 20s—geographic and lifestyle dictates notwithstanding—didn’t. In fact, that could be integral to what appears to be its return: Women in their 20s can embrace pantyhose in part because their mothers had the freedom to shed it—and were likely raising their daughters with the knowledge that nylons were no longer a must. (And in Japan, where pantyhose sales are growing as well, teens may have some shyness about exposing bare legs, thanks in part to their mothers’ fondness for leggings.)

Whatever the case, insofar as pantyhose is back, it’s, as they say, not your mother’s (optional) pantyhose. “Value-added” hosiery is partly responsible for the category’s resurgence; call it the Spanx effect. Between consumer expectations that foundation garments give a virtual tummy tuck and technological developments that mean such garments are no longer insanely uncomfortable (trust me, “control top” in the early ’90s was a different beast), it’s no surprise that part of the L’Eggs campaign emphasizes the shaping functions of their hosiery. Plus, since opaque tights have been perennially popular for several years (whereas they weren’t particularly in vogue 15 years ago), hose can now be marketed as “sheer tights,” an exercise in oxymoronic rebranding if there ever was one.

That doesn’t mean that the reasoning for pantyhose’s comeback isn’t retro. Bare legs—at least according to the Hollywood Reporter, which, well, whatever—are now beginning to look “tawdry” and “cheap.” So let me get this straight: Pantyhose was once thought dowdy, and now appearing without it might be tawdry. Virgin/whore, anyone? Between the association of bare legs with “cheapness” and pantyhose with somewhat conservative fields and regions, I’m actually wondering if there is some sort of connection between pantyhose and conservatism, even if most of its wearers—like myself—don’t consciously think of it that way. I wore it in earnest for years and still do, but at least now I can play it up as a sort of “retro” thing à la Mad Men—a show that was born from America’s conflicted relationship with conservatism.

Certainly one of the complaints against pantyhose—that it looks like one is trying too hard—registers with this line of thought. “Trying too hard” can take a lot of different forms, but it has immediate associations with a sort of over-the-top femininity that goes hand-in-hand with the conservative “let women be women again!” mind-set. And though I don’t find pantyhose particularly uncomfortable, it’s not exactly comfortable either**—again falling into line with conservatism, the idea that maybe women shouldn’t be too comfortable with their bodies.

Still, despite the connections, I’m going to stick with ’em. For here is my conservative little secret: Pantyhose, to me, are one of many symbols of womanhood. My mother didn’t wear pantyhose, but I remember visiting her mother when I was a kid and eagerly accepting a pair of nylon knee-high castoffs that I figured would have to do until I was old enough to wear full-on big-girl pantyhose. Which I started doing in 8th grade, for special occasions: I loved feeling encased in this tight, stretchy stuff that somehow didn’t look tight but just looked...finished, making me feel finished, giving me a sense of finesse that I lacked otherwise. It does that for me still: I happily go bare-legged in the summer, but come fall, slipping on a pair of pantyhose is an adult version of putting on my back-to-school wardrobe. Pantyhose means I’m ready; it means I’m in public, wanting to be seen not as a prolonged adolescent who still sleeps on a futon and wrinkles her nose at broccoli, but as a professional. As an adult, as a woman who isn’t afraid to take herself a little seriously. As someone who looks at what some might say is a sign of “trying too hard” and instead interpret it as a willingness to go the extra mile. My nails may be chipped, my hair may have flyaways, my lipstick might be eaten off. But my bottom half? I’ve got it covered.


*To wit: Despite being firmly in the pro-pantyhose camp, black pantyhose now makes me shudder. Tights are fine, as are black thigh-highs in the boudoir—but the sheer stuff, on the street? Ix-nay, otally-tay.

**Certainly not as comfortable as these freakin’ amazing fleece-lined tights that I am totally shilling for without shame because I love them so much, and they really do keep you warm.

On Being a Fat Child

I was a fat kid. I haven’t written about this before, telling myself it’s because this blog is about beauty, and I’m wary of conflating weight and beauty. That’s true, but the real reason I haven’t written about having been a fat kid is that—listen, I know writers are supposed to “show, not tell,” but how can I show you the scar the ever-present question of fatness has etched onto my heart? I can’t, and so I will just say: I haven’t written about being a fat kid until now because it was too painful. Being a fat kid hurt me then. Having been a fat kid hurts me now.

Things I remember about being fat: Not being able to wear jeans (there was no such thing as jeans for fat girls in 1983). Not wanting to participate in any games at the school fair except the cake walk; wanting those cakes so badly that I moved faster than I ever had in my life to repeatedly get the last seat, thus winning five cakes; understanding the implicit humiliation of being the fat kid who wanted five cakes but wanting those cakes more than I wanted my pride; doing my best to be gracious when my parents insisted we give away three of them. Faking sick on the day we were supposed to do height-weight testing, only to find out upon return that it had been postponed a day; jiggling my leg incessantly until I had to step on the scale in hopes of losing “enough” weight by midmorning. Immense disappointment at learning that the three scoops of ice cream I’d piled on my plate at the Bonanza buffet weren’t scoops of ice cream but of butter. Pretending to twist my ankle at age 7 in the 50-yard dash at track and field day to spare myself the embarrassment of being the fat kid who came in last; doing the same at age 8, and 11. Stealing bags of brown sugar from the pantry to eat in my bedroom, alone. Secreting away boxes of cereal, to do the same; denying to my mother that I’d done so, even when it was clear she knew I had.

There is a theme here: absence, and falsity. I couldn’t wear jeans; I didn’t want to play games that wouldn’t get me cake; I faked sick; I pretended to twist my ankle; I denied secret eating. Being a fat child wasn’t so much about the fact of being fat as it was about couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t. There is a counter-theme too: Love—of food, exquisite food, food, füd, phood, food, the panacea to whatever free-floating stresses there were in my life as an intellectually mature but emotionally not-so-mature 8-year-old girl. I didn’t have a difficult childhood by any means, but it was a childhood; it came with bumps and dents and scratches that I didn’t really know how to handle. Lucky for me, I didn’t have to learn, because I had food right there, every day, making it all okay. It worked—until it didn’t, but that’s not the story I’m trying to tell here. Food felt like it worked, and in a child’s mind, that’s enough.

*     *     *

Things I do not remember about being fat: Being teased. Being bullied. Having my weight remarked upon by strangers; being laughed at or taunted. I remember exactly three instances of shaming from other people about my weight: a neighbor suggesting I not enter her family’s trailer because I was fat and might somehow damage it; my grandmother telling me in the JCPenney’s dressing room that the problem wasn’t that the pants were too small but that I was too big; a third-grade classmate gasping when she saw my three-digit weight listed on my weight-height chart, when most kids weighed in at around 65 pounds. But when I try to fish deeper for the other memories—the memories that are surely there, for what fat child escapes a landslide of teasing from cruel classmates?—I come up empty. I remember being lightly teased for other things—my name, my glasses, my ponytail, my lack of athletic coordination—but my fatness, the singularly most visible thing about me, remained uncommented upon.

When I look at my own experience of being a fat kid, I don’t see a problem with society, or cruel children, or unlimited soda refills. I see a problem with—how do I put this without appearing to be swatting the wrist of my 8-year-old self?—I see a problem with me, and with the way I understood my size. There was very little fat-shaming in my life, but I still felt like being fat was wrong, bad, unfeminine, shameful—all those things fat activists say are erroneously attached to weight. They’re right to say that; those feelings should be separate from weight. Yet they weren’t separate, not for me. I filtered any feeling I had—about my fatness or anything else—through food, and my chronic overeating was what kept me fat. My feelings were my fatness; my fatness, feelings.

I wouldn’t have been better off had I been basically bullied into losing weight, or into feeling worse about being fat. But I would have been better off had I learned ways of coping with stress that didn’t center around food; I’d have been better off had I understood the joy of moving my body. I’d have been better off if clothes shopping weren’t an exercise in futility; I’d have been better off if any of the well-meaning sweatshirts and tees that were given to me as gifts had fit without revealing the immovable fact of my belly. I’d have been better off if I hadn’t had the hurdle of weight to constantly run up against. What I’m saying is: I’d have been better off if I weren’t fat.

I’d also had been better off if the world around me didn’t disperse shame upon overweight people—had my grandmother not told me I was “too big,” had my classmate remained nonchalant whatever the number on my height-weight card, had my neighbor not insinuated I could singlehandedly topple over a trailer designed for far greater stress than a fourth-grader’s frame. The world needs to change in its attitude toward fat people, and that is unquestionable. But it wasn’t only the world around me that inscribed my fatness upon my identity to the point where I still sometimes cannot recognize myself in photos because I’m looking for someone bigger than I actually am.

Yes, I wish the world around me had been different. I wish I’d been different too.

*     *     *

Being a fat kid wasn’t easy. But the reasons being a fat kid wasn’t easy had little to do with what body-positive bloggers such as myself usually cite. I wasn’t teased, I wasn’t bullied, few people ever tried to make me feel like I was lesser-than because my body was more-than. I don’t recall looking at “aspirational” images of thin women and feeling like I didn’t live up to them, though of course it’s impossible to determine how much of those messages seep into our brains. Sociological reasons alone cannot account for the shame I felt about my fatness. The problem went deeper than that. The problem—to a point—was me.

I keep wanting to baldly state some sort of vaguely political point, but then I find myself stymied as to exactly what I want to say. That maybe childhood obesity is something we should be “fighting”? (Yes, but then there are those billboards in Georgia.) That there’s a way to instill good eating and exercise habits in children without shaming them? (Yes, but who on earth is arguing the opposite?) That maybe when we say fighting childhood obesity is about health, it’s not some fat-shaming conspiracy but is truly about children’s emotional, physical, and mental health? (Yes, but that doesn’t mean that concerns about “health” aren’t also a veiled way of talking about children’s looks.) That maybe plenty of fat kids aren’t built that way, aren’t “big-boned,” aren’t victim to some sort of “fat gene” or environmental hazard but instead have bodies that are suffering from too much food and too little exercise? (Yes, but there are children whose set point is higher than what’s recommended, and I don’t want to advocate anything that would see a child beginning a lifelong battle that she’ll never be able to win. Those children—all children—deserve dignity that gets slighted when we stick too heavily to the traditional way of thinking about weight.)

I suppose the closest I could come to having a larger “issues” point here is this: The emphasis on childhood obesity is a convenient scapegoat for the deeply conflicted relationship pretty much our whole society has with food, comfort, bodies, and conformity. And we as a society have a responsibility to not only take a cold, hard look at that relationship for our own benefit, but, yes, “for the children.” We need to help children on a physical, mental, emotional, and sociological level be as healthy as possible. And sometimes being as healthy as possible includes losing weight. I’m not a public health expert, I’m not a psychologist. I don’t know how to help children reconcile the ostensibly dueling messages of You are good just the way you are and You might be better off if you took certain steps that will make you healthier—and, as it happens slimmer. I just know that we need to.

I don’t like feeling like I have to choose a side: That I’m either a body-positive blogger who looks at weight as entirely separate from health when I know from my own experience that it’s not always separate, or I’m one of those body-shaming fat-phobes who thinks it’s fine to put chubby kids on a billboard as a warning and example. I only have my own experiences to go on, and when it comes to something as intensely personal as our bodies, going on personal experience alone can be dangerous. My experiences as a fat child can’t be superimposed onto the life of every fat kid in America, and I might be even more hesitant to quietly suggest that plenty of kids would benefit from losing weight had I been the childhood equivalent of those adult powerhouses who eat healthfully and mindfully, exercise aplenty, and remain fat. But that wasn’t me. Had I eaten the way my parents tried to teach me to eat, and not been so terrified of moving my body, I would have been well within recommended height-weight guidelines. As an adult, that’s where I fall, though my relationship with food is still conflicted enough that I may never know how much I’d weigh if I were able to be an intuitive eater. (Indeed, that’s another reason I haven’t written much on this; it’s hard for me to know how much of my feelings about childhood obesity inhabit the same space as the part of me where disordered eating thrived for years. Can we ever know?)

Nobody should be made to feel bad because of how they look, or because of the size their body takes up in the world. Does that even need to be said here? I’m saying it anyway, for good measure. But not all fat-phobia comes from outer sources. Yes, I’m tired of the idea that weight loss is unequivocally a good thing; I loathe the bumper-sticker wisdom that inside every fat person there’s a thin person waiting to get out. Nobody wins when we assume fat people must be unhappy. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t fat people—including children—whose size does make them unhappy, and who don’t have a vocabulary for articulating that unhappiness without falling down the rabbit hole of self-loathing. Had I such language as a child, I might have found more satisfaction from what came out of my mouth than what went into it.

Life at 36: Anne Bancroft, Phylicia Rashad, Reese Witherspoon, and Me

Thirty-six!

I had a birthday over the weekend, and it’s the first birthday I’ve had where I’ve been remotely tempted to be coy about my age. I’d never understood why anyone, particularly a woman, would lie about their age. I’d heard the classic story about Gloria Steinem quipping to a reporter upon being complimented for looking good for her age, “This is what 40 looks like. We’ve been lying for so long, who would know?” While I loved the story, her reasoning made such innate sense to me that I actually had a hard time grasping its actual importance. Why wouldn’t you claim your age, especially if you’d taken care of your health and pride in your appearance? Why would you say you were younger and risk looking “okay” for, say, 35 but fantastic for 40? It’s not like lying about your age actually makes you younger, after all; it just gives you something else to feel ashamed of.

I’m not ashamed of my age, to be clear; I’m 36 and wouldn’t go back to my twenties if you paid me in rainbows. Still: As of Sunday, I’ve felt the slightest twinge of hesitancy about saying my new age. I’d never lie about it, nor will I avoid the question, but for the first time I’m at the age where I understand the impulse to do so. It’s easy to dismiss such thoughts as vain twaddle at 28. It’s a hair harder as I inch toward 40.

When I turned 30, people around me took delight in saying, “Forty is the new 30,” the idea being that where our parents supposedly had all their shit together by 30, the perpetual adolescence we GenXers had carved out for ourselves meant we had a whole added decade in which to do so. The larger import of this statement is about things beyond the scope of this blog—the ways we’ve reconfigured work, family, geography, careers, the idea of success itself. But there’s something else lurking in the idea of 40 being “the new 30,” and the phrase that keeps coming to mind is, We look younger than our parents.

When I was in college, the hot new face belonged to an actress named Jennifer Aniston, who, at age 25, had found herself with the coveted Rachel haircut and a hit TV show. Thirteen years after my graduation, who do I see on magazine covers? A 43-year-old Jennifer Aniston. And a 39-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow, 36-year-old Kate Winslet, 42-year-old Jennifer Lopez, 42-year-old Tina Fey, and 36-year-old Reese Witherspoon—all of whom were big or rapidly on their way there when they, and I, were in our 20s. Add to that the 38-year-old Elizabeth Banks, 33-year-old Rachel McAdams, 32-year-old Zooey Deschanel, 33-year-old Kate Hudson, 38-year-old Heidi Klum, 37-year-old Christina Hendricks, and 36-year-old Angelina Jolie, and it gets harder and harder to believe that Hollywood truly does fetishize youth as much as we say it does. Yes, there will always be the 18-year-old Dakotas and 22-year-old Kristens, but we’re in an unprecedented age of mature women being construed as alluring in the mainstream press. Julianne Moore is 51. Want to know who else was 51? Rue McClanahan, when The Golden Girls first aired.

Part of this, I’d like to think, is a broadening definition of what beauty and allure actually are, or at least an acknowledgement that women of a certain age have plenty of both, without anyone needing to fetishize the fact that they’re not 22. Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson wasn’t only sexy for an older woman; she was just plain sexy. But there’s something else at play here: People today look younger than people of the same age did a generation ago. Bancroft was 36 when she played Mrs. Robinson; Elizabeth Taylor a mere 34 as the aging Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. There are some technical reasons for this, starting with the greater knowledge base about aging we have available to us today. I may have spent my early years thinking of a tan as being “healthy,” but by the time I was a teenager the anti-sun brigade had thought to add “premature aging” alongside “skin cancer” on the list of reasons not to sunbathe. Same with not smoking, getting my omega-3s, and exercising—I may well have done these things regardless, but vanity is a pretty big motivator.

