Two More Cents on Dove

I call retouching on dove.

I’m fascinated by the continued coverage of the most recent video in the Dove Real Beauty Campaign arsenal. Though much of the coverage has been critical, its very discussion shows how effective the campaign has been—and how ready women are for a new conversation about beauty, one that doesn’t rest on the belief that we don’t like the way we look.

I’ve heard from several readers who have pointed out that whatever quibblings I might have with the Dove campaign, the fact is that it’s better for women than traditional advertising, specifically the type that relies on sexist tropes. I agree: At the end of the day, if I had to choose between Dove’s “BFF marketing” style and the rest of ’em, I’d choose Dove. (And I’ll readily point out that the sketch artist ad “worked” on me: I totally got teary at the big reveal.) But as Cassie points out, we’re not limited to either/or options here, and as cynical as I might be about advertising, I'd feel more cynical if I just threw up my hands and said, Well, this is the best we can do, so I'll take it.

More to the point: I’m not so sure that the roots of the Dove campaign are all that different from conventional ads, though the feeling each creates is quite different. The Dove campaign exploits women’s beauty-related self-esteem for its own purposes. In other words, it’s doing exactly the same thing as the ads that tell women they aren’t good enough as-is. The means are different, of course, but the tool of leverage—and, of course, the end goal of selling products—is the same: Without a self-esteem crisis, neither type of ad would work. It’s this bare fact—that without women disliking their looks, Dove would lose its ace in the hole—that should make us suspect of the premise. Do women feel bad about their looks? Yes! Sometimes. Sometimes.

The feminist argument against beauty advertising often hinges upon a neat equation: Companies need to make women feel bad about the way they look, so that they can then supply the fix—lipstick, hair conditioner, whatever. Contrast this with what people within the beauty industry (like the beauty editor I interviewed here) say: The beauty industry has a stake in making women feel good about themselves, by giving us tools of independent self-care and the ability to enhance our natural gifts. At first glance these two arguments seem pitted against one another, but in fact they exist in symbiosis. The beauty industry has a stake in keeping women in the space between desperate unhappiness with our looks and bulletproof self-esteem. A consumer who simultaneously believes that she is beautiful and not-beautiful makes for a better consumer. And in fact it’s simple for advertisers to leverage our chronic cognitive dissonance because that’s closer to the actual experience of beauty than some neat yes/no box. If there was no part of us that didn’t secretly believe we just might be beautiful, the Dove ad would have no effect. It’s not only the possibility but the permission of the Dove ad that makes it so powerful.

Yes, there’s an enormous problem with appearance-related self-esteem among women (and men). Yes, we need to continue to address this concern on a sociological level. Yes, it is incredibly painful for any of us in those moments of exquisitely vulnerable self-loathing. Yes to all that. And yet: Yes, most of us have looked in the mirror at some point and liked what we’ve seen. Yes, we look forward to wearing certain outfits because we know we look fantastic in them. Yes, we now snap so many self-portraits that we had to invent the word selfie to describe the phenomenon. Yes to all the natural human joy and pride and immodesty and pleasure we take in our looks. To deny that side of the beauty question is to deny our lived experience. To deny that side of the beauty question is to take shame in those moments of pride, to deny ourselves lest we be seen as thinking we’re “all that.” To deny that side of the beauty question is to publicly deny other women the same right we privately give ourselves. We don’t give ourselves that right all the time, no. But we don’t need to.

I’d be hesitant to put this thought out there, that maybe we like the way we look at the same time we don’t like the way we look—because really what I’m saying is that this is true for me, and my my, isn’t someone arrogant? But when I look at the numbers—the numbers we don’t hear about all the time in clucking tones—I see that my experience of beauty duality isn’t mine alone. Check out the numbers that writer and sociology PhD candidate Kjerstin Gruys points out: According to another study, 58% of women are satisfied with their appearance. 65% of women consider themselves “above average” in appearance. Or, hell, look at Dove’s own numbers from their 2004 research for the launch of the Real Beauty campaign: While only 4% of the Dove survey respondents copped to considering themselves “beautiful,” 55% of them were satisfied with their body shape and size. One of these numbers works in the narrative Dove is creating with the Real Beauty campaign. And one of them doesn’t.

Add to that the other structural concerns Virginia Postrel points out about the Dove video: We only see the results of seven women; 20 women participated in the initial experiment. (Did some of those women’s sketches fall out of line with the desired result?) The sketch artist—i.e. the person whose work the entire ad centers around—knew what the experiment while doing his sketches. There was no opportunity for women to correct the sketch as would happen if the goal actually were accuracy; how would someone know whether what she called her “long nose” differed wildly from the artist’s rendering of it?

And there’s that word beautiful, which, according to Dove research, only 4% of women describe themselves as being. What Dove doesn't tell you is how they came up with that number: They asked survey respondents to choose one word to describe themselves from a list of 10 words. Here’s a list of the words respondents were given to choose from (on page 10): natural, average, attractive, feminine, good-looking, cute, pretty, beautiful, sophisticated, sexy, stunning, and gorgeous. Does me choosing, say, sexy, or pretty, or natural or attractive signal a self-esteem problem? Hell, even choosing average doesn’t mean we're suffering—if you’re approaching the question from a statistical standpoint instead of an interpretive one (and some respondents undoubtedly would), by definition most of us would indeed be average. (Speaking of averages: When respondents were asked to place themselves on a “bell curve” of beauty, 13% of respondents said they thought of themselves as somewhat less or much less beautiful than other women. And 16% of respondents said they thought of themselves as somewhat more or much more beautiful than other women.)

But back to why I bothered to revisit the campaign in the first place: I think some of us have had enough. Just as Dove created the campaign in response to the fact that women had had enough of traditional advertising that asked us to feel lesser-than, it’s clear from the overwhelming response to the ad that while we’ve still had enough of that type of ad, we’re also becoming wary of the ads that use those feelings as leverage. And frankly, I’m thrilled to see such a variety of responses to the campaign. To me, it signals a desire to shed the therapeutic narrative of beauty. The question is: What narrative will we design in its place?

One Narrative Fits All: Dove and "Real Beauty"

A few years ago, the Mad Men marketing team came up with the ingenious idea of building a tool that allowed you to create your own personalized Mad Men–style avatar. And once we found out about it, a good friend and I came up with the ingenious idea of making avatars of each other, along with avatars of ourselves, and then comparing the results. 

Here are—re-created from loose memory—the avatars of my friend. On the left, the one she designed of herself. On the right, the one I designed of her.

^^How my friend "drew" herself // How I "drew" my friend ^^

Notice anything different? 

I thought of our avatar exchange when I first heard about the most recent arm of Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign, i.e. the campaign that brought us those billboards several years ago of “real women” modeling for Dove, and that launched the viral “Evolution” video about the process that goes into making media images. This particular project featured women describing themselves to a forensics sketch artist—who was separated from the women by a curtain so he couldn’t see them—and then having near-strangers describe the same woman to the same artist. When the results were compared—ta-da!—the sketches drawn from the strangers’ descriptions were conventionally prettier than the sketches drawn from the women’s descriptions of themselves.

It’s an interesting exercise, one I’d love to try myself—if out of narcissism/curiosity more than, as the Dove tagline would have it, finding out that I Am More Beautiful Than I Think. (Maybe I’ll just sign up for Selfless Portraits instead.) It’s intriguing enough, in fact, to make me overcome my knee-jerk “oh, brother” reaction to the Real Beauty campaign to consider exactly why I find myself disgruntled with a campaign that, on its face, shares many of my own goals as far as getting people to question the meaning of beauty.

Yes, the women in these ads are overwhelmingly conventionally pretty, and trim, and white; no, the ads don’t aim to question the essence of beauty standards so much as expand them to include more women; yes, in the process of examining beauty these ads also limit its definition. But not only have other people critiqued these angles more incisively than I could, the truth is, those aren’t my deepest problems with it. My real problem is this: Just as ads of yore leveraged the attitudes that made women feel bad about their looks in order to sell products, the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty leverages the response to those attitudes in order to sell products. It allows for exactly one way that women can feel about our looks—bad—and creates a template for women’s relationship with their looks that’s just as rigid as the beauty standard it’s challenging.

But hold on, lady—didn’t you know that only 11% of girls around the world feel comfortable using the word beautiful to describe themselves? Isn't that problematic? You can find that statistic right on the Real Beauty Campaign’s website—preceded by a statistic about how 72% of girls "feel tremendous pressure to be beautiful." I look at these numbers and ask myself: How many girls now feel tremendous pressure to use the word beautiful to describe themselves? Another unanswered question stemming from those neat statistics: How many girls and women might not use the word beautiful to describe themselves yet still have a generous interpretation of their looks? How many women, when asked to describe themselves to someone they love or trust as opposed to a total stranger, might dare to use kinder words about their looks? How much our hesitation to claim beautiful for ourselves has to do with either a satisfaction with being pretty, or lovely, or striking—or with not wanting to be seen as suffering from “she thinks she’s all that” syndrome?

