Beauty Blogosphere 3.23.12

March 23, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

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

From Head...

Un/covered: Spellbinding discussion among three Muslim women who have varying interpretations of what the Koran's dictate of modesty means, from a woman who wears the niqab (face veil) to the hijab (head scarf) to no head covering at all. (via Sally)

"These vagabond shoes..."

...To Toe...
Exposed: It's sandal weather! I'm probably the least germophobic person on the planet (somebody's got to save all you germ freaks from the superbugs—you're welcome). But after day 1 of sandal weather and coming home with my feet looking like this, I'm about to admit defeat. I was wearing a maxidress, which apparently makes your feet hideously dirty by tracking in every bit of grit on New York sidewalks. Anyone else dealt with this? Thoughts, advice, help?

...And Everything In Between:
"Political hygiene": Russian opposition leaders are calling for a boycott of Proctor & Gamble products. The company advertises with the second most-watched network in Russia, NTV, which has a history of minimizing Putin's detractors, accusing protestors of showing up at rallies for "free cookies" instead of showing up to make a statement about election fraud.

Story hour: Ads have always told us stories, but apparently we're on the cusp of a literal storytelling ad trend (this piece actually cites "Stop Kony" as an example), with Revlon taking the lead in an upcoming storytelling campaign.

Brazilian blowup: The Brazilian blowout company has settled, as Virginia Sole-Smith reports at The Nation Institute. But as she appends at her own blog, this really, really shouldn't be a story anymore.

Nutty trends: Four beauty industry trends worth noting, including beauty kiosks and incubators like Sephora and Duane Reade boutiques. Plus, "Nut Oil Optimism"!

Avon calling: What is the future of the Avon lady? With the availability of online purchasing, the company's iconic sales force is suffering. As the company searches for a CEO to replace Andrea Jung, the question is whether the new chief will hark back to the days of Avon's direct-sales glory or throw it overboard altogether.

Viva Glam: MAC, o MAC! You do things right and I get suspicious, and then you appear to do more things right and I'm left sort of admitting that you're awesome. I knew about MAC's Viva Glam lipstick campaign, which gives 100% of its proceeds to AIDS/HIV work. What I didn't realize was that it also strongarms its retail partners into donating their cut, and that it's specifically ramped up efforts in developing nations, which need funding the most. This video with the senior vice president breaks it down.

Mao, Andy Warhol, screenprint, 1972

Empire: Nars Cosmetics takes a cue from MAC and releases a collection based on an art icon: Andy Warhol.

Lone gunmen: Aaaaand speaking of art-inspired makeup collections, there's always Estee Lauder's Mad Men collection, which, like, ugh. I'm a huge fan—of the show, not the collection; I'm inclined to agree with The Gloss about the questionable message that packaging an era that wasn't so hot for women into a product designed for men. Anyway, Amanda Marcotte's theory about the lawnmower incident being a metaphor for the Kennedy assassination is put to video here—absolutely worth a viewing, though it might make you jones even more for the show's return on Sunday.

Model citizens: Israel becomes the first country to pass a law regulating the body mass index of models and requiring visible notices of photo retouching when the effect makes the model look thinner. Other countries have passed resolutions about this but no laws as of yet; am eager to see how/if this effects bodily satisfaction of Israeli women and men.

Girly men: Saudi Arabia is suspending visas for foreign salesmen in lingerie shops in order to force businesses to comply with the recent edict that only women could hold these positions.

Hear, hear!: Want to give the FDA a piece of your mind about cosmetics regulation? The government body is having a public meeting May 15 to discuss regulation, particularly international consistency.

Dr. Awkward: Eager to read more from this Alberta researcher who is studying women in changing rooms (locker rooms, dressing rooms, etc.). (via Imp Kerr)

Also, stethoscopes: Wearing a lab coat may increase your attention span. What I take from this is not so much that we should all wear lab coats all the time (though JustLabCoats.com may persuade you otherwise) but rather that the idea of "dress for success" might have more worth than we realize. (via Rebekah)

No 'shopping: The Economist's cultural arm, Intelligent Life (like the mag, but am I the only one who thinks that title is pretentious as hell?), is featuring Cate Blanchett sans Photoshop on its latest cover. (This isn't a first; Marie Claire did the same thing with Jessica Simpson in 2010.) I cynically tend to think that airbrushing is the least of our problems, but seeing Blanchett's face, which is glowing and lovely as-is, makes you wonder why the industry relies on it. Intelligent Life gives their two cents: "Publishers want a recognisable person on the cover, with a real career; but they also want an empty vessel—for clothes and jewellery and make-up, which often seem to be supplied by the advertisers with the most muscle."