But the larger reasons are generational. With delayed marriage and childbearing—and, of course, the increased acceptance of saying no to either or both—comes a loosened idea of what adulthood itself really is, and its subdivisions are looser still. Age is just a number, but not because of what that Hallmark adage was designed to signify. It’s “just a number” because our conception of youth and aging is relative. There’s no such age as “old”; we collectively decide what “old” means, and within that we collectively decide upon the million variations of oldness: old enough to know better, too old to dress that way, old ladies. And because it’s relative, it’s always shifting, often without our consent. So the idea of a 40-year-old woman looked like one thing when I was 20, and another thing to me today at 36; what’s more, had I been 36 in 1982, a 40-year-old woman would probably have looked quite different than my conception of a 40-year-old woman today. There is no Platonic Form of a thirtysomething woman; she must be relative and known to us through cues and sensations, not as some pure ideal of Thirtysomething Woman. Her template changes all the time: Not all that long ago, it wouldn’t be terribly unusual for a woman my age to not only be a mother but a grandmother. More recently, Jacqueline Kennedy’s pink suit and “helmet hair,” forever memorialized as the distraught First Lady, belonged to a 34-year-old woman; Meredith Baxter-Birney and Phylicia Rashad were 35 and 36, respectively, when Family Ties and The Cosby Show hit the air. It’s hardly a surprise that when I want to dress conspicuously adultlike, I often find myself reaching for clothes that recall another era, one with lines drawn more strictly for women versus girls—my tailored pink Jackie O-style sheath, my surprisingly demure leopard-print dress with a 1940s cut.

Of course, all those are things I can change—my clothing, my hair. My face, not so much. I’ve done many of the things that one is supposed to do for “anti-aging” (a nonsense term if there ever was one). But so have most other 36-year-olds, so all that my efforts mean is that I look like other middle-class 36-year-old women in The Year Our Lord 2012, instead of looking like I might have as a middle-class 36-year-old in 1971. Collectively, we’ve decided that today’s 36 looks younger than our mothers did when we were in fifth grade, or even our surrogate TV mothers; instead, our 36 looks more like Kate Winslet, even if we don’t. The things keeping us from looking like Kate Winslet are more along the lines of professional beauty treatments (and, um, genes), not some magical anti-aging potion. She looks her age. Most of us do.

All of this should make aging as we know it easier, and I suppose it does; I’m thankful that with some styling I can achieve the womanly look my grandmother had at my age, and thankful that I can shake loose of that consigned womanhood and wear some of the same things I might have in college without being considered inappropriate or, worse, pathetic. But underneath that is a cognitive dissonance with what I know up-close to be true: I am aging. And while the reconfiguration of adulthood has liberated women like me from making semi-permanent life choices too early, it’s also easy to take from that liberation a free-floating fear or denial of aging and what aging actually looks like. There’s far less shame about the number of aging than there used to be—truly, the twinge of hesitancy I feel about saying I’m 36 is just that, a twinge. The greater fear is not saying I’m 36 but acknowledging that I’m 36—which, all told, isn’t seen as young but is hardly seen as old—and therefore have some of the signs of what we associate with actual, undeniable oldness. Battle-won crow’s-feet are one thing. Knee wrinkles are quite another.

Aging “gracefully” is part of it, sure, but I’m less afraid of being seen as clinging to my fading youth than I am of being seen as having lost some sort of essence. I’m less concerned about wrinkles than I am about things I’ve never had to think about before because they came naturally, like “tone” and “texture” and “radiance.” My most pronounced signs of aging haven’t been things that should rob me of that radiance; if anything, with age I have more energy, more vigor than I did when I was 24. I drink less, I sleep more, I exercise, I eat my greens. I’m far more nourished now in every way than I was then. And it shows—by nearly every conventional measure, I look better now than I did then.

But there it is, looming, unfair: No matter what I do, no matter how impeccable my self-care, there is a quality I had at 24 that I will never have again. I’ll happily take the tradeoff age has offered me—please, don’t miss that point—but it seems like a joke to me somehow. I want the vitality my skin had at 24 not only because it looks “better” but because I feel like it’s rightfully mine. I feel more vital now; I feel more radiant. I hadn’t earned the look of vitality I had when I was 24, and I didn’t realize I hadn’t earned it; it was only when it began to slip away that I recognized that I’d been working on a pay-it-forward system that I hadn’t signed up for and couldn’t reneg on.

Thirty-six years young; today is the first day of the rest of our lives; it’s never too late to learn; you’re only as old as you feel. I will take these cheap sentiments over what people, particularly women, were faced with not so long ago, like marrying by 30 or resigning oneself to lifelong spinsterhood. But an unintended side effect of age positivity is that we’re left with a clashing of ideals: If age is a state of mind, what do I do about the tangible ways in which that “state of mind” is showing up on my body? Without the other markers of adulthood, the ways I mark my age are internal, amorphous; I say I “feel” differently now than I did at 26, and I do, but I’d be hard-pressed to tell you exactly what that difference is. The biggest differences between my life now and my life when I was undisputably young are inarticulate—I still sleep on a futon, I still consider reheating Indian food “cooking,” I’ll still stay for one more drink—but there’s a definitive articulation of aging on my very form. The occasional thread of silver in my otherwise dark hair, the darkness beneath my eyes that never quite goes away, the way a day in the sun now makes me look haggard instead of bursting with California-kissed good health. It’s not that any one of these is so horrible but rather that it runs right up against my idea of myself as someone who’s aging but not, you know, really aging. I’m not afraid of getting older; I’m not afraid of looking my age. But it was a lot easier to say that more loudly before I began to learn that “looking my age” would mean looking older in ways that so far had applied only to other people.

I am thankful beyond words that women before me have lived their lives so vibrantly as to make it clear that life doesn’t end at 30, or 35, or 55, or 75. Without them, the choices I’ve made in my life—to remain single, to freelance, to live alone in an urban space far away from family, to not have children, to be a lousy housekeeper—are largely viewed by those around me, and by myself, as choices, not as some unfortunate set of circumstances that’s befallen me, the poor thing. But within all that positivity, I want to create a sliver of a space for mourning what has slipped away from me with age. Not so I can dwell on it, or long for its return, but so that I can honor this quality I had at a time in my life when I had every right to feel young, vibrant, and carefree but rarely consciously felt any of those things. In truth, what looked carefree at 24 was more often than not merely chaotic. I had no idea that despite that chaos, I carried with me a radiance that was mine simply by dint of being young. There is no way to say this without speaking in a cliche, so forgive me, but: I didn’t know what I had until it was gone. My hope in allowing myself to mourn these small losses is that I’ll create room for the conscious recognition of what I have now, at a perfectly fine 36, that I haven’t yet recognized. What those gifts are, I’m not entirely sure, but I trust in their existence nonetheless. Perhaps the moment I stop doing so is the moment I really will grow old.

The Transcendence of the Makeover

Makeovers are such a staple of movies targeted toward teen girls that it’s almost beside the point for me to call out specific examples. (Oh, fine, since you asked for my favorite movie makeover: Fran in Strictly Ballroom. Remember, though, I was a theater geek in high school so I sort of don’t have a choice here.) They’ve gotten sort of a bad rap over time—yeah, they send the message that we’re not really lovable until we fit a certain standard, and they set up the idea that the record-scratch moment has to happen or we’re doing it wrong. And it’s obvious but let’s say it anyway: How many actresses who aren’t conventionally good-looking to begin with are cast in these roles?

But Hollywood keeps on making makeover movies, and girls keep on loving them—and frankly, I keep on loving them too. As Rachel Rabbit White puts it in her roundup of the best makeover moments, “While there’s plenty to tease apart there culturally, it’s hard not to love a good geek to chic makeover montage, especially the rebellious or ill-advised.” (Word up, Prozac Nation!) Part of the fascination is projecting ourselves onto the character: What would we look like with enough attention from a small battery of dedicated team players (with a sassy gay best friend to boot!)? The chance to make ourselves over unapologetically is part of the enduring lore of prom movies too; for adult women, weddings supplant prom as our chance to “play pretty,” judgment-free.

But our fascination goes deeper than just our own wishes to be made over—after all, we project ourselves onto movie characters all the time, so the makeover is hardly unique in that sense. At first look it seems like we’re collectively into the idea of transformation: changing into a form we’re not. The more I think about it, though, what we’re after is transcendence—going beyond, rising above, triumphing. That’s what is so satisfying about a good makeover movie: not seeing our heroine change into something new, but seeing something revealed through change.

It’s rare that I ever wanted to look like anyone other than myself. Even in times of my life when I was unhappy with my appearance, the changes I wanted to make were tweaks to what I already had, not an essential change in form. In my fantasy-dream-makeover world, I look like myself, except plus or minus a number of things that are too boring to list here (#6: remove the colorless mole half an inch from my left nostril that nobody else has commented on, ever). And while I’m not trying to overestimate the resiliency of the self-esteem of the American woman, in talking with a good number of women about beauty, only rarely have I heard a wish to actually look like someone else. Most of us, most of the time, don’t wish to transform; we wish to transcend.

We wish to transcend the features that we think have held us back. We wish to become better than our troublesome thighs or inconvenient nose; we wish to triumph over what those features have personally meant to us. We wish to outdo ourselves, with what we already have—and if we want to outdo others, chances are we want to outdo them with what we have instead of what we don’t (isn’t that more satisfying?). In some ways it’s the basis of body image and self-esteem work: The entire idea is to go beyond, not to change essential composition. And despite the attention paid to women who do actually transform, much of the time that attention is done with a clucking tone, the undercurrent being: Honey, why don’t you learn to work with what you’ve got? There’s much to be critiqued about that form of judgment, to be sure, but at its heart is a well-meaning but harshly misdirected desire for our Heidi Montags to be more like our Jennifer Anistons. Isn’t the moral of most makeover tales that the makeover only helped its owner articulate what was already there? (Isn’t that why we have the term makeunder?) Transformation is linked to transcendence, yes, but the compositional change required by a transformation seems to me to be a route to the greater goal of transcendence. The focus on the tangible aspects of makeovers—the eyeshadows and push-up bras and blending of lipsticks—is understandable, given that transformation is an easier concept to look in the eye than transcendence. But our fascination with makeovers can’t be about the tools alone. They wouldn’t have such a hold over us if it were just about the outer shift.

It’s fitting that the person who got me thinking about transcendence is the author of several books about what one might call transformation at first glance. When I interviewed my friend Carolyn Turgeon last year, amid a thoroughly appropriate amount of mermaid talk, I also asked her about makeovers. Her second book, Godmother, gave the fairy godmother’s account of the most famous makeover of all time, Cinderella; her third, Mermaid, delved into the oft-literal pain that transformation can bring, with our protagonist (whom you may know under another author as “The Little Mermaid”) bearing the sensation of knives slicing her legs with every step. You can revisit the interview here, but this part in particular stuck with me:

There are definitely makeovers in fairy tales. … I love powerful moments of transformation. I even have a tattoo of Daphne turning into the laurel tree. When people long to be something else, it speaks to this basic human condition of being earth-bound and longing for transcendence. There’s that Platonic sense: You were once whole, and now you are not whole anymore; you long for that wholeness you once had. You fell from the stars and you want to return there. Or just your plain old Catholic thing of wanting to return to God. Whatever name you put on it, there’s this longing to return to some sense of wholeness that you came from and that you’ll go back to someday. So my characters are longing for other worlds, places where they’ll be more complete.

This idea—wanting to be whole again—stayed with me as I read her new novel, The Next Full Moon. It’s a young adult book, carrying on the YA-lit tradition of outer transformation echoing the intense bodily transformation of the early teen years, but the hook here isn’t a makeover per se. Nearing her 13th birthday, our heroine, Ava, begins to sprout feathers, which of course are terrifically mortifying, and the book follows Ava from the feather-freakout stage to, well, transcendence, in every sense of the word. (I don’t want to give away the plot, but Carolyn’s turn of phrase from our interview “You fell from the stars and you want to return there” was a hint of foreshadowing.)

Just as teen makeover movies abound, YA makeover books aren’t exactly new. But what The Next Full Moon does is give us the essence of the makeover without the actual making over. The Grimm Brothers (and their many sources) gave us a handy template with Cinderella: Girl gets makeover, girl gets boy, sisters get eyes pecked out by birds. It was so handy that while plenty of feminist scholars have deconstructed Cinderella, we still keep going over the same old ground without asking for a new makeover tale. Turgeon takes the end goal of transcendence and creates a storyline around it in a way her fairy-tale precedessors never did. Just as Gregory Maguire’s Wicked took the underlying themes of imperialism and cultural autonomy already present in Wizard of Oz, The Next Full Moon takes what’s inherent in plenty of fairy tales—supernatural means of becoming our best selves—and distills it to its essence.

The story is original, but it stems from another set of fairy tales: Swan maiden myths have shown up in various forms throughout world folklore (they’ve earned their own spot on the Aarne-Thompson folk tale classification system), and in fact there’s another contemporary retelling that got some attention last year. The story that became Black Swan was originally set in the theater world but Darren Aronofsky specifically decided to place it in ballet, and I don’t think it’s just the good girl/bad girl theme that made Swan Lake a fitting choice of framework. In the film, Nina isn’t just encouraged to find her internal “black swan”; she’s encouraged to go above and beyond her mere technical talent to truly inhabit the role—to make it, and herself, whole. Both Black Swan and The Next Full Moon marry swan maiden myths to a chrysalis tale, each of our heroines emerging from transcendent experiences with a knowledge they didn’t possess before. They’re both changed by their experiences (as any good makeover should do, natch), but in each case they’re only discovering what is already there. I’d hardly recommend Black Swan as a metaphoric tale for teenagers on the cusp of young adulthood (I think the film works best as a horror flick, actually), but the ease with which The Next Full Moon presents the essence of the makeover without the breathless pandering of shoddier makeover moments makes me wonder why we haven’t seen more inventive YA retellings of transcendence. (The answer, of course, is that Miss Turgeon is a visionary, but that’s beside the point.)

Straight-up makeover tales aren’t going anywhere, nor do they need to. I just want us to keep our eye on the prize here: The goal is not to change, the goal is to reveal. And makeovers don’t actually make us transcend, of course. That’s part of why we both love makeovers and fear them—what if we look in the mirror and we look different but are still the same? A makeover doesn’t make us complete. But given that most of us aren’t secretly swan maidens, fairies, mermaids, or even werewolves, the makeover is the closest thing we’ve got. It’s an immediate, albeit brief, stand-in for the longer, harder work of transcendence, which often requires such unglamorous tasks like study, or meditation, or spiritual communion, or plain old age. And when you’re 13, everything feels so urgent—you’re in a hurry to grow up and transcend this damned acne-ridden, retainer-bound form. Makeovers are a fine shortcut. But we need to remember what they're a shortcut to.

Thoughts on a Word: Glamour (Part II)

I’ve had my chance to expound on glamour (which, of course, I did from my chaise longue with a Manhattan in hand while my protégé took dictation), but the concept of glamour is intriguing enough to warrant a revisiting—not from me, but from four women who each have their own distinct relationship with glamour. I’m delighted that each of them—author Virginia Postrel, publicist Lauren Cerand, artist Lisa Ferber, and novelist Carolyn Turgeon—took the time and effort to share their thoughts on glamour with me. And now, with you.

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Virginia Postrel, author, columnist, and speaker who is currently writing a book about glamour, to be published by The Free Press in early 2013. She explores "the magic of glamour in its many manifestations" at DeepGlamour.net, a group blog.

Like humor, glamour arises from the interaction of an audience and an object. Someone or something is always glamorous to a specific audience. So there has to be something about the glamorous object that triggers and focuses the audience's desires—that makes them project themselves into the glamorous image and feel themselves somehow transformed. But those qualities are different in different contexts, and they may not even be things that are widely recognized as "glamorous."

A good way to understand glamour is to start not with fashion or people but with the glamour of travel. Think of classic travel posters and contemporary resort ads, with their images of exotic locales, peaceful beaches, or seemingly effortless transportation. What makes an image of the New York skyline, a cruise ship against the blue Mediterranean, or Ankgor Wat at dawn so alluring? Why does the sight of a jet rising against a sunset or full moon seem so glamorous?

The glamour of travel lies first in its promise to lift us out of our everyday existence. We project ourselves into this new and special place, imagining that there we will fulfill our unsatisfied longings—whatever they may be. Just getting away doesn’t make travel glamorous, however. Going every year to your family’s cabin on Lake Michigan may be fun, but it’s too familiar for glamour. A glamorous destination is at least a little bit exotic. It shimmers with the possibilities of the unknown. Its mystery not only stokes imagination. It also heightens the good and hides the bad (or the banal, like all the other tourists congregating to snap Angkor Wat at dawn). As the great studio-era photographer George Hurrell put it: “Bring out the best, conceal the worst, and leave something to the imagination.”

The glamour of travel illustrates the three elements found in all forms of glamour: mystery, grace, and the promise of escape and transformation. These elements explain why certain styles or codes seem to spell “glamour.”

Take fashion. If glamour by definition requires elements of mystery and aspiration—escape from the ordinary—then the clothes you wear or see on the street every day are not going to be glamorous. Hence we often associate glamour with the kinds of extraordinary evening wear that few people can afford and even fewer have any occasion to wear. But, depending on the audience, other forms of fashion can be glamorous. Vintage styles that represent some idealized period in the past are an obvious example. So are sneakers associated with great athletes. Even something as mundane as a business suit can be glamorous if it represents a career you aspire to but have not (yet) achieved.

