Beauty Didn't Birth the Beast

Sally Draper, preachin' truth.

I swear I will one day blog about something other than Mad Men. But until that time comes! This episode was interesting in that two separate characters referred to Don's good looks as a liability. One of the creatives at the agency says to him in anger after Don suggests he might want to work on some character-building, "You don't have any character, you're just handsome—stop kidding yourself." And then toward the episode's end, his daughter says that both he and first-wife Betty are exactly alike, in that "anyone pays attention to either of you—and they always do—you just ooze everywhere." (Two of Sally's friends, totally separate from one another, had each attempted some amateur seduction on both of Sally's parents in this episode, so this wasn't out of nowhere.)

The first one was interesting, but mostly just in the context of Mad Men: Don has plenty of character, but we know that indeed a chunk of it has been formed around his incredible looks. The second reference is what's really juicy here. In fiction, if someone's good looks are referred to as a liability, it's usually used to mean a fairly limited set of options. Maybe the character hasn't had to develop other facets of herself because she's relied on her beauty. (Which—I mean, has anyone ever met someone like that, for real? In my experience dullness and beauty have exactly zero correlation, let alone causation; the dullards I know are plain and pretty in equal amounts.) Maybe a character been taught her looks are her greatest asset so she's used them to manipulate others, or his handsomeness has pushed him toward con artistry. If it's a feminist-minded creator maybe we've seen how beautiful women aren't taken seriously (i.e. the genesis of many a Joan plot line in this very series). Or maybe women don't trust her, or men don't trust him, or whatever. (Of course, the #1 way we see a character's looks work against her is that Her Beauty Drives Men to Madness, but that's such an ugggh cliché I'm not even counting it here.)

But here you have a character's attractiveness being referenced not as a liability in and of itself, but as an amplification of an already-existing tendency: the inability to turn away sexual attention. Don and Betty are two people who are starved for attention, and that would be true even if they weren't played by actors as good-looking as Jon Hamm and January Jones. But their beauty allows the quality Sally refers to as "ooze" to be read by others as charm or graciousness, or as a stream of reciprocal attention. And in turn, both of these characters have learned to trust that that's how their highly sensitive attention-radars will be seen. The fact that their looks garner each of them a generous amount of attention becomes almost secondary; it just lets them get away with absorbing the gaze of others in a way that doesn't seem desperate.*

I've interviewed lots of people, mostly women, in-depth about their relationship with their looks, and when I first started doing formal interviews I was initially surprised that I wasn't finding any sort of parallel between a woman's experiences or attitude and how conventionally attractive she was. Asking a professional beauty about her experiences as a model is one thing, but asking her about how her looks had shaped, say, her love life was a different story. I never thought that meant a person's looks were irrelevant to how she viewed the world, but I sort of chalked it up to beauty not being as important as other factors in shaping one's worldview, or chirpily shook it off as "Well, everyone's different!" But I think Sally's quip crystallizes an important factor: A person's looks can shape already existing tendencies. It does not create them. Nor does it shape tendencies in the same way for everyone. But I like the idea of looks functioning as a filter—as one of many filters—that determine how we walk through the world. There are so many oppositional ideas about how beauty affects people out there: You've got men who are genuinely surprised when they meet a woman who manages to be both beautiful and brilliant, you've got people who assume beautiful people have it easy because "everything is handed to them," you've got people shaking their heads about how hard gorgeous women have it because other women supposedly hate them so much. If we come to see appearance as one of many forces that distinctly shape our lives, we might have a more genuine understanding of how the lives of extraordinarily beautiful people are affected by their looks—and of how the rest of us have our lives affected by the same.


*Asterisked because this will mean absolutely nothing to people who don't watch the show: Rather, Don's and Betty's ways don't seem desperate until it's seen by someone who knows better, which in this case is Sally. Or the viewer, who is supposed to be thoroughly horrified when Betty gives 18-year-old Glen the eye. When the two of them had a creepy encounter years before, we were supposed to read it as a sign of Betty's yearning to connect with someone—anyone—even if it's a prepubescent boy down the block who has an enormous crush on her. Now that Glen's gone and grown up, that same need of hers goes from being pathetic-as-in-pathos to being pathetic as in...pathetic. 

Okay, you got me, I just wanted to find a way to work in GLEN.

