Men's Fashion, Eugenics, and Cultural Capital

Here’s a party whose caucus I’d love to watch: The Men’s Dress Reform Party. While researching the history of men and makeup, I ran across a mention of this odd-duck British party in the 1930s whose sole purpose was to agitate for loosened clothing restrictions on men. They paraded about in shorts, open-collared shirts, and color-coordinated socks; if a member wore a tie, he might fasten it inches below his Adam’s apple.

The idea was that the dark, heavy clothes men were expected to wear were unhygienic (it was difficult to wash a suit before widely available dry cleaning—indeed, that’s part of why suits are traditionally dark, to mask dirt), and ugly to boot (we’ll get to that). Men’s clothing was a health hazard, they claimed, which fell into line with its parent organization, The New Health Society, a group devoted to educating people about nutrition, “intestinal stasis,” and “helio-hygiene.” (I visualize them as a predecessor to Gwyneth’s Goop team.) So they fought back, urging employers to let workers wear freer dress, organizing ersatz holidays in which men were to wear whatever they pleased, and throwing rallies at which members were instructed to “Come as you are and feel your best,” which for some meant togas, for others singlets and jeans, and for H.G. Wells, meant “ordinary evening dress.”

Western Argus, Kalgoorlie, Australia, July 14, 1931

It seems odd at first that this would be an organized group instead of a looser assemblage, but its goals were political. They’d seen how women had begun to fling off repressive roles, a movement reflected in their clothes; why not do the same for masculinity? J.C. Flügel, an influential psychologist at the time and a proud MDRP member, claimed that the institutionalization of the suit had led to a “a remarkable repression of Narcissism among men,” which he saw as undesirable, as it left all the fun of self-ornamentation to women. Unleashing men’s sartorial fancy, he argued, would loosen their superego, the restrictive, repressive force in the human psyche—which would ultimately lead to greater freedom.

What’s interesting about the MDRP is its split between a vision that even today seems progressive (a lessened emphasis on traditional masculinity) and a cause that seems abhorrent. Part of the MDRP’s cause revolved around eugenics: If the “right” men were to showcase their appearance, they would be more attractive to the “right” women, and more “right” babies (that is, white babies born into the professional class) would be created. Eugenics was widely accepted in mainstream science and medicine then, but even contextualized, it’s clearly troublesome for all sorts of reasons, with fascism topping the list. Yet even within this odious framework, I appreciate their commitment to at least thinking through the evolutionary logistics. Evolution is often cited as a reason women wear makeup: It’s ornamentation that catches the eye of potential mates. It’s a perfectly fine theory until you question why it’s women, and not men, who wear makeup (for the most part), when both sexes have an evolutionary need to attract the other. So the MDRP’s eugenics mission was wrongheaded, but at least it bothered to be consistent with its own internal logic and wasn’t just cherry-picking its theories to justify a sexist vision.

Eugenics is tied to class, not just race, and the MDRP has an interesting fabric here too. The party claimed to be for people of all classes, but the fact was that most of its members were middle- and upper-class, and that they weren’t advocating for more accessible clothes, but more fashionable ones. (In fact, clothes were about to become way more accessible, with the invention of fabrics that invited ready-to-wear clothes—which actually wound up accomplishing the MDRP’s goals, even though they had nothing to do with it.) But the MDRP’s biggest reinforcement of class is something that’s familiar today. The suit that the MDRP was fighting against was the very thing their grandfathers had fought for: a uniform of sorts that would theoretically allow for meritocracy to flourish, since it was more difficult to display wealth through the suit as opposed to the ruffles of the aristocracy. The ruffles were seen as oppressive; eventually, the suit that replaced it became seen as the same.

Today it would look like the MDRP’s vision has won out, at least in America (though remember, the MDRP was British) with leisurewear accepted in plenty of professional workplaces and shorts no longer seen as the province of little boys. But the suit remains, and it remains as a symbol of class. Most of the time I see a man in a suit, he’s either in the upper echelons of certain professional worlds (financiers, government officials), or he’s in a position of servitude (security, hospitality). By agitating for the loss of the suit, the Men’s Dress Reform Party wanted to revert to the days of male self-ornamentation as a display of cultural capital. The suit remains, albeit changed—and changed in a way that has shifted its meaning to be about a display of, not an eradication of, cultural capital. In that way, regardless of the MDRP’s place as a mere footnote in history, they were unexpectedly successful.

Nerd Crushed: Where Are the Average-Looking Female "Sex Symbols"?

"Do they exert a disproportionate gravitational force, or are your eyes just a Great Attractor?"

Around the time I started “casually” walking by the home of a man who gave me my one and only skydiving lesson, I realized one of the factors that makes me find someone attractive: If I watch a man do something he’s good at and loves to do, it's likely I’ll develop a little crush on him. It’s not a sexual crush necessarily, nor is it a crush that I’d actually act on—in fact, much of the time the object of my crushdom is someone I know full well I’d have no interest in otherwise. Most of the time the crush doesn’t persist past the moment (the skydiving instructor was an outlier, because, I mean, the dude jumps out of planes on purpose). My minute-long crushes are usually an acknowledgement that watching someone at their best makes them attractive, regardless of their attractiveness overall.

So of course, midway through watching the premiere of the rebooted Cosmos, I’d developed a crush on its host, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. His barely-contained eagerness to share the secrets of the universe, his slightly jumpy demeanor, the liquid pools of his warm brown eyes—if he hadn’t had me there, he’d have gotten me with his tear-jerker anecdote about being hosted for the day as a 17-year-old kid from the Bronx by his hero, Carl Sagan. 

Now, I may understand the drive behind my own mini-crushes, but I also know that my predilection has led me to some highly unlikely crushes; I had a photo of Tom Brokaw hanging in my locker in seventh grade. But I’m used to those crushes being seen as sort of idiosyncratic—let others have their obvious Clooneys and Pattinsons, I’ll stick with the unexpected, thanks. So when I searched for what other viewers were saying about deGrasse Tyson, I didn’t think I’d find that just as we’re not alone in this universe, I wasn’t alone in my crush. Neil deGrasse Tyson, according to Twitter, is everything from a “science crush” to a “nerd crush” to a “celebrity crush.” He’s “superhot” and “handsome,” making us “hot and bothered,” what with his “sci-sexy” “sexy voice” and general “hotness.” In fact, he was once listed in People’s annual Sexiest Man Alive list as the Sexiest Astrophysicist, is routinely listed as a “nerd sex symbol” in headlines, and has been asked about his sex appeal to the point where he even has the crushworthiest response possible ready at hand: “When you tell people something that's intellectually delectable, they can feel sensually towards it. But I think at the end of the day, the object of their affection is the universe." (Swoon!) Point here is: My NDT crush isn’t idiosyncratic, offbeat, unexpected, or unlikely in the least. The man isn’t just a little crush of mine; he’s a bona fide sex symbol, regardless of whether it’s qualified by the word nerd.

I think it’s splendid that so many people are freely acknowledging what most of us already know from our own experience: Sex appeal isn’t strictly tied to conventional good looks, and average-looking people can become immensely attractive in our eyes if we find their other qualities appealing. I mean, Neil deGrasse Tyson is nice-looking enough, but I doubt he’d be seen as “handsome” or “superhot” were it not for his other gifts. (Sure, there’s an argument there about the dangers of labeling everything appealing as “sexy” and why a good astrophysicist can’t just be a good astrophysicist in peace—but really, it’s the quieter sort of sex appeal that has made us humans keep propagating the species, so I’m all for it.) I mean, who among us hasn’t experienced an unlikely flutter of the heart or loins in watching someone blossom before our eyes in a single moment? A headline proclaiming an utterly normal-looking man as a “sex symbol” of any sort means that we as a culture are eager to see beyond the surface when it comes to human appeal.

But when I tried to think of a woman who is widely seen in the same light, I came up short. Sure, there are plenty of well-known women who are seen as “nerd crushes” because they speak of their nerdy interests (like Mila Kunis) or are involved with nerd culture in the sense that they go to Comic Con. Then there are the women who have been christened as “the thinking man’s sex symbol,” like Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Susan Sarandon, and Rachel Weisz, all of whom may be excellent performers and writers, and all of whom are also pretty much exactly the definition of the beauty standard, even if they’re not as cheesecake-perfect as sex symbols who don’t usually garner the prefix of “thinking man’s.” Sarah Palin of all people is actually the closest I can think of, in that she's a well-known woman viewed as attractive in a field where you don't have to be a professional beauty to succeed—but besides the fact that her sex appeal became a tool of ridicule, she was literally a beauty queen, hardly landing her in the same camp as Neil deGrasse Tyson. (Also, she’s Sarah Palin, but whatevs.) Google turns up a few other women labeled “thinking man’s sex symbol” who aren’t entertainers—writer Jhumpa Lahiri, Sheryl Sandberg—which come closer to the spirit of the deGrasse Tyson phenomenon, but they’re acknowledged as sex symbols on a far smaller level. The point: Call her a nerd crush or the thinking man’s sex symbol—if she’s a woman, she’s still got to be pretty damned good-looking to get the title. I mean, when The Wonder Years child star Danica McKellar went on to be an advocate for girls in math, she was doing book promotion in lingerie. 

Just as we’d be unwise to blame individual men for patriarchal beauty standards, we can’t say that the lack of widely acknowledged atypical female sex symbols is a reflection of men’s abilities to see beyond the physical. Men are just as capable as women of finding someone attractive for reasons that have little to do with visual attraction, and I’ve heard plenty of individual men share their crushes on somewhat unlikely targets: soccer player Abby Wambach, economics blogger Megan McArdle, Broad City’s Ilana Glazer, poet Nikki Giovanni, and tennis player Martina Hingis before the makeover. An ex once sheepishly told me he had just a wee little crush on Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, you know?