From Nokia's patent file.

We are all cyborgs: Nokia applies for a patent for magnetic tattoos that would vibrate upon electronic activation. "Examples of... applications may be low battery indication, received message, received call, calendar alert, change of profile, eg based on timing, change of time zone, or any other." Also, as of next week, this blog will appear strictly in binary code 00101110010011110100101100111111

Expression and self-love: The truly fabulous Gala Darling, who gives workshops on radical self-love in five-inch heels, gives a sort of manifesto on personal expression, beauty standards, self-love, and societal expectations—and manages to do so without a whiff of judgment. "Some women say that if we wear lipstick, we’re only doing it because society has told us to. I would argue that the woman who tries to buck society by NOT wearing lipstick is just as influenced! No one exists in a vacuum, & almost all of our decisions are effected by external sources. ...I also don’t believe that policing other womens’ choices moves any of us forward."

Missing the point: Apparently this story about Jennifer Aniston's beauty routine, which I linked to last week, was being taken literally by that rigorous arm of research and reporting known as celebrity journalism. Yo, nobody was claiming that Jennifer Aniston literally spends $8,000 a month on beauty, and the idea that this is something she's supposed to refute is nonsense. The point of the original article was that this is how much her routine would cost in aggregate—many of the items were one-time deals (like the nose job), and let's not forget that as a celebrity, much of this stuff is foisted upon her whether she wants it or not. The point isn't that Jennifer Aniston steals money from starving orphans for her skin cream; it's that the mass of stuff Jennifer Aniston needs in order to look like "Jennifer Aniston" is ridiculous.

Going nude: As I've written before, I'm sort of ambivalent about what going without makeup means. But I support projects that seek to untangle the essence of makeup by having regular users of the stuff go bare-faced, so I'll be keeping an eye on The Naked Face Project—no makeup, no shaving, no primping, for 60 days.

The medium is the message: From Danielle at Final Fashion, why fashion bloggers are more like designers than critics: "Great bloggers are brilliant at expressing themselves through images and words—just like the most successful designers are. Media is not used to translate reality in an informative way, instead it is used to bring their personality to life in the imaginations of an audience. ... As a blogger myself I find the entire process to be far more intuitive and artistic than it appears—it comes from inside you."

Firm investment: What do we really mean when we say something is an "investment piece"? As Sally points out, we wear pajamas every night, but only rarely are they considered an "investment piece": "It seems that the idea of an “investment piece” is linked to visibility and status as well as quality and use."

Long tail: Darlene at Hourglassy offers a bit of hope that the "long tail" of niche markets might trickle down to clothing sizes. As it is now, the customer is bearing the risk inherent of new markets (if large-breasted women are considered a "new market"—I suppose the market is actually large-breasted women who want a proper fit finally). Could that change with time?

I Dream of Deenie

March 21, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

I was recently diagnosed with a medical condition. I’ve got a mild case of it, but it brings a few troublesome complications regardless, nothing serious. And as one might well do, the first thing I did when I got home upon receiving my diagnosis was Google it to learn more. The list of symptoms included what took me to treatment in the first place, a good number of troubles I don’t have, and a surprising entry: poor body image. The diagnosis? Scoliosis.

Now, if I’m being officially diagnosed for the first time at age 35, obviously my scoliosis isn’t terribly problematic. I was monitored for it as a child (do they still do those annual scoliois screenings at school? It somehow seems like a remnant of the ’70s, like the Dorothy Hamill haircut) but it was so mild that it barely qualified as scoliosis, and it didn’t warrant treatment—certainly not intervention like surgery or a brace. Basically, my muscles compensate for my wonky spine, running me through varying degrees of pain; I treat it with exercise, occasional ibuprofen, massage, and masturbation. (Deenie in da house!) In other words, it’s not a huge deal, and it’s not something that weighs on my mind a lot.