With our Mad Men avatars, my friend saw herself as being slimmer than I’d “drawn” her. Now, I don’t want to conflate thinness with beauty, but I knew she was somewhat aesthetically unhappy with her weight at the time we did one another’s avatars—so by the very guideline she was looking toward at the time, she depicted herself as being “more beautiful” than I did. It pains me to say that, because I’ve found her beautiful at every size I’ve seen her inhabit, and I’d be saddened if she thought my avatar of her meant anything less than that (which I don’t think it does). But my point here isn’t which avatar was more accurate—after all, none of the three body choices look particularly like her, or like me, or like anyone except perhaps Christina Hendricks. (The bloody mary, of course, is totally on par.) It’s that in an exchange with someone she intuitively trusted with her mental snapshot of herself, she defaulted not to the more conventionally negative image but to the more conventionally positive image. And like I said, we’re talking here about someone who wasn’t terrifically happy with her body; my friend is psychologically healthy but hardly has bullet-proof bodily self-esteem. Yet her experience of herself as relayed to the “sketch artist” of the app wasn’t one of hesitant self-deprecation—an experience we saw nowhere in the Dove sketch artist video.

The Dove campaign has confounded me from the beginning. I’ve alternately felt annoyed by it, touched by it, in simpatico with it, turned off by it, patronizing toward it, and thankful for it. In other words: It is having exactly the effect it’s supposed to have. And that’s what makes it both an effective campaign and a gold mine/red herring for skeptics like me. Dove’s parent company, Unilever, does not exist to make women feel good about themselves; Unilever exists to sell products. That’s fine, that’s their mission—they’re not a therapy center, they’re not a nonprofit (though they do sponsor nonprofit groups that work specifically for girls’ self-esteem)—and at day’s end, whatever my intellectual quibblings, I’d rather have a company trying to meet its mission in a way that’s socially responsible rather than in a way that grasps for the lowest common denominator. But to forget that their goal is to sell products to you, and that all these campaigns exist to generate buzz—call it “start[ing] a global conversation” if you will, it’s the same thing as "buzz"—in order to make you want to buy those products would be a mistake. Hell, by contributing to this “global conversation” here I’m doing unpaid PR for Dove, regardless of what I’m actually saying about their work. (And for Mad Men too, for that matter.) If that sounds cynical, remember that the entire concept of branded content (i.e. what the Dove campaign is, as opposed to a traditional commercial) exists because consumers got tired of regular advertising. And—hold your breath here, folks—female consumers ages 25 to 34 prefer Dove’s “branded content” approach to a traditional ad by a 7:1 margin. 

I just can’t help but wonder if part of the reason those consumers prefer this approach is not only their own cynicism, but their own imprinting of the idea that women’s greatest challenge in this world is to love their looks. It can be a challenge, yes, of course it can be—an enormous one, one that, without any path outward, can inhibit any of us to the point where we can’t accept any greater challenges. It’s a terrible feeling, isn’t it? I know it well. For make no mistake through my critique: There’s a part of me that feels fiercely empathetic when I watch the Dove video, and that’s because it’s an ad that gets me where it hurts—for when I’m in that zone, I’m intensely vulnerable. Intense vulnerability is easily recalled in the body; tears sprang to my eyes during the part of the sketch-artist video when the women’s side-by-side portraits were revealed to them. And intense vulnerability that is easily recalled in the body makes for a highly receptive consumer. 

Do I get something out of the Dove campaign? Yes, I do. And Dove will always get more.

Yer Cheatin' Heart: The Relationship Between Beauty and Betrayal

The Fête of the Order of Cuckoldry Before the Throne of Her Majesty, Infidelity, France, c. 1815

Looking at appearance and infidelity vis-à-vis the Petraeus household made me curious about what role beauty actually does play in betrayal. Most of us know from casual observation that it’s fully possible for a person to cheat with someone who isn’t as physically attractive as that person’s primary partner—but is there any sort of pattern there? Are people likelier to cheat with someone who’s conventionally better-looking than one’s partner?

I was surprised/relieved to find that there weren’t any studies available that delved into that particular question. (Not sure how that would work in a lab setting anyway: “Please send photo of mistress to...”?) But there’s a wealth of research looking at other intersections of appearance and infidelity. Some of the more interesting findings:


1) Women reported feeling more threatened when “the other woman” was particularly attractive—but only in cases of emotional infidelity. In sexual infidelity, the other woman’s appearance had no effect on the wife/girlfriend’s feelings about the betrayal.

I was surprised by the findings of this study at first. On the surface, our culture tends to equate beauty with sex appeal more than it connects beauty and lovability. (The frowsy girl in movies never gets laid, but someone’s gonna see her heart of gold, right?) So wouldn’t a woman feel more threatened by an attractive rival when the betrayal was sexual more than emotional?

But with a closer look, it makes perfect sense. Sexual infidelity can be as meaningless as a drunken, regrettable one-night stand; emotional infidelity implies not a fleeting crush but something with a deeper current that develops over time. In other words: Someone cheating sexually could just want one specific part of a person (ahem)—but someone cheating emotionally is entranced with the entirety of the third party. And in a culture that likes to make-believe that a woman’s value as a person lies in her beauty and feminine charms, it’s logical that a beautiful woman—i.e. a valuable woman—is going to pose a greater threat in situations of emotional infidelity. When your partner becomes emotionally invested in another person, it stings regardless of who that person is. But when it’s someone whose value is evident, the threat is greater because your own value diminishes comparatively. With sexual infidelity, the value of the person isn’t called into question as sharply as it with emotional infidelity, so a beautiful “rival” poses less of a threat.


2) Women are more likely than men to end a marriage after their own infidelity—and the more attractive the woman as compared to her husband, the likelier she is to do so.

To put it plainly, attractive women are likelier than men to use infidelity as an opportunity to “trade up,” in the language of this study. The lesson here seems clear: Beauty increases a woman’s “market value,” while infidelity (including the person’s own infidelity) lessens the value an individual gets from her or his partner. Put the two together and it’s not hard to see how a woman might feel as though the algorithm of the relationship has changed after infidelity, to the point where ending the relationship makes sense in a way that it might not if she weren’t confident of her “market value.” By the way, I’m putting that in quotes because it makes me a little queasy not to.


3) Women were twice as likely as men to endorse “the other person makes me feel attractive” as an acceptable reason for infidelity.

Endorse is a strong word here but it’s the word used in the study so I’m borrowing it here; the participants weren’t necessarily saying infidelity was hunky-dory under any circumstance. With that weakened use of endorse in mind, take this in: 20% of men endorsed cheating if the other person made them feel attractive, while 42% of women said the same. In addition, women were 6% likelier to endorse infidelity when the cheating party wasn’t attracted to their spouse. (In fact, the only reason for cheating that men endorsed significantly more than women was “Opportunity presented itself,” with 32% of men signing on.)

Read cynically, this confirms the wretched stereotype of women as hopelessly vain, forever needing to be fawned over and then getting huffy enough to cheat if that fawning stops. But I interpret this rather as a sad comment on what all these studies are driving at: Plenty of women still internalize their value as lying in their looks. Feeling beautiful under someone else’s gaze can be intoxicating—and so validating that it might trump other values one might hold dear. Bathing in that gaze is often construed as such a foundational condition of a relationship that it might be easy for some women to quietly substitute in that feeling for commitment and fidelity. Indeed, so much advice given to women about how to “catch his eye” is geared toward maximizing physical attractiveness that if you squint hard enough, catching his eye can appear to be the grand prize that women are supposed to shoot for—not the relationship itself. Little wonder that under that paradigm, plenty of women might be willing to excuse infidelity with “but he makes me feel beautiful.” Plus, since attractiveness is often seen as the way one “earns” sex (only the beautiful get to do the nasty, you know), it makes sense that having your appearance highly valued by another lays the groundwork for beauty’s payoff.


4) Men married to women they believe to have a high infidelity risk are likelier than other men to use “mate retention tactics” to keep their wives from straying. Women, on the other hand, were no more or less likely to deploy such tactics regardless of whether they thought their husbands might cheat. 

You’ve gotta love these “tactics” too: punishing the woman for whatever it is that makes him think she might stray, putting down competitors, submission and debasement, and “concealment of mate,” whatever that means (the study didn’t say). Of course, that’s better than the tactics used by men who perceive their wives to be more attractive than they themselves are: emotional manipulation, derogation, sexual threats, and violence against rivals. And once again, women who perceived their husbands to be more attractive than they themselves are weren’t more likely to use those tactics.

These tidbits are just randomly dispiriting until you look at another finding of the study and see exactly how dispiriting it really is: There was no correlation between how hot a guy thinks his wife is and how likely he thinks she is to cheat on him. Yet a woman’s perceived beauty and her perceived risk of infidelity are not only punished, but are punished in much the same way. (Not all the “mate retention tactics” measured in the survey were negative ones; love and care were considered tactics, for example.) So basically: Women are groomed to maximize their attractiveness, in part because that’s supposed to snag you a higher-quality mate. Yet getting into a relationship with a man who thinks you’re better-looking than he thinks he is carries risk. Talk about feeling cheated, eh?