"Mad Men" Beauty Musings: Envy, Similarity, and "Modesty"

There’s much to say about Mad Men in general, and about last night’s last-season kickoff, and about the relationship between Joan and Peggy, and even about their conversation in the elevator (burn it down, Joan!). But what’s most relevant in this particular wheelhouse is one exchange that comes between Peggy and Joan after a business meeting in which a group of male colleagues make lewd jokes at the expense of Joan, specifically at the expense of her generous bustline: 

Peggy: Should we get lunch?
Joan: I want to burn this place down.
Peggy: I know, they were awful, but at least we got a yes. Would you have rather had a friendly no?
Joan: I don’t expect you to understand.
Peggy: [With demonstrated doubt] Joan, you’ve never experienced that before?
Joan: Have you, Peggy?
Peggy: I don’t know—you can’t have it both ways. You can’t dress the way you do and expect—
Joan: How do I dress?
Peggy: Look, they didn’t take me seriously either.
Joan: So what you’re saying is, I don’t dress the way you do because I don’t look like you. And that’s very, very true.
Peggy: You know what? You’re filthy rich. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.

(That last line, of course, is more cutting than Peggy could know, given how Joan became partner.)

A few things:

1) I don’t like to focus on the jealousy/competition aspect of beauty, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and we see it here on both sides. The thing is, research shows that we tend to feel competitive with people who are similar to us, not people who are different. It’s fun enough for fans to construct the Mad Men ladies as opposites—are you a Peggy or a Joan? a Betty or a Megan? a riding lawnmower or a rifle?—but they’re not. In particular, Peggy and Joan have far more similarities than differences. They’re both hard workers, they’re both whip-smart, they’re both vulnerable, they both have their secrets, and the personality summation that Peggy’s date delivers to her over dinner could well apply to Joan, if not as consistently: “Johnny said you were the kind of girl who doesn’t put up with things. ... He said you were funny, and that you were fearless.”

There might be some cattiness, pain, or simple retaliation behind Joan’s cutting remark; none of us are above that. But I’d like to think that there’s more to her comment than that: Underneath the snipe is an acknowledgement that part of the difference in the ways they’ve each handled their careers stems from genetic fate (or rather, from the ways women were treated because of their bodies). Joan is saying, If you looked like me you’d dress like me—and if I looked like you I might well have your wardrobe too. She’s taking what Peggy posits as a duality and makes it clear that it’s anything but. And Peggy, in a different way, does the same, by pointing out that the men didn’t take either of them seriously, even though the crude comments at the meeting were aimed almost entirely at Joan. The women are clawing at each other on the surface, but the way in which they do it says that they know full well they’re in the same position.

2) One of my viewing companions last night, a busty lady herself, pointed out that when you’re built like Joan, it can be hard to wear anything that will safely ensure nobody will accuse you of dressing provocatively. Peggy can accuse Joan of dressing sexily even when, as in this scene, she’s wearing a tailored blouse that shows no cleavage because Joan’s build proves how judgmental the idea of “modesty” is. Joan’s body puts her in a position of being accused of immodesty no matter what she wears, so why not wear what she looks good in? Peggy, on the other hand, with her slighter, more “modest” build, is put in the position of keeping the meeting as on track as she can—a task Joan herself is fully capable of but is barred from doing so because of her body. 

It reminded me of Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s assertion in a guest post here that “style 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.” (To wit: this photo series of Debrahlee Lorenzana—who was fired from Citibank because she dressed too sexily—wearing various office outfits of hers. Like, you know, a turtleneck and slacks.) It’s tempting to say that the moral here is that Joan can’t win. But as Maltz Bovy points out, the construct actually serves as a reminder of just how ridiculous beauty standards are. Burn the place down already, Joan.

3) What to say about Joan’s clothes-shopping binge toward the episode’s end? Instead of shrinking herself down after that awful meeting, she goes out and spends loads of money on fabulous new clothes. It’s a consumerist balm to being treated as a product for consumption, and I’d be misled to applaud this particular move as a you-go-girl proof of Joan’s resilience. But it’s interesting that we see Joan assert her buying power while wearing what is undoubtedly a provocative dress—it’s her way of saying that she has no intention of taking Peggy’s tack to the workplace (which, as we’ve seen, would be a loser’s proposition for her anyway). 