The "codes of glamour" change with the audience and the times. The iconography of glamour in 1930s Hollywood films—bias-cut satin gowns, "big white sets," lots of glitter and shine—is quite different from Grace Kelly in the New Look, sweater sets, and pearls. Yet we think of both as classically glamorous.

Like humor, glamour sometimes emerges spontaneously and sometimes is actively constructed. Some things tend to stay glamorous, or funny, over time. Others cease to have the right effect. Mink coats used to be a quick way of signaling a kind of glamour. I'd argue that they've been replaced with another cliche: the hot stone massage photos you see everywhere. The massage photos also show indulgent feminine luxury, but they appeal to different longings—not so much for social status as for pampering and relaxation, a private experience rather than a social good. Similarly, I write about how wind turbines have become glamorous symbols of technological optimism, in the same way that rocket ships were in the 1950s and early '60s.

Finally, some things are glamorous without being widely recognized as such. The bridge of the Starship Enterprise is intensely glamorous to a certain audience. It elicits the same kind of projection and longing that other people feel when they think of Paris or haute couture, and it also shares the three essential elements of glamour.

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Lauren Cerand, independent public relations consultant. She shares notes on living at LuxLotus.com.

Glamour is the word, pertaining to me, that I hear most often from other people, and, in truth, the word I think of least on my own (conceptually, I gravitate toward things that are elegant, or correct, or comfortingly archaic, and, most importantly, eschew embellishment of any kind. I'm a minimalist with opulent taste). That makes sense, though, if, to quote Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, whom I heard read her poem "Glamourie" in Edinburgh years ago, "glamour is a Gaelic word," intended to mean a sort of enchanting trickery, "fairy magic" cast down over the eyes of the unsuspecting (sophistication also had similar implications, of a gloss for the purposes of deceptive artifice, in its early usage, according to Faye Hammill's wonderful cultural study, Sophistication, on University of Liverpool Press). Glamour certainly seems to play out that way, as a quality of perception more than direct experience. I don't think then, that I could regard myself as glamorous. I simply make a living from having a semi-public life and the fact that people admire my personal taste enough to emulate it. While I never stretch the truth, as lying takes too much time and I am always short of it, I am a private person at heart and so I can see the tantalizingly faint trail of breadcrumbs that I leave behind, twinkling in starlight, inspiring one to imagine the cake from which they must have fallen. Perhaps now and then it really was that grand. It could be our secret, but I'd never tell.

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Lisa Ferber, artist, playwright, performer, and bonne vivante. Peruse her works at LisaFerber.com, and keep an eye out for her upcoming web series, The Sisters Plotz.

The funny thing about glamour is that an exact definition of the word is as elusive as the quality itself. The quality is like a special fairy dust that makes a person sparkle; you can’t put your finger on precisely what it is. I think it has to start from within. When I see today’s teenage starlets trying to pull off 1940s Old Movie Star Glamour, I just think, Um, no, you can’t just do a deep side-part and red lipstick and think now you’re Ava Gardner. But there’s this woman who works the bread counter at Zabar’s who I admire because there she is in her white bread-counter smock, but she’s probably in her 60s and always has a full face of makeup on, and sparkly barrettes in her nicely done hair, and she’s gorgeous and all dressed up to work the bread counter. Whenever I see her I have to repress blurting out, “You are my hero! You look like a movie star!”

It absolutely cannot be purchased, but I do think there is an aspect of formality involved. Glamour always involves looking pulled together. Even if the look is over-the-top, it has to come across as though there was care taken. That's part of the mystique. Glamour implies that everything you meant to do is coming across just as you want it to. It’s hard to be glamorous in a track suit, but if you really want to do it that way, you can go over the top with heels and baubles and make it eccentric, because eccentricity done right can exude glamour. I think the best glamour will teeter on eccentricity, because it’s about going just a little bit too far. All the photos I love from early 20th century photographers like Horst and Irving Penn are about going too far…giant hats, luxurious gowns...clothes that serve no practical purpose, and therein lies their glamour. Because glamour is about transcending the everyday.

When people have called me glamorous, it thrills me, because I have always felt a kinship with those old-school 1930s and 1940s women. People have always told me that I seem like I’m from another time, which I think is funny because it’s not really something I’m trying to do; it’s just how I am. I’ve painted from photos of Carole Lombard, Liz Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Jean Harlow…all of them have that Something, where it would be impossible to imagine them ever looking disheveled or weighed down by life’s woes, though of course we know they were real women with all the problems people have.

Recently I shot the first episode of my new web series, The Sisters Plotz. I wrote it, and it stars TV icons Eve Plumb, Lisa Hammer, and me (Hammer also directs). Eve, Lisa, and I were shooting a street scene in which we are dressed like glamour girls from the 1930s, and everyone we passed on the street would smile at us and tell us how great we looked. And it wasn't just because we looked "good" or were dressed up; it's because glamour, particularly the old-school, dedicated, womanly glamour of the 1930s, has an effect on people. It says just check your troubles at the door and be your glorious self. Glamour is transportive in that sense. I think glamour means a person has a quality of being slightly outside—dare I say above?—the normal realm of boring problems. A few years ago, I was going through a tough time, and my wonderful friend Chris Etcheverry gave me this gorgeous green-tiled art-deco mirror, and he said, “I know things are hard for you right now, and you might not feel your best, so whenever you aren’t feeling so good, I want you to look in this mirror and remind yourself that you are glamorous.” And I knew what he meant is that I have something inside, that glamour is a strength from the inside that allows you to transcend life’s unpleasantries.

Glamour is a quality that makes someone look and seem Famous; it’s intriguing, it is the quality that makes people wonder who you are, and what your secret is. A person finds their own glamour—it’s not about being an 8-year-old wearing expensive clothes, rather it’s about developing yourself so that you’re a person with a Something. I was watching a biography on the fantastic Gertrude Berg, the entertainment pioneer who created The Goldbergs, and her son was saying that she always dressed a certain way and had a quality about her, where people would see her and even if they didn’t know who she was, they could tell she was somebody. That’s glamour.

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Carolyn Turgeon, author of Rain Village, Godmother, Mermaid, and The Next Full Moon, coming out in March. She blogs at IAmaMermaid.com about all things mermaid.

With glamour, I see images. I see red lipstick, I see arched brows. I see Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Greta Garbo. I see sitting in a satin bed with bonbons. I see glittery, shiny things, I see everything in black-and-white, old-timey, leopard print. Glamour takes what’s beautiful and chic and makes it over-the-top. The first time I went to Dollywood—I love Dolly Parton—I went to the museum, and it’s full of all her crazy rhinestone-crusted paraphernalia. There’s this quote there where she says that she knows people might think she’s ridiculous and laugh at her, but she was this girl from the mountains who grew up running around barefoot, so to her, this is beautiful. The rhinestones and the glitter. She doesn’t care if some people think it’s ridiculous. She’s like a little girl playing dress-up, reveling in the artifice of it. Glamour can be a little like that, a way to add fabulousness and fantasy and a little over-the-top shimmer to your regular life.

Glamorous doesn’t have to be beautiful. In terms of female beauty, you can take a natural-looking girl without makeup on the beach and she might be really beautiful, but not glamorous. Glamour is, by definition, unnatural; it's about adornment and style; it’s about knowingly adorning yourself in a way that hearkens back to certain images that are cool and dreamy, otherworldly. Not everyone can be beautiful, but anyone can be glamorous, because it's something you can actually do. I like that any woman can put on really red lips, get an old travel valise and a little muff, and wear sunglasses on top of her head. (Of course men can do all these things, too, and become, among other things, that most glamorous of creatures, the drag queen.) It doesn’t matter how old she is, what color she is, whether she's rich or poor, big or small. It's the woman standing in shadow in the doorway, Marilyn standing over the subway grate, Garbo emerging from the smoke in Anna Karenina.

First Dance

Early in the summer of 1987, my next-door neighbors had a garage sale, and among the goods was a square-dance-style turquoise dress with silver rickrack. Those of you who have ever doubted me when I insist I don’t have a natural eye for style will surely become believers when I tell you that I thought it was the most beautiful dress I had ever seen, and that it looked something like the dress on the left—

—except it was double-breasted, and with more silver, more rickrack, buttons, pockets, and a clasp belt, and was worn not by a sylphlike blonde from a vintage pattern illustration but by a pudgy 12-year-old in Aberdeen, South Dakota, whose most adult fashion choice until that point had been to remove the star sticker from her Sally Jessy Raphael glasses. It was a wonderful dress for a hootenanny, and thoroughly inappropriate for any other occasion whatsoever.

My attitude toward my wardrobe was more advanced than my style, and I knew that I might be able to cadge the $10 from my parents to buy it—but that doing so would weaken my hand when it came to buying the Guess sweatshirt I’d been pining for, so I stayed silent. But as with the Alamo, I remembered. I remembered.

Later that summer, I enrolled in a weeklong camp. Going to camp was one of my biggest dreams ever since reading about it in any one of the YA novels that were set on the east coast, where, in YA we-need-a-setting-that-allows-for-personal-growth-and-minimal-adult-oversight-without-parents-appearing-neglectful world, everyone goes to camp. Nobody in South Dakota went to camp (unless it was 4-H camp), but there was a lot of attention being given to the perilous position of “gifted kids” at that time, so they rounded up all the Stanford-Binet changelings in the state whose parents could afford a couple hundred bucks for tuition and threw us onto a college campus for a week. “Camp,” in fact, might be a misnomer, implying that at some point we’d go fly-fishing and make God’s-eyes with yarn and popsicle sticks. Let’s instead call this a conference of seventh-graders who enjoyed logic puzzles, shall we?

I received the agenda for the conference, and somewhere among seminars on Future Problem Solving and South Dakota Literature, I saw the magic words: FRIDAY NIGHT: DANCE. I’d never been to a dance before—this was the summer before I started junior high, so definitively boy-girl entertainment hadn’t yet entered my social calendar. But of course I knew all about them. Pretty in Pink! Sixteen Candles! Footloose! Carrie! More important, I knew what a dance meant. A dance was redemption for the dorky girl; a dance was where she would step foot into the gymnasium and all eyes would be on her. At the dance, the popular boys would realize she’s the one they should be courting, not the rich girls who have as many Guess sweatshirts as they want; the rich girls, of course, would recognize the dorky girl as someone they should be inviting into their select clique (but will the dorky girl have them? the dramatic tension!). Forget that nobody was really dating yet, and forget that while I wasn’t the most popular girl in school, neither was I picked on; forget that there wasn’t yet anything in my life that needed me to redeem it by setting foot into the gymnasium and taking everyone’s breath away. I wanted the dance, I wanted the moment, I wanted the validation. The makeover was an essential part of the dance plot in teen movies—but just as important was the dress. And you’d better believe I knew exactly which dress it would be. Fate had even sealed the deal: The theme of the dance was “Western,” and what could possibly be more western and simultaneously becoming than a double-breasted turquoise square dance dress with silver rickrack? Exactly.

The garage sale had taken place weeks earlier, but I went over to my neighbor’s house to inquire as to the whereabouts of the dress. I was briefly crushed when she told me that the dress was actually her sister’s contribution to the garage sale, and that when it didn’t sell her sister took it back with her, to her home a four-hour drive away in Vermillion, South Dakota. But wait! Vermillion, South Dakota, was the exact site of the conference of seventh-grade logicians! With the inimitable pluck of a 12-year-old girl whose experience with sexual metamorphosis extended no further than a bevy of 1980s prom movies, I asked her if her sister would be so kind as to hand-deliver the dress to the camp so that I could then be suited up for my grand record-scratch of an entrance. And with the bemused affability of a thirtysomething woman being asked to urge her sister to drive across town into a horde of prepubescent Odysseians of the Mind just so a girl could make an entrance, she agreed.

I wasn’t exactly sure how the handoff was going to happen—this was before cell phones and e-mail, so I just had to hope that all communication was a-go and that somehow my neighbor’s sister in Vermillion, South Dakota, would be able to find me on the university campus. On the third day of camp, the camp director was doing “mail call” during breakfast (who sends mail during a weeklong camp?), and then he held up the dress—my dress—and said, “And who does this pretty little number belong to?” Someone—I now presume one of the other teachers—let out a loud wolf whistle, and the entire camp burst into laughter.

This isn’t where I became embarrassed. No, I loved it. It was mildly embarrassing in the same way you’re embarrassed when someone gives you a lavish compliment: I loved the attention but felt a tad gaudy (never mind that I was picking up a double-breasted turquoise square dancing dress with silver rickrack). The wolf whistle sealed it for me: This dress was smokin’, and I knew it, and now thanks to the loudspeaker delivery, everyone knew it, and as I walked to the small stage where the camp director was to claim the dress, I knew that come FRIDAY NIGHT: DANCE I would own the University of South Dakota campus.

Now, I’m not fast-forwarding past the rest of the camp in order to keep focus on the story. I’m fast-forwarding past it because I have no recollection of it whatsoever, other than a handful of memories involving the single friend I managed to make there (who now lives in Sioux Falls and is evangelical about the gluten-free lifestyle, or so Facebook tells me). I was there for a week, and I do not recall a single class, seminar, or activity we did the entire time, except for a timed writing exercise based on that year’s theme, “South Dakota Pride,” which I scribbled fervently even as I felt vaguely embarrassed that I was supposed to be proud of this state that had exactly zero glamour to it. (We were all from South Dakota, of course, but to remind us of this fact and to make us write about our pride on the matter seemed an act of aggression.) I think I had a good time? I don’t know, honestly.

But I remember the dance. The dress actually fit me reasonably well, and my neighbor’s sister had even thought to include a pair of matching silver sandals so I wasn’t stuck wearing my sneakers. They were too small for me (I wore a size 8 by sixth grade) but I wore them anyway. My now-gluten-free friend had brought eyeshadow, and I’d brought a curling iron and hairspray, so I went over to her dorm room after putting on my dress so we could get ready together. (My own roommate, who was possibly even dorkier than I was and professed to have no interest in boys or dances whatsoever, chose not to attend. This was fine by me because I’d already run out of excuses to not walk with her to the cafeteria and therefore have to eat meals with her, not wanting her dorkiness latch onto my own and create a Velcro-like dork hold. It’s not like Gluten-Free or I were cool, but at least we both knew about boys.) I knew we weren’t supposed to show up exactly on time, because that would be Uncool, so we waited until the dance was barely underway and then made our way to the gymnasium.

The adult counselors had decorated the gym with crepe paper, and they’d turned down the lights, but not too low, because we were 12. None of this mattered, however, because nobody was there. Nearly everybody—boys and girls alike—was in the hallways and rooms surrounding the gymnasium, doing the various planned, adult-supervised activities that each of those spaces held. I couldn’t tell you what any of those activities were (rebus throwdowns?) because I was too busy being horrified. This was a dance! This is where it—it!—was supposed to happen! It’s not like I’d met any boys over the course of the camp I took any particular interest in, but I was at a dance, and there were boys in the vicinity, and I was bewildered that they weren’t suddenly lining up to give all the girls punch from a punch bowl as a prelude to extending their hands as “Is This Love” by Whitesnake played in the background. No—they were doing, I don’t know, word games, and so were the girls, and I’d just had enough. I liked word games just fine. I’d spent my whole life doing word games, and rebuses, and logic puzzles, and making crosswords, and writing scripts—I liked doing those things so much that I’d gone to gifted camp. But this was the night that all those word games and rebuses and logic puzzles were to be transcended. This was the FRIDAY NIGHT: DANCE, and I was in my turquoise dress and borrowed silver sandals. I was ready. And nobody cared.

So I cried. I didn’t cry at the dance; I held it in with as much dignity as I could muster and made a beeline to the bathroom, where I entered a stall, sat on the toilet, and cried. I wasn’t crying because I didn’t feel pretty, not exactly; I was crying because I felt foolish for having thought that a turquoise dress and a curling iron would be enough to make me pretty, and for having such a specific result in mind, one I’d learned in a flash wasn’t going to happen. I cried because I knew I was smart—every girl in that gymnasium knew she was smart, that’s why we were there—but I didn’t know if I would ever be pretty. I cried because I saw that what I’d heard all along—girls mature faster than boys—was true, and that I was going to have to wait before any of them wanted any of us. I cried because someone had whistled when everyone saw my dress, and nobody was going to whistle at me in it. I cried because this was my chance and I didn’t even have the opportunity to blow it. I cried for not having been more kind to my roommate, and I cried for crying about not having been more kind to her because I knew I didn’t deserve my own pity. I cried because I’d believed with all my being that once I put on eyeshadow and a turquoise dress, I’d turn into a heroine of any of the slumber-party movies I’d watched; I cried because that was the night I began to understand that the success of those movies depended upon girls like me thinking maybe that would happen to them. I cried because at that moment, in a gymnasium decorated with crepe paper so that the gifted kids could feel not just smart but glamorous, I began to understand that not everything would come easy to me, and that some forms of failure could be intangible, inexpressible, and nonetheless undeniable. I cried because I wanted to be seen, and because nobody was ready or willing to see me.