*     *     *

These findings are hardly conclusive, largely because some of them relied upon hypothetical infidelities, and also because the conclusions drawn from the studies are rather oblique. (Plus, I’m skeptical of beauty studies to begin with.) Intellectually, what I gather from them is what popped up plenty of times above: As long as we see women’s value as lying largely in their appearance, there will be a relationship between beauty and betrayal, even if that relationship isn’t as straightforward as some people would make it seem.

Personally, though, I take something else from this data: Since there’s no pattern here as far as actual behavior, there’s little use fretting about one’s own appearance in conjunction with infidelity. I know that when I’ve been cheated on, my instinct (after seething rage) is to wonder why I alone wasn’t enough for my partner. And, yes, to wonder whether the betrayal happened because I ceased to be attractive in the cheater’s eyes. (I didn’t say it was a healthy instinct, people.) But looking at all these studies, they’re...fuzzy. Weird little conclusions come up, none of which explain the only thing I’ve really cared about when I’ve been betrayed—or, for that matter, when I’ve had the poor judgment to betray a partner myself: Why. The why of betrayal sears and smolders, and at least in my case, it never fully burns out, even years later. I don’t feel anger when I think of my high school boyfriend telling me he kissed his ex during a snowball fight, but the why still flickers, even if the only emotion it provokes in me is nostalgia for the time when that was the most complicated thing I could imagine happening in my intimate life.

These studies don’t provide a why. And as satisfying as it would be to have something concrete we could turn to in times of the heartbreak of betrayal, it’s fitting that no why emerges. Can we ever know why? If “opportunity presented itself” is one of the more popular reasons for cheating, there really isn’t a why. It might be cold comfort to see that beauty isn’t really a part of the why—or it might not be comfort at all, depending upon your relationship with beauty, and with infidelity, for that matter. But only when we learn to take our own perspective on appearance out of the equation can we begin to see “opportunity,” disappointment, and the chaos of love and desire—the unsatisfying but undeniable components that are likely a part of the why—as the real flame-throwers here.

This is part two of a three-part series on appearance and infidelity. Part one is here; look for part three next week.

The Enduring Popularity of Tans

Around this time each year—usually a hair later, but, hey, climate change!—I enter the same debate with myself: to self-tan or not to self-tan? After years of studiously avoiding the sun, fervently evoking old-timey movie stars with porcelain complexions as my reason for doing so, I spent time in the tropics a few years ago and returned with a deep allover tan that made people around me say, “Wow, you’re tan.” I freakin’ loved it and promptly spent a small fortune on Jergens Natural Glow. It lasted through the summer, but then the following summer I was faced with a conundrum: I’d adored having a natural tan and didn’t mind keeping it up artificially, but healthwise I couldn’t afford to do it again—I tick nearly every box on the list of skin cancer risk factors. (I’d initially done my best to avoid the sun in Vietnam but when that proved impossible, I threw off the towel and sunbathed for all it was worth.) Did I actually want to start from scratch, building up a “tan”—a tan made up of what amounts to skin dye, I might add—for no particular reason? Did I really want to invest the money and time in a fake tan, for a capitulation to vanity?

So here we are, leg-baring season quickly approaching, and I’m in the same spot again. And as I go back and forth with myself about whether I want to appear tanned this year, I'm asking myself a question that, surprisingly, I haven’t wondered before: Why do we want to look tan in the first place?

Part of the answer, as with many things fashionable, is Coco Chanel. Prior to the designer’s rise to prominence, clothes covered so much of women’s form that a body tan was impossible, and a tan on the face and hands signified what it still does in developing nations: that the tanned person is an outdoor laborer, most likely of low social status. Lily-white skin remained a sign of a lady even after industrialization, but legend has it that when Chanel was accidentally sunburned during a trip to the Riviera and developed a tan shortly thereafter, her new hue took fire as a symbol of all she herself embodied: modernism, luxury, and independence. The episode “coincided” with a shift in the medical approach to sunlight, as the medical field went from regarding the sun as dangerous to seeing it as a cure-all within a span of 30 years. In 1905’s The Effects of Tropical Light on White Men, Dr. Chas Edward Woodruff wrote that “The American girl is a bundle of nerves. She is a victim of too much light,” but by WWI “heliotherapy” was readily used to treat wounds, rickets, tuberculosis. Whatever the case, according to Vogue, “The 1929 girl must be tanned,” and so she was.

But here’s the thing that’s sort of flummoxing: That was 83 years ago. We haven’t let up since. There have been plenty of developments that have kept tanning popular—the bikini in 1946, the foil blanket in the 1950s, a plethora of tanning aides from “gypsy sun tan oil” in the 1930s to the perfunctory Coppertone baby—and there have been fluctuations in the fashionability of suntans. But since their arrival, tans have never truly gone out of fashion. Even through the enormous rise of awareness of the dangers of UV rays, tanning is, if not a cultural imperative, something we don’t necessarily question. We might swat wrists of friends who bake in tanning beds, but we don’t really blink an eye at self-tanning creams even if we don’t use them ourselves (and up to 46% of us do). Plus, judging by the number of people who complimented my tan after my return from Vietnam, it still holds a good amount of cultural cachet. Since 1929 we’ve given up spit curls, drop waists, and breast binding, but we cling to the tan.

We cling to it in part because its significance hasn’t changed all that much, sure; it’s affluence, luxury, and even though we all know better, health. The idea now isn’t so much that we’re acting as if we’ve spent two weeks at Saint-Tropez but rather that we’re not desk-bound. It’s also the perfect accessory: A tan hits the sweet spot between conspicuous and inconspicuous consumption. It visibly shares that you’ve done something we still connect with leisure and affluence, but without the bourgeois connotations of furs, Jaguars, and jewels. Once tan, you cannot help but be tan; it’s literally a part of who you are. It’s the ultimate expression of “Oh, this old thing?” The dearth of tans among hipsters supports this: In a community definitively marked by inconspicuous consumption, the standards for visibility change, stigmatizing any visible consumption, i.e. tans, more than they would be elsewhere. The activities prized by the hipster community—not that such a thing exists, mind you!—with the possible exceptions of fixed-gear bicycling and rabid picnicking, are largely indoor: art, music, Tumblr. The less tan you are, the more easily you can create the appearance of partaking in these activities. Certainly I don’t think hipsters are avoiding the sun to act as if they’re not secretly weekend warriors. But taking the step those weekend warriors might—applying self-tanner or bronzer to advertise one’s proclivities to the outdoors—would send the wrong sort of social message at Chloe Sevigny’s tea party.

Beyond the idea of material luxury, a tan represents that we have the luxury to be connected to both nature and culture simultaneously. Tourism boards use tanning in their materials: “The bourgeois on their Mediterranean beaches can entertain the illusion of learning to love their bodies again as they did in childhood,” writes K.K. Sharma in his overview of the history of tourism. A tan is a message, and the message is that its bearer is a child of nature who has returned to one’s filing-cabinet life bearing proof of the nature connection. The idea of tans returning us to a state of nature makes tanning less stigmatized where more tangible icons of luxury might be sneered at. 

But even with all these reasons for tans sticking around for more than 80 years, it’s still counterintuitive. I’m having trouble thinking of anything that we know full well is bad for us but that we do anyway, for vanity—rather, that we encourage the mimicking of. We might go on diets, wear high heels, quaff martinis, puff smoke rings, or any number of other things that have been glamorized that aren’t so hot for your health—but we’re actually doing those things, not pretending to do them. With self-tanner, it’s like we’re all standing around puffing on electronic cigarettes even if we’ve never touched real tobacco. We all know tans don’t actually represent health and that there’s no such thing as a “healthy tan,” but we don’t really believe it. Rather, plenty of us believe it but covet the tan anyway, and turn to products to help us regain what has been taken from us with our banishment from the sun.

And, as with so many things about the intensely personal choices we make, it just might come down to this: There is an enormous financial amount at stake in keeping us sunny-side up. Sunblock is a good-sized segment of the skin-care industry (it’s projected to hit $5.2 billion globally by 2015), but so are its cousins: sunless tanning products, spray-on tans, and cosmetic bronzers totaling $516 million annually, not to mention the indoor tanning industry and low-dose sunblocks marketed as "tanning creams." I’d initially thought that the cosmetic approaches to tanning were developed as a “healthy” alternative to natural tans and tanning beds, but actually, various lotions and dyes have been around as long as tanning has been fashionable, for the very reason that a suntan is sought after in the first place: Most of us don’t have unlimited time to lounge around Biarritz (or, today, to lay complacently in tanning beds—which ain’t cheap, even if you’re willing to take the health risks). Mantan, a sunless tanning lotion popular in the 1950s, promised dual action with its “moisturizing” action that “lasts for days without touch-ups!”; even in an era when women were being supposedly liberated from housework with the modern kitchen, time was at a premium.