But there’s also something sadly hollow about it, magnified by her refusal to admit that she once worked there as a shopgirl. It reminds me of the first time I went shopping as “retail therapy”: I was 19 years old and had somehow landed a part-time concierge gig at a mid-level hotel, working the VIP lounge. A client there had actually pulled a move straight out of a bad movie: He put his hand on mine and gave me his room number, the implication being that I should pay him a visit once my shift ended. Part of me was thrilled by this—this happened to people in bad movies!—but I was also nauseated by it. It was my second job ever besides babysitting, and I was proud of the fact that I’d gotten it, and I knew I’d been assigned the VIP lounge because I had an accommodating nature. But it was also the first time I’d felt the flipside of what others might assume of me because of that accommodating nature—until then it had just earned me accolades as a “good girl.”

Anyway, the next day I felt possessed to buy a dress. It was a specific desire: I wanted to buy not just clothes, but a dress, and I uncharacteristically skipped the sales rack and perused the new offerings with intent. It wasn’t until years later that I identified the impulse: I didn’t just want a dress, I wanted to spend money on myself. I wanted to spend something relatively intangible to get something tangible in return; I wanted proof of my power, and since I’d just felt my meager power slip in a professionalized context, it made sense that I wanted that proof in the form of something that context rewarded me with. 

We know that Joan is a bit of a clothes horse (she did, after all, go to retail when she had to get a new job), which I wasn’t when I wandered into the mall Gap in 1995 the morning after a being the target of a sleazy episode. But just as my desire for a new dress had nothing to do with why I bought it, that’s not why we saw Joan buying up the store: It’s her clutch at power, rendered in a language she can speak without breaking a sweat. We’ve seen Joan work and grow and prosper in a variety of ways, but going back to this lesson—looking your best will get you the best—is always going to be a place of comfort for her. The irony is that it’s a lesson that, for Joan, also leaves scratches long and deep.

One Narrative Fits All: Dove and "Real Beauty"

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

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

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

Notice anything different? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Really Got Me

I have a regular Mad Men date on Wednesday evenings, which is a fantastic way to have good conversation about the show, but a poor way to blog about it since I’m three days later than everyone else. But this week’s episode was so chock-full of material on erotic capital, beauty, and power, that I’m going to jump in anyway. Do I even need to say there are spoilers here? There are spoilers here.

If Mad Men were a less nuanced show that hadn’t worked hard to win viewers’ trust over the years, this week’s episode might have seemed hamfisted. We have Peggy Olson, the show’s stand-in for feminist career gals, leaving Sterling Cooper Draper Price for greener pastures, or at least pastures with more greenbacks; in the same episode, we have Joan agreeing to sleep with a client, at his explicit request, in exchange for a partnership at SCDP. Joining the two is the winning Jaguar campaign tagline, concocted with the idea that the sleek, expensive, finicky sportscar is akin to a mistress: “At last. Something beautiful you can truly own.”

The idea behind erotic capital (at least how it was presented last year with the deliberately provocative book by Catherine Hakim), is that men suffer a sexual deficit because women have lower libidos than they do, so women can leverage their allure with men in order to raise their “value” in all sorts of market, including the workplace. So if you champion erotic capital, you’re really championing the idea that men just can’t help themselves when the right girl is around. She’s the one who’s really in control, can’t you see? And it’s this idea—that in the face of a beautiful woman, men supposedly cede all their power—that’s at the heart of the Jaguar pitch. With women, even if you control the purse strings, they’re really in control. With a Jaguar, finally, you get to own it. Truly. The ad isn’t an endorsement of erotic capital; it’s an admission that nobody comes out ahead under that system, which is why you need actual consumer goods to fill the gap it creates. But by playing it up—this idea that even though mistresses are “impractical” and “temperamental”and maybe even “lemons,” it’s only “natural” to want to to possess them—the presumed male consumer comes out feeling as though he’s won, even though in reality, any way you play it, he’s lost. It’s a beautiful illustration of capitalism and patriarchy—and screenwriting, because Mad Men gets to have it both ways here. You can see the prostituting of Joan as a tsk-tsking endorsement of erotic capital, or you can see it as a tragic critique of the ideas it embodies. You can see Joan as being the “beautiful thing” that is now owned, or you can see her as deploying her erotic capital to secure her financial future with the knowledge that she’s coming out ahead in the long run, or you can see Don’s pitch as an acknowledgment that there’s a certain kind of man who spends his whole life trying to make up for his inability to own the creatures he covets (and which men in that room aren’t that sort of man?)—enter Jaguar, stage left.

