Do Lipstick Feminists Actually Exist?

FEMINISM.

I’ve written five beginnings to what I intended to be a mini treatise on “lipstick feminism,” but I keep running into the same problem: It doesn't seem to actually exist. Sure, there’s a handful of Twitter accounts with “lipstick feminist” in the handle or description (some of which seem fab); there’s the odd blog with the same, or the stray essay about Why Lipstick Feminism Is Fine. But we’re talking about single-digit numbers in each medium here, folks. And as for offline lipstick feminists? I have yet to meet a single one. 

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’ve met plenty of feminists who wear lipstick. (It will probably not shock you to learn that this blogger indeed is one of them, both literally—lipstick corollary, yo!—and figuratively, as in, duh, look at this blog.) In fact, when I took a quick Twitter survey the other day, that was the number-one response I got: I’m a feminist, and I wear lipstick, but I’m not a lipstick feminist—followed by, I’m not exactly sure what that is.

Lipstick feminism, as I’ve seen it used (in accord with that highly reliable source of all wisdom, Wikipedia), is the idea that conventionally feminine hallmarks—lipstick and other cosmetics, heels, perhaps suggestive dress—can be a source of power for women, not simply a sign of one’s obedience to patriarchal requests. It’s somewhat related to the idea of “erotic capital” in that it seeks to render traditional signals of female sexuality as legitimate routes to authority—but feminism or some semblance of it, not money and other forms of capital, is the goal.

This is an intentionally friendly definition of lipstick feminism—in fact, if this description were what people were actually referring to when they use the term, I might on occasion identify myself by it (even as I’m skeptical of the idea that using one’s sexuality is a legitimate route to authority. It might be effective sometimes, sure, but it’s forever dependent on the mercy of people with actual power). But here’s the thing: Most times I’ve read or heard the words “lipstick feminist,” derision has been the intent. Sometimes it’s feminists explaining why the concept is bollocks; sometimes it’s from people using it to dismiss feminism wholesale. In other words, it’s a word we use to describe other people, not ourselves.

Not that this is restricted to lipstick feminism. Fact is, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard a feminist qualify her feminism with any sort of label, even labels that were established by feminists themselves. Third-wave and second-wave are possible exceptions here, but not “official” schools of thought, even if any individual feminist generally adheres to one. And the reason we don’t tend to sort ourselves out by neat labels is that most of us believe a whole lotta things. I believe that legislative reform can be beneficial to women; I believe that men and women have some essential differences beyond mere biology; I believe gender oppression is linked to capitalism. So am I a liberal feminist, a cultural feminist, or a Marxist feminist—or am I just a feminist with a multifaceted approach to her politics, and indeed her life?

Yet you’ll notice that these various schools of feminist thought—which I’m guessing some women do stick to pretty strictly and would use to define themselves, though again, I can’t think of more than a couple of times that I’ve heard someone identify herself as an “[insert school of thought] feminist”—are named by their organizing approach and systems, not by their specific beliefs. That is, I can’t imagine anyone saying, “I’m a government-subsidized child care feminist” or “I’m a sexual violence feminist,” though both of these things fall under a feminist umbrella.

So enter “lipstick feminism”—hell, enter “pro-sex feminism,” which has always irked me because it implies that there are anti-sex feminists, and you’ve got to get pretty deep into an overly literal interpretation of certain strains of radical feminism before you’re going to find any of those. ("We so horny!") It reduces a concept that in some ways is simple (women = people!) and makes it simplistic, boiling down one of the most influential movements of the 20th century and putting a swivel cap on it. It trivializes feminism—hell, it even trivializes the questions implied by the term itself (can conscious exploitation of one’s own sexuality be a feminist act in some circumstances?). Like “pro-sex feminist,” it implies that there are feminists who are against lipstick, playing into that whole “feminists are ugly hairy-legged lesbians” stereotype that I thought we’d retired eons ago. And speaking of lesbians, isn’t the term “lipstick feminist” linguistically similar to the more established term “lipstick lesbian,” thus sapphically binding the two together in the listener’s mind?

And furthermore! Gah, I went and did what I said I wasn’t going to do: I’ve spent all this energy on what I’m pretty sure is a straw feminist.

But here’s the thing: Above all else, I’ve always believed that feminism—or any kind of social movement—takes all types. We need the Planned Parenthood canvassers I avoid on the street; we need the driven, unswayable voices you might describe as, yes, strident; we need nice-girl feminists who take pride in gently educating others about feminism; we need people whose response to teach me is don’t make me do your work for you. We need men; we need women-only spaces; we need people who reject a gender binary; we need people who use the gender binary to articulate the idea of a female essence and what that might mean. We need the marches and petitions; we need the quiet, life-changing transformations that take place in families over generations. We need the wearers of “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like,” and we need the “I’m not a feminist buts” too.

Which means we just might need lipstick feminists. So here’s what I’m wondering: Do you describe yourself as a lipstick feminist? If so, do you define it similarly to how I’ve defined it here, or do you have a different interpretation of the term? If you don’t call yourself a lipstick feminist: Do you think the term should be reclaimed? Is the label feminist-bait or is it a handy way of making the point that feminism needn’t be incompatible with beauty work?

(Thanks to Chelsea “Dipstick Feminist” Summers, Elisa “Pole Dancing Feminist” Gabbert, Rosalind Jana, Lacy “Eyeliner Feminist” of ModernSauce, Alyssa Harad, Rachel Hills, Nicole “Doc Martens Feminist” Kristal, Lily “Googling How to Get Red Wine Stain Off My Lips Feminist” Benson, Heli Lähteelä-Tabone, Cassandra Goodwin, and “Underwire Feminist” Bubbles for a set of thought-provoking and oft-hilarious answers to my Twitter inquiry on the matter.)

Wearing Stigma

Yes, there's actually a board game called Fashion Rules.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this Sociological Images post on managing stigma in the weeks since I first read it. I was struck by an anecdote it relates from journalist Brent Staples, a 6’2” black man, on why he started whistling classical tunes when walking down the street at night: “Virtually everybody seems to sense that a mugger wouldn’t be warbling bright, sunny selections from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.” It provoked an instant sympathy—I sometimes find myself whistling without realizing I’ve started doing so, a habit I picked up from my father (who, like me, looks white), and the thought of using it as a tool of “I’m OK, you’re OK” sent a small stab through me.

But sympathy wasn’t necessarily the idea Lisa Wade was pursuing here; instead, she was writing of how stigma management calls attention to the ways that race, class, and gender are, among other things, performances: “In order to tell stories about ourselves, we strategically combine these things with the meaning we carry on our bodies.” And what sort of body is more loaded with meaning than that of a young woman? It’s impossible to think of the performance of femininity without considering the ways that the performance is an exercise in stigma management. And it's impossible to think of the ways women manage the stigma of their bodies without looking at fashion and beauty.

You’ll rarely see the word stigma in a fashion magazine, to be sure (though it could be a great brand name—“introducing Stigma by John Varvatos”), but so many fashion “rules” are simply sets of guidelines to managing the connotations of womanhood. The shorter the skirt, the lower the heel. The smokier the eyes, the more neutral the mouth. The tighter the pants, the more billowy the shirt. The more colorful the top, the plainer the bottom; the bigger the earrings, the smaller the necklace; the bolder the nail polish, the shorter the nail. I’ve seen all of these “rules” written out in fashion magazines and the like (which isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of contradictory “rules” or guidelines on how to best break those rules, but these are generally considered to be within “good taste” instead of being fashion-forward), and what stands out isn't so much the rules themselves as the fact that they're presented without explanation. You're supposed to know inherently why you wouldn't pair a short skirt with high heels, a loud lipstick with a dark eye.

Now, some of these rules make a certain amount of visual sense: If you’re trying to showcase a gorgeous pair of earrings, wearing a bunch of other jewelry will just compete for attention. But other rules make visual sense only because we’ve adopted a collective eye that codes it as “right”—anything else betrays our sense of propriety. A micromini with four-inch heels? Coded as tramp. It doesn’t matter if the visual goal is to lengthen your legs, or if the woman next to you garnering not a single sneer is wearing a skirt just as short with a pair of low-heeled boots. You’ve failed to manage the stigma of womanhood correctly. You haven't made the right choices, the right tradeoff. You haven't found that ever-present marker of "good taste": balance. And while there are all sorts of stigma attached to womanhood, none is so heavily managed and manipulated and contradictory and constantly on the edge of imbalance as sexuality.

Complicating sexual stigma is something that’s closer to the permanence of race or ethnicity than these other fashion dilemmas are. (After all, fashion is a choice. You might be subtly punished for opting out of it altogether—or loudly punished for opting in but doing it wrong—but at least there’s a degree of control there.) If your body type is coded in a particular way, you’ve got a whole other set of stigma to deal with*. As Phoebe Maltz Bovy pointed out during her guest stint here, “[S]tyle and build have a way of getting mixed up, as though a woman chooses to have ‘curves’ on account of preferring to look sexy, or somehow magically scraps them if her preferred look is understated chic.” A woman with small breasts and narrow hips has more freedom to wear low-cut tops in professional situations without raising eyebrows, because there’s less stigma to manage. A woman in an F-cup bra with hourglass curves? Not so much. Witness the case of Debralee Lorenzana, the Citibank employee who was fired for distracting the male employees with her wardrobe—which, on a woman without Lorenzana’s figure, would be utterly unremarkable, and, more to the point, unquestionably work-appropriate. Her failure, as it were, lay not in her clothes but in not “properly” managing the stigma that her figure brought. (And when it came out that she’d had plastic surgery, including breast implants, internet commenters around the world engaged in a collective forehead slap.)

Certainly there are women who consciously break away from the fashion "rules" of stigma management, even if they don't think of it in those terms. I've always had an admiration for those women—whether they're opting out of the performance altogether by not engaging in beauty work, or whether they're turning their persona into a performance art piece of sorts by going over-the-top with femininity. (That is: I sometimes wish I had the guts to be what you might call tacky.) But I'm not one of those women; I do play by the rules. If a skirt fails the "fingertip rule," I pair it strictly with flats—and in fact, the number of those skirts in my wardrobe dropped considerably after I turned 30, not through any conscious decision but through the sort of subtle shift in my own guidelines that makes up the bulk of stigma policing. I know myself well enough to know that I'm not about to start challenging the stigma of femininity by breaking the rules. But I can't help but wonder what would happen if we started thinking of fashion "rules" as neither arbitrary guidelines dreamt up by ladymag editors nor as a way to bring aesthetic harmony to our appearance, but rather as a set of social dictates that carve out a space of "acceptable" womanhood for us. My first thought is that if we started looking at fashion rules in that way, we might be able to better call attention to the stigma of inhabiting a female body between the ages of 12 and 50, and eventually demolish that stigma. But then I wonder if there's a sort of comfortable safety within those rules—if, in fact, the women who go over-the-top are doing so exactly because it's a flouting of the rules, and if self-expression might ebb in importance if we didn't have boundaries to constantly push up against. What would we lose by dropping the fashion guidelines that police the stigma of womanhood? And what would we gain?

* In looking at my blog feed the other day, I noticed that I read a surprisingly large number of blogs written for busty women, given that I’m not one myself. But in this light, it makes sense: Many women with large breasts—particularly those who don’t wish to “minimize” their chests—have had to deal with a level of sexualization that my B-cup sisters and I don’t, or at least not in that particular way. So it only makes sense that bloggers who have had to think about their self-presentation in this way might have a good deal of sociological insight that comes out through their writing—which is exactly what I turn to blogs like Hourglassy and Braless in Brasil for, despite the fashions therein not being right for my frame. Consider this my official cry for small-breasted bloggers to take up the cause! C’mon, ladies, I want your insight and your tips on how to find a wrap dress that doesn’t make me feel like a 9-year-old!

Invited Post: Work Appropriate

When I first found The Reluctant Femme, I felt like I'd discovered another kid in the sandbox (you think of feminist beauty blogging as a sandbox too, right? Right). Cassie Goodwin consistently brings a mix of social criticism and personal storytelling to her work, tempered with service pieces like her fantastic nail art posts (the glitz! the glitter! the mermaids!) and guides to thrift store shopping. Whether she's examining how brands have the power to create community or the intersections between visibility, cosmetics, and self-harm, Cassie's reflective, inquisitive voice is one I look forward to seeing pop up in my blog feed. She's also written for The Closet Feminist, Lacquerheads of Oz, and The Peach. When I learned that she'd worked in the sex industry in an administrative support role, I immediately wondered whether that leg of her career had affected how she viewed self-presentation—and I was thrilled when she agreed to write about it for The Beheld.

Pair it with pumps and you're brothel-ready.

It's Casual Friday at work today, but the process I go through deciding what to wear is anything but casual. I pick up a skirt, and put it down because it's too short for work. I pick up another and put it down because it's too long, it looks too casual and hippiesque even for Casual Friday. I pick out a shirt, then put it down because it doesn't have any sleeves. Despite it being stinking hot, I'm not sure if a singlet top is acceptable, because I have big tits and fat arms, and a girl got told off at work the other week for her shorts being too short. I put on bright eyeshadow, then smudge half of it off so it's not "too much." I pick up a lipstick, then decide against it because it draws too much attention to my mouth and that might make someone uncomfortable. The whole dance is a complex balancing act between what I want to wear, and what I think I can get away with, taking into account the weather, possible visitors to the office, my body type, and which colleagues are likely to be in. It's exhausting. 

Dressing for work used to be much more fun for me. I spent five years doing reception in the sex industry, at a variety of parlours and agencies and brothels. The rules everywhere I worked were simple—no jeans, no thongs, no boots, at least some makeup, and preferably feminine. That's it. There was no such thing as a shirt too low, even when you have as much cleavage as I do. There was no skirt too short, so long as you were still more covered up than the sex workers—not out of any sense of inappropriateness, but because you never want to take focus off the workers. I never worried about whether bright red lipstick made me “look like a whore” because, well, I was working at a brothel and the sex workers were the rock stars of my world. Open toe shoes, closed toe, no one cared so long as you could run up the stairs to collect towels and round up stray clients. No matter how over-the-top your nail polish, there would always be at least one worker in an outfit with more glitter. I had previously only worked in conventional offices where conventional rules applied, so I embraced my freedom with abandon and enthusiasm.

The attitude of management to how I presented myself was only half of the joyful equation though. It's a fact little known outside the industry that almost without exception, the administration staff in the sex industry are Untouchable. You want to touch some lady flesh, you pay your money and you touch one of the workers. The admin staff are always very firmly off the menu, no matter what. Any reception staff I ever saw deliberately violate this taboo were immediately dismissed. It's just Not Done. This is not to say I was never groped, or leered at, or had clients talk to my cleavage, or had clients offer absurd amounts of money they obviously didn’t have if I was to sleep with them. There was one guy I had to tell three times in ten minutes to put his cock away while I was talking to him. But it was always understood that the clients were only allowed to do any of these things at my discretion. The daily dance, the balancing act in that workplace was How Much Money Does The Client Have Vs How Annoyed Am I. I could kick clients out more or less at my discretion—well, that was what they thought anyway. In reality I would always consult with the workers first, before throwing out potential earnings. But the clients didn't know that, and in their eyes my word was Law.