Still, collectively we’re slow to recognize the possibility of a female “sex symbol” who doesn’t possess the hallmarks of a traditional sex symbol. And to be clear, on its face this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I mean, the flipside here is that anytime a prominent woman does anything nifty, she’s suddenly a “sex symbol.” Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi: the Hill’s sex symbol! Doesn’t Alice Munro look hot as a Nobel laureate? By no means am I arguing that we should sexualize women’s accomplishments just so we can have a female equivalent of a Neil deGrasse Tyson. But the thing is, we already do sexualize accomplished women, assuming she’s conventionally attractive. What’s missing is room for a wider public acknowledgment of the enormous swath of qualities that make accomplished women attractive. We give it to the gents, and on an individual level we give it to women too. But when it comes to our culture—or hell, just Twitter—christening an utterly average-looking woman a sex symbol of any sort, we shy away from the possibility.

Basically, this is a version of the same old song—I mean, news flash, women are expected to look conventionally pretty. It’s just interesting to me that we as a culture are willing to go to greater lengths to extend the definition of attractive to include skill and charisma when we’re talking about men, but not so willing when we’re talking about women. Or are we? I’m hoping I’ve got a major blind spot here. Are there famous women I’m overlooking who are widely known as “sex symbols” despite not matching the definition of conventional beauty? I’d like to learn that I’m mistaken.

"You're Gorgeous": Invited Post

Claire Napier is a midlands-based, commissionable illustrator and comic artist whom I met through the now-defunct Feminist Fashion Bloggers group. I saw bits of her visual work on her blog, but was largely struck by her thoughtful writing, whether that be things like her musings on conventional femininity, or something out of our shared sphere entirely, like her awesome gift guide for the unemployed. So when she reached out to me about my series on compliments with some ideas about visually expressing her own complex feelings toward unsolicited compliments from men, I jumped at the chance. Enjoy!

Yer Cheatin' Heart: The Relationship Between Beauty and Betrayal

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

*     *     *

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

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

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

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

The Petraeus Affair: Infidelity, Beauty, and Scapegoating

The sex lives of public figures bore me. Rather, the sex lives of public figures interest me no more than that of, say, my dentist. My view on sex is generally pretty solipsistic: If it’s not me having the sex in question, I don’t particularly care about it, and I don’t understand why anyone besides those directly affected would.

So I didn’t pay much attention to the David Petraeus scandal—at least, not until I read this excellent piece by Meghan Daum that questions the mandate of beauty in high-profile women. The article draws upon Petraeus’s wife, Holly, and the flurry of nasty comments in the “chattersphere” about how one could hardly blame Petraeus for sleeping with his attractive biographer, given that Mrs. Petraeus dared to look like a middle-aged woman who doesn’t pay homage to the beauty industry at every opportunity. "If it's no longer shocking that a powerful man would have an affair with a younger, worshipful woman,” writes Daum, “it is a little shocking that the wife of that powerful man, nerdish as he is, would thwart the beauty industrial complex quite so vigorously.”

Daum’s larger point—that we need to eliminate the double standard dictating that accomplished women like Olympia Snowe, Dianne Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi must pay attention to conventional beauty standards while their male counterparts can eschew them—is one that needs to be made, repeatedly, until things change. (Remember the hubbub when Hillary Clinton had the audacity to speak at a news conference without makeup?) But what’s interesting to me is something Daum acknowledges in her article: Save for a smattering of comments-section trolls, nobody is publicly suggesting that Holly Petraeus’s low-key, glamour-free looks are to blame for Petraeus’s infidelity. Yet the piece hinged upon that very idea, and the piece gained traction because we all quietly understand the game of pin-the-blame-on-the-gray-haired-woman. Save for an ugly little post from Mediabistro, a bizarro article about how all the women involved in the scandal could use a makeover, and the aforementioned comment-section trolls, the only mention of Holly Petraeus’s looks I could find by poking around online comes from...well, Meghan Daum, and people rightfully echoing her point. Few people are trying to suggest that Holly Petraeus’s gray hair is responsible for her husband’s dick falling into another woman—but we get the idea anyway, even when it’s not spoken aloud.

If we’re collectively too kind to snark at a pained woman who has been publicly humiliated, we’re not above raising our eyebrows when the betrayed wife is conventionally beautiful. “If Tiger Woods could cheat on Swedish model Elin Nordegren, what chance do other women have?” cried the Examiner. “Beauties and the beasts,” blared the New York Post after Tony Parker cheated on Eva Longoria. There’s a certain freedom to say it when a beautiful woman has been betrayed, because we’re ostensibly championing the woman; we’re reassuring her that the dude must be cray-cray to cheat on her, because she’s hot, and it’s too bad that her insurance policy of being good-looking had a loophole for infidelity. A loophole that an estimated 22% of married men have exploited at some point, sure, but never mind the 1-in-4 odds at play, right? Those odds are “supposed” to fall in the favor of the Eva Longorias of the world—at the expense of the Holly Petraeuses—and though both parties gain our sympathy, only one of them garners a head-scratching “huh?”

There are all sorts of problems with that mind-set, starting with the insulting idea that good looks are all that wives can count on to keep their husbands faithful (note that while plenty of pieces on Holly Petraeus highlight her striking accomplishments on behalf of military families, none of them suggest her husbands is nutso for cheating on her because of those accomplishments). But deconstructing the idea doesn’t answer the fundamental question of why we’re so eager to tie appearance to infidelity.

I can’t help but think that maybe we want beauty and cheating to be linked. Because if they’re not, the statistics on infidelity are just too depressing. I remember confiding in a friend after a man I loved cheated on me. She was sympathetic, but a part of her response continues to flit around in my mind years after the fact: That’s just how men are, she said. She wasn’t trying to say it was “natural,” but rather that in her experience, men were simply eager to cheat, so I couldn’t take it personally. Let’s say for a moment that she was right—that men just cheat, end of story. It’s awful to think that a man might cheat on you because someone more attractive came along. But it’s worse to think that he cheated just because. Because then the logical fallout is that since he cheated just because, every man cheats, so you’d better learn to either adopt a laissez-faire attitude about the whole thing or get used to losing your dignity on a regular basis, because this is just how it’s going to be.

Accepting that notion would undermine the entire idea of monogamy, which, in this culture, is how we construe commitment. So we refuse it, and we seek a scapegoat for infidelity—and what better scapegoat than something that has already instilled in plenty of people a sense of insecurity, futility, and self-abasement? Beauty, along with its surrounding pressures and expectations, comes in mighty handy here. It makes me think about how often beauty and appearance are used as a scapegoat for other issues, and indeed how rigid we are with the narrative arc of women’s relationship with our looks (woman feels bad about body, woman works to come to peace with it, all is well—which is a fine tale, except it sets an expectation that women are displeased with their bodies, leaving little room for those who might not fall prey to that narrative).

It’s not often that I’m going to argue in this space that beauty is irrelevant; the entire thesis of this blog is that personal appearance becomes relevant to pretty much everything. And that’s not what I’m arguing, not exactly, not least because none of us have any way of knowing exactly why David Petraeus slept with Paula Broadwell—or why any person, anywhere, has cheated on someone they’re ostensibly committed to. (It’s something you often hear from philanderers themselves: I don’t know why I did it, I don’t know what came over me, The whole thing was stupid.) But I will argue that beauty is more relevant to the discussion of infidelity, and to how we make sense of infidelity, than it ever is to infidelity itself, which is why, as Daum points out, “assiduous gym rats with nary a gray hair get cheated on.”

In fact, there’s further evidence of this in the Petraeus case: Since I only paid cursory attention to the story yet kept seeing photos of Jill Kelley everywhere, I assumed that she was Petraeus’s lover. It actually wasn’t until I started researching this piece that I saw a picture of Broadwell, his actual paramour. As a long-haired Lebanese-American socialite usually photographed in bright, tailored dresses, Kelley has more photogenic glamour than an academic from Bismarck who favors a severe hairstyle. Bluntly put, Kelley looks the part of the stereotypical homewrecker more than Broadwell does—which is, I’m guessing, a large part of why her visage, not Broadwell’s, has become one of the iconic images burned into the public mind in regards to this affair. We want a fall gal, and Kelley makes a good one (especially given that she committed adultery as well, just not with the main figure involved here).

The sooner we stop gaping, wide-eyed, when we see men have affairs behind the backs of their beautiful wives, the sooner we can truly start leaving the low-maintenance betrayed wives like Holly Petraeus alone. And the sooner we can do both of those things, maybe we’ll come just a hair closer to understanding why we place such importance on an institution so many people flout—with lovers beautiful and plain, glamorous and mousy, younger and older. Perhaps with practice we’ll even come a little closer to fixing it.

On Veterans Day

"Nicky," Here Are the Young Men, Claire Felicie, 2009–2010

When I write here of beauty, most of the time I’m actually writing of convention—of what we as a culture have given our stamp of approval in the realm of beauty. The point isn’t any person’s actual appeal; the point is the standards and parameters we create around beauty.

But the way I experience beauty in my day-to-day life is personal, not sociological. When I register someone as beautiful—that is, when a person shows up on my radar as you should continue to look—it’s because of a quality the person has. A flicker in the eyes, a smirk, the way the person moves. That sounds vague because it is vague, it has to be vague, because if it were charted and fully understood, it might lose its properties of fascination. Beauty’s ineffability is part of what makes it register to us as beauty.

It's that elusive transcendence—which may or may not be beauty—that comes to mind with Claire Felicie’s remarkable photographs of soldiers taken before, during, and after their tours of Afghanistan, titled Here Are the Young Men. If you saw these photographs absent of context, some of them might have that sort of unclassifiable but intriguing quality about them to you; others wouldn’t. But when you learn that these were taken before, during, and after a life-changing experience that most of us will thankfully never know for ourselves, other qualities leap forward. Aversion, deadening, patience, cynicism, hatred, weariness, reluctance: The photos reflect something more complex than a mere loss of innocence. The phrase “the fog of war” refers to the shrouding of facts, evidence, and ability to determine the best course of action that something as extraordinary as war brings. I think of it here because of these men’s faces: You can’t look at them and draw any sort of universal conclusion. Some men look like the grew into themselves during their tour, a sort of adultness settling across their face. Other men, afterward, are unable to look into the camera. There’s no one way to know how war will change any individual, or any nation.