But there it is, that symptom far down on the list—below the physical pain, below the visual cues—poor body image. There’s a whole body of work devoted to studying the psychosocial effects of scoliosis, particularly in adolescents, but it boils down to this: Something about your body is “wrong,” and chances are it’s not something you ever thought was a problem, and you really can’t do much of anything about it. Wearing a brace may or may not have an impact on patients’ body image, but there’s evidence supporting a correlation between scoliosis and body image, regardless of treatment.

Now, the people being studied aren’t people like me: I’m an adult, for starters, and one with a very mild case of scoliosis. Though I’ve been told repeatedly by chiropractors, tailors, and osteopaths that there’s something irregular about my form, nobody until recently has used the word scoliosis about my body since the sixth grade. Whatever body image problems I have come from the usual suspects—perfectionism, media, growing up girl—not my spinal curvature.

But it’s not hard for me to see how my body image has shifted ever so slightly in the past few weeks. Part of it was the pain that drove me to seek treatment; it’s difficult to feel like your body is something to be proud of when you’re wincing whenever you take off your shirt. But more than that, I’ve learned that—and this is an unkind term—I’m misshapen. I found myself complaining of feeling “broken” and “twisted”—words I’ve never used to describe myself. Whenever I’ve had a problem with my body, there’s been a part of me that has known it’s in my head, because the concerns I had were solely about about how I appeared. If I thought my thighs were unappealing, there was still a part of me that understood that "unappealing" was subject to interpretation. With a twisted spine that was causing me pain—that wasn’t in my head, that was in my bones.

But in a way, whatever feelings I had are beside the point here. My literal body image—that is, the visual projection I have when thinking about my body—had shifted as well. My new mental drawing of myself was small, dropped onto a large white canvas, drawn in a combination of pencil and ink, and, yes, crooked. In my head, I went from looking somewhat like this:

(No, I do not look like Suzuki Beane in my head; she is far cooler than I could ever wish to be. It's just that Louise Fitzhugh is a far better illustrator than I am.)

to looking more like this:

Most of the time when I refer to body image, I’m really referring to negative self-talk. The image part doesn’t come up much, not for me; I’m pretty sure that my actual mental drawing of myself is reasonably spot-on. Even at my lowest, I don’t actually envision myself with elephantine thighs or a ballooning waistline; it’s more that I see roughly the same body in my mind that I saw the day before when everything was fine, but suddenly it’s unacceptable for one reason or another. I can dissect that all I want, but what it comes down to is that the interpretation of the image is what’s poor, not the body image itself.

But with the specific and decidedly dysmorphic shift in body image that accompanied my diagnosis, I’ve become aware that there is a body image living inside my head, one that’s plastic and that can shift according to new information it receives. And I don’t necessarily have any conclusions as to what this might mean, because in my case I don’t think my mental projection is erroneous. (Yes, I recognize that that’s sort of the point—that the very idea of body image means that you don’t think your mental projection of yourself is erroneous. I’ll never know how close my mental image actually is to the real deal. At least not until brain scan image projection is a helluva lot more developed, and when that happens I am using all my brain scan image technology to be able to put my dreams on YouTube.) It was only when there was new information presented—the information about myself as someone with a spinal curvature that causes me some troubles every so often—that a disconnect appeared. (For the record, once I recognized what was going on I felt fine mentally, and physically it’s really not a problem now that I’ve learned some corrective exercises.)

I guess what I’m wondering here is A) What the “image” part of “body image” means to you, and B) How your body image is affected by medical conditions that have nothing to do with weight or conventional attractiveness. (You could argue that severe scoliosis affects conventional attractiveness, I suppose—but hell, Marilyn Monroe was rumored to shave half an inch off one high heel of each pair to lend a sway to her step, and I've got that naturally, so I’m at an advantage here, oui?) Do you have an actual visual image in your head of what your body looks like? Is it in a distinct medium—like photography, drawing, animation, video—or is it too indistinct to single that out? Does the image change? Do you think your body image matches up with what’s really there, in a visual sense if not on the level of judgment/perception? Could you draw or otherwise externally project your body image? And have you ever found your body image being formed by things outside the normal trajectory of body talk?