A lot of women have never been in a position where they have so much direct, immediate power to control their environment, and it's almost impossible to convey the sense of freedom that comes with that power until you have experienced it. What we wear is so closely tied to how we are seen that it is almost impossible to think of another situation where I have felt free to wear anything I want. It’s such a deeply entrenched idea that what we wear influences how we are treated that if we are harassed, in the workplace, in public, what we are wearing or what we did to deserve it is always part of the conversation. Whenever I’ve complained about getting groped in a club, or catcalled on the street, the response is often, “Well, what were you wearing?” I’ve happily never been molested in a workplace, but the women I know who have been have never had their complaints taken seriously. The response is usually once again, “Well, what were you wearing?” or “They’re just being friendly!” While working in the sex industry, I knew that any problems I encountered would never be blamed on what I was wearing. If the clients did push my boundaries, it was always accepted to be their fault, not mine. Always. Can you even imagine a situation like that? A guy tries to put his hand up my skirt and no one says, "Well, look at what you're wearing!" or "Boys will be boys, you know what they’re like". The response was always, "Ugh, what an asshole.” The blame, the entire blame, was always very firmly on the attacker, and never on me, even tangentially.

I have never spent time in a venue where I felt so comfortable on an everyday basis, despite the occasional bursts of violence I encountered. I was part of a little bubble outside of “normal” society, but I have never felt more normal anywhere. In a normal office, in a club, on the street, I am always aware to varying degrees of what my physical presentation is saying to the people around me. If my makeup is too obvious, I wonder if people are looking down on me for it. If my skirt is too short, I'm acutely aware of hundreds of (largely imagined) eyes on my pasty, wobbly thighs. If my shirt is a millimetre too low, I will spend the day constantly adjusting it to try and avoid making other people uncomfortable with my excessive cleavage. If I wear a Rainbow Brite tshirt to work on Casual Friday, I fret that my work and my suggestions won't be taken seriously. There is a constant dialogue in the back of my head analysing the present and potential reactions of people around me to how I'm dressed. In the sex industry, these voices were silenced by the knowledge my word was law, and that all I had to do was make sure the place ran as smoothly as possible to get respect. So long as I made sure there were clean towels, and enough sorbolene cream (there was never enough sorbolene cream), the workers would take me seriously and give me respect. It didn't matter if the clients thought my shirt was childish—they had to take me seriously to get what they had come there for. They could think what they wanted, but they had to show me respect. All I had to do was raise an eyebrow to remind them of that.

After dancing around for way too long this morning, I ended up getting an outfit together for Casual Friday. I eventually decided on a Rainbow Brite t-shirt (fitted, but not too tight), a sensible black skirt (knee length, flatteringly flared), bright but not too glittery nail polish, and colourful but sparingly applied eyeshadow. I’m sitting here fussing with my eyeshadow still, fretting that the colours don’t match as well as I though they did. The CEO is here visiting, so I feel stupid for wearing a cartoon shirt, even though this is usually my favourite feel good item of clothing. I wore a bra which is uncomfortable and pinchy, but which tames my cleavage, and I kind of wish I hadn’t. It’s times like this I miss the freedom, and miss the power of working in the sex industry so much I can taste it. I would swap all the coked up assholes waving broken bottles at me in the world to be able to be feel normal again.

Tizz Wall, Domme, Oakland, California

Interviewing Tizz Wall under her guise as a professional domme was a delight, but she actually has a panoply of guises that would have made for excellent beauty chat. A speaker (she’ll be speaking at the upcoming Catalyst Con on how to ally with sex workers), sex educator (she assisted sexuality author Jamye Waxman with her most recent book), writer (including her Mistress Manners column at Playpen Report), and erstwhile advocate for survivors of domestic violence, Wall’s working lives appear diverse but all surge toward the larger goal of making the world a better place for women of all walks of life. In fact, she’s currently completing her San Francisco Sex Information Sex Education certification. She currently does her domme work independently (though when this interview took place she worked out of a BDSM house). We talked about assimilating to—and literally blinding—the male gaze, the pressures of being a physical worker, and the similarity between BDSM houses and slumber parties. In her own words:

Photo by Lydia Hudgens

On Looking the Part

Some of the women show up for work looking cute, but most of the time everybody shows up in their sweatpants and don’t have makeup on, or they biked there so they’re all sweaty. No one’s showered. They’re in states of comfort, almost like, “Oh, did I manage to put on pants today?” In the morning we have kind of a ritual—there’s opening chores to get things going for the day, and then we’ll sit down at the kitchen table. There are a bunch of mirrors we pull up and put on the table, we’ll have our computers out, listening to music and talking and gabbing about whatever. That’s when we’ll all put on our makeup and do our hair. If we’re struggling and can’t get our hair right it’ll be like, “Can you please do the back?” It’s the female bonding over grooming at its max, I guess. Almost every day that you’re there, it’s part of the process. It’s like having the slumber party makeover every morning. It turns into one of those tip-sharing things that happens at slumber parties: “I got this new concealer, do you want to try it?” or “This color doesn’t work for me but I think it’d look great on you, do you want it?” We’ll do that, cook breakfast, make coffee. You all want to get ready in the morning because you want to have someone available in just a few minutes. If I need to, I can put on full makeup in probably 20 minutes tops, 10 if I’m really hustling. 

I’m very aware of my looks, specifically as a sex worker. Personally, I’ve wondered if I’m attractive enough—I can get very self-conscious. I feel confident in myself, and I did when I first started too, but back then I was like, I’m definitely not the tall, thin, blonde, model-esque type, and obviously you have to be that to be in this line of work, right? So I wasn’t sure I’d get hired. Then, it’s funny—being there, there’s kind of a transformation that happens. So it’s particularly interesting to see the getting-ready process in the morning, because everybody is gorgeous—and the particular house I work in has a wide variety of body types and ethnicities and different types of beauty, it’s really varied—but you see everybody show up in their normal-person outfits, and then you see them do all this and it’s a whole transformation that happens. 

I had no idea what this world was like when I got into it. I remember asking, “How much makeup should I put on?” My boss said, “Whatever is going to make you feel comfortable and make you feel like you’re going to personify this character”—which is an extension of yourself but also still a character. You’re kind of amplifying a certain part of your personality. Whatever will make you feel like that character, that’s how much makeup you need to put on.

On Bodily Labor

A lot of our client base is older straight men, and that means on some level we are catering to the male gaze. We keep that in mind a lot. The people who have tattoos will hide them; I have a septum piercing, and I tuck it in my nose. I have a coworker who has a mohawk, but she has long, pretty hair in the middle; if you’re not paying close attention when she wears it down, it passes for long hair. When I first started, I’d been dyeing my hair blonde. I changed it because when I was at work I couldn’t have big old roots.

You show off your body in a certain way. One of women has lost a ton of weight since she began working, and that has helped her get more work. I know I’ll get more work if I do certain things that are more traditionally feminine. It becomes a business decision. There are definitely sex workers who don’t cater to that. But our particular community, the particular house that I’m in, that’s something the person running it gears toward. That’s what our advertising is geared toward. So that regulates a lot of our choices for our physical presentation.

I’ve actually gained weight since starting this work; when I first started I was doing roller derby, skating 10 to 12 hours week, and I’m not anymore. So now when I’m not getting work, I’ll be like, Oh my god, is this because I’ve gained weight? And I know that’s not it—I mean, I fluctuated just one size, it’s not this massive difference. But this feeling of the possibility that my looks are tied to my income can really hurt my self-esteem. Being financially independent is really important to me. In this work, everybody has slow weeks, and then you’ll get a rush with lots of work; it’s a back-and-forth. But when that happens, I can start to think that I’m actually putting myself at risk by gaining weight. Rationally I know that’s not the case—even if I were a supermodel, there would be an ebb and flow no matter what I do. But when I gain weight it’s more than just, “Oh, I’m having a bad day and feel so ugly and bloated.” Body stuff takes on a different tone. It’s less destructive in my personal relationships and my personal interactions and personal self-esteem, but with this financial angle there’s this feeling of, If I don’t lose this weight, I’m not going to work again. 

On Being Seen—or Not

When I first started I had a lot of self-consciousness about leading a session by myself. I wasn’t yet 100% on my domme persona, so I would use a blindfold. When I was really new I had a three-hour session booked, and I just hadn’t gotten the timing down and I still didn’t really know what I was doing. One of the things we learn to do is negotiate what to say and how to elicit what the clients want to do, and match that up with what our interests are. What I want to do is, you give me your money and leave, because really what I want is to just read my book and still have the money, you know? So it’s not really what you want, but they say that, so you have to be good at asking the right questions and proposing things. So during this three-hour session I kept getting bored and not really knowing what to do and needing time to think, particularly because at that time I was so green—I had no clue what I was doing. I’m very expressive, so if I’m confused or thinking about what I’m going to do next, it’s all over my face. Blindfolding him was great, because then when I was sitting there thinking, What am I going to do next, he’s not really being responsive and I don’t know what to do, I didn’t have to pretend like I wasn’t having those thoughts. Now that I’ve been doing it a while and feel like I’ve hit my stride, that amount of time would be a great session and it would be fun.

Clients will often request that I have them only look at me when I give permission. I mean, that’s very submissive! In a playspace, not making eye contact can represent submission and reverence. It can become about asking for permission, or earning that privilege in some way. If a client is coming to see a domme rather than going to a strip club or going to see an escort, they’re going to a domme for a reason. They’re seeking out that dominance. Saying “Don’t look at me” is a subtle, effective way of establishing dominance, of making it clear that this is my room, this is my space, and you need to respect that.

That applies outside of work in some ways—not to that extreme, of course, but in terms of self-presentation. It makes the argument of how you present yourself in a certain way to control how people look at you in a fair or appropriate way where you have some degree of control over it. Women are so judged by their appearance that making certain choices about how I present myself becomes a way of controlling how people view me.

On Commanding Attention

Being a sex worker has made me recognize power I can have in everyday interactions. Before, I was much more self-conscious about things, even if I was dressed up or whatever. Everybody talks about how confidence is something you can do, but I don’t think I understood that until I started this work. I mean, I’m incredibly clumsy, so I’ve fallen in front of clients. But being a domme is a lot like theater in many ways, where the show just keeps going. You drop something, you trip over your words, you trip over your feet, your garter comes undone—whatever, you play it off. And when you’re a domme, you can play it off like, “That’s not even my fault. Why did you do that?” I’ve had the CD skip and I’ll be like, “Why did you make my CD skip? It wasn’t doing that before you got here.” “I didn’t touch it.” “It’s still your fault!” “I’m sorry.” One of the stories that gets told around the house is that this woman had a client who basically wanted humiliation; he wanted her to punish him. He was very tall, and she was a shorter woman. So the minute they got into the room she said, “How dare you be taller than me?! Get on your knees.”

It’s amazing what can happen once you stop having the expected male-female interaction, since women are so socialized to be nice and really cater to men—even if you’re a staunch feminist, even if you’re really mouthy, like myself, before this job. I still have some of that tendency to apologize profusely if something goes wrong. I’m gonna be like, “I’m so sorry, I messed it up, I’m so sorry.” But I think having this job made me really realize the power I can have over a situation. I mean, personal accountability is important, and you should apologize when you mess up. It’s a matter of not overdoing it, not feeling really bad about it. Something went wrong? It’s fine, we’re moving on. Having that sort of presentation has a lot of power.

Doing the “I’m pretty but I have no brains” thing is not my goal. I don’t present that way, even as a sex worker when I’m trying to appeal to that male attraction, even though the presentation is definitely vampy and really conventionally feminine. And we definitely have clients who come in and think we must be stupid. My goal is that my presentation will command your attention—but now that I’ve got your attention I’m going to use all the other things in my arsenal. My brain, my sense of humor, being okay with myself and with what happens in that situation, communication skills. That definitely crossed over into dating: I’m going to use a certain presentation, and it will command your attention, but the other things are what’s going to hold it together.

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No, *You're* So Pretty: Compliment Week, Part I

In the few days since I published last week’s post about the role of compliments in female friendships, I’ve become painfully aware of how often I give compliments. It’s certainly not something I want to stop doing, but when I found myself fussing over the color of a waitress’s nail polish in the presence of a friend who had just finished telling me what she thought of the piece—rather, when I suddenly felt like my friend had caught me in some weird act of benevolent manipulation—I started to think more about what compliments actually are.

Luckily, I’m hardly the first to that table: There’s plenty of research out there from linguists, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists about the fine art of the compliment. Robert Herbert, an American sociolinguist, published a fascinating study about the different ways men and women treat compliments that illuminated some of my experiences around complimenting women around me. Some of the findings:

• Women give wordier compliments than men: “What a great coat!” vs. “Great coat!”)
• Women employ more personal terms than men: “I like those earrings” and “You look great in those earrings” versus “Great earrings”
• Men generally don’t use the “I like/I love” construction when complimenting people of either sex; women use it frequently, most of all with other women 
• American women are more likely to use “I like/I love” in compliments than British and New Zealand English speakers, and speakers of other languages (it’s rarely found in Asian languages).

I’m intrigued by this, particularly when examining the dual function of using personal terms in compliments. The first thought here is that women are simply speaking in ways we’ve been encouraged to socialize—we’re personal, not political, remember?—and would gravitate toward imbuing compliments with a personal touch that ostensibly aids sincerity and sociability, marking compliments as a more acceptable way of saying Gee, I think you’re swell. But looking at it from another angle, making a compliment personal is also a way of hedging a compliment. “I like that lipstick,” on its face, is about what the speaker likes, not about the lipstick; “Great lipstick” is about the lipstick, plain and simple. It simultaneously takes a risk (“Here is what I like”) and pushes it away (“Remember, this isn’t about you”); it’s assertive, not aggressive. It’s indirect, in other words—a communication mode linguists frequently claim women excel at.

But it’s in studying the reception of compliments that the connection between compliments and intimacy becomes clearest. Compliments given from man to man were accepted 40% of the time; only 22% of compliments given from one woman to another were accepted.

To be clear: Not accepting a compliment doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting it. By “accepting” a compliment in this context, we're talking “Thank you,” or an agreement with the compliment (whether that be a simple “I like it too” or an inflation of it, as in “Yeah, this sweater brings out my eyes, doesn’t it?”). The other forms of compliment response—nonacceptance, nonagreement, or a request for the compliment to be interpreted—can range from returning the compliment (“No, you’re so pretty!”) to scaling it down (“Yeah, well, you should’ve seen how my hair looked yesterday”) to reassigning it (“My hairstylist is a genius”). You can see the numbers here:

You, too, can rent "Sex-Based Differences in Compliment Behavior,"
Language in Society, 1990, pp. 201-224, for 24 hours!

With that in mind, it’s easy to see why women might “accept” compliments about half as often as men—we’re taught to be deferential and modest and bashful and all that, right? But looking at this data, it’s clear that women know full well how to accept a compliment: When it was a man, not a woman, giving a compliment, women accepted it 68% of the time. The factor most likely to influence how people respond to a compliment isn’t what sex they are, but what sex the person giving it is. I’ll look more closely at male-female compliments later in the week; for now, what interests me isn’t why we’re likelier to say thank you to a man, but why we say anything but to a woman.

Scanning down the column listing responses to compliments given woman-to-woman, we find part of the answer. One number jumps out: 85 women out of 330 responded to a compliment with a “comment history,” defined in the paper as when the “addressee accepts the complimentary force and offers a relevant comment on the appreciated topic.” That is: A quarter of the time, we respond to a compliment with girl talk.