These photos also call into focus the fluctuating gap between what we really see and what we expect to see, both overshadowed by our knowledge that predetermination will change what we see. As Heather Murphy writes on Slate’s photo blog, “[T]here is something else in that third picture; a dullness to the eyes, a stiffness to the jaw. Isn’t there? What’s interesting about this project is that you can convince yourself that someone changed dramatically from middle to right, only to compare right to left and talk yourself out of it. It must just be angle or lighting, you say.” Yet Murphy reaches the same conclusion I do: “But even after you’ve concluded that wrinkle isn't really any bigger, it's undeniable that there is a difference. … It's not about the obvious clues like a frown or matted hair, but something far more nuanced.”

This can be applied in a far broader context: How our assumptions regarding people’s experiences color how we visually perceive them. Those broader applications are worth looking at, but today, for once I’m not thinking of how to make these questions bigger. I’m thinking of the soldiers—the veterans—and their before, during, and after. Whatever any of us may think of the war in Afghanistan, these people were there fulfilling their duty—as many of our parents did in Vietnam, our grandparents in WWII, our great-grandparents in the Great War that made the eleventh day of the eleventh month a global call for peace, and a global remembrance of those who served. I don’t want to glorify war or its participants by commenting upon Veterans Day. But an honoring needn’t be one of glorification; it can be an honoring of experience. And today, we honor just that.

The Dating Game: Compliment Week*, Part III

Am I the only one who's just ever so slightly creeped out by this song?

I've been putting off writing about male-to-female compliments because, quite honestly, it’s touchy. I crave hearing compliments within my relationships, but I also know that when I’ve gotten them, I still feel dissatisfied. In fact, the compliments given to me by men I’m not dating tend to be the ones that stick. This is somewhat in line with research indicating that women are likelier to respond with a “thank you” to compliments from men than they are to those given by other women. The author of that study speculated that it was because compliments can indicate social status, and since generally speaking men are seen as having more status, women may treat compliments from them as coming from a social superior? Or something. Honestly, I think it’s more that when a guy friend compliments me, what I read into it is that he sees me first and foremost as his friend, but that sometimes I might do something with my appearance that reminds him, Oh yeah, you’re also a nominally attractive woman—and that he’s comfortable enough with our relationship to say something approximating that without it becoming weird. I take it at more face value than I would with a partner, or with a female friend, because I know from my own experience that giving compliments to other women has a different sort of function.

So when it comes to male-to-female compliments, I feel able to hear and accept them from male friends and acquaintances and not get all angsty about it. Not so for men I’m dating. Naturally, my interest was piqued when I came across this study examining the role of compliments in heterosexual relationships. (Unfortunately, the study didn't look at same-sex relationships; I'm very curious about how compliment patterns might differ between female friends and female partners.) The general body of research on this is minimal, but here’s what stood out:

• Compliments between romantic partners frequently differ from compliments given to friends. The role and intent of compliments are always contextual, and nothing provides a broader context than culture. Intimate relationships are a sort of “microculture” that’s reflected in the form and content of compliments. In Japan, a statement like “Those earrings are pure gold, aren’t they?” would be taken as a compliment (according to compliment scholar Robert Herbert), whereas in the United States it would be more likely to be seen as a question. The form (roundabout) and content (wealth and taste) tell us something about cultural values in Japan. Similarly, in a relationship’s microculture, “There’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather be than in your arms” becomes a compliment despite not resembling one structurally; these emotion-based compliments were the number-one type recalled by participants of both sexes. Whereas compliments among friends are often roundabout ways of expressing “I like you,” in romances there’s freedom to say exactly that, and to still have it experienced as a compliment by the receiver.

• Women are likelier than men to be aware of the presence—or absence—of compliments. But listen to the flipside: Both sexes equally value the role of compliments in relationships. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this. I’m guessing it has something to do with the traditional role of women as the gatekeepers of emotion, which would lead women to be more sensitive to all sorts of emotional indicators. Alternately, women’s heightened awareness of the role compliments serve with female friends and acquaintances might lead them to a similarly heightened awareness of compliments in their partnerships.

• The more compliments, the better. The study found a correlation between relationship satisfaction and the number of compliments given and received—and also a correlation between relationship satisfaction and feelings about the number of compliments received. It’s unclear which comes first: Are we happier with compliments because we’re happier with the relationship, or are we happier with our relationships and therefore more likely to give and receive—or at least, remember giving and receiving—compliments? Whatever the case, it seems like it wouldn’t hurt to tell someone you love that, oh I don’t know, the brightness of her cheek would shame the stars as daylight doth a lamp, or whatever floats your boat, really.

*     *     *

So this research is interesting and all, but it doesn’t really get to the heart of why compliments in romances can feel so fraught with tension. These studies look at how the interplay of compliments works within relationships, but in truth, my conflicted reactions to looks-based compliments has little to do with the relationship and more to do with my own insecurities surrounding my appearance. It shouldn’t be that way: By dint of being together, presumably people in relationships find one another attractive. But in my experience—and that of many women I’ve talked with about this—there’s frequently a gnawing sense that maybe that assumed attraction isn’t...enough. Compliments become laden with tension: Does “You look pretty” carry less weight than “You are beautiful”? Does “You are beautiful” become diminished if it follows “Do I look okay”? Does a dropoff in compliments mean that our partners are less attracted to us, or that they’re comfortable enough to express admiration in other ways, or that they don’t want us to think they only find us beautiful when they explicitly say so? Or does an unflagging stream of compliments mean that they’re uttered by rote and don’t “count”?

In truth, only the rare compliment can ever “count,” because the very thing we seek in a compliment—validation—is a host of ambiguities and contradictions. Validation, by definition, relies upon one party affirming something about the other that has not yet been confirmed, and the thing being affirmed must already hold some water. That is, you can’t validate something that neither party really believes is true, or even that only one party believes is true; if you tell me I’m an excellent cook but I believe I’m just doing the bare minimum, I might be pleased by your compliment but I won’t feel validated by it, because there’s no preexisting belief to be affirmed. Similarly, when someone confirms something we already know to be true, validation isn’t in play—I don’t feel validated by being seen as a woman, but a transgendered woman may well feel validated by being called ma’am. With beauty, most of us hover between these poles: We might think under the right light that we might not look half-bad, but we’re not necessarily entirely sure of it. In order for an act to be one of validation as opposed to confirmation or presentation, we need both the possibility of the quality being true and the possibility of it being untrue. In other words, if you’re seeking romantic validation in a compliment, chances are you’re never going to get it.

Not that that stops us—or rather, not that that stops me—from searching for validation in compliments anyway. I’ve dated men all over the compliments scale, from one who actually stopped and sighed while I was brushing my teeth to tell me how beautiful I was, to one who told me early on that he didn’t “do” compliments. Nowhere in there have I ever really found a comfortable place to exist with compliments. With the stingy men I treat each compliment like a rare jewel; with the overkill guys I become exasperated and begin to suspect their words are building a pedestal I don’t want to be on. And with the men who have a moderate, sincere, and appreciative attitude toward compliments, I usually just wind up feeling frozen. I'm not proud of this, and I don't think I've taken out my compliment complex on the men I've been involved with, but I admit it seems like there's no way for a partner to win here.

Yes, yes, it's me, not you, sure. Yet there’s an inherent paradox in compliments that can make them difficult to receive from those we love. The moment a compliment escapes the giver’s lips, a division is created: It’s a reminder that we are being looked at instead of being experienced as a part of a cohesive unit. A looks-based compliment is a reminder of the impossibility of merging with another person—and whether or not merging is actually your goal in a relationship, the whole "the two will become one flesh" bit is pretty much the basis of marriage in the western world.

More importantly, a looks-based compliment can be a reminder of the existence of our own feminine performance—our beauty work, our sleight-of-hand that supports the overall impression of beauty. If the end goal of feminine performance is looking beautiful, sexy, pretty, cute, and then we’re complimented for meeting that goal, it can be hard to shake the feeling that perhaps it’s the performance being complimented, not us. The first response I usually have après-compliment is not to feel pretty but rather to feel as though I need to keep on looking pretty. That is, my knee-jerk reaction is not to experience a compliment as an affirmation of who I am but of what I do. Continuing the performance is the only way to not reveal ourselves to be frauds, even if the fraudulence is benign and socially engineered; we’re not actually beautiful, we just look it right now. By calling attention to the end goal of the performance—a proper signaling of our femininity—compliments pull us out of the assumed nonchalance that makes feminine performance. Even if the goal has been successfully reached, part of the goal of feminine performance is to keep up the illusion that there’s no performance taking place.

No wonder, then, that so many women report ways of defending against compliments: One woman reports scrunching up her face whenever her boyfriend tells her she looks beautiful; another bats her eyelashes “absurdly” when complimented on her eyes; another says she feels “caught” for not being able to follow the compliment script when, in truth, she feels unsure of how to react when a partner says she looks lovely. The gap between the safety of love and the precarity of being seen as an image is a space of uncertainty—and in relationships that already host a good deal of uncertainty, that gap can easily become toxic.

I take heart, though, in one of the findings of the partnership compliment study: The number-one topic of compliments between partners was neither appearance nor skill nor personality, but emotions. Not You look amazing but You make me feel amazing. When I first read that this sort of statement was considered a compliment within the bounds of the study, I hedged—that’s a statement of love, not a compliment, right? But that’s exactly what compliments are: an expression of admiration, appreciation, or plain old liking—and perhaps, with the people we choose to really let in, an expression of love. And it’s not like I—or the women I’ve talked with who wrestle with looks-based compliments from their partners—value our appearance above those expressions of emotion. But framing these statements—which, in good relationships, have flowed easily regardless of the number of You’re so prettys that spill forth—as compliments helps put that urge to hear You’re so pretty in proper perspective.

In fact, it’s exactly that—understanding the true significance of any compliment—that might shoo away that urge for good. According to a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, when people with low self-esteem went beyond merely hearing compliments from partners and instead described the meaning and significance of them, they started to feel better about the compliments, their relationships, and indeed themselves. In fact, once people with low self-esteem did this sort of reframing, they started to behave as people with high self-esteem do.

Now, I’m not sure where I’d fall on the self-esteem scale, but when it comes to my looks, it’s not like I’m always standing on solid ground. I’m hoping that the next time I long to hear a looks-based compliment from a partner, I’ll be able to remember what I’m really looking for: the meaning and significance of things like You’re so pretty, not the words themselves. That is, I’m looking to hear I am attracted to you. I want to be near you. I choose you; you are special to me. And with the right person, the reminders of these facts—for with the right person, they will be facts—should be just that, reminders. You’re so pretty, with luck and patience, can be put aside, where it belongs.