Throwing a wrench in this whole thing is Lane Pryce. My primary argument against the idea of erotic capital as just another form of capital has always been that it keeps power in the hands of people who already have it. I’ll be very curious to see if Joan is financially rewarded for following Lane’s advice to ask for a partnership instead of a good deal of cash (a very good deal—more than $355,000 in 2012 dollars). Given that we know and like Lane but also know he’s been more than a little shady, his moment with Joan is meant to be taken as being both in good faith (for Joan’s protection) and selfishly motivated (for his own protection). We’re not yet supposed to know if Joan’s deployment of erotic capital was a smart financial move, which, for the moment, keeps the focus on the other issues surrounding the choice.

And one of the primary issues about Joan’s choice—for the viewer, anyway—is what message we’re supposed to get by comparing Joan to a very expensive car that someone can “truly” own, “at last.” The comparison is blatant, but I don’t think the two are actually being equated: The point here is that nobody can be “truly” owned. That’s why it’s an effective advertising campaign; that’s why it has to be boy-wonder Ginsberg instead of Don Draper who comes up with it. In the first scene of the episode, we see Ginsberg rolling his eyes at the sleazy mistress comparison; he’s on board but thinks it’s hacky. Later we see him express contempt for not only his colleagues (who are salivating over the woman crawling on the table) but for the idea that Megan can interrupt a meeting, coming and going “as she pleases,” which inspires the winning tagline.

We don’t know enough about Ginsberg to really know his machinations. But he’s pointedly ignoring a half-naked, self-exploitative woman when his creative wheels start turning; whatever regard he has for female beauty, it’s not going to be showcased in this situation. The best writer in the room sees Megan and her friend not as beautiful women but as something else: interruptions, distractions, perhaps threats. So I don’t think his eventual pitch is an admission that we all just want to own beauty. We want to capture beauty, sure—an offshoot of our desire to replicate it—but capture is not the same as possession. The desire to own beauty is less about beauty itself and more about fear: fear that if we don’t own something, cage it, it will not only escape, but it will overpower us. That sounds like less a rapturous affair with Beauty itself and more like the kind of misogyny that masquerades as romance. Beauty here is a stand-in for women—all women, not just beautiful ones, or perhaps women who exist under capitalist structures (which today is all of us), of which advertising is the apex. Whatever Ginsberg thinks about women or erotic capital, he knows how to play it to the hilt, making him a sort of surrogate for the actual Mad Men writers here.

I’m also struck by a certain word choice in his winning tagline. What he comes up with: “At last. Something beautiful you can truly own.” And at another key moment, the end of the episode, we see Peggy’s triumphant exit to the opening strains of The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.” Really, truly: These are words used to strengthen the point, to communicate that no, for real, this time we mean it—we swear. These strengthening words need to be used because the listener has been failed so many times before. You thought you were going to own something beautiful, but you couldn’t; you thought someone had gotten you, but you were wrong. There are two levels of ownership, of “getting” and “owning”: There’s what you think you have, and what you really have, and SCPD (or Ray Davies) is here to tell you which is which. So in actuality, “really” and “truly” here, instead of being speech strengtheners, are speech weakeners. They contain an overassurance, a placation, a soothing of the soul—a technique Joan might have used with a weepy secretary onceuponatime, with just the slightest hint of honey-coated condescension. And I don’t think it’s an accident that these speech weakeners are used here in two key spots, because of what they’re both emphasizing: erotic capital, and erotic dominance. The song in particular has layered meaning: It’s an admission of someone’s power over another, but who exactly are we talking about? Has Peggy “got” Don? Has the ad world “got” Peggy? For a song that’s a paean to the ways women supposedly control men (“You got me so I don’t know what I’m doing”) it’s interesting that it’s used here, with Peggy’s exit, in an episode many would say is about anything but women controlling men. Even Megan, whose balance of control with Don has been a theme this season, is chastised as doing “whatever the hell [she] wants.”

A handful of reviewers have suggested that Peggy is the one who emerges as the only independent woman of this episode, the only who who isn’t “truly” owned by someone else. I disagree wholeheartedly: Yes, Peggy is autonomous in ways that Joan, Megan, and Betty aren’t, but the point of this episode (and in some ways, the entire show) is to show the complexities of autonomy and ownership. Megan can afford career autonomy because Don is paying the bills; Joan, who essentially told Roger to buzz off when he bugs her about helping out with their son, is painted as having made the decision to sell her time only when the price really is right.