And we can’t look at tanning products without at least glancing at their counterparts: lighteners. Skin lightening creams are wildly popular in Asia; the idea isn’t to look white but rather to look sophisticated and wealthy—an elevation from the peasant class that works outside.The politics and implications of skin lightening call for deeper examination than I can give them here; for now I’ll just point out the obvious: Both self-tanners and skin lightening creams are class in a bottle. Asian women using skin lighteners don’t want to look white any more than I want to look Hispanic when I put on self-tanner; we want to look lighter or darker, sure, but both of those are a route to looking what our cultures deem better. Skin lightening creams are making in-roads in the North American market, with claims about “radiance,” “brightening,” and “illuminating—but the truth is, those adjectives are similarly applied in Asia as well (as I found out when I bought a “radiance” face wash in Vietnam that didn’t strip away my tan but made me look chalky immediately after washing). These are the same formulas, mind you, but being packaged to apply to the inner desires of each culture: paleness in Asia, radiance in America, youth and “rejuvenation” in both. As this excellently reported piece on the rise of skin lightening creams in North America shows, "a brightener is whatever we want it to be."

In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf writes about how the beauty industry attempts to package the radiance each individual brings to the world. “The Rites of Beauty offer to sell women back an imitation of the light that is ours already, the central grace we are forbidden to say that we see,” she writes. If radiance can be bought and sold, in a consumer society that sends the message that the “real” radiance is what comes in the package, while the homemade stuff gets moldy. Add to that the reality that the homemade tan—that is, a tan acquired from actually being in the sun—is damaging to your health (and eventually to your vanity through a leathery appearance), and suddenly the stuff in the bottle becomes even more appealing than run-of-the-mill makeup that just promises to make you look “better.” Eyeliner makes you look more awake, but self-tanner (or lightener, depending on the culture) promises to give you back that light that was originally yours, and it does so in a way that lets you play by the rules. Good girls stay out of the sun, but good girls also look like they get plenty of the stuff regardless. The tan in the bottle—that “Radiant,” “Natural Glow,” that “Sublime Bronze,” that holy protection of the “Bronzing Veil”—gives us an out, allows us to have our radiance without the harm the real deal would inflict. The beauty of it for us is that we’ve figured out how to get that “healthy tan” after all. And the beauty of it for the industry is that we’re paying $8.49 for each opportunity to do so.

Beauty Without Borders

When I first read of a bomb on October 26 that injured 12 people at a cosmetics store in Peshawar, Pakistan, I didn’t think much of it. Rather, I thought of it as much as I think of any number of bombings one might read about in a day: Awful, I think to myself, perhaps briefly trying to picture what it is like to be doing your shopping and suddenly hear a bomb nearby. Depending on the severity of the injuries, the number of deaths, the profile of the area—or, more frankly, my mood—I may feel a shot of anything from anger to sadness. It is almost always fleeting.

But several days later, when the bombing came up again at Central Asia Online, that fleeting sadness stayed. Nobody was killed in the explosion, though the shop was destroyed, so at first glance it seemed odd that this bombing was getting attention beyond the perfunctory notice I’d read originally. The piece was the hook for a focus on the resilience of area shoppers and the growth of the Pakistan beauty industry, but what struck me was what never was explicitly written but what was implied with this sentence: “This is the first time that a cosmetics shop has been targeted in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where CD shops have frequently been targeted by militants who consider music to be in opposition to their version of Islam.” In other words, the store was not targeted because it was a store in a busy market. It was targeted because it sold makeup.

There’s much to say about Islam and makeup (Nahida at The Fatal Feminist writes frequently and fluently on the topic), but beyond pointing out that this is the work of extremists who happen to be Muslim, not the dictates of Islam, that’s not really what I’m getting at here. What I am getting at is this: It is very easy for western feminists to pit beauty talk and body politics in opposition to women’s issues that are literally life-and-death. Reproductive rights, sure, but also issues affecting women of the Middle East and Central Asia—girls’ education, extraordinary violence against women, honor killings, divorce and marriage laws that strip women of power, etc. Even once beauty and appearance became legitimized as a feminist issue in the west, it’s still often taken seriously only when coupled with the idea that the beauty myth is designed to replace eroding patriarchal structures so that women will stay in our place. What’s not necessarily taken as seriously is the idea that women who are at risk for the honor killings we rightfully prioritize as more important than our western beauty talk might want to wear eyeshadow too. And if the bombing of October 26 becomes a trend, they could pay with their lives.

To talk of beauty is to talk of women’s lives. Appearance is a brush stroke even in the lives of women whose challenges are greater than I could ever imagine from my middle-class American perch; remember, Anne Frank packed curlers. If we do not pay attention to those brush strokes, at best we may miss out on details that illuminate truths of the lives we believe we’re trying to make better. At worst, we overlook the fact that something as simple as going to a cosmetics shop in a Peshawar bazaar can be dangerous, but that women will do it anyway, because those brush strokes matter.

I’m wary of saying too much here, because I haven’t talked to women living in highly unstable countries about beauty, and I don’t want to either try to speak for them or assume that I know better. Especially because in one of the higher-profile acknowledgments that women in politically shaky environments still care about beauty reflected exactly that. In the 2004 documentary The Beauty Academy of Kabul, we trail the first graduating class of Beauty Without Borders, a now-defunct cosmetology school run by Americans who were training Afghan women to be hairstylists and makeup artists. There’s since been plenty of controversy over the school; one of the instructors, Debbie Rodriguez, published a memoir that other instructors claim misrepresented both the school and her role in it. Far worse was the retaliation that came to some of the students after the book was released; though all names were changed, Rodriguez writes of various acts the local women engaged in, and recounts how she helped a student fake her virginity for her wedding night. At least two of the women were forced to flee the country.

The fallout from the book is tragic, but it doesn’t make me wince like I did when hearing one of the instructors say to the students of their donated beauty toolkits: "Some of you are getting frustrated with your scissors. Frédéric Fekkai actually donated these scissors, and they’re very good scissors. They are much much better than what you’ve been using," as if what makes a pair of shears "good" is who donated it, not how the user experiences it. At another point, we see a fired-up Rodriguez attempt to rally the students—who have just explained that they don’t wear makeup every day because they believe it will ruin their skin—by saying she’s going to take them out of their “rut” because they’re in a “hole.” The translator looks at her with dismay, silently refusing to translate the words, though it was probably too late to not have the message come across clearly: You poor, poor women. Let us, with our Frédéric Fekkai scissors, help you. Only Sheila McGurk, a Virginia-based instructor who gently questions what the students mean when they say they’re “having trouble” with their husbands, seems to grasp that she can’t apply her ideas of western liberation to the women she’s teaching to cut hair, even as she seems humbly unsure of what ideas she can apply. And what she comes up with may be a shade naive, but as someone who has gotten teary in the hairstylist's chair, I know there's truth in it: “You’re not just cutting their hair,” McGurk advises her students of their future clients. “You’re healing them, inside.”

The documentary—which is definitely worth a viewing, and which is streaming on Netflix—is at its best when we get to hear from the students, most of whom already have years of experience under their belt. We meet Hanifa, who operates a salon out of the one room allotted to her family, separating the work space from the living quarters with curtains. In the same breath in which she mentions not being able to wear nail polish under the Taliban, she talks of witnessing the Taliban cut off people’s hands and feet. Fauzia, another hairdresser operating out of her home, was ordered by her husband not to stop styling hair, but to never mention it to him—presumably because the less he knew, the less risk the family shouldered for her illegal work. Nasifa talks of the fear she’d feel whenever a Talib knocked on her door—yet every time she’d open the door, there was an officer requesting services for his wife. Other Taliban wives didn’t have husbands who were so permissive; they’d come in and get their hair done but not their makeup, as makeup left telltale traces more readily than a coif.

The most telling moment involves—what else?—the burqa. As Nasifa tells us of the hair and makeup work she did on clients that had to be covered up, her expression told me more than the subtitles could. She appeared indignant that her handiwork had been deemed illegal for years, remaining unseen; finally, I thought to myself, her work could be seen in public, garnering her client referrals, not to mention the pride of seeing her clients walk out of her home with their heads held high. Her actual concern hadn’t occurred to me, its subtitle coming as a reminder of how easily we can get it wrong: “Our work would be ruined.” It wasn’t the lack of visibility of her work that was troublesome; it was that the quality of it was eroded the minute the fabric of the burqa flattened the hair, smeared the makeup. The pride wasn’t in having the work seen by the public; it was in having it done right.

I hope it goes without saying that I don’t think we should be aiming to up beauty talk within international discourse on women’s health and basic quality of life. American feminists couldn’t really tackle the beauty question until after we’d tackled, oh, voting, and unfair financial and divorce laws, and statutes saying it was okay for a man to rape his wife because, hey, that’s what marriage is. And we still have so far to go, but appearance now has a loud place in the national feminist conversation. I’m thankful for that, and I also recognize that it’s a goddamn luxury. But just because it’s a luxury for us to talk about appearance as a feminist issue doesn’t mean that the topic doesn’t have a valid role in the lives of women whose gender-related challenges are greater than I could imagine—or that it doesn't have a valid role in our work as feminists concerned about international issues. We talk of acid-throwing, bride-burning, honor killings: horrific acts that the international community must prioritize. The woman walking into a market in Peshawar to buy some hair oil is a part of the conversation too.