*"Week" is to be taken loosely, mkay? And with that, Compliment Week has finally come to a close. Part I, about the ways women use compliments in relationships with other women, is here; part II, a cursory look at compliment scholarship, is here.  

A Partial List of Male Celebrities Who Have Given Or Received Pedicures

Will Arnett, actor
Howard Stern, radio personality
Charles Barkley, former basketball player and sports analyst

Ptahhotep, vizier during reign of Djedkare Isesi

Brendan Fraser, star of Encino Man

Nick Gonzalez, kickboxer

Dave Navarro, musician, goat
Len Wiseman, director

Mel Gibson, actor (note: only expressed wish to pedicure; actual pedicure status unclear)
Shaquille O'Neal, rapper, Shaq Diesel (1993)
Anthony "The Man" Mundine, boxer

Cristiano Ronaldo, soccer player

Larry Malitzsky, urban hero

Roger Huerta, MMA fighter

Jack Black, actor

Dwayne Wade, basketballer

Maddox and Pax, citizens

Dean McDermott, actor
Ndamukong Suh, football player

50 Cent, musician

Tim Tebow, Tim Tebow
The good soldiers of Forward Operating Base Marez
Twiggy Ramirez, musician
Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana
Conrad Murray, physician to the stars
JC, lower primate
Bob Saget, comic

Newsworthy.

Beauty Blogsophere 11.11.11*

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

From Head...
Thin Mint lips: Girl Scout Cookie Lip Smackers! But what's with this "Coconut Caramel Stripes" flavor? You already yanked the rug out from under me with that "Samoa" jazz. Caramel Delight 4-eva!

...To Toe...
This little piggy went to fashion week: Fashionista's slideshow of models' feet on the runway is a lightly grody reminder that fashion ain't always glamorous (and that you're not alone in having fit problems).

Pediprank: Indiana governor Mitch Daniels went in for surgery on a torn meniscus and wound up with a pink pedicure. Dr. Kunkel, you old dog you!


...And Everything In Between:
"It's angled, like a diamond baguette": The rise of the $60 lipstick in the midst of a recession. Not sure about the "pragmatic" part of the term "pragmatic luxury," but what do I know? I just drink red wine, smack my lips together, and hope for the best.

Dishy: The flap surrounding the Panera Bread district manager who told the Pittsburgh-area store manager to staff the counter with "pretty young girls" was reported as a racist incident, since the cashier he wanted replaced was an African American man. But as Partial Objects points out, it may have been more motivated by sexism. To that I'd add that it's not just sexism and racism, but the notion of the "pretty young girl" that's at the heart of the matter here.

Give 'em some lip: American Apparel is launching a lip gloss line, with colors that will be "evoking an array of facets of the American Apparel experience." Names include "Legalize L.A.," which references the company's dedication to immigration reform, and "Intimate," an echo of the company's racy advertising aesthetic. Other shades on tap include "Topless," "Pantytime," "In the Red," "Jackoff Frost" and "Sexual Harassment in Violation of the Fair Employment and Housing Act Govt. Code 12940(k) Shimmer."

Music makers: Boots cosmetics line 17 commissions up-and-coming musicians to write and perform songs that align with the ethos of 17 products. As in, "You Might Get Stuck on Me" for their magnetic nail polish.

"Let women of sixty use 'beautifiers,' if they think they need them. But you, who are young, pretty, and have a complexion like a rose-leaf—you should avoid such things as you would a pestilence." 

99% marketing: For its 132nd birthday, Ivory soap is unrolling a new ad campaign, which hinges upon it being A) nongendered, and B) soap. Revolución!

Baby fangs: Intellectually I should be against about the practice of yaeba, in which dentists in Japan artificially enlarge their lady patients' incisors to create a childlike appearance. But as someone who is genetically blessed with noticeably sharp and semi-crooked incisors, I'm basically all, I am gonna be huge in Japan.

Vaniqua'd: The active ingredient in Vaniqua—you know, the drug you're supposed to take if you have an unladylike amount of facial hair—is also an effective treatment for African sleeping sickness. Of course, the places where African sleeping sickness strikes can't afford to buy it. But hey, our upper lip is so smooth! (via Fit and Feminist) 

La Giaconda: The Mona Lisa, retouched.

Beauty survey: Allure's massive beauty survey reveals that 93% of American women think the pressure to look young is greater than ever before. Am I a spoilsport by pointing out that every person who answered that question is also older than they ever were before? (Of course, the "hottest age" for women according to men surveyed is now 28, compared with 31 in 1991, so there may be something to it.) Other findings: Black women are three times as likely as white women to self-report as hot, and everyone hates their belly.

Gay old time: Jenelle Hutcherson will be the first openly lesbian contestant of Miss Long Beach—and she's going to wear a royal purple tux for the eveningwear competition. The director of the pageant encouraged her to sign up, and Hutcherson has been vocal about how she's reflecting the long tradition of diversity and acceptance in Long Beach. (Thanks to Caitlin for the tipoff!)

Miss World: In more urgent beauty pageant news, British women protest Miss World, and somehow the reporter neglects to make a crack about bra burning.

The freshman 2.5: Virginia debunks the "freshman 15," and then Jezebel reveals that the whole thing was an invention of Seventeen magazine, along with the notion that every single New Kid on the Block was supposed to be cute.

Ballerina body: Darlene at Hourglassy examines the push-pull between embracing and dressing large breasts (which she does beautifully with her button-front shirts designed for busty women) and her love of ballet. "By the end of the performance I wasn’t paying attention to anything but the movements. There was nothing to distract me from the dancers’ grace and athleticism. Would I have been distracted by large breasts on one of the dancers? Definitely."

(Still taken from SOMArts promotional video)

Subject/object: Prompted by this intriguing Man as Object exhibition in San Francisco, Hugo Schwyzer looks at the possibilities for desiring male imperfection. He's the expert here, both because of his research and his male-ness, but I can't help but wonder how much men have internalized the notion of male perfection. I have zero doubt that the focus on the body beautiful has impacted men, and certainly the tropes of masculinity are a reasonable parallel to the tropes of femininity. But there's always been more room—literal and metaphorical—for men of all varieties to be considered sex symbols. Everyone gawked when Julia Roberts paired up with Lyle Lovett, but even then there was talk of how he had "a certain quality." Save someone like Tilda Swinton—who, while odd-looking, isn't un-pretty either—when have we ever spoken of women in that way?

Am I the only one who thinks gigolo should be pronounced like it's spelled?: Tits and Sass has been looking for voices of male escorts, and lo and behold, Vin Armani to the rescue!

"Did my son inherit my eating disorder?": There's been some talk about how a mother with food issues can transfer that to her daughters—but Pauline wonders if she's passed down her eating disorder to her son. A potent reminder that boys internalize ED factors as well.

What you can't tell by looking: And along those same lines, Tori at Anytime Yoga reminds us shortly and sweetly that eating disorders of all forms come in a variety of sizes. This is enormously important: I'm certain that there are many women with eating disorders who don't recognize it because they don't think they fit the profile.

In/visible: Always glad to see celebrities acknowledge that looking they way they look actually takes work, à la Jessica Biel here: "My signature style is a 'no-make-up make-up' look, which is much harder than people think." Well, probably not most women who do no-makeup makeup, but whatevs.

Touchdown: This BellaSugar slideshow of creative makeup and hairstyle from NFL fans in homage to their favorite teams is a delight. I could care less about football itself (I finally understand "downs," I think) but I think it's awesome that these people are showing that there are plenty of ways to be a football fan, including girly-girl stuff like makeup. (IMHO, football fans could use a PR boost right about now. Seriously, Penn State? Rioting? You do realize your coach failed to protect multiple children from sexual assault, right?)

Face wash 101: Also from BellaSugar: There were college courses on grooming in the 1940s?! 

She walks in beauty like the night: A goth ode to black lipstick, from XOJane.com. 

Muppets take Sephora: Afrobella gives a rundown of the spate of Muppet makeup. Turns out Miss Piggy isn't the first Muppet to go glam.

Love handle: The usual story is that we gain weight when we're stressed or unhappy because we're eating junk food to smother our sorrows—but Sally asks about "happy body changes," like when you gain weight within a new relationship.

Locks of love: Courtney at Those Graces on how long hair can be just as self-defining as short.

_____________________________________

*Numerology field day! More significantly, Veterans' Day. Please take a moment to thank or at least think of the veterans in your life—you don't have to support the war to support soldiers. It's also a good time to remember that not all veterans who return alive return well: The Huffington Post collection "Beyond the Battlefield" is a reminder of this, particularly the story of Marine widow Karie Fugett, who also writes compellingly at Being the Wife of a Wounded Marine of caring for her husband after his return from Iraq; he later died from a drug overdose.

While most combat roles are still barred to women, there are plenty of female veterans—combat, support, and medical staff alike. Click here to listen to a collection of interviews from female veterans of recent wars, including Staff Sergeant Jamie Rogers, who, in When Janey Comes Marching Home, gives us this reminder of the healing potential of the beauty industry: "I went [to the bazaar near Camp Liberty in Baghdad] often to get my hair cut. They had a barber shop and then they had a beauty salon. It was nice to go in and it was a female atmosphere. It was all girls. You could put your hair down, instead of having it in a bun all the time, get it washed. It was just something to escape for a while, get away from everything. And it was nice to interact, and the girls were always dressed nice and always very complimentary: 'You have such beautiful...' and I don't know if it was BS, but it felt good that day. That was a good escape."

Beauty Blogosphere: 11.4.11

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

Clockwise from top left: eyeshadow app or police brutality?; the tiny tiny woman who lives inside Beyoncé;
fears of a clown; what did ever happen to Baby Jane?

From Head...
All made up: Meet the man responsible for all those makeover apps. Here's to hoping he wasn't behind the Beyoncé matroyshka effect that serves as the pièce de résistance in writer Lindsay Goldwert's photo collection of makeup apps gone wrong.