Janet Holmes, a leading scholar in linguistics and gender who conducted another influential (and gated, grrr) study on the gendering of compliments, puts it this way: Women recognize that compliments “increase or consolidate the solidarity between speaker and addressee.” Men recognize this too; “comment history” was also the number-one response men had when complimented by a woman. Part of this is women being assigned the emotional tasks within conversation: the how-did-that-make-you-feel-type stuff that, as the supposedly nurturing sex, comes “naturally” to us—and that gives men permission to articulate emotions that they might otherwise lack. But it’s not just limited to men: Women of different social statuses were likelier than men of different social statuses to exchange compliments. The solidarity isn’t in class, or if it is, it’s our classification as women that lies beneath what might masquerade as nattering on about perfume.

That solidarity is what makes compliments effective. It’s also what makes them poignant, and, as my friend Sarah put it, at times subversive. But given that appearance-based compliments are the most popular type of compliment shared between women—this is the research talking, not me—we’re tethering that effectiveness, poignancy, and subversion to how we look. I cherish the solidarity that compliments of all sorts can bring—nail polish, shoes, and hairstyles absolutely included. I just want us to remember that what makes us pretty is not what makes us women.

Girl Talk

For my money, the most unrealistic part of Sex and the City was always the friendship. “Friendship porn,” I once heard it described as. People fingered Carrie’s wardrobe as being truly ridiculous, but after years of working in an industry where I’ve seen an adult woman spend a day at the office wearing a dress made entirely out of ribbon, I accepted that part of the show without question. But having a group of friends I have brunch with every weekend? Where would I find that?

So I’m interested to see that part of the critique tsunami surrounding HBO’s Girls has examined the characters’ friendships. It’s brought us everything from a feminist social history of best-friendship to a zoological history of the same. In fact, there’s been a good deal of attention paid to female friendship lately, including with the number of people who linked to this essay, which made the internet rounds when it was first published at The Rumpus. I’m glad to see these conversations happening; it’s a welcome relief from tired tropes of backstabbing women bad-mouthing one another at every opportunity.

My relief is tinged with melancholy, though. I couldn’t bear to read the Rumpus essay more than once because it hit me so hard when I read it the first time. Not because it resonated, but because it didn’t. To be clear: I have many wonderful female friends, some of whom I expect to be close with for the rest of my life. And in sheer numbers, I probably have more female friends than male friends. But in terms of who I treat as confidants, it’s slanted toward men, due to a combination of serial monogamy, the fortune to have remained friendly with a handful of men I used to date, and an incidental number of male friends. Given that I’ve usually worked in female-dominant fields, perhaps this has just been my way of adding some yang to my yin.

But there’s another reason my relationships with men move more fluidly. It may sound silly coming from a feminist who writes primarily for female audiences, but I’m talking socially, not intellectually, so here goes: I feel awkward around women. Now, that’s speaking in some pretty general terms—certainly I don’t feel awkward around every woman, or comfortable around every man. It’s more that accurately or not, I have an odd sort of faith that men enjoy being around women because of our womanness, making my sex is a built-in fortification of what I offer socially to men. We as a culture have been pretty successful at spinning stories about Man + Woman=Makes Sense, and the consequence for me has been just the tiniest bit more assurance that a man has reason to want to be in my company, even when attraction doesn’t factor into it. Then it becomes a catch-22: I’m more likely to be relaxed—and therefore more pleasant, charming, and fun to be around—if I trust that whomever I’m talking with genuinely wants to be there. So generally speaking, I probably am better company to men than I am to women, which results in a different sort of friendship.

I’m not proud of this attitude. I don’t like what it implies I think about men, or about myself. But it’s also notable for what it says of my relationships with women. I heard this quote once: “Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn’t seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.” Treat it like glass I do: afraid to touch it, afraid to give it the sort of handling that burnishes it and makes it uniquely yours. I’ve always hated the trope that women distrust other women, or secretly hate their friends or women in general, and that’s not what I’m saying here. If anything, I’m saying the opposite: I get tongue-tied around remarkable women because I dearly want them to like me, and unlike with men, there’s no culturally assumed “reason” for them to like me. The lack of trust here is in myself, not in other women.

So I feel like I have to work a little harder to get women’s approval. But the specific ways I’ve cultivated to gain approval—laughing a little longer at someone’s jokes, asking lots of questions, letting a gaze linger—sound suspiciously like flirting. Specifically, flirting with men. So when I’m around a woman I want to get to know better, suddenly I’m left not only being a little unsure how to be my best self, but also aware that my default “like me!” antics are conventionally feminine ways of appealing to men—which means plenty of women see right through them because they themselves have deployed the same tricks. At least, at my most vulnerable, self-doubting, and insecure that’s what I fear: that women—particularly the sort of intelligent, critical, soulful women I admire—will see through my laughter and questions and smiles and decide that whatever I bring to the table, it isn’t for them. (Perhaps that’s why I feel drawn to woman-only spaces like ladymags, come to think of it—it forces me to break out of relying upon the ways I’ve learned to communicate with men.)

At some point, though, I learned one thing I can bring to the table with women: girl talk. And yes, I mean highly stereotypical girl talk. I mean: I like your earrings, That’s a great color, Your hair looks fantastic. I used to consciously stay away from beautystuffs as small talk because I wanted to feign nonchalance about such matters; somewhere along the line, though, I recognized how well I myself responded to such conversation starters. My countenance, particularly around women, is pleasant but a little serious, meaning that something frivolous can come out of my mouth and I’m fairly certain it doesn’t make me seem frivolous. It simply lightens me, desirably so.

It’s been several years since I’ve started being more fluent in beautytalk, and between working at image-conscious magazines and running a blog that is specifically designed to examine women’s attitudes and feelings about beauty and being looked at, it’s second nature now. Compliments and questions related to style or appearance easily tumble out of me; if I’m meeting a woman cold, like if I’m at a party where I don’t know anyone, chances are that’s the first thing out of my mouth. I’m always sincere about it—compliments fall flat if they’re a lie—and at this point I wouldn’t even say that this line of conversation is intentional. But I know where it comes from, and I know what I’m hoping to elicit when I do it.

Here is my trouble: I fear that I am forgetting how to connect with women in any other way. I found myself at a dinner party a while ago with a woman whose manner intrigues me; she’s one of those people whose words seem to matter more than other people’s, so wisely does she choose them. I was seated next to her, and my first words to her were something about her shoes (which were gorgeous, so I’m not entirely to blame here). She smiled and said Thank you, as one does, and after we had each nodded acceptance of the compliment and ensuing gratitude, neither of us had anything further to say to one another. Rather, I didn’t know how to get to that further point—at least not without her doing some of the heavy lifting along with me.

I’d expected her to help me out, which isn’t an outrageous expectation on my part; that is, after all, how conversations work. But in expecting her to help me out by saying anything other than the logical, polite response—thank you—I was actually attempting to direct her attitude. Toward herself, toward me, toward womanhood itself. I was expecting her to play along—to tell me, say, some story of where she’d gotten the shoes so I could then riff off a detail of that story, and in the course of that we would have each revealed something personal that could serve as a launching point for the conversation I actually wanted to have with her. I was expecting her to speak some code of womanhood right along with me—a code that as a feminist I know better than to think is actually how women communicate. I lobbed exactly one volley in her direction and expected her to return it.

And when she didn’t, I found that I didn’t have a backup plan. The code I’d been speaking in wasn’t code at all; it had become my native tongue, at least when attempting to make small talk. For it wasn’t just that laconic seatmate and her response that’s troubling me. It’s also the times when it works too well and I find I don’t know how to better anchor the conversation; it’s the times when I see exactly how moored I feel by “girl talk” with women and I wonder how deep my own feminist blood can run if this has become the primary way I know to reach out to other women. My approach has assumed that women in my path are eager to talk about their appearance, and not only that, but that they are eager to talk about their appearance with me because we are both women. Small talk works because we presume all the small talkers share a common condition. While I believe that all women have a unique relationship to presence, style, and visibility, the route I’ve been taking to get to that relationship isn’t helping me establish better friendships with women. And that’s because of another characteristic of getting-to-know-you chatter: Small talk is, by its nature and nomenclature, unimportant. And the very thing I value about beauty talk is what it reveals about us—that is, the stuff that is important. And yes, sometimes beauty talk gets there quickly and directly; that’s exactly why I defend it and work hard in my writing to not have it be written off as cotton candy. Yet in relying so heavily upon beauty talk as a conversation starter, I’ve been failing in my central mission. I know that you can’t just jump into a conversation by asking the really meaty stuff, sure. But if I truly believe in “girl talk” as a portal to that meat, to treat it in practice as fluff is a disservice to my goal.

Perhaps that became clearest to me when I was the recipient, not the instigator, of this sort of exchange. Some time ago, I found myself having a drink with a friend of a friend. The person who introduced us was doing most of the talking, so we were both able to quietly get used to the rhythm of the other before our mutual friend departed and left us on our own. We continued the conversation to its logical point, and it was clear that we each had a good deal to say to one another, but that we were perhaps too much alike in our being better responders than presenters. The conversation was good but not fluent. During one of our fumbling, strained pauses, she looked down and said, “I like your shoes.” The only thing remarkable about these sneakers is how unremarkable they are: Cheap, several years old, a faded olive color, scuffed and beaten, I’d only worn them because the weather was in flux and they were the single “shoulder season” pair I could fine.

I knew enough secondhand about this woman and her somewhat turbulent life to know that I wanted to know more about her. I wanted to talk with her about art and expression, about motherhood and madness. I wanted to know if what she saw every day in her appointment book, her mirror, her life was what she’d envisioned for herself; I wanted to know about disappointment and relief, and where the two might meet. I didn’t ask those questions, of course; you can’t just go in and ask those sorts of things. Sometimes chatter of shoes and mascara is a portal to the questions we really want answers to; sometimes the words that don’t matter are the only way to the words that do. But sometimes those words—where did you get that and I had a pair like that once and what a great color—form a Mobius strip of the words we know don’t matter, with no apparent outlet to what we want to say but don’t know how to articulate. I am trying to step off that neverending loop. But I am not sure how.

I felt that ache, that frustration that comes when I dance around intimacy, a dance only made more frantic when I sense the other person is there with me in our pas de deux. I felt it—I saw it—but I am still unpracticed in saying whatever one would need to say to get to what comes next.

And so I looked at her and said what we both knew you’re supposed to say upon receiving a compliment, the words that, with luck and effort, could lead to chatter of other cross-weather shoes, which could lead to climate, which could lead to where we grew up, which could lead to how we each define the word home. That is, I said Thank you.

What I didn’t say—but what I hope she heard—was I like you too.

The Conundrum of Body Hair

1933 ad for underarm-specific razor with curves, which I can't believe isn't a thing now.

It’s skirt season again (my favorite), which means the body-hair feminist conundrum is cropping up again. I shave year-round, and at this point I don’t particularly examine the “why” behind it anymore. But it’s a loaded topic, and for good reason: The traditional feminist arguments in favor of performing beauty work fall flat when applied to depilation. It has little to do with fantasy, play, or self-expression; it’s expensive, occasionally painful, a time-suck, and just sort of a pain in the ass (actually, it’s a pain somewhere else). Sally successfully argues for the role of confidence in deciding to depilate—certainly that’s why I do it, more on that below—but in reading comments it struck me how loaded the whole body hair thing really is. And in some ways the answer is obvious, but I still have to ask: Why?

People have been manipulating their body hair for centuries; an excavation of a Sumerian tomb dating from 3500 BC contained tweezers, and there’s evidence of techniques like sugaring (still used today) and quicklime depilation going back just as far. But pit shaving as we know it came about after a Harper’s Bazaar ad campaign in 1915 started up with ye olde pit shame. The idea was, of course, to sell depilation products, but it was also a way of managing the fact that women were now showing more skin than they ever had. If pits were now shown, pits must now be problematized, and if pit-showing meant that women were beginning to think that maybe they didn’t need to be managed in every facet of their life, well, we’d better come up with a way to make sure they had to manage them pits, eh? (We see something similar now with Dove’s “Your Armpits Are Naaaasty, Girl” ads for their armpit-beautifying deodorant.) Leg shaving followed, after an uncertain era of fluctuating hemlines, and as for pubic hair—well, that’s another post altogether.

So I get that body hair policing is a way of adding onto the list of mandated beauty work, and I get that there are certain connotations of youth—dangerous youth, prepubescent youth—that make depilation particularly troublesome from a feminist perspective. But when you think about it, isn’t the whole thing...weird? I mean, most adults are attracted to other adults, not to children; hair growth should be all rights be a symbol of mature adult womanhood. Body hair should be a sign of sex, or at least sexual readiness, the same way evolutionary psychologists want to trot out our cultural fascination with breasts as being about our animal instincts.

Yet unlike breasts and hips and plumped-out lips and breath voices, body hair remains verboten for women because it breaks the ultimate taboo: gender. In my conversations with various women about what beauty work they conceal from partners, by far the number-one item done behind closed doors only is depilation. We’ll let partners see us in goofy face masks, but to let them see us plucking a stray hair—especially if that hair is in a place other than the legs or pits, like, say, the chest or toes—seems a step too far. It’s like admitting that sometimes hair grows on our toes is just a step too masculine, a threat to the status quo, even if that status quo is within a relationship of equals. Body hair contains a threat, and in fact maybe it’s a combination of its embedded masculinity and its embedded female maturity that makes it such. Body hair is thriving proof that gender isn’t entirely binary (testosterone prompts its growth), and it’s also proof that women’s sexual characteristics aren’t limited to just the curves that make such nice statues.

All this is nice rhetoric, but where does that leave us? Well, in going to the post that prompted this one: It leaves us ambivalent. Like Sally, I feel much better when I’m depilated according to my own standards (which, in my case, are legs, pits, and a very literal bikini line, as in everything that would show in a bikini), but I also see, as Sally puts it, the “baggage and hypocrisy” that surrounds it. And I hear the argument about how nothing will change about beauty standards unless we actively challenge them...and then I think about picking my battles, and how this isn’t a battle I’m willing to spend energy on. In fact, it’s a battle that has actually wound up giving me energy once I’ve withdrawn: When I was struggling with a particularly bad bout of depression, I realized that part of feeling so gross on a day-to-day level was that I hated feeling stubble on my legs from not shaving daily. I could either spend even more energy than I already do trying to deconstruct the relationship between stubble and “gross,” or I could just fucking shave my legs and spend my energy—energy I would not have were I to stay in a depressive mode—thinking about the larger picture. Shaving my legs didn’t cure my depression. But it was one of many small things I did to take care of myself, and the more I take care of myself in the small ways, the better I’m able to take care of myself in the big ways, and the better I’m able to care for those around me and give my best self to the world.

There’s also an argument about feminism and body hair that gets lost. It’s actually a non-argument, and it’s this: I’ve never personally known a feminist who has refused to shave her legs or pits because of her politics. I've known plenty of women who don’t do it because they don’t like the act of it, or they have sensitive skin, and I suppose the refusal to participate for those reasons is to some degree political. Point is: There are probably plenty of hairy-legged feminists out there, but in my entire 35 years as a feminist (okay, okay, 34, there was that one year in junior high where I really wanted to fit in), I’ve never met one. (That is, I’ve never known that I’ve known one. And while I could count Rebekah’s Body Hair Laissez-Faire month, I get off on a technicality because it was just a month. It’s not even really a technicality because the point was to examine these issues, not reject them wholesale, so, hey!)