Beauty Blogosphere 10.14.11

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

From Head...
The new face of MAC: Miss Piggy. You know, I used to be skeptical of MAC because it was trying to seem terrifically edgy while simply being an arm of one of the biggest cosmetics companies in the world. And I maintain that advertising can never be subversive, so I'm not about to do the Internet equivalent of pat MAC on the back. That said, between its makeover campaign in the UK and Miss Piggy, the company has officially won me over. Its brand managers have a keen appreciation of the fantasy aspect of makeup, and even though I wear makeup in a pretty straightforward manner, I like that MAC isn't asking me to buy its product to make a better version of myself.


...To Toe...
Footloser: As a disliker of most things remake (with the possible exception of the Joe Cocker "With a Little Help From My Friends") I remain appalled by the new Footloose, and DOUBLE APPALLED by Deborah "Traitor" Lippmann's polish collection inspired by the remake. My feet will remain tight.


...And Everything In Between:
Big hair: Hairstylist Bashar Brown opened up a UK salon catering specifically to plus-size clients. The idea makes sense—larger chairs and drapes, for starters—but some salons are just snooty anyway regardless of one's size, and I'd hate to see salons seizing this as an opportunity to further snootify their offerings since "they have their own salons now."

Backpedal: Procter & Gamble assures shareholders it doesn't support political causes—and then reveals its $40,000 donation to conservative causes in Ohio, including support of Senate bill 5, which would restrict collective bargaining power of public employees.

Gross violation: In other assuring Procter & Gamble news, the district attorney in Scranton, Pennsylvania, assures the public that "No Procter & Gamble products were contaminated" in the case of the P&G employee who has been injecting his semen into coworkers' yogurt containers. 

Latin American biodiversity: Colombia's plan to become a major cosmetics player: Bank on its biodiversity, which, in conjunction with the call for natural ingredients, could easily prove a boon to the nation's economy.

What I see in the mirror: Wonderful series at The Guardian in which well-known people are asked to share what they see when they look in the mirror. (via Already Pretty) For as Elissa at Dress With Courage reminded us this week, "Your body image is how you perceive, think and feel about your body. This may have no bearing at all on your actual appearance." 

Dirty politics: Interesting twist in Massachusetts politics: Senator Scott Brown posed nude in a 1982 Cosmo spread to help pay for law school. When his likely rival, Elizabeth Warren, commented that she "kept her clothes on" to pay for her own degree, Brown later responded to her jab with, "Thank God." I don't care what Warren looks like or how Brown paid for school; what's interesting is that people thought Brown's words were unkind, as though it would be a compliment to say that we should all want to see a politician nude. Can't we just fast-forward to the sexy stuff like S.139, the Equal Access to Tax Planning Act?

Stuck on you: Beauty Redefined is offering their fantastic body image media literacy billboards as sticky notes. "You are capable of much more than being looked at" is a success writ small as well.

Sunspot: Nail polish that changes colors in the sun! I was all over "mood polish" in the '80s so this is catnip to me.

The best dry shampoo: Two of this week's Beheld topics are magically synthesized this week at Persephone magazine, where Tuesday's interviewee Golda Poretsky writes about not washing her hair. (Her secret hair powder trick made me snort out loud, and it's one I guarantee you haven't heard of yet.) 

What a drag: Rachel Rabbit White asks why we don't love drag kings as much as drag queens. I'm not into most drag queens—most of the ones I've seen seem to be co-opting the sucky stuff about femininity and presenting it as sheer fabulousity instead of truly engaging with it or critiquing it. (In fact, the only drag queen I've seen and truly loved is...a woman, the World Famous BOB, who is a self-described "female female impersonator" and manages to be both fabulous and critical of the feminine role.) My quick answer to her provocative question is that we're used to seeing women take on the hallmarks of masculinity but not the other way around; I suspect that if we had a more culturally equal society drag queens would lose much allure as well.

Small pleasures and the new Dr. Pepper slogan: Finally, someone says something intelligent about the "lipstick index" other than note its existence. (Lipstick sales haven't gone up in this recession, leading to patter about a "nail polish index.") Thank you, Molly Lambert.

"Self-consciousness isolates and cancels": Sally works her magic at Already Pretty to weave together a few of my favorite topics: self-consciousness, projection, and the words we speak to one another about our appearance. 

Beauty, Disrupted: Supermodel Carré Otis's memoir is out this week, and though the number of celebrity memoirs I've read I can count on one hand (I was once stranded in a cabin with nothing to read except Shirley Maclaine's Out on a Limb), this seems promising. She touches on something in this interview with ET that you rarely see acknowledged in talk about domestic violence: "I think that that initial meeting [with ex-husband Mickey Rourke, who was arrested in 1994 for spousal abuse] was an immediate familiarity. It was sort of recognition of somebody who I knew there was an incredible charge with, and energy between. So in a way it was that 'dangerous at first sight' ...and now I think, I know better —those are the red flags." Also, it's cowritten with Hugo Schwyzer, who always takes a fresh spin on questions of appearance and gender in his own work.

Daredevils, from left: Annie Edson Taylor, Maria Spelterini, Maud Willard

*I spent most of said week taking in a different sort of beauty—upstate New York and Niagara Falls—so this roundup isn't as complete as usual. In compensation, I offer you an off-topic collection of daredevils: Annie Edson Taylor (the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel), Maria Spelterini (the first woman to cross the Niagara gorge on tightrope, in 1876, shown here wearing peach baskets on her feet during one of her three follow-ups to her first successful crossing), and Maud Willard, a dance hall actress who perished in 1901 while trying to shoot the rapids in a barrel. She was accompanied by her fox terrier, who survived, presumably by shoving his little nose inside the single air hole in the barrel.

Hot For Teacher: Erotic Capital and Valuing Traditionally Feminine Traits

(Let's just say "erotic capital" was a difficult concept to illustrate.) 

Last year, I did what every good soul-searcher does and whisked myself off to Prague for three months in order to become certified to teach English to speakers of other languages. (Most good soul-searchers did this in 1994 or so, but I like to take a retro approach to bohemian life events. Maybe I'll make it to Burning Man when I'm 47.)

The certificate I was aiming for, the CELTA, is widely regarded as the gold standard in the ESOL world, short of getting an actual degree. The principle of CELTA is basically this: If you teach students English, they won't learn it; if they teach themselves, they will. Nothing but English is spoken in a CELTA classroom, regardless of level (I speak about three words of Czech, all of which involve beer, but had no trouble teaching beginners). There's lots of group work, eliciting answers, student participation, and peer teaching. It's a fairly new method of teaching language, and it's not how I was taught French in school, but mon français est terrible, so there you go. It seems to work, that's all I know.

Things we were told as teachers: We were there not to teach, but to help students learn. We were told to use students' lives in the classrooms, since relevance is key to memory. We were told to coax answers from students, not give them; we were told not necessarily to correct, but to ask other students what they thought of any given answer, either correct or incorrect. We were told to learn to distribute classroom attention evenly; we were told to be considerate of students' emotional needs. And, of course, we were told to be ourselves.

In short, we were told to adhere to a lot of traditionally feminine values. And it makes sense: ESOL teachers are disproportionately female, and indeed all of my instructors were women. Over the years, ESOL programs have evolved to match the needs of the teachers, and it follows that traditionally feminine traits would be valued in an ESOL classroom. (The men in the class who didn't do well complained of sexism, and while I did see some of that, I also saw that many of them were struggling with the work because it was counter to the values they'd been taught.)

I excelled at teaching English. Students liked me and repeatedly sought me out during breaks and after class. I got high marks from my instructors, and despite being one of the only students in the class with no prior teaching experience, I got the highest grade possible. This isn't because I'm some ESOL savant or unusually talented. It was because it happened to use all the skills that I've unintentionally cultivated over the years: listening, indirect communication, helping others see their own knowledge, making people feel valued. Teaching per se didn't come naturally to me, but the ideal CELTA teacher personality did, and that helped me get through where my skills were lacking.

There's another part of why I excelled at teaching English that has to do with my gender, and I suspect that Catherine Hakim might call it "erotic capital." Hakim's recent book, Erotic Capital (Honey Money in the UK), posits that women need to better capitalize on their looks than we currently do. And by "erotic capital," she means not just beauty and sex appeal; she includes social grace, self-presentation, and liveliness in her definition. By not wielding our erotic capital in the market, we're essentially shortchanging ourselves economically.

In other words, it seems to pretty much be a feminist "duh" that she's talking smack in a lot of ways. But like Rachel Hills, who posed a series of excellent questions about Hakim's thesis yesterday, I'm not willing to dismiss the argument wholesale, despite how troubling it is on some levels.