...To Toe...
Tootsie: Another reason to show off your pedicure with bare feet: You won't be mistaken for a mama cannibal. (Not that cannibalism would do anyone any good anyway.)


...And Everything In Between:
Land of smiles: Thailand is well-posed in the beauty industry because of its biodiversity and the growth of the call for natural products—it's expecting a 10%-15% increase this year alone. Here's to hoping a beauty boon can help offset some of the damage caused by recent massive flooding.

Avon not calling: Between corruption charges in its Asian arm and tumbling sales, Avon hasn't been doing so hot, and the New York Times questions whether it's time for CEO Andrea Jung to hand over the reins.

Occupy skin cream: A small skin-care line is urging us to "occupy" the beauty industry by supporting small lines started by women "who were fed up with products that didn't work" instead of the Citibanks of the beauty industry like Estee Lauder and Revlon. 

Lipstick philanthropy: The Helena Rubinstein Foundation, after nearly 60 years and $130 million in charitable distribution, is closing its doors.

A peek inside cosmetics law: Apparently product names can takes years to clear, trademark-wise? Wondering how Lancome got the Bureau of Consular Affairs to approve Shimmer Mocha Havana.

Can men handle being ogled? Well, women have been handling it with aplomb for centuries; surely the old boys are up to the challenge?

Apple man: Did Steve Jobs have disordered eating? Certainly his habits point toward yes—an apples-and-carrots diet for weeks on end, for example—but reading about his peculiarities makes me wonder how exactly we defined "disordered eating." Does suffering need to be a component?

"How do you spell 'Ms.'"?: Wonderful oral history of Ms. magazine, collated by the daughter of one of the founders. A personal note: Ms. was the first magazine to issue me a paycheck, making the 23-year-old me just about die when I found myself sitting in a real-life honest-to-God meeting with Gloria Steinem, who is just as awesome as you'd expect her to be. This article, in the same issue of New York, about the feminist blogosphere ain't bad either. Ladybloggers represent!

Boxing day: Speaking of Ms., they're the ones who bring us this piece about the Amateur International Boxing Association recommending its female competitors wear skirts, to distinguish them from the men. I think this is bollocks (though at least it's not the Lingerie Football League, which Fit and Feminist beams her laser focus at this week), but there's also a part of me that thinks the fact that women aren't otherwise distinguishable from men sort of proves that "not bad for a girl" might be on its way out? High hopes, people, high hopes.

East meets west: The communist-era Prague metro is now a "virtual drugstore."

Prague officially the land of the future: Commuters in Zlata Praha can buy shampoo, razors, and other goods at the "virtual drugstore" in certain metro stations by scanning codes with their smartphones; the wares are then delivered to their door by mail.
 
Skweez me: Karen Duffy reviews shapewear, and isn't afraid to name names. (Spanx may have the highest brand equity, but it's far from the highest quality, it seems.)

Fair fashion: One of the earliest makeup lines for women of color, Fashion Fair, is revamping its image.

Bathroom bounty: British women have £964 million of unused skin care products in their bathrooms. Unsurprisingly, the number of failed products dwindles with age, making me want to act like a 60-year-old and clean my bathroom shelves already.

Equal-opportunity eating disorders: 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.

Calling all angels: Beauty Redefined questions Victoria's Secret tagline, "We are redefining what it means to be sought after." I'm not sure which is more upsetting: the possibility that the tagline is wrong because VS is obviously not adding anything new to the conversation, or the possibility that the tagline is right and there's more redefinition to come.

How little is enough? Verging on Serious examines the Minimum Effective Dose—of exercise, of makeup, of blogging, all of which are dear to my heart, and all of which I do just enough of to be able to live my rightfully slothful life.

By the numbers: I'm usually a tad wary of "here's what I weigh" information, though I understand the arguments in favor of transparency, and enjoy My Body Gallery. In any case, the way Already Pretty presents her measurements is done in such a way as to show why the measurements tell us nothing, even when they're all laid out as they are in her post. "This post shows how little you know about someone just by looking at them, and how body stats actually provide scant additional, relevant information.... And even though you’ve now got a whole bunch of details about my body, you still don’t know everything. ... You know the stats, but you don’t know the story." 

About face: The Jaunty Dame follows up her inspirational "photo philosophy" post with photos not just of herself completely bare-faced, but with her Halloween-ish alter ego, reminding us that we all "perform for a live audience nearly every day." Is your costume comfortable?  

Girl army: Virginia questions the underlying message of the potential Army ban on French manicures and ponytails: "So what does it mean when the strongest woman in the US military agrees that displaying overt signs of femininity might impact a female officer's perceived strength as a leader?"

Nose jobbed: Dress With Courage looks at the connection between body dysmorphic disorder and nose jobs. Much of the talk about BDD surrounds the body, but in fact it's a fixation on any part of one's physical presence. Sadly, I'm unsurprised by the findings Elissa expounds upon here—43% of rhinoplasty patients have BDD.

Thoughts on a Word: Handsome

Handsome is a man, a woman, but rarely a child. Handsome is a Hemingway heroine, “built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht.” Handsome is Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and every member of the Handsome Men’s Club. Handsome can be equine, old girl, full of vim and vigor. Handsome is well-constructed, sturdy, but not without refinement. Handsome can be gray-haired and possibly carrying a cane. Handsome is the default for a man, but particular for a woman. Handsome, coming from a misinformed speaker, can be an insult. Handsome is a craft.

Handsome, etymologically speaking, is easy on the eyes. It originated from the old English hand and some, meaning "easy to handle," morphing into “of fair size” by the 1570s and making a quick transition into “good-looking” only a few years later. Until the 20th century, men and women were both described as handsome—good-looking, attractive—with regularity, with little difference in meaning. Rather, little general difference in meaning: As with so many words we use to describe women, as early as 1783 writers were eager to parse out what exactly makes a woman handsome. “By a handsome woman, we understand one that is tall, graceful, and well-shaped, with a regular disposition of features; by a pretty, we mean one that is delicately made, and whole features are so formed as to please; by a beautiful, a union of both,” writes John Trusler in 1783's The Distinction Between Words Esteemed Synonymous in the English Language. “A beautiful woman is an object of curiosity; a handsome woman, of admiration; and a pretty one, of love.”

Trusler may have been prescient here, for the case of pretty vs. handsome pops up again in 1813, with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. At the grand ball, after Mr. Darcy protests to his confidant Mr. Bingley that there aren’t any good-looking women to dance with, we have the following exchange:

The one who is deemed merely “pretty” is, of course, Elizabeth Bennet, whom we’ve already learned is “not half so handsome” as her sister Jane. Elizabeth gets the guy in the end—but only after it’s been made clear that prettiness plays second banana to handsomeness in looks while ultimately reigning victorious in love. “Austen portrays the ‘handsome’ rival [as opposed to] her own ‘pretty’ heroine—as the old woman of parts, seen now as all too predictable,” writes Ellen Zetzel Lambert in The Face of Love: Feminism and the Beauty Question. “However virtuous...Austen’s ‘handsome’ woman is always condemned to play the other woman, the ‘pretty’ woman’s foil. Often an older sister or an older-sister surrogate, hers is the beauty that can be appraised by the judging man.” Today we champion the idea that Austen meant for us to root for the plain girl over the beautiful one, but in fact, on paper, we’re rooting for the pretty one.

Of course, Austen’s use of handsome wasn’t necessarily shared by all. Not twenty years after Pride and Prejudice’s publication, The New York Mirror proclaimed in 1832 that “A handsome woman is handsome only in one way; a pretty one is pretty as a thousand.” The two ideas aren’t necessarily at odds, but throughout the book we see Jane as having an uncommon physical beauty, while Elizabeth's beauty is revealed through her quick, intelligent eyes and graceful manner—hardly the cookie-cutter gal that the Mirror gives us.

In mid-century, the question of age and the handsome woman was introduced. The handsome woman had previously not been grossly restricted by age—our heroine’s mother in Pride and Prejudice is described as being “as handsome as any of” her teenaged daughters. (On the flipside, in a 1919 congressional investigation of Emma Goldman’s role in “Bolshevik Propaganda,” the answer to “Is she a handsome woman?” is “No, she is not... She was a rather good-looking woman when she was young.” At 50, Goldman was too old to be handsome.) Age still isn’t necessarily a defining factor of the handsome woman, but it’s a consideration—and not in the way it was for Goldman. Handsome is a decent indication that the woman being spoken of isn’t necessarily graced by the bloom of youth. Life magazine, 1951, on Mary McCarthy: “She is a handsome woman of 51.” New York, 1968, on La MaMa founder Ellen Stewart: “She is an exceptionally handsome woman in her forties.” Edward Albee describes the titular role of his 1980 The Lady From Dubuque as being a “handsome woman”; 64-year-old Irene Worth originated the role. Theologian Harvey Cox put a fine point on the difference between the beautiful woman and the handsome one in The Seduction of the Spirit, 1985, when describing his grandmother, “A large, handsome woman reputed to have been a famous beauty in her youth.”

For a possible reason as to the gradual link between handsomeness and age, we’ll turn to Urban Dictionary, often a source of foul terror but on occasion spot-on: “Handsome woman: A woman with the kind of refined beauty and attractiveness that requires poise, dignity, and strength of mind and character, things that often come with age.” Dignity comes up again in the classic definition of handsome women in the Oxford English Dictionary: “Striking and imposing in good looks rather than conventionally pretty.”

It’s this—striking, imposing—that explains why we still use handsome for men as a general synonym for good-looking, while we reserve it for a particular type of good-looking woman, even if we can’t quite agree on what type that might be. With the exception of cherub-faced cutie-pies, good-looking men of many stripes are routinely referred to as handsome: classically good-looking George Clooney, of course, but also fine-featured Ryan Gosling, bushy-browed Clive Owen, chiseled Brad Pitt, manly-man Javier Bardem, smoldering Taye Diggs, or Johnny Depp, who was once described by a fellow I knew as "required by law to be considered good-looking by everyone who has ever lived." For good-looking women, handsome is a descriptor; for good-looking men, it’s the descriptor.