The Transcendence of the Makeover

March 19, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beauty Blogosphere 3.16.12

March 16, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

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

From Head...
The Blago: What will disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich do about his hair in prison? "According the Federal Bureau of Prisons commissary list, Blago's choice of hair products will be limited to a choice of shampoo—Pert, Suave, V05 or Head & Shoulders." Also, blow-dryers are banned in the joint because they can be jimmied to do tattoos.

Brazilian payout: Brazilian blowout manufacturer GIB agrees upon a $4.5 million settlement after the public outcry over the discovery of carcinogenic formaldehyde in its formula. (Hats off to No More Dirty Looks for being the first to break this to a lot of people, yours truly included.) Stylists will receive $75 for each bottle of product purchased; clients who assert they've been harmed by the process will receive $35 for each treatment, up to three.

...To Toe...
Ask a Plumber: ...about installing a home pedicure spa. (As a perennial urban renter, this seems outlandish, but then again, so does having a porch.)

...And Everything In Between:
Fight like a girl: Olympic boxer Mary Spencer on her CoverGirl modeling stint: "I think what’s important is that we put on a good performance and break the stereotype that girls can’t fight." Not sure how modeling for CoverGirl is going to help that stereotype; seems more like an attempt to show that one can be "girly" while still being fierce, making me wonder how much pressure individual boxers are under to make their sport more of a spectacle, what with the skirt suggestions last year.

Color me curious: Clinique has hired a social media marketing firm. "This is news?" part of me asks, but it could signal a potential shift in color trends: Right now makeup color trends are decided basically by the annual color show in Paris (as my beauty editor interviewee puts it, "I swear to God, I think it’s one person who decides it all"). So if these firms are good at their jobs, we could be seeing more grassroots color trends, going by, I dunno, Tumblr theme colors?

Printmakers: Where do "tribal" prints really come from? (via Final Fashion)

St. Makeup: Cosmetics line founder gives "makeovers" to abandoned religious statues in shuttered churches.

I only have eyes for you: Thoroughly freaked out by "eye-gazing parties," a speed dating arrangement where instead of chatting, you stare into people's eyes. There's no doubt in my mind that eye-gazing prompts a certain level of bonding, but who wants to be bonded to a total stranger? The power of the gaze is strong—particularly for women, I think—and I can't help but wonder what sort of weird dynamic this sets up. (via Will)

Man mascara: I'd wondered why so many stories about men's cosmetics were coming out of Korea, and now I know why: Korea accounts for 40 percent of the world's high-end male cosmetics market.

Chess code: New dress regulations in the European Chess Union, dictating skirt lengths and cleavage. Click-through bonus: amazing headwear, halfway down. (via Feminist Philosophers)

Russia's 2012 Eurovision winners.

Babushki: You wouldn't know it from looking at the U.S. media, but there are female entertainers over the age of 70 who aren't Betty White. Meet Buranovskiye Babushki, six grandmothers who constitute Russia's Eurovision entry, with dance tune "Party For Everybody." This is the group's second attempt at representing Russia in the annual competition; their 2010 third-place song was "Dlinnaja-Dlinnaja Beresta I Kak Sdelat Iz Nee Aison," which, in case you don't read Udmurt, translates to "Very Long Birch Bark and How to Turn It Into a Turban." (Which, let's face it, I'd love to know.)

What women want: Boomer women say that skin protection and looking healthy trump looking younger and pretty—but skin care ads still go for image-related messages. The survey authors seem to be saying this means that the skin care market for women over 50 should shift their messaging, but it's not exactly like that market is lackluster. I'm guessing it's more that women over 50 miss the effortless look of health that came 30 years prior. (I say this as a 35-year-old woman who doesn't want to look any age I'm not, but who realized six months after her 30th birthday that the "tired" look that had befallen me wasn't exhaustion but age.)

What happened when Sally Adee was hooked up to electrodes: "I felt clear-headed and like myself, just sharper. Calmer. Without fear and without doubt. ... I can’t tell you how stunning it was to suddenly understand just how much of a drag that inner cacophony is on my ability to navigate life and basic tasks. ... Who was I apart from the angry little bitter gnomes that populate my mind and drive me to failure because I’m too scared to try? And where did those voices come from? Some of them are personal history, like the caustically dismissive 7th grade science teacher who advised me to become a waitress. Some of them are societal, like the hateful ladymag voices that bully me every time I look in a mirror. Invisible narrative informs all my waking decisions in ways I can’t even keep track of."