The moment when Don kisses Peggy’s hand is a clue that the female roles in Mad Men aren’t so clear-cut as to be Joan = erotic capital, Peggy = feminism, Betty = feminine mystique, and so on. The first time we saw Don’s and Peggy’s hands meet, it was in the very first episode of the show, when Peggy awkwardly places her hand on Don’s, letting him know that she was available to him in any way he wished. Don, of course, refused her advance. As viewers, we quickly forget about Peggy’s confused, fleeting bid for Don’s sexual attention, in part because Peggy and Don themselves appear to forget about it. But it’s there from the very first episode of the show: At one point, Peggy was basically willing to prostitute herself in order to secure power. She would have been paid in sleeping-with-the-secretary currency—a city apartment, or perhaps the home in the country that Joan herself alluded to when she lays out what Peggy could have if she “really” plays her cards right.

So while Peggy is clearly representative of the enormous gender shifts about to happen historically, to pit her in opposition to Joan here is too simple. It’s not a matter of Joan’s personality or character that she agrees to the Jaguar plan. (This would be true even if sex work itself were a matter of “character,” which it isn’t.) It is a matter of age, opportunity, and, as we got reminders of this season, upbringing. Joan’s mother raised her to be admired; Peggy’s mother, as we see through her clenched-jaw protestations about Peggy moving in with Abe, raised her to be valued. It’s ironic that one response to this episode is that Joan, through being admired, winds up being quite literally valued, while Peggy, through the valuation of her work, walks away from Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce with our—and Don’s—admiration.

For as show as popular as Mad Men, it’s interesting that there haven’t been tons of memes and quizzes going around along the lines of “Which Mad Men character are you?” (Searching for “Which Sex and the City character are you” brought up ten times the number of Google results, for the record.) But it’s deeply textured episodes like this that show why, despite our collective eagerness to commodify Mad Men with our SCDP avatars and our Banana Republic styles, we haven’t jumped headfirst into saying which characters we identify with most: We are all Peggy. And we are all Joan.

Beauty Blogosphere

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

From Head...

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

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

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

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

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


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

...and the Things In Between: 

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

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

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


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

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

Anne Hathaway: "I'm Not Very Pretty"

Anne Hathaway thinks she has weird features. And, you know, she’s kind of right. Not that I’m critiquing her looks, but she has large eyes with wide brows and generous lips. Without putting her features on a grid or something I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing she falls pretty high on the features-to-face-space ratio.

But what I take from this is not that Anne Hathaway is a googly-eyed freak any more than that she’s a doe-eyed beauty. It’s a case of two things: 1) Someone not valuing in themselves what other people single them out for, and 2) the beauty standards for actresses being different than the rest of the population.

The latter gets attention on an evaluative scale: Oh, these professional beauties, we see them everywhere and it’s hard to live up to it. (Well, sure, but there are lots of actresses who are actually not so much beautiful as they are symmetrical and slender, which, when toyed with by a small army of makeup artists and hairstylists, is handily transformed into what we think of as beauty. My interview with Sarah gets into this, in the last section.) But on a different level: Large features invoke a child-like vibe, and on an adult woman that can communicate a lot of what we associate with femininity. As an audience, we simply see Anne Hathaway’s face and maybe feel protective, or sympathetic, more so than we might with performers with subtler features. Is it any surprise that the fine-featured January Jones was cast as a largely unsympathetic character on Mad Men? We’re supposed to find her beautiful but aren’t necessarily supposed to like her.

In a world of shifting astrology, it's good to know that face reading remains reliable.

I don’t believe in physiognomy (though I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to find a practicing phrenologist, out of sheer curiosity) but we are prone to associating certain physical traits with certain personality traits, or at least recognizing that to some degree you’re “supposed” to. (When was the last time you read  a book and the protagonist instead of the villain was described as thin-lipped?) And casting agents are fantastic at this. Certainly delicate-featured actresses aren’t left scaring up work, but a good look at Hollywood will show a lot of people who might look a bit weird on the street because of their face-to-feature proportion. (This is in addition to the lollipop-head phenomenon, which somehow made news in 2005 with the likes of Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie. Their exaggerated thinness was what was “newsworthy” at the time but performers frequently have somewhat large heads—they telegraph better both onstage and on film.)

But Hathaway follows up her statement about her “weird features” with this: “I’m not very pretty.” And this is such a weird paradox. The very thing that makes her watchable, the very thing that announces her beauty to her audience, is what she winds up being self-conscious of. Is that true for all of us?

Helen Gurley Brown on Makeup

That fabulous face...can you achieve it by being very, very clever with make-up?


I don't think there's even a prayer!