The traditional rules of masculinity dictate that we’ll take our men striking and imposing as a default, just as we’ll take our ladies demure. We also describe men as beautiful, hot, cute, and good-looking, just as we do with women, but beneath most of these (with the possible exception of cute) lies an assumption of the strength and fine construction that’s already built into the default definition of handsome. The rough equivalent of a default compliment for women—beautiful—can imply a sort of divine harmony, a grace that must be inspired, not constructed. We want our men built, our women magic. The craft of handsomeness keeps it available to any woman or a man given a good set of genes. But it's only women whom society requires to go above and beyond fine construction into the realm of beauty.

I’ve grown to rather like handsome, though I didn’t always; I used to see it as lacking a feminine delicacy I wanted to be seen as possessing. Certainly I’m not alone: “A handsome woman. Did he honestly think that was flattering?” writes a character in Stephanie Grace Whitson’s Sixteen Brides, and hive-mind sites like Urban Dictionary and Yahoo Answers are rife with confusion on the matter. “Not conventionally pretty,” says one commenter; “May be either slightly attractive or slightly unattractive, but not to be mistaken with ugly,” says another. The less kind interpretations of handsome might still accurately apply, but over time I’ve begun to think of handsome as implying a sort of health and vigor I’d rather possess than delicacy. Handsome garners an admiration that needn’t be about lust or attraction, more about general appreciation. I might be warming to it in part because of age: At 35, while I’d like to think the bloom isn’t entirely off the rose, handsomeness is something that, with luck, I can look forward to for decades to come. Because of its breadth of connotations, it’s a term we can use to pique interest—in fact, at its best, the handsome woman may have an allure that the beautiful one might not. “She is gloved to ravish. Her toilet is of an exquisite simplicity. She has the vivacity, the fashions of an artist,” writes Mary Elizabeth Braddon in her 1875 novel Hostages to Fortune. “Permit, monsieur, it is not so easy to describe a handsome woman. That does not describe itself.”

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For more Thoughts on a Word, click here.

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 9.30.11

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

(via Makezine)

From Head...
Totally rhombic: Math haircut!

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Cynthia!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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."

Beauty Blogosphere 9.9.11

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

From Head...
No product no problem: Awesome roundup of 130+ women with absolutely no hair products from green beauty site No More Dirty Looks. (Bonus points if you can spot me without cheating! I also see a couple of Beheld readers...)

...To Toe...
Pedi for the cause: Men in Jonesboro, Arkansas, are getting their toenails painted for ovarian cancer awareness. Okay, now, truly I am glad that these men are making it clear that women's health issues are actually people's health issues, and I should probably just shut up. But doesn't the whole idea here hinge upon ha-ha-women's-concerns-are-so-hilarious? Or am I just looking for a self-righteous feminist reason to not endorse slacktivism?


...And Everything In Between:

And the award for the MOST OBVIOUSLY IRONIC headline of the year goes to: Me, with "I Was Bad at Sex!" in this month's American Glamour (the one with Jennifer Aniston, Demi Moore, and Alicia Keys on the cover). My mini-essay about being a lousy lover is on page 250 (but isn't online), and is waiting for you to peruse whilst on line at the grocery store. (In Glamour's defense, they did run the headline by me. And to my relief, they did not fact-check it.)

Isn't he lovely: Super-excited for the upcoming Cristen Conger eight-part series at Bitch about the male beauty myth!

Crystaleyes: Vogue Japan tapes Crystal Renn's eyes to make her look...Japanese. This seemed both racist and ridiculous before I learned it was Vogue Japan (the stylist who did the taping was Italian), and now it just seems absurd.

Where are all the male Asian models?: Forbes asks. (And we answer, well, they certainly aren't working at Vogue Japan.)

Oshkosh B'Gosh: I'm oddly fascinated by the shoplifting of cosmetics, despite not having done it myself for 20+ years, and this story has the brilliant twist of the culprit being the reigning beauty queen of Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Uncanny!: A Boston federal judged ruled that The Manly Man Cans, a bundle of men's grooming products, must cease distribution under that name, as it comes too close to a competitor, The Man Can.

Not like teen spirit.

When the judge cries: Prince is to pay nearly $4 million to Revelations Perfume and Cosmetics after he backed out of a deal to promote a perfume in conjunction with his new album.

Mercury poisoning from cosmetics: A good reminder of why the Safe Cosmetics Act is important: 18 people in south Texas have reported elevated mercury levels as a result of a Mexican skin cream. And that's just what's being brought across the border--I shudder to think of the mercury levels in the blood of users whose governments might not be as vigilant.

"Why do you walk like you're all that?": Nahida at The Fatal Feminist has a fantastic essay about slut-shaming, modesty, and the male gaze: "Don't lecture me about modesty when you've clearly lost yours, arrogantly believing you have any right to tell me these things or command me to stop or interpret my behavior..."

News flash: Okay, I am officially over the whole "Did you know women can legally go topless in New York City?" publicity stunts with the arrival of the Outdoor Topless Co-Ed Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society, which in an interview with Jen Doll of the Village Voice claims to want women going topless in public "something of social inconsequence" yet has the tagline "making reading sexy." I mean, seriously, am I missing something here?

Extreme confessions: Interesting read from one of the "extreme plastic surgeons" on Extreme Makeover. Seems that the show was somewhat nonrepresentative of how plastic surgery usually goes. Shocking, I know, I know.

"That's not funny": Speaking up about sexism makes men nicer, according to a recent study. My personal experience correlates with this, and I always thought it was because I'm a bit of a wuss and while I will call out men on their sexist remarks I do so with tons of apologies and nice-making and blushing and stammering. But maybe I'm not giving either myself or the men enough credit?

Self-care Rx: Rosie Molinary's prescription for wellness comes at a handy time for me as I attempt to up my self-care. Being specific and deliberate helps here—and I can attest to the power of actually having a prescriptions. (An old therapist once actually wrote out a prescription for a monthly massage.)

Wearing confidence: Already Pretty on how to broadcast your body confidence. My favorite (and most unexpected) is about giving compliments, which, when spoken from a place of truth, brings rewards to both giver and receiver. (Here, though, I'm reminded of the double-edged sword compliments can become.)

Midge Brasuhn of the Brooklynites

Roller derby and spectacle: Fit and Feminist looks at roller derby—usually played by women in suggestive uniform/costumes who go by oft-racy pseudonyms—as a sport by the way we currently define sports. I'm not the biggest roller derby fan, but after reading this intriguing post I'm ready to declare it not only a sport, but the sport.

Scent strip: Strippers test pheromone perfumes at Tits and Sass to see if they increase their earnings. The grand result: eh. But an amusing "eh"!

There she is, Miss America: The history of the American beauty pageant. Is it any surprise that one of the first brains behind these events was circus impresario P.T. Barnum?

Un/covered: Photographs of women in public and private life in the Middle East. Most interesting to me are the photos of the fashion designers who are fully covered. It seems like a juxtaposition—and it is, given the flashy designs they're creating—but it makes me wonder about what traits we assign to designers, assuming that their work is an extension of them...and about what traits we assign to women in hijab.

She's my cherry pie?: Jill hits the nail on the head as to why the self-submitted photographs for the plus-size American Apparel modeling contest are disturbing. Intellectually I guess I should be all yay subversion! but my genuine reaction is quite different.

Why Hearing "You're Beautiful" Makes Me Freeze

(via)

My first kiss was unremarkable except for the fact that it was mine: 4-H camp, nighttime, crickets, slow motion, etc. I’ll remember it forever, of course, but I will also remember what came next. We managed to break from our starry-eyed hold to go back to the main camp for movie night. We rigged up a makeshift blanket-nest, then he then got us some popcorn. Upon his return, I thanked him, and in a dead-earnest manner that can only be successfully performed if you are a mild-mannered, tender-hearted son of a hog farmer—which he was—he looked me in the eye and quietly said, “I’d do anything for you.”

I froze. I recognized the winsome romanticism of it all, of course, and wasn’t untouched by it. But I remember feeling his eyes on me and thinking that now we were something out of a movie: My gallant hero would do “anything” for me (he’d even fetch popcorn!), which made me his heroine, and heroines were there to be looked at, and heroines were pretty, maybe even beautiful, and I froze and thought, He might be thinking I am pretty right now, at this very moment, and I didn’t know what to do.

I was 14, and in the following years I learned how to not freeze in the face of sweet nothings. But that frozen sensation—the sensation of having been caught in the act of playing someone who is there to be looked at—creeps up nearly every time a man I’m dating looks at me and says, You’re beautiful.

Please do not misunderstand me: It’s not that I don’t want to hear those words from a person I’m intimately involved with. In fact, I want to hear it very much; at times, the longing can be exquisite. Yet when I hear you’re beautiful, more often than not I feel as though I need to stop whatever I’m doing in order to continue being beautiful.

If observing ourselves in the mirror makes us aware of the potential of being looked at, hearing you’re beautiful seals the deal: You are being looked at. It’s with approval, to be sure, but that approval can be instantaneously overriden by the consciousness of being observed. In physics, the observer effect states that the very act of observation changes that which is being observed. In romance, I feel that change creep through my body the instant I recognize that I am being observed. Without having actually seen it, I'm guessing it's a variation of my mirror face: My eyes open wider, my smile arranges itself into an invitation, my belly sucks itself in. You are beautiful is my body’s cue to begin the performance of pretty, a role I fill in a last-minute cast shuffle, hoping the performance can be seen before whatever fleeting beauty the graces loaned me is spirited away.

And, of course, the act of observation not only changes that which is being observed; it can also kill it. For I know that while the companions who have uttered this have meant it, I also know they were speaking not of my God-given face—which is pleasant enough but is in no immediate danger of launching a thousand ships—but of whatever quality it was that drew them to me in the first place. I know You’re beautiful has been the way a fellow here and there over the years has let me know that I am beautiful to him—that I am special, that I am being seen under the incandescent glow brought only by infatuation, or, on occasion, love. I know that when spoken between people under that incandescence, You’re beautiful is not so much a comment on anyone’s looks as it is code for: You, at this moment, captivate me. And the minute the performance of beauty rides roughshod over the captivation that prompted those words, beauty dwindles. Depending on the fellow’s aesthetic tastes, he might find me pretty regardless, for prettiness is not as rapid a shape-shifter as beauty. But if a man tells me I am beautiful because I am being myself, and then I stop being myself, I smother my own glow in trying to hold onto it.