Eventually two other campers came into the bathroom and heard my sobs. After I insisted I was f-i-i-i-i-i-ne, they called in one of the adult counselors. I don’t remember what she told me; I just remember that she was blonde and pretty, and that seemed comforting somehow. She walked outside with me while I decided whether I wanted to go back to the dance. I did, so she led me there, but once inside I lost all enthusiasm for it. My friend the gluten-free enthusiast found me and said she wanted to leave. Together, we did. The next day, we all went home.

I’d go to camp again the next year. Not gifted camp, but 4-H camp, where I had a certain amount of social cache because I was secretary of a rather important 4-H club (our “den mother” had been named Dairy Woman of the Year). By then I had contact lenses, reasonable proficiency with eyeliner, and a knack for detecting whether a boy liked me. I got my first kiss at that camp. It was where I got my first inkling that with a bit of skill, a few omissions, and an artfully placed laugh, the girl in the turquoise dress wouldn’t be the first thing everyone saw when they looked at me. It was where I learned that getting what you want—a boy telling you he likes you—could bring worries of its own. It was where I found that the magic happens not at the dance, but outside of it, as you hear people chanting to "Mony Mony" while you look into the eyes of someone who, at that moment, can see only you.

I returned to my room, aloft, and told my roommate in great detail exactly what had happened. And I understood when, in the middle of the night, I heard her muffled tears.

Invited Post from Alexa of Blossoming Badass: My Generation

Alexa and I decided who gets to play Pete Townshend by consensus vote. We are, after all, feminists. 

When I wrote about Generation X and how the grunge ethos gave women my age a bit of a reprieve from an uncompromising beauty standard, I was attempting to compare my experience with that of today's teenagers. But after I wrote the post, I realized something major was missing: a teenager. Enter Alexa, a writer I first noticed when she posted at feminist blog The F Bomb, musing on the word pretty, thus laying an irresistible trail of bread crumbs for me to more of her work. Her blog, Blossoming Badass, is a collection of feminist observations and insights ranging from the sociological to the political to the grammatical to the personal. (And did I mention she has impeccable taste in her reading material?) I wanted to know what she, as a teenager, writer, and feminist, thought about her generation's beauty ethos, especially in comparison with what I observed about mine. I'm honored to have Alexa guest post at The Beheld, and would love to know what you—whether you're a baby boomer, GenXer, GenYer, or something else entirely—think about your own generational response to beauty norms.

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I was thrilled when Autumn asked me to write a response to her post on the beauty norms of Gen X teens from someone who’s a teenager today. And as her post begins with Nirvana, so does mine.

My friend Abby and I are on a sports team together, resulting in a minimum of ninety minutes of school bus rides together a day for over two months. This resulted in copious conversation about essentially everything. As we noticed that our conversations became increasingly confessional as it got darker out, they were dubbed Bus Rides of Truth.

One of these bus rides was about different people and time periods we identified with. Abby’s time periods were the ’60s and the ’90s. I too had a penchant for the ’60s, so we spoke yearningly of Woodstock (her) and the 1969 Miss America Pageant (me), of Janis Joplin (her) and Gloria Steinem (me again). But I didn’t really feel anything about the ’90s. What explained her fondness for the decade we were born? I wondered. Her answer was concise: “Kurt Cobain.”

Abby loves ’90s grunge rock, as well as the whole mentality and style Autumn wrote of as “low-key, a tad sloppy, free-flowing.” Some aspects of ’90s style are still present. Flannel shirts, for example, are still very popular in our high school, but don’t have the same carefree connotation; they’re paired with leggings and Ugg boots, and are left wide open with a tight tank top underneath. Yet no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t correlate the trends of my generation’s attitude toward life with our attitudes toward beauty. I solicited friends and asked them for ideas, but it just wasn’t happening. Everyone had something different to say. Then I realized that was exactly the point.

My generation has our differences branded as diversity. We pride ourselves on individualism. A recent, excellent New York magazine article, entitled “The Kids Are Actually Sort of Alright,” described the generation of recent college graduates, not much older than me, as “delayed, afraid, immature, independent, fame and glory hungry, (ambitious?), weirdly apathetic when it comes to things outside of the internet,” and even, simply, “self-absorbed delusionals.” Although not flattering, I agree. It’s intrinsically human to want to know that you’re different and you’re special. However, in my generation, it’s more of a need than a desire. This has had awesome benefits for us in terms of clothes and beauty as much as everything else. There are trends, but they’re more liberal, in my experience; there isn’t one blanket trend for the entirety of my generation. (There tends to be in middle school, though not by high school—but that’s another story.) In my opinion, the biggest trend in clothes tends to be their tightness. Those oversized blazers of the ’90s are long-forgotten.

However, this more individualized approach to appearances has led to far different problems, demonstrated with the small sample of girls that I asked, “What pressures do you as an individual feel in terms of your appearance? Regarding weight, makeup, skin, clothes, whatever.”

One classmate, noted for her fondness of clothes and fashion, wrote, “okay so here's my HONEST opinion, albeit an unpopular one. Wanting to look good or be something that is—in your opinion—better is a good thing. If a person wants to change by losing weight, or dressing nicely, or whatever, it doesn't have to be because of the pressure of wanting to fit in… I don't know how it is for everyone else, but I don't look good to please other people, I do it for myself.” This confidence is what the Second Wave feminists so wonderously hoped for one day. Yet a friend from camp remarked, “Personally, as terrible as it may sound, I feel pressure in school to look different and controversial…I feel the pressure to not conform, which I suppose is in itself a form of conforming.” This translates straight to my generation as a whole. And then a teammate provided, “I've had friends who don't think I wear enough make-up (I only wear cover-up), friends who don’t like the way I dress, and friends who don’t even like the way I wear my hair. So, in my opinion there is a lot of pressure from both girls AND guys to look a certain way. I've had guys tell me I’m fat, or that my boobs are too big, or that I need to wear sexier clothing. Personally, I don’t care terrribly much, so I just tell them to fuck off, but I've felt the pressure to change myself for better or for worse.”

So as I sit here, listening to the Nirvana MTV Unplugged CD I borrowed from Abby, what conclusion could I draw? These girls had utterly different views on how this generation influenced how they felt about their bodies and fashion. Still, I identified completely with all of them. While the pressure to brand ourselves through our clothes and overall look might be greater than it was for previous generations, that didn’t seem quite satisfactory. And then I realized another reason I’d had difficulty summing up my generation’s attitudes toward beauty: I can’t diagnose a generation still in formation. Maybe that seems like a cop-out, but the 16-year-olds of 1991 weren’t able to identify themselves as disillusioned in the midst of their genesis. Like they were, we’re all still in the throes of it, straightening our hair or deliberately not, wondering whether to button up our flannel shirts.

Yet there’s one thing we’ve got going for us that can only serve us well: All of our sharing of feelings and expounding of individuality has led to a far larger discourse about how we feel about our bodies and deal with appearances when compared with our predecessors. An aspect of Gen X fashion was most definitely a forced not caring, but our culture didn’t yet have a ready vocabulary for Generation X teens to discuss that feigned nonchalance with one another. My generation has the benefit of that vocabulary, and from that spring things like Abby’s and my Bus Rides of Truth. There’s commiseration between girls, both silent and not. We can all see how hard everyone is trying to look like they’re not; it’s a topic that’s spoken about. For now, it’s only being spoken about; for it to actually impact the amount of effort we spend on ourselves, we’ll need to keep the conversation going. If we can make that happen, I think that in twenty years, we might be able to find the positivity in our generation’s mentality as well.

Evolutionary Psychology, Aging, Beauty, and the Baby Dreams

When I was 19, I started having recurring baby dreams. The typical plot was something like this: I’d be at an important event and would look in my purse, finding a thumb-sized baby. I’d close the purse and then feel guilty about doing so, and would open up the purse and I’d realize I’d lost the baby the way you might lose a pack of chewing gum. Sometimes the baby would reemerge at my feet, throwing tiny knives at my ankles, but more often than not I’d just have lost the baby.

It makes sense that my body might have been sending me some primordial signals around that time: At 19, I was at the dawn of my most fertile years, and indeed the dreams continued for a couple of years, dwindling around 21. But let’s also pay attention to the content of those dreams: The tiny babies found their way into my possession through no will of my own, and then they kept getting lost, and occasionally attempted to harm me. Which is to say: My body may have been wanting to play house, but the rest of me in no way wanted a child.

This struggle between biological destiny and human will illustrates one of the greater flaws of evolutionary psychology as applied to beauty. The idea behind the evo-psych line of thinking is that we apply cosmetics to highlight or mimic the traits a woman has at her most fertile: We use skin creams to appear youthful, blush to capture the “rosy glow” of youth, and so on. And as I’ve said before, I don’t entirely discount evolutionary psychology. But it’s only one part of the beauty equation. Human will is a crucial element of what we find attractive; the ability to go beyond the basics of what’s required for our species’ survival is part of what makes us human. (Do we truly think that we as a species can invent karaoke but are limited to having sexual impulses toward people who look like they’re 19?) The reason anyone lusted after Mrs. Robinson wasn’t that she looked 19; it was that she didn’t.

There’s a picture somewhere out there of me at age 20, getting ready to go out with a bunch of friends. One of us was wearing a high-low combination of a sequined dress and flat leather sandals. I was wearing a velour T-shirt, velvet heels, and hot pants over black control top pantyhose, and only in looking at the photo did I realize that the “control top” was below the hem of the shorts. My friend who looked classiest of all of us—truly—was wearing jeans and a bra with an open white button-down tied between her breasts, exposing her midriff. When I looked at the picture only a few years later, I couldn’t believe how ridiculous we looked: We were all reasonably good-looking girls, and we had no clue how to act sexy. Whatever sexiness we had came from being 20 and daring and able to stay up all night with no consequence and just being young and in love with independence, life, ourselves, each other. Our appeal didn’t come from culture or comportment, and it certainly didn’t come from styling.

Today, I’m still not the most cultured creature alive, and the only reason anyone would think I have style is because I’ve learned how to fake it on occasion. But it took me years to learn that: How to figure out not only what pieces emphasized my best features, but what my best features even were. How to maximize my beauty labor to get the most bang for the buck. How to find a balance between Clothes That Are "Flattering" and Clothes That I Can Breathe In; how to detect when a situation is worth your effort, and when it isn’t. Part of this was becoming more skilled in artifice—including the sort of artifice that makes us seem younger, livelier, and, yes, more fertile. (And certainly there are plenty of young women who know how to present themselves well—I don't mean to imply that people under a certain age are bedraggled kittens.) But also allow me to mention the obvious: Like most people, I am more cultured, more informed, less self-absorbed, more seasoned, and a better conversationalist than I was when my fertility was at its peak—and therefore, by evo-psych standards, when I was most attractive. All of these things come together to make me more attractive than I was back then, and today when I see my college friends, I see this truth multiplied. I am more attractive at 35 than I was at 20 not because I’m mimicking youth, but because I’ve grown into myself in a way I couldn’t have in that youth.

I’m not denying that there’s a unique, intangible charm to women—and men—at 20. I see the dewiness, I see the zest, I see the shiny enthusiasm that seems to come naturally, and there’s no doubt it’s attractive. And as I write this, I can feel that my facial skin is no longer as soft as it was 10 years ago. I see stretch marks that weren’t there before, and not long ago I was vexed by a stray hair laying across my forehead that wouldn’t budge—only to find that it was a wrinkle. Cynics might tell me I am writing this post mainly to feel better about myself—and hell, maybe they’re right.

Yet when I look at that photo of myself, beaming but trembling in velvet high heels and a pair of hot pants, I am so relieved not to be her anymore. I wasn’t unhappy at 20, or unattractive. There’s an attractiveness I had then that I’ll never have again. And there’s an attractiveness I have now that I definitely didn’t have then. Evo-psych still has a role here too, I think: Consider the instinctual repulsion we feel when we see an older person who takes drastic measure to look young. I’m not talking skin cream; I’m talking injectables and rearranging—the sort of thing that makes us ridicule older women for trying to look young. From a feminist standpoint, we can say we recoil from that look because women are damned if we do, damned if we don’t. But knowing the shudder I personally feel when I’m on certain stretches of the Upper East Side, I think it’s more because that rejection of the natural order of things—preserving youth at all costs—feels far more unnatural to me than the God-given attractiveness of a woman past her childbearing years who has aged, as they say, gracefully.

When I turned 30, I wrote a letter to a friend of mine who was in her late 40s. I told her of my excitement for the upcoming decade: I’d left a bad relationship, was excelling at my job, had a tight circle of friends, and looked better than I ever had. I was more verbose than that, but the point was, Man, my thirties are going to be the best. Which made her response, presented here in its entirety, all the more delicious: “Happy birthday! Thirties are good...forties are even better. You’ll see.”

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This post is a part of the monthly Feminist Fashion Bloggers roundup. This month’s prompt: youth and aging. To read other FFB posts on the prompt, click here.

Thoughts on a Word: Cute

Cute is for sunny blondes, shiny brunettes, pert redheads, and anyone under the age of 10. Cute is for girls, boys, shoes, and guys—but when was the last time you heard the term “cute woman”? Cute is for kittens and puppies, wobbling toddlers, and bunnies with pancakes atop the head. Cute doesn’t have to be pretty, beautiful, or lovely, and cute just might not be sexy at all. Cute can overload. Cute can be for the mumbling teenage boy about the girl he’s pining for; cute can be uttered about a friend’s boyfriend without seeming improper. Cute can dismiss, make irrelevant, declaw. Cute is upbeat; cute minimizes the speaker’s risk. Cute hedges your bets.

Cute began as a shortened form of acute, meaning a sharp, quick intelligence or cleverness. In the 1830s, it became slang for pretty in the American South—specifically a diminutive prettiness, retaining the piquant playfulness implied in the word’s original meaning. As late as the 1890s cute still meant clever in the north, as well as the British Isles, where it became slang for pretty only in the mid-20th century. But cute worked its way north quickly enough for The Nation to decry its overuse in 1909: “The reviewer will also ever pray in the interest of the English language...that the word ‘cute’ be banished from the pages of serious literature,” and Emily Post followed suit in 1927, calling cute “provincial.”

The Great Depression brought a backlash against not the slang of cute, but the concept itself. “In this changing world, the ‘sweet girl’ and the ‘cute girl’ belong to the past,” read ads for a 1935 mail-order “charm test” from actress turned charm expert Margery Wilson. It wasn’t just a sales pitch: Leading ladies like Jean Harlow, Barbara Stanwyck, and Bette Davis were bringing an adult sensibility to the screen that 1920s cutie-pies like Clara Bow and Lillian Gish couldn’t. The “cute girl” wasn’t necessarily going to help out the economy either; as with today’s recession, men’s jobs in the Depression were hit disproportionately, leading more families to depend upon women’s wages than ever before. “The women know that life must go on and that the needs of life must be met,” said Eleanor Roosevelt in her 1933 book, It’s Up to the Women. “It is their courage and determination which, time and again, have pulled us through worse crises than the present one.” Cuteness wasn’t an asset; the steely strength of Harlow-style glamour was to pull the nation through. 

With economic recovery returned a longing for the cute girl: In 1944, the same year that U.S. unemployment hit its lowest-ever mark of 1.2%, scripts for radio show Meet Corliss Archer saw quips like “Trade you all the Lamours and Lamarrs in the world...for a cute girl who can wear gingham and isn’t afraid to giggle. Glamour’s too rich for my blood.” The 1950s embraced cute, bringing ever-more appendages to the word: A woman might be a “cute thing,” “a cute trick,” “a cute dish,” “a cute number,” “a cute little piece,” “a cute chick,” “a cute doll,” or “a cute little bug” (of course, the latter is Robert Heinlein describing a parasitic invader from outer space, but he’d also called said bug a brunette, so I think it’s fair use here). By the 1960s, cute was in opposition not just to glamour but to sex itself. “The ‘cute girl’ is viewed as the friendly, ‘all-American girl’... She is vivacious, attractive, and, above all, not overly interested in the leverage one can obtain over boys through the judicious allocation of her affections” (American Journal of Sociology, 1967). Or, more bluntly: “Both our male and female informants define a ‘cute’ girl as a person who exudes a certain kind of sexual attractiveness but who does not demonstrate her sexual superiority in intercourse” (Studies in Adolescence, 1969).