Fitness at every size: Congratulations to Ragen Chastain of Dances With Fat and Jeanette DePatie of The Fat Chick for the successful launch of Fit Fatties Forum, a discussion board stemming from a Health at Every Size perspective, which—I mean, the last time I went to a fitness class the instructor kept yelling about how many calories we were burning and how "those of you who are happy with the way you look can keep it at the level you're at now. The rest of you BETTER STEP IT UP," which I think was supposed to be...motivating? In any case, being able to discuss fitness without the assumption of weight loss as a goal sounds fantastic, and here's the place to do it.

Makeup, the Musical: War Paint, Lindy Woodhead's chronicle of the rivalry between Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, has been optioned as a Broadway musical. Ten bucks says one of the songs is called "I Blush to Admit."

Also, wearing green on Thursdays: About-Face asks why it's remotely okay to sexualize M&Ms. The Beheld asks if this is what 12-year-olds across the globe were anticipating with the claim of green M&Ms making you horny.

xoWTF?: In my rush to defend ladyblogs, I specifically left out mention of xoJane, which has some good content, and which also horrifies me on a weekly basis. Dude, when you have a piece from someone with a history of an eating disorder being all, "You know, juice fasts are sort of great!", you are no longer being honest or subversive; you are the problem. (I'd link but don't want to traffic-feed what the team there knows full well is a problem that needs addressing. Jane Pratt has played her last Jane Pratt card, and I am no longer interested.) Anyway! Maura goes beyond the fairly obvious points I'm making here to get to the crux of the problem.

"Cute shoes": What's the difference between fashion taste and sartorial judgment?

Video star: Just because one YouTube "am I pretty or ugly?" video turned out to be a hoax/art project doesn't mean all of them are, and an expert in this piece on the trend asks whether posting these videos is a modern form of self-mutilation. Virginia questions that, however: "Almost every teenage girl, for as long as we’ve had teenage girls, has asked “am I pretty or ugly?” And honestly, I don't know where I stand. Obviously these are horrifying, but they're just a more visible form of a very old problem. But...manalive, they really are visible. I want to trust that 13-year-olds will develop the skills to navigate these questions, but I literally cannot imagine the impact of having people tell me that I was ugly at that age. It just seems to be opening the door so much wider into the symbiotic relationship between bullies and the bullied. I have no idea if this means more girls with shaky self-esteem can get the...what would you call it, negative affirmation?...they're craving, but it certainly makes it easier.

Tenure track shoes: Hilary Levey Friedman on leaving academia—and frumpy shoes, as advised by her colleagues for interview suitability—behind. "I wanted to wear fabulous high-heel shoes all the time, especially after wearing those boring flat, black boots to the interview, having two professors comment on them, and still not getting the job."

"I think I'm beautiful": The number-one link people have sent to me is Lisa Bloom's article on not praising little girls for their looks. It's a good piece, but overlooks probably the #1 thing any of us can do to help girls navigate their way through a beauty-obsessed world: being comfortable with yourself. Amanda's approach gets to the root of it: "I've started telling my girls that I think I'm beautiful."

"Doing it wrong": From Korean American Annie Koh: "I’m not troubled by doing femininity wrong in America. There’s more variety for one (indie vs. glam, San Francisco pigtails vs. Los Angeles coif). ... But I take it personally in Korea."