So while body hair has political implications, I suspect that the caricature of the “hairy-legged feminist” is actually more responsible for the intense feelings surrounding body hair than the actual politics of the stuff. (Look at the intense discussion on the three posts Sally has done on the topic for proof of how provocative the topic can be.) I think conversations about body hair are absolutely worth having (in addition to Rebekah's series and Sally's work, I also recently enjoyed this piece on how skipping the pit-shaving actually wasn't an identity act for Kate Conway). I just want to make sure we’re not being “bra-burned” into imbuing it with an importance it might not need to have—and I want to make just as sure that we’re not fooling ourselves into thinking that it’s some sort of post-Beauty Myth “but it’s for me!” act. Yes, it’s for me; my boyfriend couldn’t care less. But I know full well that I wouldn’t have dreamed this up—this irritating, time-consuming, and occasionally bloody act—on my own.

Power, Public Life, and The Hunger Games

Panem map by Aim My Arrows High and Bad Guys.

As a feminist blogger who writes about the significance of the ways we present ourselves, I’m required by law to write about The Hunger Games. This, reader, is that post.


To give you an idea of where I’m coming from, I devoured the trilogy in a week, and endured the three days of slow torture between the film’s release and my having a chance to see it. I’m usually the curmudgeonly snob who comes in and says that anything so wildly popular can’t possibly merit the hype. I read, then filleted, a handful of pages from Twilight; I saw part of one of the Harry Potter movies and felt a wave of gratitude for my IUD ensuring I'll never be forced to watch such things against my will. But The Hunger Games had exactly what I wanted, and once I got over myself enough to admit that Suzanne Collins had squarely and accurately targeted me, I gave in wholeheartedly. In a nutshell: Love the books, liked the movie, don’t think the film would have nearly as much value for those who hadn’t read the books. And my thoughts here probably aren’t anything new, which I’m glad for; I’m thrilled that these books have provoked such levels of cultural analysis.

What I have to say boils down to this (and if you’re determined to avoid any and all plot points until you’ve finished the trilogy, stop reading now): The Hunger Games masterfully explores the division between the self and the public self. We see various ways characters cope with this enforced gap—Peeta doesn’t just grin and bear it but thrives, Cinna plays his cards so close to the vest that it takes two books before we learn what he’s really about, and even Cato (in the movie, at least) is shown as finally questioning if he even has a private self, being trained since birth for his death.

But it’s Katniss’s grappling with the ways she’s presented, both by herself and what amounts to her PR team, that’s front and center. She feels like a failure for not being able to adopt a persona as easily as her fellow competitors (which ultimately winds up working in her favor, as blatantly stated in the third book when everyone does a rundown of Katniss’s Greatest Hits). She winces as she’s shoveled into her evening gown, and what in most YA books would be a “makeover moment” becomes a moment of assurance mixed with stunned fear that she’ll still fail to charm. She’s consistently unsure whether she’ll be able to perform desirability well enough to save her life, and it’s a legitimate fear. (From the first scene of both the book and movie, she breaks one of the key rules of femininity by openly disdaining a cat.)

And here’s what I think is so remarkable about the trilogy: The division between public and private life is framed through a manipulation of Katniss’s femininity, but that femininity is seen as a means to an end. The books aren’t so much a critique of the construction of femininity as a critique of the ways it serves the existing power structures. It’s a Marxist/anarchist feminist critique, and though I consider myself neither a Marxist nor an anarchist, I’ll say this: The more material illuminating that feminism exists not because men want to keep women down but because the status quo has an investment in keeping people divided and with diffuse power so as to keep power concentrated where it already is, the better. Katniss is taught to use her “feminine wiles,” but those wiles are exposed for what they are: favor-currying tools that keep women scrambling over false power while the real power lies elsewhere. The manufactured Katniss-Peeta romance only gets the pair to the point where they have to rely on their actual strengths—ingenuity, solidarity, and rebellion. The currency of compliant femininity, in the end, is worth little.

This excellent post from Subashini gets into this, but from a somewhat different angle; in the same way I’m reading Katniss’s false adherence to conventional femininity as being exposed, she’s reading it as a set of rules Katniss is ultimately punished for not adhering to, “precisely because she has demonstrated what is apparently meant to be understood as an unfeminine lack of vulnerability throughout.” She is punished, to a degree, but again what’s striking here is that constructed femininity is seen as but one expression of subservience to power (the almighty Capitol). The female characters throughout are on various places on the spectrum of conventional femininity: Prim shows a quiet propensity for healing, Clove and Glimmer are primed to mercilessly kill, Foxface uses traditional female strengths of cunning and agility to advance in the game. Their adherence to femininity is secondary to their adherence to the existing power structure: Prim is conventionally feminine but has the bad luck to be born in District 12, so she’s in constant danger of starving to death. Meanwhile, Glimmer and Clove, favored competitors who haven’t had a life of hardship, show few signs of conventional femininity except for their names and their willingness to wear girly dresses at their interviews (which all female competitors do). They’re ultimately punished by their deaths, of course, but given that that’s the point of the Games, I can’t read that as being tied into their gender typing. (Book fans: I’m eager to see how Johanna is portrayed in the film adaptations of the second and third books—she’s the one character who seems to actively and willingly use her femininity to get what she wants, though “what she wants” is ultimately exposed to still be at the mercy of another force larger than her.)

Critiquing the power structure behind femininity is a clever ploy on Collins’s part, both as a writer and as a businesswoman, for the simple reason that it seamlessly reveals how women’s issues aren’t solely of concern for women. I couldn’t find information on what the gender breakdown of the book’s audience is, but I can only imagine that a greater number of boys read—and just as important for Collins, bought—The Hunger Games than have read any other book featuring a female protagonist in recent years. (As for the film, the New York Times reported that 39% of the film’s audience in the opening weekend was male.) I absolutely don’t want to devalue literature aimed squarely at girls, so I’m not trying to say that The Hunger Games is somehow better because of its appeal to boys. But not only does it do its part to balance the gender history of great YA lit and expose boys to some feminist issues—that prettiness is constructed, and that serving as decoration isn’t natural to girls any more than it is to them—it also casts light upon the ways our assumptions about day-to-day behavior and personality can be shaped to serve a purpose that isn’t our own. 


It's a lesson in how manipulation of our public persona can wind up muddling our true intent, something that "the kids," boys and girls alike, are now forced to be keenly aware of because of their own ability to create public personae. As Rob Horning writes at Marginal Utility: “It’s not clear even to [Katniss] in the end whether her emotional reactions are real or strategic performances.” One of the trickiest parts of examining emotional work is that it can be difficult to know what we’re doing because we’re expected to do it as opposed to because the situation or our temperaments call for a certain action. The allegory of the games as the constant surveillance of social media makes sense, and Collins skillfully uses the romantic story line to illuminate the ways the manipulation of our own emotions can alienate us from them, which has a long history of being gendered but which is also endemic to the self-branding necessary to social media.

As Subashini pointed out, it’s interesting that Peeta is better at not being alienated by his emotions, since it’s women who are often thought to be both more in touch with our feelings and better able to manage them. My hope is that The Hunger Games can create a chink in that idea, exposing the ways in which calculated self-presentation can muddle what is thought to be innate and true. And the more we all recognize the price of those calculations—not just women, but anyone at the mercy of a larger state power or under surveillance, which is to say all of us—the better we may be able to figure out whether we’re actually willing to pay it.

The Grandiose Vacuity of "Rock the Lips"

Among the handful of press releases and notifications I received about International Women’s Day—which is today, March 8 (set your estro-calendar!)—was an event known as Rock the Lips. The idea is that “Because Women Rock,” women worldwide should wear red lipstick today to turn the world “into a sea of power pouts,” for “if we can get 1 million passionate, dynamic, creative, intelligent, fun women to wear red lipstick March 8th...what else can we do together?” Good question. Judging by the event’s team page on microlending site Kiva.org, “we” can raise $200, the grand total of all donations made in the name of Rock the Lips as of the time I published this.

I probably don’t need to spell out how ludicrous this campaign is. There’s the utter emptiness of it (why exactly are we wearing red lipstick? to raise awareness of...the existence of women? of lipstick? of red?), the insulting idea that lipstick is an icon that women worldwide would be thrilled to embrace as a symbol of liberation, the equation of red lipstick as a de facto symbol of womanhood. I’d call it redwashing if anything were being washed; instead it’s wholly vacuous, without even the pretense of anything progressive or charitable coming out of it, unless the idea is that women using a tool of conventional beauty en masse is a charitable act in itself, a gift to the world at large. (So pretty we are!) As Nancy Friedman, who alerted me to Rock the Lips, says, “I became a feminist and all I got was this lousy red lipstick.”

It’s the brainchild of a leading interactive marketing firm, AKQA, which specializes in digital advertising and has won numerous industry awards. I’m holding out a tiny amount of hope that this is some sort of subversive advertising campaign for a cause/company as yet unidentified, for it’s difficult to imagine an industry leader creating something this birdbrained as its independent outreach to the ladies. But I suspect that hope is optimistic; Rock the Lips appears to think it’s clever or brave for playfully challenging major brands to “rock the lips” along with them. “How about putting a red power pout on the green mermaid?” they ask of Starbucks. To Google, “Let’s see the O’s replaced with lipstick marks.” The idea, perhaps, is that if you get corporations to recognize your stunt (and that’s what this is, a stunt), you gain legitimacy. But legitimacy for what? 

Its vacuity is so grandiose as to teeter on the line of genius: Remember how everyone got all excited about flash mobs, and then they turned out to be a sort of social experiment from a Harper's editor? "Not only was the flash mob a vacuous fad; it was, in its very form (pointless aggregation and then dispersal), intended as a metaphor for the hollow hipster culture that spawned it," wrote Bill Wasik, the flash mob's creator. Is AKQA trying to prank us? Or just discredit participants by revealing them to be woefully out of touch with what women are actually capable of? Or is it really just as nefarious as it seems: A company that exists to market other companies marketing the vaguest and most superficial idea of "girl power" by doing something with absolutely zero social value and attempting to pass it off as...can we even call this slacktivism?

Listen, I often wear red lipstick, and in fact I’ve written about how “In seeing my highlighted lips move, I saw the words themselves as being highlighted.” Swivel lipstick was invented shortly after women in the U.S. gained the right to vote, and the color red has a long association with women’s sexual expression, indubitably tied to larger forms of expression. It’s not that there’s a lack of correlation between verbal articulation and cosmetic articulation. (For more on this correlation, see, oh, everything I’ve ever written. It's not the lipstick here that I find offensive, it's the total lack of substance behind the "action.") But that seems to go unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon, by Rock the Lips. It’s style without substance, rallying without a cause. It’s red without blood.

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So Rock the Lips is vacuous and terrible, we agree, right? Yes, we agree, let’s move on and not speak of it again. (Given that their goal was 1 million women, and they only have 4,500 "likes" on Facebook, I'm guessing that AKQA will see it for what it is and quietly close up shop on this initiative.) So what about International Women’s Day? I’m feeling ambivalent about it and am trying to figure out why. Undoubtedly, plenty of good comes out of it. Some assorted examples: Global action group Lane Change has a list of hands-on actions we can take to improve the status of women (mentoring women, reading feminist writers, writing about real-life female heroes), Kiva is pioneering a “free trial” program to encourage new donors to its microfinance program (presumably including the whopping $100 from The Campaign That Shall Not Be Named), and there are literally hundreds of woman-centric global events going on today.

Plus, the day’s history is pretty interesting: Proposed by a member of the German Social Democratic Party in 1910, International Women’s Day was meant to highlight women’s contributions to labor, though more general demands were included in its celebration. Union participation heavily factored into early IWDs, highlighted by the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, which occurred just weeks after the inaugural celebration. It’s bigger in other countries than it is in the U.S. (though we here have Women’s History Month) and is even a legal holiday in 27 nations. In some places it’s treated somewhat like Mother’s Day is in the States, with men in Russia rushing out in the morning to buy bouquets for wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters. It seems a shame that labor isn’t so much a focus of IWD any longer—certainly workers’ rights are very much at the heart of women’s rights—but women’s history, arts, literature, and entrepreneurship are celebrated in various activities, and there are indeed plenty of political rallies and feminist actions connected to the day. Still, I find myself hedging.

Part of my hesitation could be boiled down into a little package of "Every day should be International Women's Day!" That’s more than a little pat, I know, but there it is. I write thousands of words every week about women, and so do plenty of other people, not to mention the activists, politicians, caregivers, social workers, creative workers, health-care providers, lobbyists, engineers, educators, parents, and laborers of all stripes who devote their work partially or wholly to the needs of women. Is our work supposed to matter more today than it did yesterday? Are more people going to be paying attention because—hey, didn’t you know, today is women’s day!

Of course, that’s also a limited mind-set. Today isn’t Women’s Day; it’s International Women’s Day. And while I pay attention to international women’s issues, the fact is I’m a product of an arrogant, powerful country that thinks it matters more than other nations. I try not to fall into that mind-set but I admit I have a hard time conceptualizing how international movements and events like this play out in other countries. The United States doesn’t seem to do much for International Women’s Day, and I don’t know how it really plays out elsewhere. I have no idea if it’s treated like Mother’s Day is here in ways that go beyond the bouquets, with that underlying sentiment of “Thanks for doing the majority of household work for the other 364 days of the year, Ma,” or if it’s something that actually helps increase women’s visibility and educates the public about women’s issues. (Not to say Mother’s Day isn’t nice, but the proportion of breakfasts in bed vs. discussions of maternal leave policies is a bit skewed.)

To really suss out my thoughts on International Women’s Day, I’d have to be talking with a lot more residents of countries where it’s celebrated. But when I looked at the list of countries where it’s an official holiday, it only raised my eyebrows higher. The list of countries where it’s an official celebration reads like a list of the world’s worst places for women: Afghanistan, Guinea-Bissau, Tajikstan, Madagascar, and so on. Absent from the list is a single country known for being good to women. The celebrating country that places second-highest on the list of the World Economic Forum’s international rankings of places for women is Moldova—where, in 2008, an estimated 25,000 people were trafficked for forced labor, the majority of them women, many of those forced into sex work against their will. (Trafficking is complicated and not all women are trafficked against their will, but from what I understand Chisinau is an export hub for bait-and-switched forced prostitution.) When Moldova is one of the female-friendliest countries officially recognizing International Women’s Day, well, maybe we need to rethink exactly how effective such a day is.

You might say: That’s exactly the point, we need International Women’s Day in countries like Burkina Faso. But women worldwide don’t need flowers handed to them before breakfast; they need education, justice, basic safety measures. It’s a cliche to say something like “every day should be women’s day” in nations with more parity, but when applied to the actual countries that do set aside one particular day to honor half their population, it goes from being trite to being frightening. Uganda can afford to make it a national holiday because the other 364 days of the year women go back to, say, having no legal protection against marital rape, poor health care to treat fistula, and limited inheritance rights.

Now, I’m the first to admit that my knowledge about international issues is limited, though I know enough to see that in questioning a day that cultures foreign to me have embraced, I’m assuming that my privileged western views are “correct.” I don’t know enough about Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Africa (where most of the official celebrants are) to be able to say with authority that International Women’s Day isn’t important, or an instrumental part of a larger surge toward improving conditions for women in the countries that are the farthest in inequality. And in researching the international aspect of IWD, indeed what I found was somewhat encouraging: Plenty of countries on this list are taking active measures to improve the status of women. Moldova has taken strict measures against traffickers; Uganda has passed better domestic violence laws. Some of the celebrating countries are faring far better than the United States in ways: Fifteen of the countries celebrating IWD have a higher percentage of women in national parliaments than the United States.