When I was in front of the classroom, only rarely did I feel students' attention drifting. (This was made far easier by the fact that I was teaching adults, who tend to be more highly motivated than children or teens in the classroom.) I had a "teaching hat," there's no doubt—but that persona made use of something authentic within myself, and that something happened to coincide nicely with the ESOL system I was learning. And though of course I would never exploit my sex appeal to get students' attention (for example, I made a point of wearing very conservative clothes when teaching, not that a Prague winter allowed for much else), I'm pretty sure that some of that came into play too. Not because I was tossing bedroom eyes at any of my students, but because my own low-key brand of sex appeal lies in my warmth, empathy, and ability to help people feel special. (Or at least this is what my sources say.) Acting sexy is a role you can play; having sex appeal is something that's a part of you and that is often recognized even by people who aren't sexually attracted to you. I'm pretty sure my "sex appeal" as I'm describing it here wasn't perceived by most of my students as "sexy lady teacher," but more as "teacher we like because she listens pretty intently to us and seems to enjoy the sparkle that can sometimes happen in a classroom of adults who are all here to learn together."

Now, you could say that this isn't "erotic capital" at all, but that it's just being a good, relatable teacher, and you'd be partly right. But given that it's only pretty recently that listening instead of speaking was considered good teaching in the ESOL classroom, it's also clear that our ideas of "good teaching"—or good managing, or sales, or pretty much any job a person could have—is fluid and can indeed shift based on what an occupation's standard bearers decide to make it. And it just so happens that ESOL is valuing traditionally feminine traits, and it just so happens that erotic capital is something that is often pegged to women, and it just so happens that it's something we probably do like to dismiss, because feminists don't want to promote the idea that women "get by on their looks" just as men don't want to admit that they do the same. (Hakim takes great care to point out that erotic capital is exploited more by men than by women.)

There's a thesis within Hakim's work that's actually pretty feminist, which Hills puts like this: "[Hakim] also argues that women, on average, possess more erotic capital than do men...because women are the ones who can birth babies and because women tend to put more effort into their appearance than men do. But because we live in a patriarchal society, we're taught that these attributes have no value." It's a cultural feminist argument, and it's not necessarily what either Hakim or Hills is positing, but I think it's worth looking at when talking about erotic capital.

I think the power of beauty is righteously critiqued, and I think that's a good thing. But I think it's a good thing not because we should act as though beauty doesn't have any power, but because we need to swing the pendulum in the other direction before we come to a place that makes real sense. I don't usually go around talking too loudly about how personal beauty should be valued on a cultural level, because we get that message about a zillion times a day in negative ways. But I'll say this: The power of beauty has been discredited over time in part because it's been a power largely seen as being wielded by women. And because it was a power seen as belonging to a disempowered class, it became rigidly institutionalized to the point where we collectively forgot that the whole of our "erotic capital" encompasses far more than the ways any of us fit, or don't fit, the iron maiden of beauty. If we expand the power of beauty to include erotic capital, which includes but is not limited to beauty, we're not just talking about the power to make a guy do nice things for you because you're so durned pretty. We're talking about the power of holding people's attention; the power of placing yourself in the realm of nature, a more powerful force than words or reason; the power of mesmerizing, lulling, soothing. Sometimes, even, the power of teaching. And yes, those are traits associated with femininity, and yes, I think women have the power to soothe men and women alike with feminine beauty, and yes, I think that can be a force for good in the world.

Hills asks some excellent questions about the intersection of erotic capital and the beauty myth. And her first question, about whether the problem is in valuing beauty or in us being socialized to believe that we're never beautiful enough, rings particularly true to me—but with a feminist interpretation of Hakim's work, it needn't. Because beauty is arguably the least important part of erotic capital; it's just the part that has plenty of products to supposedly help us get there, and it's the part that women are tracked to focus on, and it's the part that probably causes us the most grief.

I haven't read Hakim's book yet (though I intend to), and I don't want to start saying that her work is feminist without having a more thorough look at it. (I'm certain I'll have more to say on the subject later.) But I will say that even though my own experience with beauty is certainly fraught, I'm eager to see a world in which "beauty positivity" is valued—and valued appropriately, neither held up as the golden means, nor dismissed as unworthy of our efforts.

Beauty Blogosphere 9.2.11

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

Between Sinéad and Jaunty Dame, it's bald-lady week 'round here! 

From Head...
So you shaved your head, eh?: To you, today, I make this vow: If a glossy ladymag ever runs a beauty tips piece as awesome as Jaunty Dame's 10 Tips for Coping With an Accidentally Shaven Head, I will copy edit it pro bono.

Hair vs. health: The surgeon general warned attendees of the Bronner Brothers International Hair Show (which is wonderfully chronicled in the Chris Rock documentary Good Hair) to choose exercise over hair, noting that she hears women say that working out will make them sweat too much to properly maintain their hair. And then a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research criticized her for engaging in "smaller issues" like this, because certainly the surgeon fucking general wouldn't know what issues are actually affecting Americans, right? Has nothing to do with him being a white man who doesn't understand issues that might affect black women, I'm sure.


...To Toe...
Pedicure woes: Cassie Murdoch interviewed pedicurists to find out what annoys them, and tells us how not to be That Customer.


...And Everything In Between: 
Makeup 101: New series at the Guardian about the history of various cosmetics companies. First up: Revlon.

Asian men and makeup: Which country ranks #1 in sales of men's cosmetics? Korea. Unsurprising, given Korea's history as being a leader in the Asian beauty market, but still raised my eyebrows. Korea, from what I understand, is reasonably egalitarian in gender roles, with the timeline of feminism roughly echoing that of North America. Are Korean men's cosmetics sales reflective of men's desire to redefine masculinity, or just a part of the market game?

Social expectation and beauty markets: Intriguing industry look at the differences between the Japanese and Chinese beauty markets, which neatly reflects how expectations of women play out in the market. For example, cosmetics are seen as an obligation for Japanese women, making color cosmetics a higher percentage of the beauty market than it is in China, where beauty products are heavily used but still eyed with suspicion, with an emphasis on "natural beauty" being prized.

NOT!

"Be the change you wish to see in the world": Op-ed piece in the Times about how bumper-sticker wisdom becomes falsely attributed to iconic figures. (This Gandhi was a mangled version of something he said in which he making a point about the importance of community action, not individual action.) What's interesting is the frequency with which these misattributions show up in a particular kind of "you can do anything!" kind of quote that shows up in some western self-help-style works. The piece is a roundabout way of critiquing some of the weaker aspects of the self-help industry, which at its sloppiest takes a Randian approach that initially seems empowering but in the end is really just unhelpful.

Lovely lobby: Interesting that the sponsors of the Small Business Tax Equalization and Compliance Act of 2011 are both women (Senator Olympia Snow, R-ME, and Senator Mary Landrieu, D-LA). Could it have anything to do with the Professional Beauty Association's lobbying efforts?

I'll have what she's having: "The food was remarkably good and inventive, but the impression that I was most left with was now effortless the whole remarkable dining experience had been made to seem," says Deep Glamour on having a good-looking waitstaff.

The Pill: I sometimes use self-tanning cream, aka skin dye, so I'm not one to talk. But taking a pill to change your skin color is creepy, right? We can agree on this?

It must be true, it's in Time!: The Beauty Myth makes it onto Time's 100 best nonfiction books published since the magazine's creation. 

Is that Tallahassee or Bismarck?: Interview with the author of Erotic Capital, who argues that women don't capitalize enough on their "erotic capital"—grace, sex appeal, social presentation, and, of course, beauty—in the workplace. Made with less intelligence this argument would totally fall flat but her interview is thought-provoking. And for a solid counterpoint, check out Hugo Schwyzer's response at The Good Men Project, nicely tying it into his continuing work on the myth of male weakness. 

Another interesting new book on appearance: Beauty Pays by Daniel Hamermesh, which details how conventionally attractive people make more money. Judging by this reader Q&A session it could be an entertaining read; he seems neither righteous nor apologetic for the intricacies of beauty and labor.

From Athlete by Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein

But what about mathletic bodies?: Ragen at Dances With Fat on "athletic" body types, which IMHO is probably the biggest disappointment in the body-typing category, because on one hand it puts a positive spin on a body type that might not be seen as "feminine enough," and on the other hand sort of means nothing. (Magazines have told me I'm "athletic" because I'm thick-waisted, which was true when I couldn't run two minutes nonstop, and is also true now that I'm a regular gymgoer. Baffled!)

Miss Universe: A weird peek behind the scenes of Chinese beauty pageants, which seem bogus even by beauty pageant standards. Hidden within is a link to this truly incredible website, Missosology, which appears to be wholly dedicated to analyzing and tracking beauty pageant contestants worldwide. Its banner includes a countdown clock to Miss Universe 2011.

Teaching with sole: A different take on the impracticality of heels (which I have a long-documented love/hate relationship with) that goes beyond simple comfort. (The update is even better: Tori's sneakers-with-skirt trend is catching on.)

Dress With Courage on body image, celebrities, and the media: The general topic is well-trod ground, but Elissa goes beyond questions of bodily dissatisfaction to examine a more philosophical issue: "We are increasingly disconnected with what our bodies actually look like."