Kjerstin Gruys, Ph.D. sociology student, Bay Area

March 14, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

When I initially met Kjerstin Gruys online, my first thought was: There’s another one! Several weeks before I did my own month without mirrors, Kjerstin had launched a project going a full year without them—the same year in which she was getting married, incidentally. (No, she didn’t peek on her wedding day.) A Ph.D. candidate in sociology, Kjerstin has focused much of her academic work on body image and eating disorders. But her years in the fashion industry as a merchandiser for Abercrombie & Fitch, and then GAP Corporate, were hardly an aside: Her dissertation on the shifting standards of clothing sizes merges her passions of body image, cultural body imperatives, and fashion. The best way to get to know Kjerstin’s work is following her blog, Mirror Mirror Off the Wall—and reading her upcoming book chronicling her yearlong adventure, slated to be published by Penguin in 2013. But she also took the time to share some candid thoughts with readers of The Beheld. We talked about the creative self, the role of trust in body image, and what singing alone in the car has to do with mirrors. In her own words:

On Scales vs. Mirrors
I first really became conscious of body image and women’s issues in late high school to early college. I had anorexia, and in going through the physical and emotional elements of treatment, I had to carve out an understanding of how our culture kind of shaped my experience. Having an eating disorder, you’re always aware of your own body image, but it’s not until you’re recovering that you’re really forced to take a step back and realize that you have to question a lot of assumptions.

In recovery I had to gain weight and I couldn’t get on the scale, couldn’t know the number; if I got on the scale I’d have to check in with my physician or whatever. But I just had to trust the process. I had to trust that I really didn’t feel comfortable with the numbers going up, and I had to trust that the process of recovery was at some point going to get me comfortable with a larger number. In terms of recovery there’s a lot of self-monitoring and constantly asking myself whether my behavior is in line with my values or with my disease. And luckily the past four or five years the values have won out over the obsession.

So when I started this project I had to consciously think: How am I going to do this in a way that I know is healthy? I didn’t want it to make me feel more symptomatic and paranoid, so I actually had to make the decision to get back on the scale more frequently to make sure that my paranoia that I’m constantly gaining weight has a logical answer. I’ve had to get back on the scale, and I felt kind of ambivalent about that. But now I’m very pleased because it’s not worse—it’s better. In one sense the project has made me say, You know what, good enough is good enough. And that is actually a shift of my values. I’m still very perfectionistic at times, so there’s been a step back from perfection, which is great. But there’s also a sense of trying to find something else to quiet my questioning mind that’s scared about not knowing what I look like in the mirror. It’s possible that I still have some dysmorphia about what my body is, and avoiding mirrors sometimes allows my imagination to run wild. And getting back on the scale has helped me not be dysmorphic about that. Getting on the scale most days of the week keeps me more in tune with what’s going on with my body, which is important if you have a history of ignoring your body!

On Vanity and Pride
At some point I looked up the definition of vanity. It isn’t caring what you look like; it’s caring too much about one part of yourself. The definition actually had “too much” in there, which obviously is subjective. An outsider can decide that somebody is vain based on their own ideas, but the person herself might not actually feel that way. There’s no one way to figure out what is too much, although I think that people who are particularly vain are often not very fun to be around—vanity causes one to be very self-absorbed. Not intentionally, but that’s what vanity is. Vanity can be totally destructive to intimate relationships.

I can say without apology that an eating disorder is one of the most vain things you can experience. I’m in no way saying it’s a choice. But an eating disorder totally warps your whole sense of priorities, even in people who hide it very well. I don’t think someone can feel fully recovered if they’re only eating properly. Behaviors can change, but if there’s this thing—like weight or food—that is the most critically important thing for them to monitor in their lives, that’s where vanity comes in.

But vanity itself should be distinguished from pride. Having pride in your appearance is a wonderful thing. I wish all women were “vain” in that sense—in taking pride in their looks and enjoying what they see in the mirror—without that subjective idea of putting your appearance higher on your priority list than spending time with your loved ones or being flexible with your routines, whether that’s eating different foods, or trying a different look with your makeup or whatever. I have friends who won’t go camping because they’ll feel so humiliated wondering what they look like without makeup and mirrors. And I myself have a little mini mirror and cosmetics that I usually take with me camping, so I can try to look like I’m not wearing any makeup when I really am. I guess you could say that my no-mirrors project isn’t an attack on vanity itself. But it’s definitely an attack on mine.