I suppose I find International Women’s Day simply confusing. I don’t want to sit in my western world ivory tower and proclaim the entire affair a pony show, and I also recognize that most people don’t operate in the feminine sphere as heavily as I do and could use a prompt to get them to think about women’s issues. On a certain level, anything that puts women in the public light as something other than sluts, assumed caretakers, bridezillas, or any such tropes, I’m going to support. But I’m just not really sure who it’s for. (Unless, as my friend Mary suggested, it's for women with dual citizenship. Swiss-American ladies, rejoice!) The actions I’ve read about seem positive (with the odious exception of Rocking the Lips), but they also seem like things that people in female-friendly spaces already do, and I don’t know how much the public at large really engages in International Women’s Day. Is that the point here? That we need to keep having these days until we really don’t need them any longer?

I want to like International Women’s Day, I really do. So...convince me. I don’t want to be a curmudgeon, I’m not as knowledgeable about international women’s issues as I should be, and I certainly don’t want to pull some Independent Women’s Forum shit and say that women have made enough gains that we don’t need events like this any longer. Do you celebrate or otherwise mark International Women’s Day? If so, why, and how? (For that matter, did you Rock the Lip?) Do you see it making an impact outside of specifically female spaces? Should that even matter?

Recommended Reading

The initial inspiration for The Beheld was, unsurprisingly, The Beauty Myth. But when Rebekkah Dilts of Radar Productions interviewed me recently, I found myself articulating for the first time why I’m eager to look beyond The Beauty Myth. Wolf’s work is incredibly powerful and necessary—we’re hardly free of the “Iron Maiden” of beauty standards, but if it weren’t for The Beauty Myth giving a name and common language to those standards, we’d feel a lot more isolated in our internal struggle regarding our bodies/our selves (and possibly more passively accepting of the rules of beauty too).

But as I said, I’m eager to look beyond this polemic from 20 years ago. I bring up its age not to say it’s no longer relevant but rather to point out that it is relevant, perhaps more than ever—and that we’re still stuck in a lot of the same old ways of thinking. I bring plenty of thought here that sprang from The Beauty Myth, but I’d also like to offer a sort of parallel track alongside Wolf’s sharp cultural critiques: Without merely being dupes of the patriarchy, plenty of women still want to be beautiful (Wolf never says we shouldn’t want that, by the way). Let’s look at what we’re actually doing within the confines of the beauty myth; let’s look at the reasoning we offer ourselves and one another; let’s examine the agency we bring to the vanity table—and, sure, the passive beliefs we’ve absorbed—and go from there.

So, yes, any true primer on beauty for women today must include The Beauty Myth, absolutely. But there are plenty of other books out there that are informing what I’m doing here in trying to work alongside Wolf's book. Here are just five of them.

Ways of Seeing, John Berger

John Berger’s classic text on art and visual culture is a must-read in its entirety. But that goes double for the chapter on representation of women in art, and the ways art mirrors the cultural roles carved out for and inhabited by women. “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. … And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. … Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” It was instrumental to my mirror project, and indeed instrumental to the way I think about being a woman in public. How much can equality matter when I am constantly under my own surveillance? 

Facing Beauty, Aileen Ribeiro
Facing Beauty takes the morsels that gave birth to the slim Ways of Seeing and expands them into a gorgeous color volume examining historical views of women as revealed through various art forms. Social mores, morality, artifice, and idealization all make their way to the canvas through how women are depicted, whether it’s the role of “common” sex workers and courtesans as muses or the strategic revealing of bared breasts. Even more engaging than the traditional art history is the treatment of cosmetics history as lived art on its wearers. From the always-beloved paintings of women at their vanities to the decorations on the actual bottles and pots of cosmetic creams, the painted self is worth as much examination as the canvas, and Facing Beauty treats it as such.

The Thoughtful Dresser, Linda Grant
I’m forever thankful to Terri of Rags Against the Machine for recommending this book after I wrote about Anne Frank packing curlers. Linda Grant’s book may as well be a manifesto for every woman who has cared about fashion or beauty and felt the sting of dismissal when someone has called those pursuits trivial. They can be treated trivially, of course, but Grant masterfully shows us why we care so much even when we don’t think we should. With Holocaust survivor and fashion buyer Catherine Hill as our default protagonist, the book serves as a sort of psychic history of fashion—why consumerism, specifically fashion consumerism, was tied in with women’s liberation (and not just for women who could afford to buy new clothes), and why even those of us who don’t particularly care about trends wind up buying into them more than we realize. Read this and just try to resist the urge to put on something beautiful. I dare you.

The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
The ten pages that constitute the twenty-second chapter of this classic are some of the most important pages ever written if you’re interested in the relationship between women and vanity. Titled “The Narcissist,” instead of simply damning women who take pleasure in their own visage, the chapter shines a brutal light on why the mirror can provide such refuge: When one of our primary public roles is being gazed upon, is it any wonder we may wish to look at ourselves to see what all the fuss is about? “All love requires the duality of a subject and an object,” de Beauvoir writes. “The reality of man is in the houses he builds, the forests he clears, the maladies he cures; but woman, not being able to fufill herself through project and objectives, is forced to find her reality in the immanence of her person.” Much has changed since 1949; women—ta-da!—can clear forests and cure maladies. But the vestiges of the prefeminist era remain in vanity, and as much as vain is often used as an insult to women, we must examine it in a feminist context (instead of a moral one) before we can understand our relationship to our self-image.

The Managed Heart, Arlie Russell Hochschild
This sociological study of the emotional labor of flight attendants and bill collectors is a fascinating look into the ways many of us harness our feelings in the course of our jobs. Whether we’re managing our feelings about the chain of hierarchy or channeling our “authentic” personality to help us shine at our work (as with friendly, compliant flight attendants), it’s near-impossible to avoid having our emotions, to some degree, commodified in the workplace. What does this have to do with beauty? It wasn’t until I read Hochschild that I was able to pinpoint my own “emotional beauty labor”: The small and large ways in which I attempt to play the part of a nice-looking woman, in ways that go beyond styling my hair or putting on makeup. It’s these small acts of emotional beauty labor—say, walking the line between the gracious and obsequious in receiving compliments, using femininity to command attention but keep it in the realm of appropriacy--make up a greater drain on our personal resources than just makeup. This book is key to understanding our own emotional labor of all sorts, whether appearance-related or not.

On Ladyblogging and the Slumber Parties of the Internet

An early editorial meeting at Beheld HQ.

As a feminist who started my career at Ms. and wound my way through Glamour and Playboy before winding up at CosmoGIRL!—the exclamation point was part of the name—finding Jezebel shortly after its 2007 launch was delicious. I enjoyed it as a reader, and I enjoyed it even more as a worker in the industry they frequently critiqued, especially as I learned that some of their writers had been in my position—simultaneously excited and dismayed to be in the “pink ghetto,” eager to up the feminist content in glossy ladymags but frustrated by the conditions that Gloria Steinem labeled a “velvet steamroller.”

So it’s not surprising that I’m more kindly disposed to ladyblogs than n+1’s Molly Fischer appears to be. I was 30 when Jezebel launched, and was still eager for what blogs of any sort provided; Fischer, at 20, had gone through adolescence with public critique a click away. I’ve also contributed to two of the four sites Fischer critiques—Jezebel and The Hairpin—and my work there has brought me a portion of The Beheld’s readership, undoubtedly coloring my attitude toward them. I cannot pretend impartiality.

Given the impossibility of impartiality, I admit to being both excited by and uneasy about the n+1 piece. The whole article is worth a read, but in a nutshell, she looks at the evolution of ladyblogs, sites that give traditional women’s topics signature treatment. (Seventeen assures you that masturbating is totally normal; Rookie tells you how to do it.) The bigger the sites get, the more they adhere to what Fischer frames as a particular form of triteness endemic to ladyblogs, in which Zooey Deschanel is shunned but eco-friendly cat bonnets are squeal-worthy. Drained of the gravitas of other alternative women’s media, like explicitly feminist spaces, the potential for ladyblogs to become a true alternative to women’s glossies becomes watered down; the tool for revolution is rendered in scratch-n-sniff. “The internet, it turned out, was a place to make people like you: the world’s biggest slumber party, and the best place to trade tokens of slumber party intimacy—makeup tips, girl crushes, endless inside jokes,” Fischer writes. “The notion that women might share some fundamental experience and interests, a notion on which women’s websites would seem to depend—'sisterhood,' let’s call it—has curdled into BFF-ship.”

What this argument overlooks is that a slumber party is sisterhood. Junior high slumber parties might have brought anything from makeovers to pained sobs over family dysfunction to raging tear-downs of pervy gym teachers. The adult slumber party touches on these, with our adult wisdom added to the mix. The voices of women online have brought me my birth control (“Ask Me About My Mirena!”), lessened my shame about my belly bulge, shined an uncomfortable light on the way social and personal notions of beauty can collide, and opened my mind to what I, as a biological woman, can learn about my own position in society from trans women. There’s fluff, of course (“Watch Kristen Bell Adorably Lose Her Shit Over a Sloth”), but just as silliness coexists alongside our more meaningful concerns, fluffy pieces can comfortably coexist alongside essays on healing from sexual assault. (In fact, for some of us, the fluff was a way to heal.) The slumber party goes all night, after all.

By talking about issues particular to women and treating them as though they matter, we create sisterhood. Ladyblogs do that in tones earnest, flip, and everywhere in between; the “Women Laughing Alone With Salad” Hairpin post Fischer mentions is downright effervescent, and it went viral because it brilliantly encapsulated the way women are painted into a corner where if we’re happy to be eating, it must be because we’re being guilt-free. The post caught on because we all got it, and because we were all fed up with it too. Women laughing alone with salad was, in its own way, sisterhood, and to dismiss it as mere quirk is to dismiss the day-to-day stuff that makes up the particulars of a woman’s life. Fischer ends her piece with a rallying cry for sites that stem from “the notion that women might share some fundamental experience and interests,” but I’m not convinced that the sites in question aren’t doing exactly that. They’re doing them in a more lightweight fashion than Fischer might desire, but the things that constitute gravitas (formality, for example) are frequently structures that purposefully omit the validity of the personal, that look to an “objective” viewpoint (as if there is any such thing) as the end-all, be-all. That is, they’re structures that dismiss the ways plenty of women have written for centuries. Here it comes, that clichéd rallying cry we feminists say over and over: The personal is political.

So it’s unclear what Fischer wants the reader to do—what, when I worked in women’s glossy magazines, we called “the takeaway.” Are we to eschew The Hairpin in favor of today’s equivalent of The Bimonthly Period, the newsletter of the women’s resource center Fischer’s mother founded during her college years? Sites like Feministing, Pandagon, and Feministe play a crucial role in feminism, and therefore in women’s lives—even for women who have never heard of these sites, as they keep the activist fires burning. They can also occasionally feel alienating. I greatly enjoyed my guest blogging stint at Feministe last summer, but I also walked away from it understanding, for the first time, why some people whose politics roughly parallel mine refuse to call themselves feminists. For every commenter who thoughtfully critiqued my message, there would be one who’d say I was a tool of the patriarchy, and another who’d accuse me of abusing my class privilege. It’s a vibrant, razor-sharp community and I was honored to be a part of it, but my point is, if explicitly feminist blogs are the only acceptable online outlet for feminists to inhabit, we’d get exhausted mighty quick. (Let’s also not forget that the number of people who wouldn’t label the targets of Fischer’s critiques as forthrightly feminist is pretty small. The other day I mentioned to a new friend that a mutual writer acquaintance was a “radical feminist”—as in, menstrual art—and her response was, “Oh, does she write for Jezebel?”)

Fischer hits plenty of nails on the head (you know, my opinions being the bed of nails), especially her questioning of the age-appropriacy of ladyblogs' tone. I enjoy Rookie, helmed by 15-year-old Tavi Gevinson—in fact, I enjoy Rookie so much at age 35 that I began to wonder how many teenagers actually read it. I’ll happily cheer unabashed femininity, but like Fischer I’m wary of mass numbers of adult women inhabiting teen spaces. In fact, many of my feelings on this topic can be neatly summed up by an excellent Julie Klausner piece that—oops!—ran in Jezebel.

Still, despite finding aspects of adult-girl culture downright creepy (Hello Kitty?), I see other aspects as liberating. Where women’s magazines place readers on a trajectory of traditional womanhood—teenager to single woman to mommy to retiree—ladyblogs generally treat their readers as though they’re child-free adult women. Ladyblogs don’t mommy-track their readers—and that’s part of why “lady” makes so much sense in describing them. Classically speaking, ladies were put into a somewhat separate class. Ladies of recent centuries had social status; earlier, they had feudal privileges. The ladyblogs don’t use lady in that sense, but it carries a separatist air: We needn’t be quite as serious as we might when using the broader term women, but we don’t want to be girls. Fischer asserts that “On the ladyblogs, adult womanhood is a source of discomfort, and so when we write posts or comments, we tend to call ourselves ladies.” I’d argue the opposite: On the ladyblogs, adult womanhood is a given, and within our shared womanhood we carve out a comfortable space we can all inhabit. Within ladyblogs, we all become ladies.

The lingo may be why the presumably adult women on the ladyblogs (Rookie excluded, as it is aimed at teenagers) might seem to be clinging to girlhood. Fischer questions both the hallmarks of ladyblog style and the way its commenters pick up on it. In my own writing I rilly rilly try to avoid the clichés of the ladysphere (amirite, ladies?), because I don’t want to rely on those methods to convey my point. But as Emily Gould points out, it’s not like “commenter sycophancy” is particular to the ladyblogs. Still, it’s particularly easy to slip into ladysphere lingo, for the very reasons these clichés evolved in the first place: When skillfully employed, ladymags’ “endemic verbal tics” connote personality. Instead of the self-seriousness of magazines, ladylingo gives a tilt to the voice, one that implies we’re all in it together (which, again, is why it’s contagious). The tics serve as a friendly politesse, a way of conveying that you’re typing with a smile.

In fact, that seems to be Fischer’s larger point, and one I’m ambivalent on: Ladybloggers and their commenters are typing with a smile. “They bake pies with low-hanging fruit: they are helpful, agreeable, relatable, and above all likable,” Fischer writes. “Surely one can’t, and shouldn’t, strive to like and be liked all the time. But how else can one be?” (I couldn’t help but wonder how much time Fischer spent actually wading around in comments sections. The culture of “like” looms large, but ladyblog commenters can get vicious, and they’re certainly not afraid to disagree.) The point is an excellent one, but two key points give me pause. First: What’s so wrong about wanting to be liked? I want to be liked; I want my writing to be liked. When I started The Beheld I repeatedly said that all I wanted was to be a part of the conversation. Some writers become a part of the conversation by being controversial, but that’s not my style. I’m a good girl from birth, and it’s built into me to want to be liked. But being liked isn’t my goal in writing; likability is a tool I use to pave my way toward the larger goal of being a part of the conversation, and occasionally hosting it too. There’s plenty to critique about women having a compulsive need to be liked, and it’s something I’ve wrestled with a good deal on a personal level. But I’m not going to apologize for couching arguments in a softer way than I would if my goal were to win.