I’d like to start seeing You’re beautiful in terms not of theater but of alchemy, the creation of that golden Venusian glow that doesn’t exist until two people look at one another and pronounce beauty. And, as it happens, I’m in a relationship that happily draws from the school of alchemy over theater. Perhaps my inability to see You’re beautiful in that light all along was immaturity, or a matter of the fellows’ intonation, or simply not being in the right relationships.

But I suspect my frozen reaction to You’re beautiful wasn’t about the words, or even about the men in question, but about the schismatic approach so many of us—including me—have to beauty. For as much as we wholly believe that beauty is about a spirit, a moment, the shape of a smile, a glint in an eye, a roll of a hip, a flip of one’s hair, a caress, a held gaze, a freedom of movement, a peace with one’s self, we also know that’s not the whole story. We know that on the other side of beauty lies the parts that alternately delight and trouble us: the taming of the hair, the whittling of the waist, the sandblasting of the skin, the pinching of a tweezer, and the constantly shifting ground we all occupy within the realm of this side of the schism. When I hear You’re beautiful, unless I know where the other person stands in the vast space beauty occupies, I can’t know what I'm actually hearing. Freezing at least fixes my own footing in that space.

Freezing, as it happens, is another concern of physics: It is a slowing of particles’ movement. When particles slow, they lose energy. When particles lose energy, they lose heat. Freezing is the opposite of incandescence, and while I know which state I’d choose given the option, I also know which one my body has chosen for me before.



This post is a part of the monthly Feminist Fashion Bloggers collection. This month's prompt: dating and relationships.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


This essay was originally posted at Feministe.

Beauty Blogosphere 7.22.11

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

But what about two-tone villainesses?

From Head...
Killer blondes: A look at hair color and hairstyles of classic villainesses--entertaining, even if the premise (Murdoch phone-hacking ringleader Rebekah Brooks' shock of red waves) is a tad shaky. 

...To Toe...

Natural nail polish remover: One of the sticking points of a green beauty routine is nail polish for your pedicure. No More Dirty Looks has tackled this before, and The Daily Green rounds it out this week with highlighting a natural nail polish remover.

...And Everything In Between:

Man-made: Gee, how long did it take folks to go from celebrating men's cosmetics to looking askance when they look a little too made-up, as here about Elizabeth Hurley's new fellow? About a millisecond?

Nasty boys: The Sydney Morning Herald asks why men get their own product designed to allow them to not shower. Are men dirtier than women somehow, or is the idea that they like showering less, or...? 

Smell of success: Duane Reade/Walgreens Look boutique is paying off, at least for Demeter fragrances (I wonder if their Funeral Home scent could have a role in Illamasqua's postmortem cosmetics service?), which has gotten a serious boost from its prominent store placement.

Food-scented beauty products may stimulate your mental appetite: Study participants in the Netherlands applied one of three lotions: a chocolate-scented lotion labeled as a chocolate-scented lotion, a chocolate-scented lotion with no label, and an unscented lotion with no label. People who applied the labeled chocolate lotion then ate more chocolate than either of the other groups. I dislike the term "obesity epidemic" for a variety of reasons, but we do live in a society with a wildly disordered relationship to food, and examining issues like these seems worthwhile enough—not so we can all slim down, but so that we can begin to understand the mess of conflicting food messages we get every day.

Why we buy cosmetics: A study from the University of Basque Country proclaims that we buy cosmetics because they make us feel good, not because of their practical use. Gee, glad that's settled.

Big businesz: It's not just in the States that small cosmetics players get knocked off the markets; between 2006 and 2010, 1,200 cosmetics stores disappeared from the Polish market, to be replaced with chains, which now generate 80% of the country's cosmetics sales.

Military brats turned beauty queens: A surprising thread connecting several Indian beauty queens: They're daughters of India's armed forces members. “I guess it comes from the gift of adaptability from having to move from place to place," points out Gul Panag, Miss India 1999. "It makes us more open, broad-minded, inclusive, allows us to go with the flow, connect easily with people, places, environment and circumstances that lead us to be, at any point, both flexible and positive.”

Nexus Vomitus, Millie Brown. Canvas and vomit, 2010.

Puke me a rainbow: Conceptual artist Millie Brown produces colorful vomit as performance art, and About-Face questions whether this glamorizes bulimia. It's a question worth asking, but ultimately I disagree. (Surprise!) Bulimia is marked by an incredible sense of shame; I imagine a bulimic would have a different reaction to Brown's work than most viewers, but my educated guess is that she wouldn't perceive it as a green light. The Lady Gaga video that Brown is most known for is stratospherically weird, but actually glamorizing bulimia? I wish I could see it because it makes logical sense, but honestly I just don't. (Brown doesn't eat for two days before performances, which certainly isn't healthy, but if she doesn't have an eating disorder then it's also not something that needs an intervention. If she did have a history of EDs, I'd feel differently.)

Is makeup a daily must?: Sally McGraw on tumbling down the "cosmetics rabbit hole" and becoming a daily makeup wearer after a lifetime of occasional use. I'll testify to her struggle: I have to be careful about what makeup I experiment with, because if I know something looks good on me I'll probably start wearing it every day. (My special-occasion look barely differs from my day-to-day look for this reason.)

Hair color, depression, and being seen: Velvet Cerebellum's compelling essay on how dyeing her hair wild colors has helped her manage depression. "I'd go out and kids would stare and smile, they liked it. Could a world as terrible as the one I imagined also be a world with kids waving and smiling and loving my hair?"
(via Already Pretty)

But I'm a Gemini!: Hugo Schwyzer on flirting for validation of attractiveness: "When married or otherwise 'taken' folks flirt with people who aren’t their partners, they’re often not trying to start an affair. What they want is affirmation of their continued attractiveness, a reassurance that their own significant others can no longer give."

Tattoo you: The Tattooed Philosopher on how tattooed women may buck the beauty myth: "I have found in my conversations with other tattooed women a unity...rather than a competition with each other or a divide from within. This unity of tattooed sisters shows the lack of power the beauty myth has on those of us gals who freely define ourselves and have our own ideas of beauty."

The "M" ain't for marriage, people: Virginia at Never Say Diet on a study that "proves" that couples are happier when the ladypartner has a lower BMI than her manpartner. "Ours is a forbidden love," she writes of her marriage (which, despite obviously being a sham, seems like it might somehow be making both partners happy?). If I'm the Oedipus of cankles, she's the Thisbe of BMI.

What's feminism got to do, got to do with it?: Some excellent talk about feminism, self-love, and dieting from Beauty Schooled, Anytime Yoga, and Kjerstin of Mirror Mirror Off the Wall via her guest post at Sociological Images.

Magic underwear: Allyson at Decoding Dress on shapewear, or rather why we choose clothing that makes us look like we have something we don't. Confession time here: I love shapewear--rather, I wear it on occasion, and I like the effect it gives enough to deal with the discomfort. But, yeah, I do sort of feel like I'm "cheating"--like I'm telling the world that my waist is a bit more nipped-in than it is, my bosom a tad fuller. And besides the obvious self-esteem question of why I'd suffer discomfort in order to whittle my waist, every time I put on a waist cincher I wonder about its larger implications. I've written before about how artificial beauty can actually be a sort of democracy, so hell, let me look like I'm more of an hourglass than I actually am! Bring it! But I also know that's sort of a cop-out on my end, a conscious opting in of a certain beauty tyranny--we're not talking false eyelashes, we're talking false bodies. And the push-pull continues.

Thoughts on a Portmanteau: Manorexia, Drunkorexia, and Liarexia

Webster's, 1894: Anorexy: Want of appetite, without a loathing of food

As Portmanteau Week here at The Beheld* concludes, I’d like to turn away from cankles and mandals—I know, how could anyone turn away from mandals?—to something with a tad more gravity: manorexia, drunkorexia, and liarexia.

These spinoffs of anorexia seem, at first (and second) look to undermine the severity of these conditions. Anorexia indicates that the sufferer needs treatment; manorexia implies that the sufferer is an outlier, not quite an anorexic (even though that’s exactly what he is), more of an anomaly than a person who might be welcomed into a treatment community. Drunkorexia conjures up not anorexia with alcoholism comorbidity (or alcoholism with disordered eating comorbidity) but a gaggle of sorority girls who skip dinner so they can hit up the beer bong and still fit into their Sevens. As for liarexia, the word didn’t appear to exist until this very month, with the Daily Mail piece about women who eat heartily in public but who restrict in private. The condition, of course, has been around for ages—it falls under the umbrella of ED-NOS, or eating disorder not otherwise specified, which actually has a higher mortality rate than both anorexia and bulimia.

Overall, I’m inclined to agree with Stephanie Marcus at The Huffington Post, who writes that “labeling the behavior ‘liarexia’ distracts from its seriousness,” which I feel goes for all of the above terms. But here’s where I’m going to trot out my beloved Gloria Steinem quote again: Because of feminism, “We have terms like sexual harassment and battered women. A few years ago, they were just called life.” The emergence of manorexia shows that people are beginning to understand that men can be afflicted with eating disorders—something that wasn’t true outside of the medical community (and often within it) less than a decade ago. Drunkorexia might get the mental wheels turning in some women who have been doing it for so long that they don’t realize it might actually be a problem, not just a Saturday night. As for liarexia, it highlights the larger problem behind the condition: We’re so on guard about women’s food intake—and we attach so much emotional and moral value to what we eat—that eating a cheeseburger becomes a signal that all is well on the food front, even when it’s not. See also: DIPE, or Documented Instances of Public Eating—which, incidentally, the Daily Mail piece addressed.