The desexualization of cute makes it particularly useful in certain instances. It’s one of the few terms of appearance we freely apply to both sexes. We also use it for children, animals, and the elderly—the latter of whom are undoubtedly not thrilled to be in the company of the former two. In fact, many a cute person well within the childbearing years may be vexed by cute. “I have remained cute for far too long, and that is not bragging,” writes wide-eyed, freckled Heidi Schatz. “By golly, I will try on lingerie until I no longer laugh when I see myself in the mirror.” The teenage male protagonist of Judy Blume's best-known book for boys, Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, weighs in after his objet du désir calls him cute: “Why do girls always say cute? That’s such a dumb word. It makes me think of rabbits.” In fact, when used by girls about boys, it’s that very harmlessness that makes it an appealing word, for the same reason the wholly unthreatening Justin Bieber went platinum. What 12-year-old girl wants the Handsome Young Men’s Association when you can have the Cute Guy Club?

Why yes, that is Sugar Ray.

The diminutive application of cute can make it a weapon: A person labeled as cute may be seen as unserious or childlike, in addition to desexualized. But that’s also what makes it safe. Cute as a weaker term for attractive allows for some reserve: A noncommittal teenage boy might say it about a girl without appearing foolish; adults might use it as a disclaimer (“He’s cute, but...”). Because cute isn’t a threat, we can sprinkle it liberally throughout our conversations without seeming to make a pronounced statement. Cute shoes, cute dress, we tell strangers. Cute haircut, we may say to friends, regardless of how flattering the trim actually is. We can use cute for ourselves without seeming arrogant. I’ve heard friends say “I look cute” about themselves far more freely than they’d use pretty or beautiful, and even though cute isn’t a word I often hear from others about myself (is it the alto voice?), saying I’m cute feels like far less of a risk than saying I’m pretty. It’s a softened form of acknowledging general attractiveness—ours or someone else’s—without making judgments about God-given features. 

Cute, I suspect, is a word whose likability decreases in direct proportion to how often you’ve heard it applied to yourself—the liveliness connoted by cute may be refreshing to the speaker, and tired old news to the wide-eyed, apple-cheeked lass who’s heard it for the twelfth time that day. On the rare occasion I’m called cute, it pleases me in the way that being called charming does: I take it as a statement of the moment, that for whatever reason the other person sees me as cute because I’m doing something uncharacteristically naive. I don’t internalize it as an indicator of my womanhood or sex appeal—a luxury I’ve been given because, as I lack the stereotypical hallmarks of “cute,” I’ve never had it used to undermine me. Yet I remember my petite redheaded pixie-faced college roommate publicly cursing cute, and as her cheeks got rosier and her pitch got higher in complaint I caught myself (to my shame) replaying that ever-undermining phrase in my mind: Gee, you’re cute when you’re mad. A blue-eyed, curly-haired friend of mine makes a point of showing cleavage as a rebellion against the years she was swaddled in 1970s high-necked doll-style clothes that emphasized her childhood cuteness, and there’s even an entire Facebook group devoted to those who Hate Being Called Cute. But the most poetic rebellion against cute comes from turn-of-the-century scribe Wesley Stretch, who duly synthesized the complaints about the desexualization of cute:

Cute, right?


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For more Thoughts on a Word, click here.

Occupied: SlutWalk, Wall Street, and Who's Watching Whom

Notice anything?

About 60% of the people snapping photos at Occupy Wall Street were men, and about 64% of the protesters were men. At SlutWalk? Men comprised about 22% of the attendees—and 65% of the photographers.

Well, duh, nothing brings the boys (and their cameras) to the yard like hundreds of women marching in the name of slutdom, right? But I don't think the conclusion here is simply "boys will be boys" or something else along those lines. Let's look at the attendees of each group: There were somewhat more men than women at Occupy Wall Street, which wasn't surprising. In no way did I feel excluded from what was going on at Liberty Plaza, and certainly leftist action has become far more inclusive than it was when Stokely Carmichael remarked that "The only position for women in SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] is prone." But neither was I surprised when, during a recent discussion I had of Occupy Wall Street with a group of people evenly divided in sex, nearly all the men were actively involved down at Liberty Plaza—while all the women, despite having politics roughly similar to the men, kept saying, Don't we need to organize first? or, simply, Convince me. In fact, figuring out why a nongendered movement seemed gendered in some ways was one of my reasons for heading down to the protest. (I came to no conclusions, other than that I'd still like to see some direction within the movement—and that it's necessary, and potentially revolutionary, nonetheless.)

As for SlutWalk, obviously there were far more women than men there, which is to be expected since it's explicitly a feminist event. But the fact that even 22% of participants were men present was encouraging, and I'm going to give the male attendees the benefit of the doubt and assume they weren't just there to gawk at women: The photography gender skew may be explained in part because some men felt that the better way to participate was to document the event rather than try to claim that particular space as their own. (I remember my pro-choice father staying home from the March for Women's Lives in 2004—not because he didn't want to march with me, my best friend, my mother, my mother's best friend, and her daughter, but because transit was a zoo and someone needed to play chauffeur and cook. Dad, dinner was delicious.) More often than not I heard photographers of both sexes ask permission before photographing anything other than crowd shots, and I didn't hear anyone refuse. The air was one of enthusiastic consent, not exploitation. The message of SlutWalk, it would seem, was absorbed.

It should go without saying that I'm sympatico with SlutWalk's goals. But SlutWalk jarred me. The word, sure, the purposefully revealing garb many of the protesters were wearing, the abandon of bodies that I think was designed to be liberating but somehow didn't feel that way at all to me—I didn't get it. I didn't get it, and I wanted to, and I felt guilty for not being able to sign on to the most visible wave of feminist action in several years. I wanted to feel seized by solidarity the way I had in college when I marched in Take Back the Night—hell, when I organized Take Back the Night my sophomore year, so moved had I been in my first march by being surrounded by hundreds of people who were all essentially telling me that it wasn't my fault. I went to see if it was SlutWalk that was my problem, or me.

And when I saw all those men taking all those pictures of all those women, my resistance made sense. My short skirt is, indeed, not an invitation for harassment or assault. But it is an invitation to look at me. And I'm troubled that at a place where the goal was to send a message of bodily sovereignty, plenty were also sending invitations to be turned into an image—an image of someone else's choosing. And I know that part of the point of SlutWalk is that these "images" also talk and walk and breathe and feel and fuck willingly and happily and only when they want to, and I know that the more important point is that our bodily sovereignty must remain inviolate. I get that. But I have to question a movement that seems to draw a good part of its power from being looked at. I have to question a movement whose markers uncomfortably resemble objectification; I have to question a movement that, in attempting to steer the conversation about sexual assault away from women's bodies, invites the gaze right back onto them. I have to question a movement that—when compared with Occupy Wall Street, a nongendered movement aiming to start a dialogue about the uneven distribution of power in supposedly progressive societies—seemed like a show-and-tell of a demographic whose sexual agency has been marginalized, and who are paradoxically urging onlookers to examine the ways in which they have been disempowered by systemic sexism.

Perhaps this is generational: Perhaps the girl I was in the '90s would have happily been chanting "Yes means yes and no means no" at SlutWalk had I been in college today instead of 1995. Perhaps my resistance to SlutWalk and my mild bafflement at Occupy Wall Street stems from me not being young enough, or postmodern enough, or subversive enough. Perhaps my earnest South Dakota roots will show wherever I go. Perhaps, after all, I just don't get it. All I know is that as impassioned as the cries were from women at SlutWalk—whether they were wearing lingerie and the word "Slut" scrawled across their chests, or the jeans and hoodie they had on when they were raped—they were just as earnest as my sense of alienation while watching women reject rape culture while jumping headfirst into another culture that's intensely problematic for a lot of women. I want a dialogue about consent, and I want that dialogue to hold the concept of mutuality in a sacred light. And I am unwilling to siphon off my complicated feelings—our complicated feelings—about being looked at in order to make that happen.

_____________________

A word about methodology: I attended both SlutWalk NYC and Occupy Wall Street and spent a timed 20 minutes counting everyone I saw either actually snapping a photograph or actively videorecording the events. (I didn't count people who appeared to be there for professional purposes, nor people who simply had a camera in hand, as that would have been everyone. The revolution will be twitpic'd, it seems.) I then stood from an observant distance and from that vantage point tallied up the number of people I saw, dividing them by sex, following a 180-degree visual arc. This is not the most scientific of methods, but my numbers for Occupy Wall Street are close to those published this week in New York, so it seems to work well enough.

Beauty Blogosphere 9.30.11

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

(via Makezine)

From Head...
Totally rhombic: Math haircut!

But what about the log lady?: Portrait of Twin Peaks' Audrey Horne (née Sherilyn Fenn) done in cosmetics for the biweekly "Beauty Myth" feature in Toronto Standard, in which the newspaper commissions artists to do portraits using makeup as the medium.


...To Toe...
The littlest libertarians: The Hartford Courant profiles an unlikely champion to make a case for industry deregulation: fish pedicures.


...And Everything In Between: 
Pacifica discount: If you're still mourning the fact that you didn't win my August self-care giveaway, fret no more! Pacifica—a company I've loved for a while, both for their delightful lotions and transporting candles—is giving readers of The Beheld a special deal: Just use the code pacifica5r9 at checkout on www.pacificaperfume.com for 10% off any order. And you can get a taste of the other part of the giveaway, Beautiful You by Rosie Molinary, through her meditative blog. 

Pink think: Two interesting bits on the pinkification (word?) of breast cancer this week. First, an interview with "pinkwashing" activist Barbara Brenner, who takes on Avon's breast cancer research and questions not only its efficiency, but its possible hypocrisy. Second: New research indicates that heavily gendered breast cancer awareness ads might not be as effective as gender-neutral ads. When female study volunteers were shown pink-heavy ads with female faces, they rated their own personal risk as lower than volunteers who were shown non-pink ads with no photos of women. Obviously breast cancer is overwhelmingly a female disease, but I'm happy to see people looking at how pink kitsch might backfire. (Unless it means I have to give back my pink Kitchen-Aid "Cook for the Cure" mixer, which is adorbs.)

GenX beauty today: How GenXers are shaping the beauty industry—and indeed, fragmenting traditional markets on several levels. "Like baby boomers, [Allure editor Linda] Wells says, Gen-Xers have grown up not accepting the status quo. That can translate to wearing long hair even past a certain age, eschewing 'mom jeans' and participating in music, sports and other interests once reserved for 'younger women.'" Basically, we are still totally radical.

Digital beauty: L2, a think tank for digital innovation, rated beauty brands on their digital and social media savvy. Unsurprisingly, cool-girl club MAC tops the list—and with three other Estee Lauder brands not far behind, the brand is proving itself to be a digital leader. The report also shows that "digital IQ" correlates to heightened shareholder value.

Root for the little one: Procter & Gamble takes on a small soap company for trademark infringement. Willa, a soap company named for the 8-year-old daughter of an entrepreneur who created the suds after hearing her complaints of the "babyish" soap offerings available, is uncomfortably close to Wella, P&G's hair-care line that has nothing to do with soap, children, or the g.d. American way.

What's the buzz?: The making of a hot new brand in China: Burt's Bees.

Lighter shade of pale: Business-side look at skin-lightening creams, which make up 30% of the skin care market in China.

Ripoff down under: Australian retailers appear to be pocketing makeup profits; Aussie women are paying up to twice what U.S. women are for the same products, a disparity not explained away by duty taxes or currency differences.

Cosmopolitan's role in bulimia treatment: Bio of psychiatrist Chris Fairburn, who "discovered" bulimia after working with a patient who exhibited symptoms of anorexia but was curiously of normal weight. Fascinating bit of ED history: Because bulimics tend to be secretive, Fairburn couldn't find enough patients to allow his research to be comprehensive, so he rallied the editors of Cosmopolitan to write a short article about this "new eating pattern"--and got more than a thousand responses (most of whom thought they alone suffered from bingeing and purging), enough to begin treatment research.

Abercrombied: The "look policy" of Abercrombie & Fitch employees, and what that means for women with textured hair. (Thanks to re: thinking beauty for the link.)

"From where I come from, you holler at a girl": Nice look into what actually happens in the teen groups moderated by Men Can Stop Rape, beginning with a deconstruction of street harassment.

Fame game: Lady Gaga is suing Excite Worldwide for branding makeup under the Lady Gaga name. The buried lede: She did the same to a London sweets shop selling breast milk ice cream under the name Baby Gaga.

Hotel humanitarian: Two of my favorite things, flight attendants and travel shampoo, come together here with Karen Duffy's story on Nancy Rivard, a flight attendant who started Airline Ambassadors after persuading her colleagues to donate their tiny hoarded hotel bottles to refugee camps.

 Cynthia!

Gaba girl: Thanks to Autodespair for turning me on to Lester Gaba's Cynthia, the first "realistic mannequin," who had her own radio show in the 1930s. It seemed pretty awesome à la Ruby until I actually saw Cynthia, and now it seems more like Real Doll territory, but maybe that's just my damage from this documentary talking.

Mais oui!: French feminists are rallying to get rid of mademoiselle, which denotes one's marital status à la miss. I'm all for this, but the fact is I get a kick out of using miss. I also like and use Ms., but sometimes Miss feels more appropriate because it allows me to simultaneously poke fun at and utilize its old-fashioned gentility for my own purposes. La hypocrite, c'est moi.

X-ray specs: Which underwire bras work best for airport security? Chime in over at Hourglassy!

Ladies of the press: Anna Kendrick, Seth Rogen, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt briefly chat about the different ways men and women are treated by the press, with Kendrick reporting that she's always asked about her beauty routine. Besides the overarching idea that what a woman looks like is more important than she does, there's another thing at play here: You know all those beauty pages in magazines? Editors are desperate to fill those pages with something other than straight-up shilling, and so there's always a need to get celebrities to say what they like. Anytime a ladymag reporter goes to an event, she's armed with questions about facial care and exercise routines in the hopes that the celeb will throw off a quick answer. (There's an amusing bit in Laurie Sandell's wonderful graphic novel The Impostor's Daughter on this, from when she interviewed Ashley Judd for Glamour. Laurie: "So, what's your biggest beauty secret?" Ashley: "Serenity." Laurie: "OK, um, what's one beauty product you never leave the house without?" Ashley: "My higher power.")

Smells like cream spirits: Pastry chef who has made his name concocting desserts with notes of famous perfumes is reversing the equation. You know, another thing I did in the '90s was just wear vanilla extract behind my ears, but whatevs.

Fashion vs. beauty: Feminaust—an excellent site geared toward Australian feminists but of great interest to us Yankee feminists too—on delineating fashion from beauty in ways that go beyond neck-down versus neck-up. I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion (I'd put "attraction" closer to the end of the beauty spectrum than the fashion end), but it resonates with me because while I'm somewhat interested in the ways we style ourselves, my true interest lies in what draws us to one another—the "animating spirit" as the writer here puts it.

"A new haircut is a butch accessory." —Kelli Dunham

"Why Is the Fat One Always Angry?": If you're new to The Beheld, you may have missed my interview this spring with boi comic Kelli Dunham, who had some fantastic insight into gender roles, butch privilege, and where to find a barber in this damn town. So check it out, and then if you're in New York join me this Saturday, 10/1, at The Stonewall Inn for her new show, "Why Is the Fat One Always Angry?" She's a great performer, and she's also promising cookies, I'm just sayin'.

Compliments, competition, and public living: From Nahida at The Fatal Feminist: "What do I care to impress strangers on the street, who couldn’t know? Who couldn’t possibly know that sometimes–sometimes–I’m still afraid of the dark?"

What's wrong with ugly?: Parisian Feline on being an "ugly girl": "When you’re conditioned to believe that ugliness is bad and prettiness is good, well, most people will do anything to show you how 'good' you really are. But here’s what I’m here to say: being ugly isn’t a death sentence, it doesn’t say anything about your character (any more than being pretty does) and it’s not mutually exclusive from being awesome." It's a point well-taken—as evidenced by me not being able to bring myself to remove the quotes around ugly girl. It's hard to use that word without judgment, for the very reasons Ms. Feline outlines.

The science of shopping: Elissa from Dress With Courage on shopping studies: "What so many studies on shopping seem to discount or even ignore is the intimacy this activity creates." I don't particularly like shopping, but I can't deny the powers it has to bond people—and much like the bonding of beauty, it's often dismissed, and that's a shame.

There's an app for that: Virginia—who, admittedly, is a body image blogger whose work resonates with me, whose work is sometimes categorized as body image blogging—on the iPhone body-image app: "I'm not sure we need any more websites, blogs, and apps about body image!" Hallelujah, someone said it! I'm grateful for the work that's out there but I worry that the intense focus on body image might drive us away from the point, which is to feel liberated from being preoccupied with our bodies.

Come as You Are: Nirvana and GenX Beauty

In the late fall of 1991, my friend Tony gave me a ride home from school. As we settled into the seats, he pushed in a tape, and I heard this jangly guitar—it sounded like it was barely plugged in, or something, somehow off, somehow disconnected—followed by this aggressive, to-the-point kick of the drums. The intro turned into the actual song, with this voice chanting Hello, hello, hello, how low?, and without knowing what I was listening to, I felt something within me twist. I could barely understand the words, but I didn’t need to; the chords, or rather the discord, said all I needed to hear. The cynicism, the apathy, the longing, the anxiety, the edge of eruption—I felt it before I heard it, and it made me want to do something. What, I didn’t know exactly, but I felt immediately and intensely uncomfortable, the kind of discomfort you feel because you know, acutely and irrevocably, that something needs to change.