I’m a little worried that I’ll be disappointed in what I see when I look in the mirror again. [Note: March 24 will be Kjerstin’s unveiling—if you’re in the Bay Area, check out the “First Look” party she’s throwing with media literacy group About-Face to celebrate body positivity.] I was like, What if I develop this really positive sense of what I look like, and it’s not actually what I see when in look in the mirror for the first time? So I’m scared about that—that would be a little bit sad and scary to go without for a whole year and finally look in the mirror and be like, Oh, I liked myself better before I was looking in the mirror again. But my hope is that I will kind of be in a good place when that happens and even if I look in the mirror and I’m like, “Eh, it’s not really what I expected or wanted,” I’ll at the very least feel like it isn't the most important thing in my life. That, and I know I’ll be excited to finally experiment with makeup again, and I’ll certainly do some shopping for new clothes. No amount of research or activism will ever dampen my enthusiasm for a shopping trip!

On Existentialism
Sometimes there’s almost a sense of numbness when I’m all by myself, without the mirror. It’s this sense of: Who am I, what am I? What is this experience? I’m thinking, I’m conscious, I can see my hands and feet, I’m typing on the computer, I’m petting the cat—whatever it is. But what am I? I can’t look in the mirror to see what I am. It’s made me realize that I used to use my reflection as a form of companionship and validation. So having moments when I think of these questions have been very bizarre.

One solution for those times (of feeling existential) has been to use something sensory, like scent, to signal one of my five senses to really experience the world instead of just being there. That’s helped me feel a little bit less like somehow I don’t exist. I’ll talk to myself, I’ll sing along with Pandora. I’m someone who doesn’t mind being alone a lot, and I really love driving in the car, listening to music on the radio, and singing at the top of my lungs. And I’m like: Okay, before I started being conscious of not looking in the mirror, being in the car and singing by myself never felt like an existential crisis. So I tried to kind of bring some of those things back, whether it’s feeling my toes on the carpet or smelling perfume or tasting chocolate. It’s like: Okay, I exist. I’m experiencing something sensual and I have an opinion about it. I’m not just a computer giving input and giving output. It’s weird realizing that simply seeing my reflection in the mirror was, in some ways, very grounding.

At one point I had a head cold, and I had no sense of smell. It was depressing. I’d figured out how to put on makeup without looking at myself, but being able to smell the product had actually been pleasurable for me, and not being able to see myself or smell the products left me feeling numb. I get a lot of pleasure about using scented products in the shower; if anything I found that since giving up mirrors I’ve become a bit more snobby about wanting to use more luxurious products, even though I try to avoid spending too much money.

On Trust and Self-Expression
So much of my issues with body image and not being a certain weight or certain size had to do with refusing to believe anyone who loved me when they’d say I was beautiful. I distrusted everyone, and I had my own sense of standards and disappointments for approval. It’s like if someone said, “I think you’re beautiful,” I’d be like, “Well, you’re either lying to me or you have bad taste.” That’s such a selfish side of yourself, and it’s interesting to see how difficult it is to give that up. I think most women struggle with this a bit. We’re supposed to be modest and not boastful, especially about looks—heaven forbid you say that you have a bangin’ bod! Normal women, if you compliment them, it’s like, “Oh, this old thing?” or “Well, maybe I look nice today but I’ve gained weight lately” or stuff like that. But with the mirror project I’ve really had to trust people, and myself. You start realizing that maybe this vision you have in your head about what you “really” look like—this idea of, “Oh, you might love me and think I’m beautiful, but really I’m not”—is faulty. Giving up the mirror is giving up the idea that your own image of yourself is the only image that’s real or even meaningful.

It makes you think about what purpose your appearance really has. If my relationships are healthy and the people around me are treating me well and telling me that I look good enough for them to love me, and respect me, then why is my own critical vision of my appearance so important? I’m still struggling with that question. I do think it’s important to have a sense of self, but I’m starting to see my sense of self as being more about self-expression and creativity and less of a status thing, or about being too much of this or not enough of that. And in a way it’s a little bit constrained right now because of not being able to look in the mirror—I mean, right around the time in my life when I had started to think that my sense of self was an expression of my own creativity and sense of fashion and play, I’m not as able to do these things. But it’s something I’m looking forward to enjoying again when the year is over. It’s such a great thing to miss! It’s totally different from being paranoid that I don’t look good enough; it’s that I miss something expressive and creative, and I know that this is a really great step in the right direction for me.

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For more interviews at The Beheld, click here.