The even-featured, alabaster-skinned, meltingly, gaspingly beautiful beauty men go to pieces over can't be achieved with make-up, prayer, incantations or sending your face back to the factory!

You can have something else with make-up...an interesting face, an alive face, a sexy face. ...

You don't have to lie your head off and say I am, I am, I am when you know damn well you aren't—a stunner. But you must love yourself enough to employ every device...voice, words, clothes, figure, make-up...to become one. ...

Nearly every woman is part-beauty. She has one good feature even if it's just smooth elbows. You play up that feature. You draw a face on the elbow with little eyes and a mouth. (I'm kidding!)



—Sex and the Single Girl, Helen Gurley Brown, 1962

Makeup Ads and Self-Esteem

The conclusion of a recent study in Journal of Consumer Research—that ads for beauty products make women feel worse about themselves—falls squarely into the category of duh, along with "Clumsy Kids Less Popular" and "Eating Healthfully and Exercising Is Good For You."

What’s interesting to me is not the grand conclusion but the smaller conclusions of each experiment. Participants were shown a variety of images: “beauty-enhancing” products like lipstick and eye shadow, and “problem-solving” products like acne concealer and deodorant. Both types of products were shown both in a neutral image (white background, no type) and embedded in an ad, with all its seductive additional imagery and words.

Unsurprisingly, seeing the enhancement products in an advertising setting made women feel the worst about themselves, when compared with the same products in a neutral setting, and the problem-solving products in both settings. But in addition to participants reporting thinking worse thoughts about themselves, they were thinking more thoughts about themselves. Their self-consciousness increased when being posed with a product that, ostensibly, was to make them more beautiful. It strengthens my resolve to do my best not to check out my reflection in every shiny surface available. (I got some excellent beauty advice once, which was to look in the mirror as little as possible because then you can think you’re as beautiful as you’d like, even if you see hard evidence otherwise. Oh but to stick to it!)

The study participants’ self-esteem remained the same when shown the problem-solving products, a wild difference from the beauty-enhancing products, whether within the ad setting or in a neutral one. A logical but counterintuitive—counterintuitive to me as a woman, anyway—response to these experiments might be surprise. Wouldn’t a product whose very nature was calling you flawed—zittily, stinkily so—make women feel worse about themselves than a product promising the fantasy playland of glossy lips and tinted eyelids? Can’t makeup be some exquisite place of luxury and pleasure? (Certainly that’s often how it’s sold to its consumers.)

But as the target of these ads, I know right away why the “beauty-enhancing” products made women feel worse. We know full well we’re not the ethereal creatures we see in the advertisements. We know we sweat in an unattractive fashion; we know we get pimples and ingrown hairs, and that our teeth get stained over the years, and that our hair falls out of place. We might get frustrated about it, but we’re also terribly matter-of-fact about it. Problem-solving products don’t promise to turn us into something we’re not; they guide us to a sort of place of neutrality. Give me the right product and I turn into a purer version of myself, a non-acne-scarred woman whose hair doesn’t slip from her ponytail, non-coffee-stained teeth gleaming. It’s corrective measures that feel like beauty work nonetheless but that ultimately are only letting me know that I’m human.

Let forthright beauty enter the picture, though, and things shift: Suddenly, instead of simply looking like a non-zitty version of myself, I might be able to look like Brooke Shields—except I’ll never look like Brooke Shields, of course, even at my non-zittiest and whitest-toothed. The beauty-enhancing products take us from the realm of humanity into some other realm where we’re supposed to transcend ourselves, with our just-bitten lips, just-pinched cheeks, miraculously blue lash lines.

The results—of beauty-enhancing products decreasing women’s self-esteem while problem-solving ones had no effect—stayed true whether or not the ad featured a person. This did surprise me; I’d always championed the Clinique makeup campaigns because they were selling me a product, not the implicit promise of looking like Brooke Shields (a Photoshopped Brooke Shields at that). It’s the lure of glamour and beauty, whether it comes from a stiletto or a glamorous actress, that leaves us feeling deflated. Now I sort of feel duped, like Clinique hired a smart, well-meaning woman to reinvent the beauty ad (Dr. Faye Miller?) for women like me who think we’re too savvy to be taken in by a bevy of starlets peddling their sheen to us. I look at Clinique’s thin sans-serif lettering, which somehow looks elite; its artful styling of products in ads. Their ads are as close as can be to the neutral-background approach used in the study, actually. So maybe they’re lowering my self-esteem less than Maybelline—but I hardly walk away a winner.