But instead of doing something, I just turned to Tony and asked what we were listening to. “This is Nirvana,” he said.

Then, as now, I rarely listened to new music, preferring my parents’ Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Blood Sweat & Tears. So I wasn’t surprised that I hadn’t heard Nirvana before, even though I’d been hearing about the band for months around school; I’d assumed it was like other buzz-generating music (which, at the time, was Vanilla Ice, if that gives you an idea of the popular music scene at my suburban high school). What surprised me was how much a part of it—whatever “it” was—I felt. Without knowing it, I was a part of the zeitgeist.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Nevermind, so I’ve been thinking about the stirring I felt in my friend’s car. When I remember how “Smells Like Teen Spirit” resonated with me without me knowing that I was listening to The Band That Was Changing Everything, I have to credit factors larger than either Nirvana’s musicianship or my own musical sensibilities. Without blathering on about what people far more qualified than I have already written about the disillusionment of GenXers: I’d seen the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Rodney King videos, Exxon Valdez, Jeffrey Dahmer, Magic Johnson’s AIDS announcement, and Nintendo. I’d seen my country invade another for reasons that were unclear to me, this after my enchantment with an earlier era in which our country invaded another for reasons that were also unclear to me, and the main difference seemed to be that while our parents took to the streets, my generation—including me—was doing jack shit. I don’t want to overstate the case here, but we had a lot of reasons to be cynical, withdrawn, and discordant. There was a reason I heard those jangly guitar chords and instinctively knew they meant something.

Now, there’s been plenty of ink spilled over what Generation X really was, and if the whole apathy/cynicism bit really held true or if it was just a handy marketing tool, or what. All I know is that I was a product of the early ‘90s, and it showed in the way I dressed myself and put on makeup: Believe me, I cared fiercely about how I looked. But the ways in which I was trying to look good reflected what was going on at the time. I was earnest about wanting to be seen as pretty, but lackadaisical about how stringent I needed to be to get there. I styled my hair by teasing it a little bit up front and brushing it constantly, but except for special occasions there were no curlers involved, and flatirons were seen as extravagant. Few of us wore foundation, though we agonized plenty over our pimples and tried as many concealers as our allowance would allow. I thought I was freaked out over body hair, but really I just felt normal teen-girl embarrassment about the stray hairs on my upper lip—a “bikini line” in 1991 truly meant the line of a bikini, tweezing stray hairs when we’d go swimming and not giving a damn the rest of the time. We didn’t wear much blush; it looked too...healthy. We didn’t reject fashion and beauty by any means—I spent hours in front of the mirror trying out various hairstyles, none of which ever saw the light of day—and we eagerly gobbled up products geared toward us. (Bonne Bell Lip Smackers survived the grunge era.) But our laid-back ethos seeped into our self-presentation. We didn’t know what tooth-bleaching was.

Spot the '90s! 1) Flannel around my waist. 2) Tucked-in T-shirt. 3) Cutoffs over hosiery. 4) VHS tape pile topped by Stephen King books. 5) Tie-dye. 6) Converse (in background). 7) Black eyeliner applied after melting tip of eye crayon with lit match to make it go on heavier/messier. 8) Pendant (you can only see the chain in pic #3 but trust me, there was a big ol' ankh at the end of it). 9) Small flower pattern dress. 10) Smirk.

*   *   *   *   *

I tend not to get too worked up about Problems Facing Girls. Or rather, I tend not to think much has changed over the years. There’s a reason I’ve never mentioned Toddlers & Tiaras on here, or gotten excited over the Botox mom; like Virginia Sole-Smith writes, “By focusing only on these extreme, headline-grabbing stories, we get to outsource the issue and blame the victims.” And in my case, I tend to think that “the issue” is the same old thing we’ve been talking about for more than 20 years (is it a coincidence that The Beauty Myth came out the same year as Nevermind?). When I read about the looks-based anxieties girls face today, I tend to superimpose my experience onto theirs. Without belittling what girls and teens go through—having been there, you can’t help but respect it—there’s also a loud part of me that says, But that’s how it’s always been. Nothing has changed. The topical issues might shift, I believed, but the underlying causes never have.

I still think that the roots of appearance anxiety are essentially the same for a 15-year-old girl today as they were for me when I was doing jumping jacks alone in my bedroom to the B-52s. Girls are succeeding just a little too much to maintain the status quo; all the better to feed them diets and eyelash extensions to keep their eyes on a different prize. But it wasn’t until I gave some thought to that moment in my friend’s car that I thought about the ways other cultural forces shaped the way I regarded my grooming choices. If the ethos of my time seeped into my way of presenting myself, that means the ethos of today’s time is doing the same thing. And I know I’m probably late to the party here—yo, Madrano, things have been harder on girls for a while now—but if the ethos of today is about putting a heavier premium display and individuality through appearance (Lady Gaga, anyone?), that’s worming its way into girls’ minds in ways my generation was spared.

If you watch The X-Files today, it’s shocking how ill-fitting and shapeless Scully’s clothes were in 1992; no wonder people freaked out about the length of Ally McBeal’s skirts in 1997 (which, for the record, now seem totally normal). Compare wardrobes of The Real World with that of The Jersey Shore. And does anyone remember the fashion item that Julia Roberts made enormously popular in 1991? Blazers. And not cute little cropped blazers, but loose men’s-style blazers that enveloped my teenage body, giving it relief from being appraised for the size and shape of what was underneath.

I don’t have any sort of treatise here; I don’t think that returning to 1991 would necessarily do us much good. Hell, the retro-grunge fad from a couple of years ago showed that: Millennials were told to achieve the grungy bedhead style through products. (The truth is, most of us in the early ‘90s just didn’t do a damn thing to our hair except dye it with Manic Panic, or, for those of us less committal, Kool-Aid. We weren’t nearly as greasy as today’s magazines would have you believe.) In some ways this post may just be a mea culpa to the world at large for not having paid closer attention to the differences between what young women experience today versus my experience as someone who came of age at a time when baby tees hadn’t yet been invented. I maintain that the root issue isn’t that different. But more has changed than I realized.

There was plenty working against teenage girls in 1991, which is part of why I felt so anxious about how I looked back then even though the end result of my efforts were of the times—low-key, a tad sloppy, free-flowing. But I’m only now realizing how much was working for us back then too.

Invited Post: Letting Myself Go

When I read the essay "Chasing Beauty: An Addict's Memoir" by Good Men Project publisher Lisa Hickey, I was riveted. I'd been turning to The Good Men Project for insightful commentary on gender issues aimed at men for a while, but this was different. This was speaking to men, yes, but it was also speaking to me: "[W]hen I’m beautiful—or close to beautiful—it’s all I think about. When I’m beautiful and I’m with you, I’m wondering if the guy across the room thinks I’m beautiful. I think beauty is going to connect us; but I’m not connecting with you, I’m connecting with a beautiful image of myself that I think you might like."

If you followed my month without mirrors project, you know that divorcing myself from my image of myself was one of the major themes I was working with—so to read someone else share her own thoughts on the matter was a thrill. I reached out to Lisa to thank her for her work, and she responded with what in some ways functions as a sequel to "Chasing Beauty." This time, it's "Letting Myself Go."

_________________________

 
It’s five years ago, and I’m walking down the street with Caroline, a work colleague; we just had grabbed a couple of salads at the nearby cafeteria, and she’s asking about my dating life. I murmur what I hope is something non-committal about the non-existence of a "dating life," and she says “Yes, I had a friend who also let herself go and my friend found it really hard…” And that was the last thing I heard. The implication that I had somehow “let myself go” was just too hard to bear. I couldn’t listen to another word she said. It was true I was no longer beautiful. It was true I used to be beautiful. But “letting yourself go” implies that you woke up one day and said, "Aww, screw it, ugly wins" with a shrug of the shoulders. Or perhaps you gradually crossed off this and this and this from your beauty routines. But it didn’t come close to acknowledging that there was still a Herculean effort going on with me vs. the forces of nature, and that the tidal wave of ageing was simply winning out no matter how hard I fought.

*   *   *   *   *

Last night I’m in the car with my two daughters, Shannon, age 16 and Allie, 19. I tell them about Autumn’s experiment with a month without a mirror. They both get all excited about the concept. Allie yells out gleefully, “Shannon could never do that.” At the same moment, Shannon says, “I could never do that.” Shannon is honest and resigned. “I think that makes me narcissistic. But I couldn’t do it. I need to see me to be me.”

I’ve written about my addiction to beauty that I’ve had most of my life, but beauty wasn’t all I was addicted to. It took me an equally Herculean effort to get sober after I became a blackout alcoholic at age 14 and drank every night of my life for the next 30 years. The addictions went hand in hand. I never understood the concept of being comfortable in my own skin. And I couldn’t stand it. So I drank to get rid of me. As a long-term life plan, it wasn’t the wisest of choices.

Caroline’s dig at having "let myself go" came at two years into being sober, when everything was still perilous. There was no escape route. I had to figure it out. I had to get a life I could own and embrace. A life I could own—that was a new concept for me.

About that time, I was realizing something profound about my interactions with other people. I couldn’t recognize faces. I had always known there was a problem, but now it seemed impossible. Everywhere I went—my kid’s hockey games, work functions, meeting someone for coffee—I had no clue who people were. Men, women, children, would come up to me, have a conversation, and I had no idea who I was talking to. I started to panic about going out in public. It was one thing if someone was the same place I had seen them last—office cubicles were a pretty safe bet—but anywhere else I’d have to search for contextual clues to recognize someone—clothing, the room we were in, height, glasses, voice, piercings. Without something specific, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t recognize someone I had met the day before unless they had really specific unique qualities. I was constantly smiling or saying “hi” to people that might be someone I knew, just in case they were. I couldn’t tell a complete stranger from someone I had known for months.

It was maddening, and I found a name for it—prosopagnosia, or face blindness. I never knew why I had it, or what caused it.

Until I read Autumn’s one-month experiment without a mirror, with this paragraph in particular:

When I see my image reflected on a mirror behind a bar I think, Oh good, I look like a woman who is having a good time out with friends. Or I’ll see my reflection in a darkened windowpane, hunched over my computer with a pencil twirled through my upswept hair, and I’ll think, My, don’t I look like a writer? Or I’ll walk to a fancy restaurant and see my high-heeled, pencil-skirted silhouette in the glass of the door and think: I pass as someone who belongs here. You’ll notice what these have in common: My thoughts upon seeing my reflection are both self-centered and distant. I’m seeing myself, but not really—I’m seeing a woman who looks like she’s having a good time, or a writer, or someone who belongs at Balthazar.

And it hit me. My inability to recognize other people’s faces happened because—whenever I met someone—in my mind, I was visualizing my own face, not theirs.

Everything clicked. I had been so worried about how I was being perceived, that it was me I was seeing in every situation, not the other person. No wonder I couldn’t remember them.

This story really, truly does have a happy ending.

I’m still sober, and along with it, all the joy of having a life I’m not constantly trying to run away from. Accepting the fact that beauty cannot, should not, will not be the defining quality of my life forced me to figure out which qualities should be. I learned to talk again by writing. I learned to connect through social media—slowly, learning about people first, caring about them first, letting them care about me long before they even knew what I looked like. I had always wanted to be funny, so I took a humor-writing course, and then a stand-up comedy course, and then an improv class. People laughed. I wrote poetry and did poetry slams. I learned to love public speaking—a feat I never would have thought possible. Public speaking, after all, requires you to actually connect with an audience, not just stand up there and look good. One of the first times I tried, it was a presentation to a room full of 75 people, most of whom I had known in various times in my advertising career. And I started out by saying “I bet most of you are here today because you didn’t actually believe that I could speak in public.” Loudest laughter I had ever heard.

Somewhere along the way someone told me, “If you want self-esteem, the best way isn’t to tell yourself you look good. It’s to go out and do something esteemable.” OH.

Somewhere else I heard, “Love is an action word.” OH. “Feeling” love wasn’t enough to make the other person love me. OH.

A sentence from a book: “Seek to connect, not to impress.” OH. OH.

And, gradually, gradually, gradually, I realized—once I didn’t have to worry about appearing funny but could talk and upon occasion have a funny sentence come out of my mouth; once I didn’t have to worry about appearing intelligent but could just offer insights that combined my knowledge with the other person’s equally important intelligence; once I didn’t worry about appearing loveable, but instead could just act with love to the person I was with—then—then—then—I could actually get into the flow with another person, just as Autumn described it. Not by performing for other people; and certainly not by desperately trying to come up on the spot with an appearance that I hoped would impress them. And once I got in the flow with the other person, even my memories of interactions changed—my memories became about them, not me. And I was able to recognize faces.

I had finally figured out that in order to connect with people—really connect with them—I, did, in fact, have to let myself go.

And that’s something I can live with.

_________________

Lisa Hickey is publisher of The Good Men Project, and CEO of Good Men Media, Inc. When she’s not writing about beauty, she’s writing about men. Her post on The Good Men Project that started the connection between Lisa and Autumn is here: "Chasing Beauty: An Addict’s Memoir."

I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got: Sinéad O'Connor and the Beauty Standard

The first time I saw Sinéad O’Connor, in 1990, I was in awe. I watched her stark video for “Nothing Compares 2 U,” struck by both her voice and her presence. She looked at us unblinkingly from those enormous eyes, her shorn head serving only to emphasize her delicacy, her voice like blown glass daring us to really listen. I loved the song, but more than that, I loved her presence: She seemed steadfast and self-possessed but fragile. Her talent shone, of course. But so did her beauty.

When reader Jeremy tipped me off to recent press about her appearance, I prepared to be dismayed. Over the 22 years since her first album was released, she’s done what plenty of people do: She’s aged (she’s 44), had children (four of them), continued to speak out for causes she believed in (most notably the decades-long concealment of child abuse within the Irish Catholic church), and struggled with mental health issues (she tried to commit suicide at 33), all while continuing to perform and occasionally record. And, like those of us who are not paid to stay ageless, her looks have changed over the years, prompting some media outlets to joke that “Nothing Compares 2 Her New Look.”

I’d say I’m displeased by how she’s been treated in the media, but the fact is the media I consume has been treating her with the care and thought her career deserves. Salon points out that we can’t expect celebrities to remain untouched by time, calling the initial hubbub over her August appearance her “latest shocker”; The Hollywood Reporter asks us to “leave Sinéad alone” and reminds us that she was a singer who rose to fame because of her talent and outspoken views, including a rejection of the beauty mold: “Should a singer who used her window of fame to highlight discomfiting political opinions as well as bringing hauntingly personal songs like ‘Troy’ and ‘Three Babies’ into the musical canon really be judged by the same harsh standards that are common currency for actresses and reality TV stars?” Yes, her appearance prompted some snark—but do we really expect better from TMZ, or even abcnews.com, which was less poking fun at her and more taking the chance to put together a celebrity slideshow they knew would garner page views? Even the reviews that questioned her looks made it clear that her voice was still splendid, and the Telegraph captioned the accompanying photo with “Comfortable in her encroaching middle age,” which, while focusing on her looks, also communicated that her looks weren’t to be trashed, but instead were something that happens to most of us. It almost seemed like a compliment.

So I’m actually pretty pleased overall with the way that the media has been examining O’Connor. But besides the general questions that can be applied to female celebrities pretty much across the board—for starters, why we expect singers to be professional beauties, and why we expect famous people to stay forever preserved in youth and then mock the ones who do stay preserved for not “aging gracefully”—it seems like there’s something else that made us want to take another look at O’Connor, something that makes us rush to defend her, that makes even vicious sources us a bit hesitant to rush in for the kill. (TMZ, hardly known for being gracious toward its subjects, called her “softer” and “matronly” instead of flat-out “fat” as it has for other celebrities, including Janet Jackson and Britney Spears.) And that something else is her long-standing tussle with the beauty standard.

A shaved head on a woman was incredibly transgressive in 1989 (and still is a decided act against the beauty standard), and to see it on a conventionally beautiful woman at first seems to be even more transgressive. But it’s easier for us to embrace a woman rejecting the beauty myth as long as she’s still conventionally beautiful—in part because we still then get to focus on the way she actually looks, not what she is actually saying. O’Connor’s shaved head was a rebellion against the beauty standard—but an iconic one, made so because she met the beauty standard in so many other ways. If she had been more ordinary-looking but still had a shaved head, she may have met with some success because of her talent, but would we have watched—entranced as she looked directly into the camera, telling us that nothing compares to us—if she hadn’t had those enormous eyes, that delicate nose, those beautifully defined lips that stayed beautiful even as they snarled with hurt? (It’s also worth noting that while she did reject the beauty standard, she was far from eschewing it altogether: Like virtually every woman in the public eye, she wore full makeup during her performances—possibly dictated by her publicity team, but still a nod toward understanding that capitalizing on her looks would benefit her.)