In fact, the Daily Mail piece that raised my ire is actually a pretty solid piece that raises awareness that one doesn’t have to have a full-fledged eating disorder in order to have a problem. I’m constantly reading up on this stuff, so I’m always glad to see a public take on eating disorders that goes beyond the classic poor-little-rich-girl tale (thankfully, there are more complex depictions of EDs out there now, but that’s a fairly recent development). But most people learn about eating disorders primarily through mainstream outlets, and by relying on cutesy terms, those outlets are failing the public. The Columbia Journalism Review opined that this New York Times piece about anorexia offshoots was frivolous, even as the writer stressed that addictions and eating disorders are troubling. “But worth nearly 1,400 words in the Sunday Times (the Style section, but still)—and deserving of the implicit validation that comes from reference as a ‘phenomenon’? Doubtful.” Yet I’m doubtful that the CJR would have taken issue with the topic if actual medical terms—say, anorexia with alcholism comorbidity, or ED-NOS—were used instead of the word drunkorexia. In pointing fingers at the Times for its reportage, the CJR dismissed a legitimate concern as a “trend piece.” But with a word like drunkorexia, can you blame them?

Anorexia spinoffs are the inverse of cankles: Where cankles invents a trivial problem to shame us, drunkorexia/manorexia/liarexia labels an existing legitimate problem and then inadvertently trivializes it. And I am fairly sure it’s inadvertent: Neither the Daily Mail liarexia piece nor the New York Times drunkorexia piece glosses over the issues at stake. (I’m picky about the way this stuff is reported and certainly see gaps in the presentation of the information, but overall I found it reasonably responsible.) What I’d like to see from here is a proper naming of what’s going on. If coining one corner of ED-NOS as liarexia helps alert some of its sufferers that what they’re doing is not normal behavior, then I don’t want to get rid of liarexia. Admitting to yourself that you have an eating disorder—especially when it’s not one that leaves you thin enough to warrant concern from others, or that doesn’t have easily diagnosable behaviors like purging—can be a long, self-searching process. My optimistic hope is that the minimizing of ED-NOS through terms like liarexia and drunkorexia may, on occasion, worm their way into sufferers’ minds in a way that a clinical term might not. (Manorexia is more problematic: Men with eating disorders already suffer a double shame, both the shame of having an ED in the first place and then the shame of not being taken as seriously as a woman with the same symptoms might. Male anorectics are already sidelined and belittled enough—but I suppose that there may be anorexic men who find solace in the term, as it indicates that other men suffer in the same way.)

I just want these terms to be portals to real discussion that could lead to real treatment for the people who need it, instead of allowing them to reside in the mental space created by the trivialization of their problem. I’m guessing that for every woman for whom hearing drunkorexia sounds an alarm, there’s another woman who uses it to laugh off her symptoms, popping martini olives—you know, dinner—into her mouth as she jokes about being drunkorexic. If we’re going to use these words as ways to develop a more comprehensive understanding of eating disorders, we need to do so with care.

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Language evolves with the people: Copyediting is my bread and butter, but nonetheless I wholeheartedly subscribe to a descriptive approach to words and grammar. (Don’t tell my clients!) You’ll never find me hand-wringing over the inclusion of LOL, OMG, or IMHO in Oxford; these are terms we use to help us communicate, and if we’re going to communicate effectively we need to make good use of all the tools at our disposal, IMHO. This includes portmanteaux—even the ones I’ve examined with skepticism this week.

But I’d suggest that we should proceed with caution when coining new words. There’s no evidence that language changes more quickly than it did before the Internet; what the Internet has done is give rise to the ability to create mini-phenomenon. When I was researching terms for Portmanteau Week, it stood out to me how the words were clustered. Cankles hit its peak in 2009 (it had gone mainstream well before then, but 2009 provided the most buzz); drunkorexia was big in 2008; liarexia has more than 14,000 Google hits, and I’ve yet to find one of those results published before July of this year. (Mandals, ever the outlier, stands alone, popping up with seasonal regularity.)

What this indicates to me is that we’re eager to examine what may (manorexia) or may not (cankles) be a genuine cultural shift, and that we’re getting better than ever at coining catchy words to describe them. I’d like to see us be careful to not chase clever terminology at the expense of the actual meaning of the words. Trend-ifying portmanteaux may hopefully (hopefully!) work well when we're talking about things like cankles (if we can agree that 2006-2009 was the era of the cankle and be done with it, I'll be thrilled). But it doesn't work out so nicely when we're talking about legitimate concerns that need legitimate examination. We can't allow for the issues behind those talk-cute terms to be swept under the rug once their press cycle has expired. If coining manorexia leads more sick men to seek treatment for anorexia, fantastic—but we need to keep discussing these issues in order to avoid turning them into the trend that their catchy portmanteaux labels indicate they are. Let’s not forget that the Times drunkorexia piece appeared in the Fashion & Style section (as do most things affecting the ladies, but that’s a different post). Human suffering is not a trend, and giving it the trend treatment makes that easy to forget.

 
*Note that I must qualify Portmanteau Week with “at The Beheld,” because otherwise I’d run the risk of confusing readers who surely participated in 1995’s “Fun People” Portmanteau Week. Everything I do, I do it for you. Also, please allow the record to reflect that as analytical as I got here, I recognize that the concept of Portmanteau Week is utterly ridiculous. Or—and with this I shall allow Portmanteau Week to close with love—ridonkulous.

Thoughts on a Portmanteau: Mandals

Speaking of portmanteaus, would this T-shirt qualify as anti-mandal slacktivism?
(For the record, I am all about sandals for all, Jesus-style.)

"Didn't the Greeks invent sandals?" asked a sandal-wearing male colleague the other day. (Actually, it turns out Oregonians did, thus setting the stage for the state's eventual reputation as hosting a bunch of Birkenstock-wearing, craft-brewing lovefreaks. Which, if my days at University of Oregon are any indication, we are.) His question was in context of mandals, hardly a newfangled fashionisto invention—indeed, they are merely sandals, which, at their base definition, are unisex. "Why do we insist on calling them mandals?" he asked.

Why do we, even if we generally sputter it out with a laugh, always using it self-consciously, making fun of the term even as we use it? It got me thinking about the uses of portmanteaus (a word formed by combining two other words, like brunch) in general, and how they're often invented to describe a new phenomenon that needs naming (like e-mail, motel, newscaster, or, hell, Tanzania) or something that somebody with an agenda names in its infancy in hopes of creating a demand. Whether it's a product (turducken) or a movement (blaxploitation), these words might not be coined cynically (there is nothing cynical about turducken), but when the term precedes its visibility in the culture, it begs investigation. I’ll be doing a mini-series this week on portmanteaus as they apply to gender and the body, beginning with exactly where my beach-oriented brain is at today: mandals.

In the case of mandals—and murses, and manpris (which, in all fairness, I've never heard anyone say out loud)—we seem to have cutesy portmanteaus that serve to trivialize aspects of men's lives that might bring them closer to the traditionally feminine realm. It's worth noting that early uses of mandals, notably in Carson Kressly's Off the Cuff, refer to a specific type of thick-soled sandal that Kressly refers to as "way too lesbian hootenanny" and that the authors of Is Your Straight Man Gay Enough? (!) call "rough and tumble sandal imitations." Presumably in its origins there was still a little wiggle room for a dignified sandal, a structured, manly, Italian-style slip-on that would allow American men to walk through heated summers with a little breeze between the toes. (In fact, early excavations of mandal find it necessarily paired with the admonition about not wearing them with socks, which, frankly is just good common sense.)

Now, however, that distinction has been lost—it's every mandal for itself, whether it be sleek and leather or rubber and chunky. My question is: Who benefits from mandal, murse, and the like? (I am tempted to include jorts, which, judging from the subjects of Jorts.com, are strictly worn by men, but the word itself remains gender-free, the hir and ze of the jeans shorts world.) Companies aren't using the term murse or mandal to sell, well, murses and mandals; they're using the perfectly good preexisting terms such as bag, satchel, messenger bag, etc. (Which, for the record, are all words women use as well for what we carry as well. I carry a midsize leather bag with internal pockets and mid-length shoulder straps designed to be worn on the shoulder, so it's distinctly a purse, not, say, a tote bag, messenger bag, satchel, or backpack—all of which might be called a murse if it were carried by a man.) In fact, if you Google murse or mandals, you'll find not links to actual bags and shoes, but criticism or praise of the items. "The Horror of Mandals," writes the Phoenix New Times. "There needs to be sand beneath your feet, or your name needs to be Matthew McConaughey,” says a source in The Daily Beast's mandals piece. On the flipside, Internet celebrity William Sledd proclaims, "I love my murse!" Of course, Sledd is best known for his "Ask a Gay Man" YouTube series, thus lobbing man-bags right into the arena of sexual identity—not because he's gay, but because he's saying this very pointedly in the persona of a gay man. (And thus we come full circle back to Carson Kressly, whose Queer Eye for the Straight Guy now seems downright quaint.)

So the companies aren't directly benefiting. You could argue that the terminology exists because of a demand for men's sandals and bags (I can't find numbers on whether sales of these items have increased in recent years), and that might be true, whether it's consumer- or company-driven—but I can't imagine that belittling terminology would actually help sales. At the same time, you don't hear the people wearing murses and mandals using the terms with a straight face—in fact, nobody says it with a straight face. These terms exist to make it clear that we as a culture are willing to cut men a little bit of slack about borrowing from the feminine sphere, but not without hazing them first. We'll allow men to wear shoes that offer a bit of relief in sweltering weather; we'll allow men to carry a bag so that they're not jamming everything into their pockets—but we'll be sure to tease them, rough them up a little, let them know that their comfort comes with a price.
 
In short, nobody benefits with these terms of mild derision—not men, who might wish to wear sandals but know they'll have to brace themselves for some light-hearted teasing, and certainly not women, for it's our fashions that are being suddenly framed as frivolous and shame-worthy instead of practical. (I never thought twice about sandals being gendered until I heard of mandals—I'm of the "my feet need to breathe!" camp, which I know is a deeply polarizing issue, but anyway.) Surely the world has greater linguistic problems than mandals, but I think it's a term worth looking at if we're trying to work our way toward gender equality.

This is why I'm hesitant to say that the widening field of men's cosmetics signifies any sort of progress in loosening gender roles, even as some spot-on feminist thinkers stake their claim otherwise. It's lovely to think that the boom in men's skin care means that we're slowly working our way toward allowing men access to the same realm of fantasy and play that we grant to women through fashion and beauty. But I simply don't see that as being the case: If we as a culture can't allow men to wear shoes that expose their toes without giving them some special word that keeps them in the corner, are we really going to be able to give them shame-free access to eyeliner—excuse me, guyliner—anytime soon?