But the larger issue here about likability is this: Maybe if more women writers were published in gender-neutral publications, writing stories that treat “women’s issues” as people issues, we wouldn’t be paranoid about being so fucking likable. This is a much deeper issue than I’m able to address here, and since most of my bylines have been in explicitly female-oriented spaces, I’m not particularly credible on this front. What I’ll say is that I’m not alone in being a female writer who writes about women’s issues who would be happy to publish in more gender-neutral spaces—and that I rarely pitch those spaces because there’s still a little voice inside me telling me that what I write about is just girl stuff. And people, this is what I do, every day: I write about girl stuff, and I treat it with the gravitas it has in my own life. But that voice is still there, and it’s a result of all sorts of things—internalized oppression, the realities of the “pink ghetto” of women’s issues, fear that if I did start writing more for gender-neutral outlets I’d have to face harsher criticisms than I usually do (the only time I’ve been forthrightly called stupid is from self-identified male commenters, and never on ladyblogs). It’s also a result of me specifically wanting to write for women; as they say, I “write what I know,” and what I know is being a woman. And I don’t particularly want it to be any other way; like I said, I’ve written for ladyblogs, and I wouldn’t bristle at The Beheld being categorized as such. Obviously I believe in what ladyblogs do. But I’m a fool if I think there are no other reasons I align myself with them—reasons that have to do with the “belonging” Fischer criticizes in her piece (“[Ladyblogs] tell us less about how to be than about how to belong”). I know I “belong” in ladyblogs, for I am a lady. I’m not so sure where else I belong.

Despite my misgivings, I liked Fischer’s piece. I like the questions it asks, and I just like that it exists. Recent discussions about women writers and where our bylines ought to be need to continue, and they can’t continue in an authentic manner if we’re afraid of critiquing one another. Ladyblogs aren’t above reproach or critique, and given that some of them serve as watchdogs to traditional women’s media, if we become lax in watching the watchdogs we’re perpetuating the problem. I just don’t want the conversation to be a ping-pong of should we or shouldn’t we, of ladyblogs versus the rest of the Internet. I want the sentiment behind Fischer’s piece to be explored so that whatever these spaces look like in five years, they’re serving women’s needs even more.

Perhaps it’s the women’s magazine veteran in me, but I want a “takeaway” from Fischer’s piece, and I want it to be something like this: We’re in an interesting time as far as gender and access to the public, and we’re also at an time when “voice” is a prime asset for online visibility—“voice” being something women writers have traditionally been told they excel at. We’re also living in a time of fragmented, personally curated information streams, one in which a person could read a handful of sites—even ladyblogs, depending on the blog—and have a reasonable handle on what’s going on in the world. So we’re at the era, and if the proliferation of ladyblogs is any indication, we’ve got the talent. Now what are we going to do with it?

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On a related note: I’m thrilled to announce that starting February 6, The Beheld will be syndicated at The New Inquiry. I’ll write more in-depth about this tomorrow but given the topic of this post I thought it would be downright dishonest to not share this bit of news, since TNI is a gender-neutral space that looks at my ladybloggin’ background as an asset, not a ghettoizing detraction. But more on that tomorrow!

Pricing Beauty (Not That Other Book)

I have a comparative review of Catherine Hakim’s Erotic Capital and Ashley Mears’s Pricing Beauty up at The New Inquiry. (Image possibly unsafe for work; I didn't choose it.) Last time I piped up here about the concept of erotic capital, I was trying to find a way to value it. For there are parts of the theory I find enticing—that if our culture began to value traditionally feminine traits and skills instead of automatically denigrating them, we might begin to see progress in arenas where sexism still thrives. I also liked the idea that erotic capital was embodied by charisma and “people skills,” not merely the “womanly arts” of being seductive and walking successfully in high heels. I’m not exactly a believer in “if you’ve got it, flaunt it,” but I’m a believer in charm, and I was ready to read an argument that valorized it.

Unfortunately, as I point out in the review, these theories were in my head, not in Hakim’s book. When I wrote my earlier piece on erotic capital, I hadn’t yet read the book that inspired it; I now wish I’d made my point entirely separate from Erotic Capital, because Erotic Capital is tripe. Like, seriously, tripe, and not just because I disagree with most of its premises; it’s poorly written, repetitive, and defensive, and Hakim seems to have a willful misunderstanding of women's history. (Hakim isn’t the first person to attempt to discredit feminism’s most visible icon by referring to Gloria Steinem as a former Playboy bunny without acknowledging that she worked undercover for Playboy to expose their working conditions. But when it’s used to ask why more feminists haven’t embraced erotic capital—including a former Playboy bunny!—it’s particularly disingenuous.) Which is exactly why, though I’m pleased with the review and would happily write it again, I’m simultaneously chagrined with myself for taking Hakim’s bait. After reading the book, it became clear she wanted exactly the kind of argument I issued. It attacks feminism and uses the word erotic in its title; she meant for it to be a provocative argument, not a serious one. I suppose my mistake was in expecting a better argument. Lesson learned.

The real downside here, though, is that in gnawing away at Erotic Capital, I didn’t get a chance to showcase Pricing Beauty, which is excellent. I was eager to read it because it was an in-depth study of the modeling industry that didn’t immediately dismiss it as harmful to the population at large, which is what most feminist discourse regarding modeling focuses on. Mears doesn’t ignore those claims; instead, she deftly illustrates how the industry embodies the social and cultural constructs the power-holders have decided upon (even when they don’t exactly know that they’re deciding upon anything). That is: The modeling industry isn’t some weird otherworld; the modeling industry just lays bare the conditions many of us operate under every day.

A recurring theme in Pricing Beauty is how an industry can put a price tag on a product whose entire value lies in representation. How can the industry decide one 5’10” lithe, toothy brunette is worth $6,000 a day, while another 5’10” lithe, toothy brunette winds up in debt to her agency? In looking at the tastemakers who control the aesthetics of modeling—photographers, bookers, agents, and most of all clients, the people signing the bills at the end of the day—Mears shows us how even the power-holders make decisions according to what they each think the other wants, leading to an inflation among what each tastemaker anticipates will be the prized “look.” And there are plenty of ways to dissect any particular look and what those in power might gain from prizing that particular look—even when they genuinely don’t realize that they’re suddenly prizing a look that serves their cultural dictates. But we can’t do any of it unless we accept modeling A) as a legitimate industry worth studying, one with its own working conditions and peculiar rules that, along with the glamour, keep its participants hungry for its winner-take-all economic stakes, and B) as an industry that isn’t against the rest of us, but rather an embodiment of the social and cultural concerns that might get us riled up about the modeling industry in the first place.

For a sociological study that could easily have devolved into academic-ese in an effort to be taken seriously, the book is both lucid and economical; it’s a testament to the good faith in which Mears, who was working as a model while doing her research, approaches the industry, looking to be neither critical nor laudatory. Each anecdote surges toward the larger thesis, even the quotes from outliers, making the entire read seamless. I’d read Mears’ work on Jezebel before; I don’t know her background other than what’s in her bio, but the ease with which she writes over there shines through in Pricing Beauty. (Few things will turn me off quicker than writing designed to appear scholarly; this book is one of those studies that shows such style is a compensation for unclear thinking.)

It’s always tempting to treat modeling as either a terrifically glamorous world, or as the opposite—a Valley of the Dolls-type world built for disappointment and tragedy, but only after years spent in blistering high heels. Mears refuses to sensationalize modeling in either direction, acknowledging its perks (you’re a model! who gets to work in Europe sometimes!) and pitfalls (you’re a model! who may well exit the industry in debt to your agency for all the work they’ve poured into your never-launched career!) but always keeping an eye on the larger questions: What do the peculiar economics of the modeling industry say about cultural values, about gender, about privilege? In essence, what does modeling say about us? We know there's a connection; that's part of why there's such an enormous amount of attention paid to the industry, or rather, to models themselves. (Why do any of us know who Claudia Schiffer is?) That's part of why some of us internalize the messages of the modeling industry so readily. We might not need Pricing Beauty to tell us that there's a connection between the cultural production of modeling and the cultural production of ourselves, but we just might need it to help us understand why.

Is It Appropriate to Outsource Emotional Beauty Labor?

I went to a wedding last weekend, and though it wasn’t a black-tie affair, it was a nighttime event at a beautiful historic estate, so I wanted to go beyond my normal look. I wound up wearing a lovely pink sheath dress, which called for heels higher than I normally wear, which called for wavy bombshell hair, which called for three shades of lip color, winged eyeliner, eyeshadow, and my personal pièce de resistance, the subtlest of false eyelashes applied to the outer corners of my eyes. It is probably the most effort I have put into my appearance for any single event since senior prom.

The wedding was a two-hour drive away, but only a 10-minute drive from the home of my gentleman friend’s father, so instead of driving from New York to Pennsylvania in our finery, we did our wedding prep at his house. As we walked from my boyfriend’s car into his father’s home, a good two hours before we had to leave for the wedding, the imbalance in our raw materials struck me. My materials: a dress; a shoebox containing shoes, high-heel comfort inserts, and two pairs of pantyhose (always have a spare!); shapewear; a curling iron; hairspray; dry shampoo; a hairbrush; makeup kit (foundation, concealer, blush, bronzer, loose and pressed powder, application brushes, eyebrow pencil, eyeshadow, liquid and pencil eyeliner, mascara, false eyelash glue, false eyelashes, toothpicks for eyelash application, eyelash curler, two shades of lip liner, lipstick); an event purse (breath mints, tissues, plus cell phone, wallet, etc.); a wrap; and a bottle of water, because I’d be damned if I went to all this trouble and then couldn’t enjoy the wedding because I was dehydrated.

His materials: a suit.

Now, this was a special occasion for people I’m terrifically fond of, and so I was happy to put special effort into my appearance—truly, I enjoyed the whole process. Weddings are one of the last rites of our culture, so pouring time and energy into our appearance to make sure we’re honoring the occasion seems like the right thing to do. And certainly all one really has to do to honor the occasion is show up nicely dressed and well-groomed; false eyelashes and all that were purely my choice. But the fact remains: I was putting a lot more labor into this event than my boyfriend. I accept that on a day-to-day level I put in more beauty labor, largely by my own choice, than he does, and indeed more than plenty of women. (I am, after all, six minutes above the national average in daily grooming minutes.) Still, that’s more along the lines of having to get up 20 minutes earlier than he does—not nearly an hour and a half of hard-core self-styling labor while he watches hockey.

And so I outsourced it. I couldn’t outsource the actual skilled labor—I suppose I could have had my hair professionally done, but that seemed excessive. But the “emotional beauty labor”—the low-level worrying about “do I look okay?” that underlies any event that requires a lot of smoke and mirrors to be pulled off successfully? The constant mirror checks to make sure that the lipstick isn’t smeared, the dress catching crumbs, the hair out of place? The attention to all the work I’d already done—the application of “skilled labor”—to make sure it stayed done? Yeah, I can outsource that.

“I’m wearing false eyelashes,” I said to my boyfriend, who then dutifully tried very hard not to stare at my lash line for the duration of my speech. “And I haven’t ever put them on by myself, and I’m worried they’re going to fall off and I’ll look like an asshole.” (This was said hurriedly in the moments before the wedding as the bride’s son was preparing to play Lohengrin on his electric guitar, because they’re cool like that.) “So could you keep an eye on them and just gesture to me—” I did a sweeping motion at the corners of my eyes “—if you see stray lashes?” He agreed.

Then I looked down and saw that the hanger strap of the dress was poking out at my collarbone. “And could you keep an eye on this too? This dress doesn’t stay on the hanger without the hanger straps but they keep showing. If you see them loose, just—” [insert dusting motion at shoulders] “—even if it’s from across the room, okay?” He said he would, and then I started in on a brief litany of all that could go wrong—smeared lip liner, teary mascara (it was a wedding! with booze!), pantyhose run, dress wedged at hem of shapewear—and then Lohengrin started, and I stopped, and two people who love one another were wed, and all of that was far more important than anything that could possibly go wrong with my look.

I didn’t think about how I looked for the rest of the evening, and excuse me if this is cynical, but I don’t think it was awe at the sheer force of marital love that was responsible for this. It was because I’d outsourced my worries. Now, I’m fully aware that there was an easier route through all this: Pick a lower-maintenance look. I could have done that, but I didn’t, and I understand that I’m the one who needs to ultimately be responsible for that choice. But dammit, am I crazy for thinking that sometimes it’s just not fair that “looking pretty” requires so much work, and that playing the feminine role requires such a greater amount of effort than the masculine role that it’s not the worst thing in the world to outsource that? We already outsource parts of it: manicures, haircuts, facials. We rely on friends and salespeople to let us know if a hemline is too high or a boot too clunky. Hell, in an ideal world the mere use of beauty products is outsourcing our beauty worries (I know it doesn’t always work that way, but sometimes it does—I don’t worry so much about looking wan if I’m wearing mascara, for example, because I trust that it’s doing its job). Does the possibility stop there?

Within traditional heterosexual relationships, the loose idea is that part of the “payment” of a woman’s beauty labor is in the guy’s wallet: She looks good, he foots the bill for dinner. (I actually think this is more common than the idea of “he foots the bill, she puts out,” but then again I’ve only dated a self-selected group who wouldn’t expect that, so I’m working with a biased sample.) Egalitarian relationships don’t work that way, and I'm in no hurry to re-create that structure in my own relationship, but that doesn’t really help when you’re an egalitarian couple functioning in a non-egalitarian world. My gentleman friend doesn’t expect me to perform femininity any more than I expect him to perform masculinity (though he’s far better at opening jars than I am), but when you’re taking on a shared role as A Couple, our private guidelines suddenly become very public. Nobody would have looked askance had I shown up in a nice pantsuit and my normal makeup, but the fact remains that people in couples have both private and public roles, and that simply being egalitarian doesn't erase the desire to fulfill certain roles. And part of my fear of failure is never wanting to fail in the role of a feminine creature. If I look particularly feminine, there’s a part of me that feels like I’ve succeeded. To be brutally honest, through all my feminism—and all my boyfriend’s feminism too—there’s a part of me that then feels like we’ve succeeded. It felt good to feel unabashedly feminine, and to feel like I wasn’t totally alone in the creation and maintenance of femininity, like it was a shared venture. I’m not sure what to think about the fact that this made me feel good. It seems like it shouldn't, as though I'm making some sort of Faustian deal on our behalf—a deal he didn't exactly agree to. And yet: I was beaming.

Is it okay to outsource part of our emotional beauty labor to our intimate partners, or is that asking them to take on an unfair responsibility? What about relationships between women: Should butch women absorb any beauty labor for femme girlfriends? How would this play out within same-sex couples who don’t ascribe to masculine-feminine roles? What about the financial cost of beauty work: Is it ever okay to have someone else subsidize your beauty work? When beauty is expected as a part of our public role, how much of it is really our own responsibility?

On Gratitude

Gruesome or awesome? You decide.

When I started reading about the harassment some female bloggers have hurled at them, my first reaction was confusion. I’ve seen trolls be rough on bloggers, but the vitriol people were reporting seemed above and beyond anything I’d seen. Once I remembered that harassment is part of why comments are sometimes screened—and that witnessing unpleasantries is part of why I’m not often found in most sites’ comments sections to begin with—the confusion lifted, and I’m glad that ladybloggers are calling out woman-specific (and feminist-specific) harassment as being exactly that. I also realized that what was really prompting my confusion was my own lack of harassment. I’ve gotten the occasional nasty comment on here, more so when I publish on other sites—but really, the number of mean-spirited comments I’ve gotten is so few as to be insignificant.