Much like how Gloria Steinem was a convenient poster girl for feminism because of her conventional good looks (which brought its own criticisms, but undoubtedly it did something to help make feminism more palatable to the masses), Sinéad O’Connor could speak to the part of us that wanted to shirk the beauty standard but still reap a few of its benefits. Hell, enough with “us”: She spoke to that part of me.

When I first discovered Sinéad O’Connor, rejecting the beauty standard hadn’t occurred to me in the slightest. I was deep in the awkward stage, and the beauty standard was something I was eager to jump into headfirst. So when I saw the video for “Nothing Compares 2 U,” in addition to liking its simplicity and the song itself, I danced on the edge of awe and something approximating irritation. Here she was, born with the chiseled features and elfin frame I was lacking, and she was rejecting her rightful status as the pretty girl by shaving her head? Frankly, I was little annoyed, as though by all rights the beauty she was rejecting should somehow be channeled to a certain 13-year-old instead of merely wasted—which is, indeed, how I saw it at the time.

With time and political consciousness, my baffled state morphed into admiration. Actually, it morphed more into just fandom: I no longer looked at her as the extraordinarily pretty woman with the unfortunately shaven head, but rather as a singer-songwriter who had some subtle yet ferocious work out there: I still get chills when I even think of the sweeping violins and shattering vocals on “Feel So Different,” and “I Want Your Hands On Me” is one of the sexist songs in existence, for my money anyway. In short, I started to see her how she probably wished to be seen.

Now, if I’d been 31 instead of 13 when I first heard O’Connor, I might have seen her more in that light to begin with instead of taking the more circuitous route—being in the “awkward stage” can dictate some acrobatic thinking in regards to looks. But I’m also pretty sure that by virtue of being a mainstream entertainer who was bucking the beauty standard, Sinéad O’Connor was initially seen as the beautiful bald chick by a lot of people, not just confused adolescents. Somewhere between the dulling of the novelty factor and the infamous Pope-picture Saturday Night Live appearance, we moved past that, but her looks became an integral part of how she was seen.

And, of course, that hasn’t changed. It hasn’t changed for her detractors, who sneer at her rounded belly and ask what happened to the waif we first eyed more than 20 years ago. But it also hasn’t changed for her supporters, I don’t think. I felt indignant when I first read about the criticisms of her current appearance—forgetting that I was reading those very criticisms in a piece that was saying that the criticisms were inappropriate. My anger stemmed not from what anyone might be saying about a singer-songwriter I like but had largely lost track of, but from reactions to someone I’d held up as a model of how to buck the beauty standard. And the sting was made worse by the fact that I too could look at the recent photos of O’Connor and see not the defiant beauty of 1990 but a normal-looking woman with an unflattering haircut and odd clothes. I’d never criticize her looks (or anyone’s, for that matter), but I saw what her detractors were saying, and it felt frustrating. An icon for rejecting the beauty standard had moved into the arena of having it reject her, insofar as it rejects any of us who don’t fit the mold of being thin and white with doll-like faces.

I had to admit that there was a part of me that continued to get a deep satisfaction from seeing a conventionally beautiful woman buck the beauty standard—as though somehow it means more for Sinéad O’Connor to shave her head than it would if someone with unremarkable bone structure were to do so. There was a part of me that still wanted that sort of trailblazing protection from a standard-bearer: Look, I did it, it’s okay for you to do it too.

And I know better. I know that the beauty standard has little to do with what any individual woman looks like and more to do with how women as a class are seen. I know that while the struggles of a conventionally beautiful woman may on the surface differ from an average-looking woman or a homely one, they’re all masks covering the same core. That doesn’t mean I don’t fall for it. I tend to make minor heroes out of women of all stripes who actively work against the beauty standard—and there’s a part of me that gazes on conventionally beautiful women who do so with the inverse of an old woman’s cluck, “Such a pretty girl, would it kill her to put on some lipstick?” I think, Such a pretty girl, good for her. In other words, I’ll see her first as the pretty woman with the shaved head, and only later will I learn that the girl can sing. I’m holding onto the beauty standard in a different way than the architects of society—but at the end of the day, I’m still putting a prize value on it.

Appearance obviously the first thing we see about people, and I can hardly reproach myself for noticing Sinéad O’Connor’s looks. It would be disingenuous to claim that the goal is to somehow see through someone’s looks, to peer into their soul—which can happen with people we know to varying degrees, but really not with celebrities, with whom we form relationships based largely on static images. But I can wonder what it means for women, and for the power of beauty, when I narrowly manage to skirt falling into the mainstream beauty standard trap we set for women, only to find myself in a more benevolent version of the same contraption.

Beauty Blogosphere 8.19.11

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

From Head...
Au naturel: No More Dirty Looks is doing another hair challenge, and it's a good one. Send in a picture of yourself with your natural hair—no blow-drying, no product beyond shampoo and conditioner (no leave-ins!)—to the green beauty site, and you'll not only help show what the real story is behind "natural hair," you'll also be entered to win a hair-care gifting from NuboNau. Challenge ends Sunday, 8/21, so get a-snappin'!

Year without mirrors, days without makeup: Kjerstin Gruys of Mirror Mirror Off the Wall is upping the game with embarking on makeup-free Mondays. Check out her first post on the weekly event.


...To Toe...
Sarah Palin's polka-dotted tootsies: News or not news? You decide.


...And Everything In Between:
Beautiful Girls: The pilot episode of Beautiful Girls, a show about employees at a cosmetics company, was picked up by Fox. This has the potential to be interesting, as it's the work of Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain, who collaborated with Joss Whedon on Dollhouse, which was a thoroughly engrossing look at appearance, identity, the idea of "perfection," and being looked at.

Birchbox biz: Interview with one of the founders of Birchbox, a subscription-based box of curated, personalized beauty product samples sent to you monthly; focuses on the business end of things but still interesting to those of us who aren't so inclined.

Tip of the...nevermind: The department of health in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal will start offering circumcision to 10% of the male babies born there, in a reversal of custom (currently circumcisions are only performed for medical or religious reasons). Why? Foreskins are commercially valuable, used in anti-aging treatments (in addition to more legitimate medical uses). As Reason notes: "2.3 million foreskins are at stake." (Okay, that phrasing is ridiculous, but I'm firmly against circumcision and it's upsetting to think that profit could be driving this.)

Natural cosmetics in the Middle East: Sales are expected to grow 20% this year, but that's only up from 0.01% of the cosmetics market (compared with 3% in North America and Europe). The theory is that the growth in awareness of natural foods trickled down to cosmetics, but since there's no similar drive in the Middle East, the market has to create itself.

Mean stinks: Secret deodorant, in an effort to up its profile à la Old Spice and Axe, launched an anti-bullying campaign with the "Mean Stinks" tagline. "Secret stands against things that stink, whether it's body odor or mean behavior like girl-to-girl bullying," says a Procter & Gamble spokesperson. It (hopefully!) goes without saying that I'm anti-bullying, and I'm glad to see smart minds like Rachel Simmons of Odd Girl Out pairing with star power like cast members of Glee. But...I dunno. The kids who were always teased the worst in my junior high/high school were ones whose home lives were clearly in such disarray that their personal hygiene wasn't a priority for either them or their caretakers. The Secret campaign is anti-bullying, girl-positive, and is not at all encouraging people to use deodorant to prevent their own bullying. Except...by virtue of it being a deodorant, that is also sort of an unspoken message. Am I reading too much into this? Yay for anti-bullying, though!?

Heidi Schatz on being "cute": "By golly, I will try on lingerie until I no longer laugh when I see myself in the mirror." (via Already Pretty)

Guerrilla complimenting: From Decoding Dress—"Why, of all the women she passed on her way to wherever she was going, did she choose to offer such an apparently non-violent but utterly confrontational compliment to me?" I'm generally in favor of complimenting other women, and I don't necessarily intend to stop. A friend of mine once astutely observed, "A well-placed and heartfelt compliment between women can sometimes feel subversive," and it's a point I stand by. Still, Decoding Dress's meditation on the self-indulgence and self-gratification of complimenting adds a new shade to the conversation here.

Woman in the mirror: Advertisers are placing their goods on mirrors, which seems like the missing link between "the commodity of the self" and personal branding that Marginal Utility laments.

How girls look good: Amusing piece at Vice on the various products we use to be pretty in "juuuust this other way." (And besides being amusing, it's one of the few places I've seen the socioeconomic dance of salons being discussed. Beauty Schooled, the conversation is happening!)

Questions for perfect-looking women: I wrestle with the term "perfect," but I know exactly what Stephanie Georgopulos is getting at here. "Does perfection bore you? Do you look at people like me and wish your hair would frizz a little, that your bra would peek out? Do you ever want to let your nail polish chip? Or is this, the coiffed hair, the ironed shirts; is this your version of happiness?"

Poetry break: "The Beauty Myth," by blogger Shine.

Why don't you wear hi'jab?: Nahida at The Fatal Feminist is sort of tired of the ever-present question among Muslim feminists, but addresses it eloquently nonetheless. "There will most likely come a day when I will wear hi'jab. ... Maybe just that day, I needed an extra dosage of modesty, because I could feel myself becoming vain. ... Hi'jab means something to me—in relation to my spiritual self, to modesty, and to God.... It is only for me to evaluate. I will be the only one who knows what this means."

Flying while fat: Regan Chastain at Dances With Fat offers much more reasonable options than, say, shame and humiliation for larger air passengers. (The usual "well THAT oughta solve it!" answer is to have fat flyers purchase two airline seats, but as Regan points out, that isn't as easy as it sounds.)

Blogosphere body love: There's always a lot of great stuff going on in the self-acceptance sphere of the Internet, but this week seemed particularly awesome. Tori at Anytime Yoga puts it as plain and simple as you can, with "I don't want to change my body"; Courtney at Those Graces lets go of pretty; and Virginia at Beauty Schooled reminds us that "cleavage wrinkles" are not a thing.

"Life's a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!"

News flash, you don't shrivel past 55: Speaking of "a thing," I'm questioning the pulse over at Allure, which declares that "Granny Beauty" is "officially a thing." I know they're trying to acknowledge the superlative style age can bring, but making style awareness of senior citizens a "thing" seems a tad degrading to me. Auntie Mame, my fashion-plate 85-year-old grandmother, and any of the subjects on Advanced Style would probably be surprised to learn that the wisdom they've acquired over the years—plus the financial means, confidence, and fuck-it attitude that comes with age and that helps one become a style icon—is a "thing." Yay for recognizing the fashion sense of people of a certain age; boo for indicating that it's a trend as easily discarded as jeggings.

The health/beauty conundrum: Virginia gets to the heart of one of my major concerns: Is "health" sometimes a convenient cover-up for beauty concerns? "I’ve noticed that those who reject that plastic beauty ideal in favor of 'natural beauty' are often nevertheless still saying that health and beauty are one and the same. They just get their 'healthy glow' from vegetables and yoga instead of tanning booths. Of course I see why that’s better—but I’m still worried about making health and beauty synonymous."

Assume positive intent: Sally asks what would happen if we assumed that those clunky comments we sometimes hear about our appearance came with positive intent. It's an interesting question, because appearance is both a way we connect with others in an immediate sense ("Cute shoes!" "Thanks, and I love your dress!"–that can be an entré, and a manner of appreciation), and a well of attachments we can use to undermine others and ourselves (as in Sally's example, when an acquaintance told her she'd look so much prettier if she'd "just put on some makeup and a skirt once in a while"). Where do we draw the line between setting others straight on appropriacy of their comments and assuming positive intent? I don't think I've found an answer yet. You?

Where My Girls At? Guest Post from "The Illusionists" filmmaker Elena Rossini

 

Filmmaker Elena Rossini has directed short films, a narrative feature, and multimedia projects, but it's The Illusionists—a feature-length documentary about the manipulation and exploitation of women’s insecurities about their bodies for profit—that piqued my interest. The film will delve into the issues at the heart of the matter: sociology, globalization, capitalism, and the fear of female power. And you can help make it happen. The film's Kickstarter campaign has been successful, but your contribution can help the film go even farther. Even a $10 contribution could wind up buying coffee on set for lined-up interviewees like Jean Kilbourne, Susie Orbach, or Jenn Pozner—and wouldn't that be a cool claim to make? There are three days left to contribute to this corner of women's history.

I asked Elena to compile a list of "recommended viewing" for readers of The Beheld—fantastic body-image role models, for example, or even just outstanding characters. And when she had trouble doing so, instead of presenting a lukewarm collection she penned this thoughtful essay exploring the challenges of making such a list. Read on: 


Confession: I'm a filmmaker who rarely goes to the cinema. I haven't seen the latest crop of blockbuster films—Avatar, Iron Man, Inception, The Hangover—and I have no interest in watching them. I'm an equal-opportunity discriminator: action, sci-fi, drama, arthouse, comedy... Not my thing. Why? Because the representation of female characters in current movies is so limited and stereotypical that it smacks of the 1910s—not the 2010s.

In my 20s, during my formative years as a filmmaker, I must have watched thousands of films. I was a cinematic omnivore, with a predilection for Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, and Taiwanese and Iranian cinema of the 1990s. When I graduated from film school and took my first steps in the professional world of cinema, I had a realization that profoundly changed the way I see the world—and my cinematic tastes.

When we read magazines, watch movies and TV shows, or see billboard ads, what is the underlying message about the chief role of women in our society? A maxim by Ambrose Bierce—an American writer and satirist born in 1842—says it best: “To men a man is but a mind. Who cares what face he carries or what he wears? But a woman’s body is the woman.”

Women are constantly reminded that their worth is directly linked to their youth and physical appearance. Ambition, power, and success are associated with masculinity and are portrayed as being at odds with femininity. Our popular culture keeps telling women—implicitly and explicitly—that it is virtually impossible to be liked and to be powerful at the same time.

The realization that successful, mature women are virtually absent from mass media and popular culture made me fall out of love with the world of cinema. And it also turned me into an activist of sorts.

When The Beheld asked me to put together a list of my favorite five female characters from TV/movies, I had difficulty finding examples of women who were powerful and whose objectives were not to attract a mate, but rather to do something interesting.

You don't believe me? Give me an example of an onscreen female character that meets the following criteria:

• Protagonist of the TV show/film 
• Over the age of 30 
• Holds an important job and is successful at it 
• Liked/likeable 
• Her physical appearance is peripheral to the story (and she can't use her sex appeal to get what she wants) 
• Her romantic/personal relationships are peripheral to the story 
• The TV show/film takes place in "the real world" (not a sci-fi universe) 
• She has to be alive by the end of the film

Thing is, if the character were male, I could give you thousands of examples of films and TV shows that meet these criteria. For women? Not so easy.

I could find only one example from the world of cinema: Contact (1997), starring Jodie Foster—the story of an astronomer who finds evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Jodie Foster in Contact (which totally gave me that I-just-had-an-experience feeling after viewing)

Amelia—a 2009 biopic of legendary aviator Amelia Earhart—had tremendous potential, but unfortunately it zeroed in on her personal life.

Television fared better. I found one airtight example: U.S. President Mackenzie Allen from Commander in Chief (played by Geena Davis). She holds the most powerful job in the world and is extremely good at it; her relationship to her husband is a secondary storyline.

Special mention for White House secretary C.J. Cregg from The West Wing (played by Allison Janney)—unfortunately she's not the protagonist of the series, but she's still a key player in the ensemble drama. Ditto for Peggy Olson of Mad Men.

I sincerely hope to have missed other examples. Because it would be far too sad to think there are so few works out there portraying strong, powerful women doing interesting things.

Why is this an important issue? A couple of months ago I attended a conference at the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). Cherie Blair—who has recently created a foundation for women—spoke during a talk about gender equality. She stressed the importance of showing positive female role models to girls and boys. Carlos Mulas-Granados—the executive director of the IDEAS Foundation, a progressive think-tank launched by Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero—was on the same panel as Cherie Blair. He said that Spain witnessed a radical change in collective mindsets when Prime Minister Zapatero appointed a predominantly female cabinet in 2008. And a very pregnant defense minister—Carme Chacón—walked in front of troops.

Now, if only mass media could adapt, abandoning ridiculously antiquated portrayals of women and showing the obvious truth: that the sky is the limit. In the words of Marlo Thomas: "We've finally reached our era of great expectations." 

*    *    *    *    *

Any TV shows or movies to add? I'll throw in a vote for Jackie Peyton on Nurse Jackie. She's a drug addict but is fantastic at her job regardless. Hey, nobody's perfect!

Should We Praise Little Girls For Being Pretty?

 My eighth birthday party. I am in the middle. The cake is on the table (my mom let us decorate it ourselves, per my wishes). The frosting is on our faces. Makeovers!