We'll be her mirror: Kjerstin Gruys's year-long mirror project has been getting some amazing press recently (Yahoo and HuffPo!), so a congratulations to her--and a great opportunity to look at what it means to package one's appearance-related message through for-profit media, as Sociological Images does here.

Macrofashion: Decoding Dress asks us about our fashion economy, in which we "pay" for entry to a social group via adhering to that group's norms. "Is there...a limited supply of social inclusion?" she asks. "Or do we limit supply artificially, by declaring certain modes of dress to be “inappropriate,” so as to enrich ourselves, to increase our own powereven though our doing so denies a good (and potentially causes harm) to others?"

Work it: I hadn't really thought about it until Sally asked, but I'm with her: My body image at the gym is actually pretty solid. Definitely more solid than it is when I'm roaming free on the streets, and here she breaks down her (and, as it turns out, my) reasons for that.

LGBTQ...A: Rachel Rabbit White asks some great questions about where asexuality should fall on the sex-positivity curve. "[I] argue that sex positivity needs a more psychological approach that is personally crafted—that may ask: what is okay for me? How interested in sex am I really?"

Goddess pose: Virginia looks at Yogawoman, a documentary about yoga's journey from being a male-dominated practice to the American incarnation, which is pretty much all about the ladies, it seems. I'm with her in wishing that the film spent more time looking at some of the not-so-great things about the faddishness of yoga: "Women have reinvented yoga in many important and beneficial ways. But they've also spawned a multi-billion dollar industry devoted to selling you pants that give you a yoga butt."

Nightmare Brunette on the performance of desirability: "'You’re almost intimidatingly good-looking,' one man told me after we shared our first kiss. 'No,' I said, laughing. But I thought about it later and maybe. The trappings matter so much: right hair cut, color, style; right make-up (the lighter the better; it’s less strange in the morning) the right shoes, the right dress, the eye contact. I look in the mirror and I see me, working, which is separate than myself. Their desire makes me a different person. I think it’s not so hard to shape myself that way." (This week Charlotte also gives the best defense of Pretty Woman I've ever read, not that I've read a lot of them, but still!)

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?

Welcome to the Dollhouse: Men, Cosmetics, and the Beauty Myth

Back when pretty much the only men wearing makeup were either rock lords or Boy George, I privately came up with the guideline that if any particular piece of grooming was something women generally performed while men generally didn’t, I could safely consider it “beauty work.” Nail polish and leg-shaving? Beauty work. Nail-trimming and hair-combing? Grooming. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a useful guide in helping me determine what parts of my morning routine I might want to examine with a particularly feminist—and mascaraed—eye.

That rule has begun to crumble. Americans spent $4.8 billion on men’s grooming products in 2009, doubling the figure from 1997, according to market research firm Euromonitor. Skin care—not including shaving materials—is one of the faster-growing segments of the market, growing 500% over the same period. It’s unclear how much of the market is color products (you know, makeup), but the appearance of little-known but stable men’s cosmetics companies like 4V00, KenMen, The Men Pen, and Menaji suggests that the presence is niche but growing. Since examining the beauty myth and questioning beauty work has been such an essential part of feminism, these numbers raise the question: What is the increase in men’s grooming products saying about how our culture views men?

The flashier subset of these products—color cosmetics—has received some feminist attention. Both Naomi Wolf of The Beauty Myth fame and Feministe’s own Jill Filipovic were quoted in this Style List piece on the high-fashion trend of men exploring feminine appearance, complete with an arresting photo of a bewigged, stilettoed Marc Jacobs on the cover of Industrie. Both Wolf and Filipovic astutely indicate that the shift may signal a loosening of gender roles: “I love it, it is all good,” said Wolf. “It's all about play...and play is almost always good for gender politics.” Filipovic adds, “I think gender-bending in fashion is great, and I hope it's more than a flash-in-the-pan trend.”

Yet however much I’d like to sign on with these two writers and thinkers whose work I’ve admired for years, I’m resistant. I’m wary of men’s beauty products being heralded as a means of gender subversion for two major reasons: 1) I don’t think that men’s cosmetics use in the aggregate is actually any sort of statement on or attempt at gender play; rather, it’s a repackaging and reinforcement of conventional masculinity, and 2) warmly welcoming (well, re-welcoming, as we’ll see) men into the arena where they’ll be judged for their appearance efforts is a victory for nobody—except the companies doing the product shill. 

Let’s look at the first concern: It’s not like the men mentioned in this article are your run-of-the-mill dudes; they’re specific people with a specific cultural capital. (Which is what I think Wolf and Filipovic were responding to, incidentally, not some larger movement.) Men might be buying more lotion than they did a decade ago, but outside of the occasional attempt at zit-covering through tinted Clearasil, I’ve seen very few men wearing color cosmetics who were not a part of a subculture with a history of gender play. Outside that realm, the men who are wearing bona fide makeup, for the most part, seem to be the type described in this New York Times article: the dude’s dude who just wants to do something about those undereye circles, not someone who’s eager to swipe a girlfriend’s lipstick case unless it’s haze week on fraternity row.

“Men use cosmetic products in order to cover up or correct imperfections, not to enhance beauty,” said Marek Hewryk, founder of men’s cosmetics line 4V00. Sound familiar, ladies? The idea of correcting yourself instead of enhancing? Male cosmetic behavior seems more like the pursuit of “relief from self-dissatisfaction” that drives makeup use among women rather than a space that encourages a gender-role shakeup. Outside of that handful of men who are publicly experimenting with gender play—which I do think is good for all of us—the uptick in men’s cosmetics doesn’t signify any more of a cultural shift than David Bowie’s lightning bolts did on the cover of Aladdin Sane.

Subcultures can worm their way into the mainstream, of course, but the direction I see men’s products taking is less along the lines of subversive gender play and more along the lines of products that promise a hypermasculinity (think Axe or the unfortunately named FaceLube), or a sort of updated version of the “metrosexual” epitomized by Hugh Laurie’s endorsement of L’Oréal.

The ads themselves have yet to be released, but the popular video showing the prep for the ad’s photo shoot reveals what L’Oréal is aiming for by choosing the rangy Englishman as its new spokesperson (joining Gerard Butler, who certainly falls under the hypermasculine category). He appears both stymied and lackadaisically controlling while he answers questions from an offscreen interviewer as a young woman gives him a manicure. “That’s an interesting question to pose—’because you’re worth it,’” he says about the company’s tagline. “We’re all of us struggling with the idea that we’re worth something. What are we worth?” he says. Which, I mean, yay! Talking about self-worth! Rock on, Dr. House! But in actuality, the message teeters on mockery: The quirky, chirpy background music lends the entire video a winking edge of self-ridicule. When he’s joking with the manicurist, it seems in sync; when he starts talking about self-worth one has to wonder if L’Oréal is cleverly mocking the ways we’ve come to associate cosmetics use with self-worth, even as it benefits from that association through its slogan. “Because you’re worth it” has a different meaning when directed to women—for whom the self-care of beauty work is frequently dwarfed by the insecurities it invites—than when directed to men, for whom the slogan may seem a reinforcement of identity, not a glib self-esteem boost. The entire campaign relies upon a jocular take on masculinity. Without the understanding that men don’t “really” need this stuff, the ad falls flat.

We often joke about how men showing their “feminine side” signals a security in their masculine role—which it does. But that masculinity is often also assured by class privilege. Hugh Laurie and Gerard Butler can use stuff originally developed for the ladies because they’ve transcended the working-class world where heteronormativity is, well, normative; they can still demand respect even with a manicure. Your average construction worker, or even IT guy, doesn’t have that luxury. It’s also not a coincidence that both are British while the campaigns are aimed at Americans. The “gay or British?” line shows that Americans tend to see British men as being able to occupy a slightly feminized space, even as we recognize their masculinity, making them perfect candidates for telling men to start exfoliating already. L’Oréal is selling a distinctive space to men who might be worried about their class status: They’re not “metrosexualized” (Hugh Laurie?), but neither are they working-class heroes. And if numbers are any indication, the company’s reliance upon masculine tropes is a thriving success: L’Oréal posted a 5% sales increase in the first half of 2011.

Still, I don’t want to discount the possibility that this shift might enable men to explore the joys of a full palette. L’Oréal’s vaguely cynical ads aside, if Joe Six-Pack can be induced to paint his fingernails and experience the pleasures of self-ornamentation, everyone wins, right?

Well—not exactly. In the past, men have experienced a degree of personal liberalization and freedom through the eradication of—not the promotion of—the peacocking self-display of the aristocracy. With what fashion historians call “the great masculine renunciation” of the 19th century, Western men’s self-presentation changed dramatically. In a relatively short period, men went from sporting lacy cuffs, rouged cheeks, and high-heeled shoes to the sober suits and hairstyles that weren’t seriously challenged until the 1960s (and that haven’t really changed much even today). The great masculine renunciation was an effort to display democratic ideals: By having men across classes adopt simpler, humbler clothes that could be mimicked more easily than lace collars by poor men, populist leaders could physically demonstrate their brotherhood-of-man ideals.