This wasn’t what I expected. I never expected to be called a “loud-mouthed booze vacuum” or “victim complex twat” as other ladybloggers have been christened, but I know that some people will see a woman writing about her appearance without shame or apology—especially a woman who is nice-enough-looking but isn’t the prototype of “hot”—and consider it an invitation to let her know she’d damn well better start apologizing, and quick. One of my biggest fears about launching The Beheld was that anonymous readers would be eager to let me know I had no credibility whatsoever in writing about “beauty, and what it means” (which, for those of you who read this in ways other than visiting the-beheld.com, is the tagline on my logo).

Going into this project, I understood that in order to effectively talk about personal appearance, I had to make sure I had a reasonably accurate idea of how I appeared to most people. I knew that to write as though I were either a Helen of Troy or a Medusa would be disingenuous, but I also knew that part of what makes appearance a complex subject for women is its secrecy, and that if I feigned modesty, shame, or pride I would be participating in that secrecy. We don’t share our deepest vanities for fear of being judged narcissists; we don’t share our most terrifying moments of doubt because once articulated, those doubts sound as ludicrous as they likely are. And while I haven’t shared either my deepest vanities or my most terrifying doubts on here, I have at times taken what feels like a risk. When I started The Beheld, I feared that saying in a public forum that I think I’m “nice-enough-looking” or “attractive” (do you notice I put these in quote marks? It is still difficult not to) would invite people to say, Actually, you’re not.

And on the rare occasion I’ve gotten rude comments from readers, they are along this line. How could they not be? I write almost exclusively about how women look; the bait is irresistible for anyone remotely inclined to seize upon that as an attack. I expected it when I wrote a piece for a branch of America Online; not only is AOL’s readership far different demographically than other outlets I write for, the topic was my “bombshell makeover,” and plenty of readers were happy to let me know I was “more of a dud than a bombshell.”

I’ve gotten the occasional off-comment on other outlets as well, and every so often someone pops up on The Beheld for a smackdown, but I genuinely can’t remember the last time this happened. So when I was reading the catalogue of nastiness that other ladybloggers had received, amid my horror I tried to consider various reasons why I haven’t received much harassment: Was it that I have a smaller readership than most of the bloggers who have gone public with cataloguing “men call me things”? Do I not serve enough strong opinions for trolls to feast upon? Was it because my topics are softball compared to the more political offerings other feminist bloggers have to offer? Is it because while The Beheld has plenty to offer men, my readership is overwhelmingly female? (It’s worth noting that the most vitriolic and the most complimentary comments on my AOL piece were from men, or at least people with male-sounding handles. I know men don’t have the monopoly on nastiness, but certainly the sexes have been socialized differently as far as combative tendencies.) Criminy, is it because I’m nice?

It may be any of these that prevents any particular harassment-inclined individual from trolling me here; it may be none of them. (Certainly there’s many a nice ladyblogger who hasn’t been spared harassment.) Whatever the case, I’m thankful that dealing with harassment isn’t something that’s taken up much of my mental energy here.

But the biggest factor in me not having to direct my mental energy to warding off harassment isn’t me; it’s you. Yes, I’m thankful that my readers aren’t jerks who come on here to call me uglyface poopy-pants; indeed, visitors here have repeatedly proven themselves to be intelligent, thoughtful, inquisitive, and, on occasion, side-splittingly funny. But what I’m more thankful for isn’t the absence of harassment, but the presence of vibrant minds.

When I started writing here, my goal was just to be a part of the conversation about beauty. What I didn’t anticipate was how much that conversation would enrich my life. Every time I see a new comment here, every time I receive an e-mail from a reader, every time I see readers having conversations with one another, I am thankful. The affirmation is nice, sure, and it’s an ego boost whenever I see various bloggy metrics increase. But my thankfulness goes beyond that: Every time a reader finds me, it means I find another person who wants to move past the what of beauty to look at the why, a person who wants the conversation to go beyond the beauty myth and look instead at its mythos, a person who suspects that maybe for every shackle placed upon us by a beauty standard, somewhere else on our bodies lies the potential for liberation. And I am grateful for each person who has shown up here and volunteered a little bit of themselves to help us all create a conversation. That means the people who have taken the time to let me know they’re reading—and it also means the people who haven’t, because the whole point is to take these conversations out of the blogosphere and into our lives. If you have ever gotten anything from what I’m doing here and allowed it into your personal conversation—whatever form that takes—I am filled with gratitude for that.

Which is to say, I am filled with gratitude for you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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.

My Halloween Martini

No.

If the backlash against sexy Halloween costumes hadn’t already jumped the shark, it officially has now, what with Nicole Richie pleading on her Facebook page, “Girls, can we all pledge that we will not dress slutty for this Halloween? The jig is up.”

My instinct was to applaud her, but then my mini-third-wave-feminist kicked in and was all, “But wearing skimpy clothes on a socially sanctioned day is a step toward women not feeling shame over not being ‘sexy enough!’” And then my mini-third-wave-feminist’s cantankerous riot grrrl buddy chimed in about how relegating women’s reclamation of their sex appeal to one day defeated the pro-"Slut-o-ween" argument, and then they consulted their friend who has an adorable Etsy shop, who said that dressing slutty for Halloween was okay as long as it was done “with creative force,” and then the three of them left to discuss locavores, so I was left alone and not particularly giving a damn.

My solution to the Halloween costume conundrum is to act like a grown-up, meaning I drink dirty martinis while listening to Nina Simone, discussing Kierkegaard, and laughing throatily. That is, I don’t celebrate it in the least. I’ve had an aversion to costuming ever since I quit studying theater in college after realizing that the thought of spending my life with people who were “on” all the time made me queas. If pressed, I can whip up a costume, but in my post-college life I’d rather just skip the holiday altogether.

So in the spirit of not particularly enjoying Halloween, instead of presenting you with my own rhetoric on the wretched holiday, I’ll point you toward thoughts from those who have better things to say on it than I:

• Bug Girl, an entomologist, openly admits a tinge of envy of women who can be comfortable dressed sexily on Halloween, but the real gem here is her parasitized tobacco hornworm costume.
• Rachel Rabbit White’s “In Defense of Slut-o-Ween” is the most persuasive argument I’ve seen on the matter.  Runner-up is Jenna Marbles: “There’s a time and a place for it. Probably not that appropriate to wear that to school.... But if you’re out somewhere trying to get fucking hammered, and it’s Halloween? Nothing wrong with being a ho!”

• PowerFemme thoughtfully gets into the heart of the issue: “A combination of the narrow definition of ‘sexiness’ and pervasive virgin/whore logic might help explain why women might take Halloween as a ‘free pass.’
• Side-by-side comparison of men’s and women’s store-bought costumes from Sociological Images. 
• Take Back Halloween offers a guide to costuming yourself as historical women.
• And, ahem, so does Feministe. Sexy Regina Benjamin!

• Of course, you could always dress as a British imperialist.
• And if you need to make that British imperialist have an unzipped eye socket, Lifehacker can save the day.
• After the “We’re a culture, not a costume” stereotyping awareness campaign took on an unfortunate second life as a meme of mockery, the original campaign creators at Ohio University have a chance to respond.
• But what exactly makes, say, Pocahontas a potentially legitimate costume and Random Indigenous Woman offensive? Good magazine has a history and rundown of the cocktail of factors that determine whether a costume might be judged to be in poor taste. “Rule of thumb: If you ever find yourself justifying your outfit by sharing that your ‘best friend is black,’ your costume is racist.” 

• But what exactly makes, say, Sufjan Stevens a potentially legitimate costume and Random Hipster offensive? Trick question! 

To all of the above I will say that I have blasphemously dressed as the Virgin Mary and have a hard time looking devout Christians in the eye and admitting such; that I have dressed as a go-go girl and felt cold and stupid all night; that I have dressed as “slutty Viagra” and felt like a goddamned queen; and that the most fun I’ve ever had on Halloween was dressing up in my black camping underwear, complete with balaclava and fanny pack, and silently running around with a similarly clad partner and being random ninja/robber creations of our own design. We were kooky and spooky and fun, and though what we did was mundane by the standards of cleverness and obscure at best by the standards of sex appeal, I certainly felt more delightfully mischief-filled than I had on any Halloween prior or since.

Have fun tonight, whether it be from partying like a sexy aviator, gorging yourself on mellowcreme pumpkins, having hallowed communion with all souls, or waiting for November to just begin already, martini in hand.

Beauty Blogosphere: 10.28.11

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

And yet I still can't cover a pockmark I got in 1979.

From Head...
Undercover: I've got to agree with BellaSugar: The best concealer commercial ever, starring Zombie Boy in the only time you'll ever see him not be Zombie Boy. 


...To Toe... 
Fish pedicures ruled safe! Big news this week from the UK's Health Protection Agency: “Provided that good standards of hygiene are followed by salons, members of the public are unlikely to get an infection from a fish spa pedicure," announced Dr. Hilary Kirkbride, consultant epidemiologist at the HPA. She then turned around, looked at the hundreds of small fish nibbling dead skin off the feet of people willing to pay for the privilege, and silently gagged. 


...And Everything In Between:
When in doubt, market out: The newly emerging urban middle class in Asia and Latin America is making L'Oreal want to play catch-up in those regions, as the company expects three-fourths of future growth to come from those markets. What's interesting here is that those markets are more resilient even in economic downturns than American, European, and Australian markets, as evidenced by the hand-wringing in this piece about L'Oreal Down Under. (Between this and the news that 88% of Australian online beauty spending goes overseas, the Aussie market seems rife for some bright entrepreneurs to swoop in, I'm just sayin'...)

Fakeout: L'Oreal has a wildly innovative campaign about "not faking it" linked to their Voluminous False Fiber Lashes Mascara! Gee, can't believe nobody's thought of that before. I can't help but wonder how this ties into the idea that authenticity is "getting old," as per the New York Times.

But you can recycle it, dahling: One of the Estee Lauder VPs on the intersection of luxury beauty goods and the cry for sustainability: "Are luxury consumers ready for a radical swing in the look of their packaging? No, it's an evolution, not a revolution. Luxury consumers don't necessary want the sustainability of the pack branded all over." But, he adds, "Just because sustainability is not branded all over the pack, it doens't mean the consumer is not interested in it, and it doesn't mean it's not part of the brand's message."

Speaking of brand messaging: Estee Lauder discovers the existence of Latinas.

"I want to stay behind the table": A profile of Ariel Sharon's appetite, or rather, his seemingly fraught relationship with food. While I agree with Regan Chastain that you can't tell much about a fat person by looking at them other than the fact that they're fat, as a journalist Matt Rees has spent enough time observing people to be able to tell us something potent about Sharon's inner life when he tells us about watching him devour a plate of cookies during the intifada.

Maybe they can compromise with this Army ponytail holder!

Be all that you can be: The Army is considering some dress code changes, and the thought of banning French manicures and ponytails has been bandied about, reports BellaSugar. Honestly, this sort of makes sense to me, not for reasons having to do with conformity but with practicality. Most French manicures are long, right? When my nails get long I can barely type, let alone do the far more manually dextrous things that soldiers need to do, and ponytails are easily caught in things. I have zero desire to quash feminine expression in the Army but I can't say this targets the ladies unfairly.

And to think I got a C in geometry: Finally! Math has shown us the perfect breast! This is supposed to reduce the number of poorly done breast augmentations, so therefore it falls under public service, right? Right! (via Feminaust)

Occupy Tropes: Having already decided that Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street is grody gross-gross, let's look at how it relates to Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Something I initially semi-appreciated about the Hot Chicks of OWS site was that it wasn't just stereotypically "hot" chicks: Diverse in not just race, but in age and "type," I begrudgingly had to admit that if nothing else, it could possiblymaybe reflect a broader portrait of "hotness" than mainstream media would have you believe. I knew it was shaky ground, and The Society Pages outlines why: Fetishizing protesters as Manic Pixie Dream Girls isn't true diversity in the least.

All the pretty ladies: And just in case you're occupying (or walking down the street, or hanging out at a bar, or breathing in the presence of others) and, whaddya know, there's a hot chick there? Read this guide to "Your Role as Observer" when a lady is strutting her stuff. 

I choose my choice!: Two nice pieces on "choice feminism" and "consumer feminism" this week. Laurie Penny at The New Significance writes about how as she advances in her career, she's expected to bring a new level of polish—that is, consumer goods—to her presentation. "As women, everything we wear is a statement, and we have no right to remain sartorially silent. We negotiate a field of signifiers every time we open our wardrobes, or, in my case, every time we rummage through the clothes-pile on the bedroom floor." Coupled with Jess's piece at XOJane—which I'd sort of thought was all about "choice feminism," but I guess that's why they have more than one writer?—do I sense a backlash? "Until the woman who doesn’t want to be seen as sexually available can go out with certainty that she won’t be harassed or ogled, your choice to turn heads and revel in attention is a privileged one."

Arresting images: Not sure what to make of this W fashion shoot from Ai Weiwei, a dissident Chinese artist, that features a model being faux-arrested. I normally get all humorless-lefty when I see fashion shoots co-opting social causes, but Weiwei has been held for his work, so there's a layer there that normally is absent. Hmm.

 
Kissyface: Capture the imprint of your kiss, then send it to this company and they'll make art out of it. It'll go nicely with the art of your own DNA they can also cook up for you. You always have to be different, don't you?

"Health class taught me how to have an eating disorder": Jessica at XOJane on how eating disorder education can actually trigger ED symptoms. This is a complicated topic—one that isn't fully explored here—but I'm glad to see it broached in this format. I proposed a similar story at a teen magazine years ago and my boss flat-out said, "There is no way in hell we can run that story," the idea being that fighting fire with fire just adds to the inferno. For the record, I don't think ED education causes EDs any more than skinny models do, but I do think that we need to treat "awareness" with caution in neither glamourizing ED symptoms (wow! you can count her ribs, how awful!) nor stopping short in making it clear that EDs are complex, messy, often lifelong, and not a quick fix for generalized teen pain.

Adios Barbie on the LGBT community and eating disorders: Gay and bisexual men are at increased risk for eating disorders, while lesbian and bisexual women suffer at the same rate as hetero women.

Fitspo vs. thinspo: Caitlin at Fit and Feminist on the sometimes-murky line between dedication to fitness and dedication to a disordered relationship with food and the body. "If you are prone to disordered eating, then the world of fitness must seem like a safe harbor, a place to indulge your obsessions without drawing criticism, because after all, you aren’t starving yourself completely and you’re spending a lot of time in the gym.  You’re just being health-conscious!" Cameo at Verging on Serious frequently gets into this too, most recently with her post on superstitions.

Wig out: A particularly delightful offering from Of Another Fashion, which posts vintage photos of fabulously dressed women of color, of Chicago "wig clinic" owner Minerva Turner modeling one of her truly fantastic creations.

Why we're already pretty: It's no secret I adore Already Pretty, and this entry, which sort of serves as a manifesto, explains exactly what it is about Sally's work that makes me take notice. "Whatever work you’ve chosen, whatever opus you’re creating, whatever battle you’re fighting, I want to arm you with confidence in your body and your style. Why? So you can stop worrying about your outward presentation and focus on what’s important."

The crossroads of self-care: Medicinal Marzipan touches on a delicate subject with her typical grace: weight loss in the Health at Every Size and self-acceptance communities. "Here’s the thing: ...I do love myself. It’s just that, for the first time in my life, I am understanding that sometimes loving yourself means wrangling yourself in when you’ve spiraled out of control.... You have to love yourself above everything else. But wanting to lose weight, or the act of weight loss when you’re feeding yourself the foods that make YOU feel good or moving in a way that YOU love, will not make you a body image warrior exile in my book."