I didn't grow up hearing I was pretty. This was partly by design and partly by accident, or an accident of memory: My parents made a conscious decision to not emphasize the role of appearance in my life, ruling out pretty as a household word. The rest of the world? Well, perhaps I wasn’t a terribly pretty little girl, or perhaps my chubbiness became the overriding factor about my looks, or perhaps I heard it and just don’t remember.

Whatever the case, my childhood means that I’m particularly interested in this Lisa Bloom piece about how to talk to little girls without lapsing into “you’re so pretty!” The gist is that we as adults have a responsibility to girls to encourage other parts of them to shine, and to act as role models for the same, which seems like good common sense to me. Hugo Schwyzer agrees, but notes that by avoiding the subject entirely as Bloom illustrates, we set girls up for thinking that their interest in the subject is shallow, forcing a divide between brains and beauty: “Let’s lose the false choice that says we either validate little girls for their brains or for their beauty," he writes. "We need to be fearless about praising both.”

I agree with most of Bloom’s argument, though would argue that we needn’t steer the conversation away from things like appearance and pink and fashion if they come up of the girl’s own choice. That’s where Schwyzer and I agree; we disagree on one part of his remedy, which is to recommend that in addition to reinforcing the “serious” aspects of our girls, we also compliment their appearance.

We must give our girls tools to navigate a beauty-obsessed world. I don’t think praise on their looks should be one of them. It’s engagement that will help her with that navigation: Listening to her thoughts on the matter, picking up on her cues, asking questions and paying close attention to the answer. Wallpapering her self-esteem with “you’re so pretty”—even alongside “and strong and kind and you sure can draw well!”—doesn’t get at the heart of the issue.

For unlike kindness, you can’t cultivate beauty. (Rather, the things we do in adulthood to cultivate beauty—wearing makeup, dressing well, adopting certain gestures or methods of interaction that signal we wish to be seen under the light of prettiness—we find creepy and inappropriate in a child.) Hearing “you’re so pretty” every day becomes a pronouncement about something she has absolutely zero control over. And being praised on something you have no control over—or think you have no control over—can ultimately lead to a vortex of self-doubt. I’m thinking here of intellectually advanced children who don’t respond well to challenge because they see effort as a sign that they’re not really as intelligent as everyone (including themselves) presumes them to be. It’s not exactly parallel—we hardly want to encourage girls to start putting effort into beauty, though we don’t want them to neglect self-care—but the principle is the same: Being praised for something you can’t help can feel hollow or even confusing.

Certainly, much of the time we’re tempted to tell little girls that they’re pretty, it’s not because of their classic bone structure; it’s because they are making an effort—wearing a pretty dress or ribbons in their hair or doing something else to consciously raise their prettiness profile. And many people will argue that all little girls are pretty—I mean, they’re kids, and kids are cute, right? But surely I wasn’t the only one who understood in second grade that some girls fit the classic definition of pretty more than others.

I wasn’t one of those girls. In another post I’ll probably write up some long drawn-out essay about the trials of being the smart-but-chubby-and-not-pretty girl, but for now I’ll leave it at this: Until adolescence, I was not particularly bothered by not widely being considered pretty. I understood that the prettiest girl in the class—and it was clear to me, at age seven, who the prettiest girl in the class was—was such because she was fine-boned, with honey-blonde hair and blue eyes and a delicacy that chubby, weird girls like me could never attain. I understood that, I got it, and just assumed that prettiness was Jenny S’s destiny, just as mine was as the fast reader, the good speller, the one who always wanted to write on the chalkboard. That was how the world worked at age seven, and I didn’t covet her or anyone else’s beauty then. That would come later.

Here’s how I imagine things would have worked if my parents had made a consistent point of telling me how pretty I was: I would have thought it was nice. I would have pranced around in my blue ruffled Easter dress and thought I was pretty (okay, I did that anyway). I might have been better able to synthesize smart and pretty; I might have been somewhat better prepared for the enormous gap between the feminism of the Whitefield-Madrano household and the attitudes of society at large.

And I would have thought a helluva lot more about prettiness than I did, particularly about my relation to it. I mean, I already spent a decent amount of time thinking about appearance: I wanted to be a model (not because models were pretty, but because they got to make faces in front of the camera); I played with my grandmothers’ and aunts’ makeup kits anytime they’d let me; and, after all, I was secretly deeming Jenny S. the prettiest girl in the class. Despite my parents’ not introducing gendered play into the home (they made me buy my first Barbie with my own money, people), beauty was absolutely on my radar. Beauty was something I was observing as a value, and participating in as an activity. I was not participating in beauty as a value. That was a gift I returned to the universe with adolescence, and it’s a gift I may never get back.

*     *     * 

So what to do? How, without overstating its importance, do we responsibly lead our girls through the landmine of beauty so that they’re not left adrift with no guidance when they begin to enter the realm of performed femininity? How do we affirm our girls and their desire to be pretty without reinforcing the beauty standard—which, I might add, will likely be reinforced at every single turn for the rest of their lives? How do we value everything our girls bring to the table—their joys, their fears, their curiosities, their anxieties, their very selves, many of which might be filtered through prettiness—without either overvaluing beauty or denying its importance?

I’m not sure. I just know that we have a responsibility to them to listen. Rare is the girl who won’t bring her own thoughts on beauty to the table, and when that happens, we can ask questions. We can ask what she means when she says one doll is prettier than the other, or that only the pink pony can fly. We can sense her pride when she’s picked out her favorite dress and find ways to tap into that pride of self-care without lapsing into easy compliments. We can play with makeup along with her if that’s her preference, introducing silliness and fun, to model that beauty can be a place of joy, something she might remember fondly if it ever becomes to seem more like tyranny later on. And we can do all of that without placing the value of pretty upon her.

I should add that my perspective is one of someone who cares deeply about girls in the aggregate, and about a few girls in particular, but who hasn’t raised any myself. I have the luxury of being the family friend who gets to pop into a couple of girls’ lives and leave when time’s up, experiencing the joys of being with children and few of the trials. (Clever trick, eh?) So it’s easy for me to sit here from my child-free perch and proclaim that we should talk to children on their level about beauty, for when I’m with a child in afternoon-long spurts, being with her is the entirety of the activity and I can afford the attention it takes. I’m not trying to put dinner on the table, or working through my own exhaustion, or wiping snot from her nose, or changing her little brother's diaper. Parenting is a different matter, and with no intentions of ever becoming a parent myself, I’m not poised to speculate on how one can help a daughter over her lifetime develop a healthy relationship with appearance. It’s not a job I envy, and there are a zillion ways to do it well—including telling a daughter she’s pretty. Hell, maybe my insistence on this is borne from a buried resentment from not having heard it myself; I’ll never know.

What I do know is that in my limited fashion, I can offer a handful of girls in my life a safe haven from feeling like they are being examined—even positively—in any way. It’s my responsibility to offer them that space. And each parent or aunt or friend or babysitter knows the children in their lives better than some blogger yakking away in her living room; maybe the girl in your life needs to hear that she’s pretty more than she needs to engage in child-appropriate beauty talk. But I’d suggest that with creative effort, we can all offer them safe haven. I’d suggest that we should.

Thoughts on a Word: Pretty

When I first met Mary Duffy, our conversations quickly turned to stuff that could keep me going for hours: What does it mean to be beautiful, or to witness beauty? What does it mean to be a "pretty girl"? Is there such a thing as objective beauty, or does the idea of such a thing remove the essence that makes something beautiful? Many of the ideas from those conversations have found their way onto this blog—and now you get to hear from her, in today's guest post. Mary Duffy lives, bikes, and writes in Philadelphia, and you can follow her on Twitter @maryfduffy.

The first time I think hard about the word pretty, is a few years ago, when my all-girl old-time band, Gerle Haggard, is working on an Elliott Smith song I picked for us to cover. Something about Smith's song, “Twilight,” has a hint of the southern old-time lyrics I love, and I know it's going to sound great. As we work out the arrangement I sing the first chorus: “She's a pretty thing, she knows everything, but I'm already somebody's baby.” It's that very lyric, “she's a pretty thing,” that has been hinting at the plainspokenness I think translates “Twilight” from indie folk to the old-time genre. “Pretty” in song lyrics may be a feature of my thinking on the subject, whether it's Roy Orbison singing “Pretty Woman” or Sondheim's “Pretty Women” in Sweeney Todd.

What is pretty? Pretty is superficial. Pretty is a judgment we can make in one second. “Yeah, she's pretty” is the tightfisted compliment women dole out when they envy somebody's appearance but can't admit it. Women? Me. It's the compliment I will grudgingly give out when someone asks me what I think of an attractive woman we know. Pretty is not a compliment, it's a concession: She is pretty. 

Pretty was something I envied. I envied women I thought to be easily, instantly attractive, women whose features require no hard work. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but Pretty is easy on the eyes. And despite the titles of the songs, I think of the word pretty, and I hear “girl,” like those psychiatric association tests. “Pretty?” “Girl.” Pretty girls were pretty, and my definition has a hard time escaping the tautology. Pretty: a state of being I could never attain, not being pretty myself. Pretty girls had a kind of surface of perfection that made them impervious to the slings and arrows of adolescence, was how it seemed. Pretty is a word for girls, rather than women.

Who is pretty? And what was a pretty girl in my girlhood? I have in mind an amalgam of many girls in middle and high school. I have an amalgam in mind because I realize the Pretty Girl looked like all the other pretty girls, precisely because she was pretty. 

 

She had lank, honey-blond hair. She wore makeup, and silver spoon rings, preppy clothes. She didn't have those little red dry-skin pimples on her legs, her legs which were not pale, either, but all a very nice even tan. I could never understand how generations of people with ostensibly Northern European ancestry—with last names like Murphy, Bauer, Andersen—managed to breed this crop of girls who could tan so well. I eventually figured out what a tanning bed and bronzer was. Likewise, I couldn't understand why they all had this very odd sort of honey-blond brownish hair, until I figured out that not only women who wanted to cover up gray bought hair dye. 

 

Somewhere in that time period a woman complimented my complexion, and I haven't forgotten it to this day. Which means that prettiness occupied a very big place in my young mind, at least for a while, at least until my slightly older but still young self got preoccupied with whether I was “hot,” or “sexy.” But where does that leave me with pretty, now that I'm not really a girl, and have maybe finally forgiven all the pretty ones for being “pretty.”

Just a couple of weeks after we met, a friend played a different Elliott Smith song for me, “Pretty (Ugly Before).” It's a love song, of course, and in sharing our musical tastes with each other, he played this one for me. The chorus of it goes, “I feel pretty, pretty enough for you / I felt so ugly before, I didn't know what to do.” Shakespeare it's not, but it's as true as pop songs get. Until I heard that, pretty was the purview of some very ordinary teenage queen bees whose names I barely remember today. For Smith, pretty and ugly could be feelings, not congenital conditions. I felt ugly before, too. And how can I forget West Side Story? Sondheim again: I Feel Pretty.

Pretty is a pedestrian kind of beauty, one I can't understand having ever wanted to attain, or couldn't, until I looked up the definition. Flowers are pretty, girls are pretty, and sometimes we speak of something being a pretty story, a pretty picture. Wrapping this piece up, I finally look at what the dictionary says about pretty, and it makes me wished I had looked up the definition back when I wanted the boys to think I was pretty: (adj) Attractive in a delicate way without being truly beautiful or handsome (n) An attractive thing, typically a pleasing but unnecessary accessory. It's easy to be pretty and it's easy to like pretty things, and it's natural to want to be liked by everyone, easily. But I wish someone had reminded me that it also meant “without being truly beautiful or handsome.”

Mother's Day Guest Post: Deborah Whitefield, Homemaker, Texas

Today I'm turning over The Beheld to Deborah Whitefield, my mother, in honor of Mother's Day. This blog is largely about the personal intersection of beauty and feminism; while my mother made a point of not teaching me much about makeup, hair or fashion (as you'll read below), her feminist teachings were with me literally from birth. (My last name is hyphenated because she didn't change her name upon marrying my father, and while being the only hyphenated kid was a mouthful growing up, it ensured I grew up thinking about gender assumptions and the power of words.) Given that "playing with Mommy's makeup" was strictly limited to mascara and Vaseline, I was curious to learn what she'd have to say about her own attitudes toward beauty. Here, her essay on her own beauty ritual, aging, and on rearing a daughter who was enamoured with playing pretty.

 

I have lovely red hair. While it was an embarrassment in my youth—along with the accompanying freckles—from age 17 on I reveled in it. Years ago I realized that I am indifferent to beauty, thanks to my cloak of hair. As a teen I used foundation and rouge, eyeshadow, liner, and mascara—mostly because it was popular to look "all eyes," like Twiggy. Over time, as I discarded those items from my face, I felt I still looked the same because I had my hair. And I didn't pay much attention to the hair, just washed and let it dry. The compliments on my hair continued, so I figured it didn't matter how I looked—no matter how much I weighed or what I slathered on my face.

The result is that most of my life, I haven't put much work into the way my face appears to others. I look in the mirror, see no food lodged in my teeth or milk above my lip, and I'm set...as long as I have on my brown-black Maybelline mascara. This has been my sole must-have since the days when mascara came in little red drawers with a compartment for the pigment and one for the brush. The idea was that one moistened the bristles, rubbed it in the mascara, then applied it. Often the user would be without water, so one would do what my mom did—use spit. Today it's a scary thought, given what we know about the susceptibility eyes have for germinating bacteria.

How do teenagers learn to "need" beauty products? From observation. In our household there were few beauty products, other than that red box, and red lipstick—which, of course, clashed with my hair. We had the cheapest shampoo money could buy and no conditioners. The point is: There wasn't much to learn from my mother.

I learned what not to do from a friend of mine who was cute when natural but was rarely not made up with heavy foundation; watching her beauty routine must have been the most boring thing I did with her. However, I read two teen magazines, Teen and Ingenue, that instructed me on the positives. From those I learned how to get that Twiggy look by lining under my eyes. Both my sister and I pored over those issues looking for tips on how to accentuate the eyes by making our lips and the rest of our face invisible. I recall a visit from an aunt who lived in California; she complimented us and asked how we learned to apply makeup. This was the Ultimate Flattery for two Oklahoma girls! An older woman liked our look—and one from L.A. who must have seen gorgeous eyes everywhere. Our work was finished; we were perfect.

Moisturizers weren't part of my routine until I was in my late 30s. Even then, as now, it was a seasonal thing. Here's what I know: At age 60, I am now the age my grandmother was when I first clearly recall looking at her wrinkles. Those wrinkles stay with me to this day—they looked like tic-tac-toe forms on her cheeks. I used to wish I had the nerve to make little Xs and Os on them as she napped on our sofa. The face powder she used only seemed to exaggerate the lines, making them look cavernous and permanent. I resolved then and there never to use face powder. I couldn't even tell you if they still make the stuff.

I look a darned sight less wrinkled than my grandmother—but she led a hard life. She spent over 50 years planting acres of gardens, canning the family's foods, tending livestock, ironing, cooking with a wood stove, and so on, all of which I have avoided. I've seen how people age and I feel I'm in good stead, so why sweat it? Wrinkles fascinate me, even on myself. Sometimes I think this is one reason the idea of human-concocted beauty holds no charm. If we are lucky, we all end up in the same place.

The upshot is that most of my life I haven't put much thought into the way my face appears to others. When a daughter and active feminism entered my life around the same time, I began to wonder what to teach—what were values, and what were a culture I didn't want her to overengage with? The only thing I recall consciously stressing was cleanliness. When the Prince fell for Cinderella it was because she was so clean, not because she was beautiful. Yes, I did.



Mother and daughter during Manhattanhenge 2010

By the time Autumn was 3 only the mascara remained, as I came fully into both my feminist thinking and a time crunch. Still, her fascination with beauty can clearly by marked (at least to my way of thinking) with a visit to our house by my husband's sister and mother: Aunt Marsha (an Army captain) and grandmother Mimi (a full-time homemaker and perfectionist). When the lovely Aunt Marsha arrived, eager to bond with her niece, no bars were held. By the time the Make-Up Duo left town Autumn had a box of makeup, a new haircut and her first manicure.

To my eyes, I never interfered with her desire to learn and use beauty products. However, I made sure that I informed her of my opinion that beauty products were a waste of money and time. Together we had a phrase for commercials: "Trick Cameras!" Whenever any ad illustrated astounding "proof" that a product worked, she'd point it out and I'd inform her that it was done with photography tricks. In an age of computers and Star Wars, there was little need for further persuasion.

Beauty. There are so many aspects. I haven't even mentioned health and food; exercise and sunshine; fashion and style. What did I pass on to Autumn? What did my mom pass on to me? I believe Autumn is perfect as she is—all beauty and smiles. My mother told me I was a beauty, just the way I was. Even as she applied lemon juice to my freckles to bleach them. Yes, she did.