Whether or not the great masculine renunciation achieved its goal is questionable (witness the 20th-century development of terms like white-collar and blue-collar, which indicate that we’d merely learned different ways to judge men’s class via appearance). But what it did do was take a giant step toward eradicating the 19th-century equivalent of the beauty myth for men. At its best, the movement liberated men from the shackles of aristocratic peacocking so that their energies could be better spent in the rapidly developing business world, where their efforts, not their lineage, were rewarded. Today we’re quick to see a plethora of appearance choices as a sign of individual freedom—and, to be sure, it can be. But it’s also far from a neutral freedom, and it’s a freedom that comes with a cost. By reducing the amount of appearance options available to men, the great masculine renunciation also reduced both the burden of choice and the judgments one faces when one’s efforts fall short of the ideal.

Regardless of the success of the renunciation, it’s not hard to see how men flashing their cash on their bodies serves as a handy class marker; indeed, it’s the very backbone of conspicuous consumption. And it’s happening already in the playground of men’s cosmetics: The men publicly modeling the “individual freedom” of makeup—while supposedly subverting beauty and gender ideals—already enjoy a certain class privilege. While James Franco has an easygoing rebellion that wouldn’t get him kicked out of the he-man bars on my block in Queens, his conceptual-artist persona grants him access to a cultural cachet that’s barred to the median man. (Certainly not all makeup-wearing men enjoy such privilege, as many a tale from a transgender person will reveal, but the kind of man who is posited as a potential challenge to gender ideals by being both the typical “man’s man” and a makeup wearer does have a relative amount of privilege.)

Of course, it wasn’t just men who were affected by the great masculine renunciation. When men stripped down from lace cuffs to business suits, the household responsibility for conspicuous consumption fell to women. The showiness of the original “trophy wives” inflated in direct proportion to the newly conservative dress style of their husbands, whose somber clothes let the world know they were serious men of import, not one of those dandy fops who trounced about in fashionable wares—leave that to the ladies, thanks. It’s easy, then, to view the return of men’s bodily conspicuous consumption as the end of an era in which women were consigned to this particular consumerist ghetto—welcome to the dollhouse, boys. But much as we’d like to think that re-opening the doors of playful, showy fashions to men could serve as a liberation for them—and, eventually, for women—we may wish to be hesitant to rush into it with open arms. The benefits of relaxed gender roles indicated by men’s cosmetics could easily be trumped by the expansion of beauty work’s traditional role of signaling one’s social status. The more we expand the beauty toolkit of men, the more they too will be judged on their compliance to both class markers and the beauty standard. We’re all working to see how women can be relieved of the added burden of beauty labor—the “third shift,” if you will—but getting men to play along isn’t the answer.

The Beauty Myth gave voice to the unease so many women feel about that situation—but at its heart it wasn’t about women at all. It was about power. And this is why I’m hesitant to herald men spending more time, effort, and energy on their appearance as any sort of victory for women or men, even as I think that rigid gender roles—boys wear blue, girls wear makeup—isn’t a comfortable place for anyone. For the very idea of the beauty myth was that restrictions placed upon women’s appearance became only more stringent (while, at the same time, appealing to the newly liberated woman’s idea of “choice”) in reaction to women’s growing power. I can’t help but wonder what this means for men in a time when we’re still recoiling from a recession in which men disproportionately suffered job losses, and in which the changes prompted in large part by feminism are allowing men a different public and private role. It’s a positive change, just as feminism itself was clearly positive for women—yet the backlash of the beauty myth solidified to counter women’s gains.

As a group, men’s power is hardly shrinking, but it is shifting—and if entertainment like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and the Apatow canon are any indication, that dynamic is being examined in ways it hasn’t been before. As our mothers may know even better than us, one way our culture harnesses anxiety-inducing questions of gender identity is to offer us easy, packaged solutions that simultaneously affirm and undermine the questions we’re asking ourselves. If “hope in a jar” doesn’t cut it for women, we can’t repackage it to men and just claim that hope is for the best.


This essay was originally posted at Feministe.

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!

The French Women Beauty Myth, or Happy Bastille Day

So French! So French.

A few months ago, a colleague walked by me and pronounced, “You look so French.” I, of course—in my navy blue draped-neckline polka-dot dress and slingbacks with red lipstick and a slightly disheveled updo—was très enchantéd by her remark, and secretly I think it’s the best compliment ever. (Oh, I know. I know! There are plenty of better compliments. Except not really.)

Of course, this is because I’m all aflutter with what Jezebel termed “our weird national girl-crush on French women,” primarily in reference to this NYTimes article about “aging gracefully, the French way.” As the ever-savvy commenters there pointed out, what the article is really talking about is less French and more generally cosmopolitan, though the French women in the thread did agree that being fat is emphatically Not Okay on their terroir.

So I don’t want to buy into stereotypes of any culture, even if those stereotypes are largely positive. I get that not every French woman has mastered nonchalant glamour; I know not every French woman possesses the elegance of simplicity from toddlerdom forward.

That said: I love the idea of French women. It’s like the best of American beach-babe natural beauty (“What? I just took a dip in the ocean and my hair magically arranged itself in these perfect waves and I have a healthy glow, what’s the big deal?”) plus a polished glamour that serves to simultaneously draw one in and intimidate. I love the appearance of effortless chic, I love the idea of jolie-laide, I love the idea of investing in quality fashions even if you can only afford the barest of bare minimum in quantity, I love the quintessential lipstick and the hair and the Gallic nose and the updo. I love macaroons.

And perhaps I love all this to my detriment. I suspect the very thing I love about my conception of French women is part of the double bind of femininity: Flat interpretations of third-wave feminism aside, I don’t think we can adhere to traditionally feminine ways as we please, reaping the benefits those ways bring us, without giving up something in return. When I heard my colleague say I looked “so French,” what I heard coded in there—and what my chosen outfit was an attempt to signal—was that my outfit had elements of glamour, but not so much glamour as to seem stiff or distant. That it seemed as though I simply had no other authentic choice in my very soul but to pour myself into that particular fitted dress and to sweep up my hair and draw on some red lips; that adhering to certain beauty standards was not being seen as an attempt to look pretty (and possibly failing) but was simply an expression of who I am, as a person—rather, as a woman.

Prompted by thoughtful reader comments on this post about applying makeup in public, I’ve been thinking a lot about my reluctance to give up the "beauty mystique." The more I think about it, I’m not actually offended that women on the subway or wherever aren’t considering me their audience for their grand performance of femininity; I’m irritated that players on my team are giving away our playbook. They're our secrets, the little things women can do with our appearance or demeanor to be alluring in a particular way that has little to do with our person and more to do with our persona. And every bit of common sense would dictate that as someone who fully believes that we should all strive for authenticity, and as a feminist who wants to remove the fog of beauty work to allow for a broader conversation on the matter, that I’d be all for a public revelation of those secrets so that we can see it for the emperor’s clothes they are.

The fact is, though, I have too much invested in that beauty mystique to genuinely let go of it. I’m working on it, and working on challenging myself to not cling to its trappings with white knuckles. But like any dual-headed social structure, a certain amount of opacity about my personal beauty labor has given me enough rewards that its severance will hurt.

Which brings us back to French women. From an L.A. Times article about how les françaises sont fantastique:

"There's an enormous amount of social pressure the moment you gain half an ounce of body fat," [Debra Ollivier, author of What French Women Know] says. "[In the U.S.] people say, 'You look great.' Anglo-Saxons say little white lies to make people feel good. The French don't give a damn what you think about them, and they will not mince words."

And yet, there's a positive side to the French tendency to not give a damn, and it's at the heart of their allure.

American women "grow up as girls with the mandate to be liked and to be like everyone," she says. "And popularity is all wrapped up in that. French culture doesn't have that. When I talk to French women who live here, one said the notion of popularity was so difficult for her to understand because it simply does not exist in France.

"Now imagine growing up in a culture where you don't have to worry about that," Ollivier says, noting that it's liberating.

I mean, what an (apparent) subversion! That because French culture doesn’t have the people-pleasing mandate for women, they somehow...wind up thinner, because others aren’t afraid to rap them on their knuckles? That it’s somehow sleekly rebellious to not gain weight? I don’t believe this is true—certainly not in American culture, anyway—but it’s intriguing, and it’s appealing as hell if you’re a woman who sometimes feels trapped in the double bind of wanting to be conventionally attractive but not wanting to feel as though she’s caving to The Man (or, worse, as though she’s betraying her own needs, and those of other women) in doing so. In other words, it’s incredibly appealing for women who want to find a comfortable place to reside within the beauty mystique. It’s incredibly appealing to me. And if I want to ne regrette rien in the grand scope of things, I’m going to have to examine this with an unflinching eye—because as comfortable as the faux French solution might seem at first glance, its eventual restrictions make it just as uncomfortable as the American beauty bind.

And with that: Happy Bastille Day!