Beauty Blogosphere 10.21.11

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

From Head...
Neck and neck: Flattery "rules" don't usually work for me, but this post on mathematically calculating flattering necklines explains a lot (namely, why I feel best in wide, deep necklines despite not generally showing a lot of skin). (via Already Pretty)

Smile!: Speaking of numbers as guidelines, the layperson can detect dental deviations of less than 3 millimeters, reports the Journal of the American Dental Association. But breathe easy! Says the dentist who alerted me to this, "A lot of people do more than they need to. Perfect Chiclet teeth look a little weird." I always thought that, but he's the one with the degree, so!

...To Toe...

Bootie Pies: "Pedicure-friendly" boots with removable toes. Between these and my new automated twirling spaghetti fork, my life is about to get a whole lot easier.


...And Everything In Between: 
Quiet riot: Are YOU on the lam for your participation in Vancouver during the Stanley Cup riot? Do YOU need a massage? We've got the spa for you! Just go to Vancouver's Eccotique Spa, detail your criminal activities and fingerprint yourself onto their $50 gift card, then turn yourself into the police and return to the spa with proof of arrest for your treatment of choice.

Occupy CoverGirl: Fortune magazine uses Procter & Gamble's fully legal ways of evading taxes (to the tune of billions of dollars) to illustrate the need for corporate reform.

Salon tragedy: Portrait of Salon Meritage, the California hair salon where eight people were killed when the ex-husband of one of the stylists took open gunfire on the floor. Salons are known for hosting a particularly high intimacy among workers, and to a degree between staff and clients, making the violence seem all the more shocking. It's also a hard-line reminder this month, Domestic Violence Awareness Month, that not all partner violence takes place behind closed doors. (Speaking of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, Tori at Anytime Yoga is hosting a blog carnival October 29. It's an important topic, so if you're a blogger with something to say, please participate—I will be.)

Willa won: Procter & Gamble settled its suit against startup hair- and skin-care line Willa. P&G had contended that "Willa" was a trademark infringement of their hair line "Wella," thus thoroughly annoying anyone paying attention to trademark law or good old-fashioned common sense. (Their recent Cosmo award for being a woman-friendly company doesn't seem to extend to its litigation targets.)

J&J's big move: The "sleeping giant" of Johnson & Johnson is peering into the higher-end market with its recent acquisition of Korres, a switch from its drugstore stalwarts of Neutrogena, Aveeno, Clean & Clear, and, of course, Johnson's. Considering that the company only got serious about mass facial care in 1991, it's not nutty to think that J&J could expand its offerings in luxury and masstige markets soon.

Uniclever: Unilever is quick to snap up Russian brand Koncern Koliva, noting that Russian beauty product spending is up 10% compared with Unilever's overall growth of 4%-6%.

One can never have too many reminders of our erstwhile presidents in their college years.

Rah rah: Via Sociological Images, a slideshow of how cheerleader uniforms have changed over time. I mean, obvs the bared midriff is because of global warming, but the uniforms have changed in other ways too.

"They did this to me": Hair's symbolism, particularly within some religions, makes it an unsurprising—but still shocking—target of attack from a splinter Amish group headed by the unfortunately named Sam Mullet. He's been attacking families in more conventional Amish communities by cutting patches out of men's beards and women's hair.

Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street: Gross. Gross? Gross! GROSS.

Taxed: England considers a "boob tax" on cosmetic surgery procedures, which brings in about £2.3 million annually. Fair method of supporting social programs, or an unfair way of punishing women for getting procedures that may help them level the playing field? (The U.S. rejected the similar "Bo-tax" in 2009.)

The Brazilian way: The Women's Secretariat of Brazil (a Cabinet position, appointed by President Dilma Rousseff) issued a statement against a recent lingerie ad featuring Gisele that suggested using one's erotic capital to manipulate one's husband was a jolly route to take. The complaint is somewhat plebian, but it's taking place at high levels of government, something we simply haven't seen in the U.S. Is this what happens when a country elects a female president? Women's issues get taken seriously? You don't say. (Of course, The Economist reports that women in the UK parliament are also making their thoughts heard about false advertising for beauty products, notably a bust cream claiming to increase a woman’s bra size from 32A/B to "a much fuller and firmer 32C," so it's not just the big cheese that matters.)

Betty Rubble's makeup kit unearthed.

Makeup artist, the world's oldest profession?: Anthropologists find a 100,000-year-old tool kit and workshop for making ochre paint, used as an early body adornment.

Side by side: Personal science blogger Seth Roberts on the newly coined "Willat Effect," in which we experience two or more similar items compared side-by-side as more or less desirable than we would if sampled on their own. I suspect this is the reason for popularity of "before" and "after" shots of beauty treatments. In other words: Neutrogena Rapid Wrinkle Repair (somewhat depressingly, the #2 search term that lands people at this blog) basically doesn't work at all, and only appears to when compared with the other side of my face.

What forms our body image?: Turns out it's not your body; it's your beliefs about other people's thoughts on your body, reports Virginia Sole-Smith. That includes bodies in general, so enough with the body-bashing talk, okay? Forget your own body image—you could be hurting your friends' too.

H0tTie: 13% of IT professionals gave away their passwords when asked to by a...drawing of a pretty lady? The findings are bizarre but worth reading.

Body and Soul: Interview at Threadbared with Alondra Nelson on the images that came out of the Black Panthers in the 1970s, including their Free Clothing Program that induced "sartorial joy."

Stuck on you: Magnetic nail polish! I'm such a sucker for cool nail art.

Tweezed: XOJane asks if tweezing in public is okay, pinpointing something I hadn't been able to articulate about public grooming: It's interesting to see someone be self-conscious enough to "fix" something about their appearance (stomach hairs, in this case, at the gym) but not self-conscious enough to do it in private.

Beauty contest: If you're near New York, you may want to check out the Beauty Contest exhibit at the Austrian Cultural Forum. Austrian and international artists examine "contemporary global society’s obsession and fascination with physical appearance." I went to a performance art arm of the exhibit, and the following panel discussion, including French choreographer François Chaignaud and author of The Man in the Grey Flannel Skirt, Jon-Jon Goulian, was invigorating.

"This is basically uncharted territory": Style blogger Stacyverb guest posts at Already Pretty on style and disability. "For anyone with a disability who’s interested in experimenting with style, there aren’t exactly any rules or road maps to follow. It’s not like we see models and celebrities in wheelchairs rolling down the runway during fashion week or on the red carpet on Oscar night. This is basically uncharted territory, which means it can be disorienting—but also liberating!"

No-makeup week: Rachel Rabbit White revisits her no-makeup week, an experiment she tried on for size last year. Like much of her work, what's exciting here is the acceptance of ambiguity: "It’s not about taking a week off  because make-up is somehow bad or because not wearing it is better. It’s that by taking a week off, I should be able to understand my relationship to cosmetics more clearly."

I'm a Pepper, you're a Pepper: Caitlin at Fit and Feminist on how even if the Diet Dr. Pepper "It's not for women" ad is satire (I don't think it is), it still gets to have it both ways in wrangling the diet industry into man-size portions. (I also love her post about cheerleading as a sport, and her contribution to Love Your Body Day about the difference between respect and love. Seriously, if you're not already reading Fit and Feminist, you should be.)

Good old-fashioned erotic capital: Rachel Hills, writing on Erotic Capital, raises among her many excellent points one of my biggest annoyances with Catherine Hakim: "Hakim and her colleagues would have us think they’re intellectual renegades... But while the terminology may be new, the principles underlying 'erotic capital' and 'sexual economics' are decidedly old-fashioned."

Sunrise, sunset: Be sure to check out the Feminist Fashion Bloggers roundup of posts on youth and age. Franca writes, "God forbid [professional women] just go for the suit and shirt 'uniform' and actually look old... Professional clothes need to be constantly balanced out by elements that represent youth and health and fun, like accessories and hair and makeup"; Jean writes on bucking trends usually defined by age; and Fish Monkey and Tea and Feathers, like me, write on the happiness of no longer being young.

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

Notice anything?

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

Beauty Blogosphere 9.16.11

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

From Head...
Earth face!: If body typing is appealing on the level of being an ersatz personality test, physiognomy like this new face-reading book being touted in The Daily Mail is even more oddly appealing, even though I think it's utter bullshit. Always fun to play, though!


 ...To Toe... 
If the shoe doesn't fit: Decoding Dress on why capitalism made her hunt for a month for black pumps. With her size 11 fitting, "There aren’t enough women like me to make it commercially worthwhile for manufacturers to cater to us." (Solutions, or at least ways to ameliorate the problem, here.) The shoe size question is interesting to me, as when applied to clothes we can't help but integrate the discussion with body image (as Already Pretty did this week by reminding us that "Clothes should fit you, you needn’t fit them," and as an oldie but goodie at Inkdot does with this post on tailoring). Shoes have less of an impact on our body image than clothes, so looking at the lack of diverse size options in footwear is a nice way to examine the sizing problem from a numbers-based perspective—and, yep, the man ain't giving Decoding Dress a new pair of shoes easily anytime soon. 


...And Everything In Between:
Ask a Dude: Hairpin's Dude answers two questions this week about appearance: How to accept a compliment when you're all hot and heavy with someone, and what to do when you find out your gross boyfriend has been making gross comparisons between your body and another woman's. Gross!

I'll have what he's having: We're more likely to consider someone beautiful if we think our friends think the person is beautiful. Science sez!

Fashion weak: Ashley Mears, sociologist, model, and author of Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model, on modeling as precarious labor, with few rights for the people wearing the clothes that make Fashion Week so damned glamorous.

Southern belles: A look inside the world of Venezuelan beauty pageants, and what it means for all Venezuelan women. (Banks there give loans for plastic surgery with slogans like "Have your plastic on our plastic"?!) Venezuelan models tend to be in high demand in the U.S.--very young women who can earn far more from their families while living abroad than they can from working at home--so I'm wondering about the economic implications of the beauty imperative there.

"If you could change one of your physical characteristics, which one would it be and why?": This was asked at the Miss Universe pageant, which is, as a reminder, a pageant in which contestants are selected for their physical beauty—but, of course, still need to be prodded to put down their appearance. Aiaiai! (Thanks to Caitlin at Fit and Feminist for the link.)

Vote for "The Illusionists": Filmmaker Elena Rossini (you've met her here before) is up for a nice publicity boost from IndieWire; won't you take a second and vote for "The Illusionists," a promising documentary about the exploitation of women's bodies for profit? UPDATE: "The Illusionists" won! (And had won before I posted this roundup, which I hadn't realized.) Nice work, all!

She's a winner!: Guinness world record holder for world's longest fingernails tops in with a combined 19.2 feet in length. Vacuuming, of all things, is what she claims is the hardest thing to do. (Clearly she does not wear contact lenses.)

Survivor: Cosmetics salesman is lone survivor of plane crash in Bolivia. No word as to whether skin cream played a role in his survival in the Amazon jungle.

Fly this: I've seen plenty of "travel-friendly" beauty products but had never thought about what it meant for the industry: Sales of products under three ounces have grown 10% a year since liquid restrictions were placed on U.S. flights.

Mirror Abuse Resistance Education: A high school in the UK has not only banned makeup, but has removed mirrors from the bathrooms. I think this is pretty awesome--I hear the idea that makeup allows you to express your individuality, but if the idea is to focus on learning (à la school uniforms), this certainly removes a distraction. Attention, Shelley College students: I had a great month with no mirrors, and Kjerstin Gruys is having a great year without 'em--you'll thrive during your on-school hours if you let yourselves, okay? 

Everybody loves Tavi: Nice piece in Slate about the advantages Tavi Gevinson's Rookie has over traditional teen mags (plus an acknowledgement that feminists in teen magazines aren't unicorns! we exist!). 

Smart eye for the racist guy: Remember that Crystal Renn shoot in which her eyes were taped back but of course the idea wasn't at all to look Asian? Minh-ha T. Pham at Threadbared takes it on: "Renn’s explanation is an example of a post-racial narrative in which race is simultaneously articulated through and disavowed by discourses of class, culture, patriotism, national security, talent, and, in the case of fashion, creative license."

It's called "lift and separate," Captain.

Cartoon boobs: Hourglassy on breasts in comics. Hint for aspiring comics artists: "When fabric is stretched across boobs, no matter how tight the spandex, it does not suction cup itself to each individual breast."

The Evolution of Ape-Face Johnson: Speaking of comics, cartoonist Carolita Johnson has a stunning piece in The Hairpin about her journey from supposedly funny-looking child, to high fashion model, to supposedly funny-looking model.

Army of two: Fantastic talk between Cristen Conger at Bitch and Hugo Schwyzer on the male beauty myth. "It’s self-centered in terms of meeting your own ideal, becoming the man you want to be. This all started with the Army...when they went with the most brilliant advertising slogan ever: 'Be All You Can Be.' ...They decided to stop selling patriotism because that was old school and start selling personal transformation, and that was absolute genius." (Or take it from the horse's mouth: Men's cosmetics marketers on their thoughts on the difference between marketing to men and women.)

"As much as I love feminism, I don’t believe it’s the only concept you will ever need": Nothing to do with beauty! But everything to do with feminism, and this Sady Doyle piece is one of the best I've read recently.

New No More Dirty Looks challenge: Meditation sort of kills me—it's one of those things I know I would really benefit from, but it feels impossible to do. So I'm eagerly jumping on the next No More Dirty Looks challenge: five minutes of meditation every day for sever consecutive days. (There's a prize too, but what prize could be better than EVERLASTING CONTENTMENT?) Guidelines for the challenge here, plus a nice how-to guide that shows you there's no "trick"; you've just got to do it.

Paging Amelie: A take on what it's like to be the "manic pixie dream girl" trope that plenty of smart feminists have deconstructed, and that this smart feminist has embodied. (I've played MPDG and have experienced a hint of self-loathing for it over the years, and this helped me ease up on that front.)

Apology not accepted: Virginia of Beauty Schooled guest posting at The Daily Glow about why beauty makes us happy. "I noticed that a lot of women tend to apologize for how happy beauty makes them.... Somehow, we’ve gotten the idea that it’s shallow to get too excited about beauty." But no more!

What do women look at first on a man?: Warning: This is sort of creepy and uncomfortable, but interesting as well—a man strapped tiny cameras to his biceps and crotch, then asked women for directions and let the cameras witness what body parts they looked at first. It's also interesting to see how various women respond to being approached; we only really know our own experiences, so it's a nifty insight into how others handle stranger interactions. (Basically, we're really really nice.)

How to be bold: Ashe at Dramatic Personae on fashion and self-consciousness—and here I thought I was the only one who owned amazing pieces she never wore because she felt self-conscious in them!

"The point of all this" fitness jazz: A group of bystanders to a car/motorcycle crash lifted the burning car to free the motorcyclist underneath, and (naturally!) it's caught on video. That's not what impressed Caitlin of Fit and Feminist, though: "What struck me was the presence of a young woman in the crowd. She didn’t hang back and watch.... Instead, she jumped right in. I’m not a betting woman, but I’d be willing to wager that woman is physically active... Maybe she plays sports or she does a bootcamp or she takes a Pilates class. I don’t know. All I know is that confidence in her body and her physical abilities is tightly woven into the tapestry of her self-image.... She doesn’t recite it as a mantra in hopes of one day actually believing it."