"Expectations," a Short Play in One Act

March 13, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

The Characters

TRUCK DRIVER, a man of indeterminate middle age, handling a large vehicle

JUSTIN, a 3-year-old on a scooter with flowing red curly hair

JUSTIN'S MOM, chromosomally linked to Justin

AUTUMN, an exasperated yet easily charmed 35-year-old blogger (nonspeaking role)

Time and Place

New York City, a busy street. The present. A beautiful March afternoon.

Lights up. Truck Driver is waiting curbside for a delivery. Autumn is walking down the street with a swing in her step because it's gorgeous outside. Justin and Justin's Mom trail Autumn by a few steps.

Truck Driver: Leaning out window of truck. Hey.

Autumn visibly stiffens, ancestral oppression of woman-as-object spreading across her face.

Truck Driver: Hey, kid.

Autumn quickens her pace, ignoring the truck driver, silently cursing spring as the time when street harassers come out of the woodwork. Writes mental notes for upcoming blog post.

Truck Driver: You've got cool hair, kid.

Justin's Mom: Justin, did you hear that man? He said you have cool hair.

Justin: I don't have cool hair. Cool hair is pink hair.

Finis

A Humble Plea

March 12, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

Love on the rocks.

I don’t share much about my romantic life here. This isn't necessarily by design; my gentleman friend doesn’t mind when I write about him, as he trusts I wouldn’t write anything about him that would make him uncomfortable or violate his—our—privacy. It’s more that the issued that would be relevant to write about here as far as our relationship—say, the keen desire to be desired, sometimes specifically for how I look, and how that plays out between two people who give a good deal of thought to authenticity and representation in relationships of all sorts—are things I’m still wrestling with. I frequently figure things out through writing about them, but that can be dangerous in a number of ways when the “thing” in question is another person, one you care about immensely. The end result—at this point, anyway—is that while the role of romance in beauty is hardly verboten from The Beheld, its presence is far less frequent than one might imagine.

So what I’m about to ask is, like, totally unfair. I’m working on a project (related to but separate from this blog) in which I need to hear from a lot of women about looks, appearance, and being seen—specifically, how those things play into dating and relationships. I’ll be making similar pleas in the future but for now I’m looking to talk with women about the role appearance, beauty, and the wish to be seen (or not seen) has played out in their romantic relationships and dating life. I’m not looking for any particular type of woman—in fact, I’m looking for a diverse range of people to talk with. The only requirement is that you consider yourself a woman.

If you’re interested in talking with me about how looks have played into your romantic life, please drop me an e-mail at the.beheld.blog at gmail dotcom; I’ll send you a few questions and we’ll go from there. Sound good? All responses will be confidential.

Beauty Blogosphere 3.9.12

March 9, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

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

From Head...
Blush on the line: Sixty-seven percent of British women apply all their makeup during their commute. This seems really high to me--British readers, does this ring true? I see this plenty in New York, but it's not like two out of three women on the subway are putting on makeup. (I live at the first/last stop on my subway line, so I'm in a good position to see people beginning their commute routines.) Random bonus: The article lists top 10 cities for en route cosmetics application. Number eight is Sheffield. Why? I don't know!

...To Toe...
"I've heard of a fish pedicure, but this is ridiculous!": Mermaid pedicure art. J'adore.

...And Everything In Between:

From Girl Model, directed by David Redmon & Ashley Sabin

Model citizens: I'm hoping for a wider release of Girl Model, a new documentary tracing a 13-year-old model and the woman who scouted her, following them through their various paths in the industry. In the trailer alone, to see a teenaged girl in her "country mouse" town in Siberia—fertile ground for new talent—and speaking candidly in her native tongue is nearly shocking in its rarity. (via Virginia)

Starving 9 to 5: Laurie Penny on eating disorders as the cannibalization of rebellion: "Eating disorders, particularly anorexia, are to riots in the streets what a white strike is to a factory occupation: women, precarious workers, young people and others for whom the lassitudes of modern life routinely produce acute distress and for whom the stakes of social non-conformity are high, lash out by doing only what is required of them, to the point of extremity." Yes.

Missing Pakistan: Why Miss Pakistan is hardly ever from Pakistan. Fun (?) fact: There is such a thing as Miss Pakistan Bikini.

Face-off: Hijab isn't just about oppression, folks. Or is it?

America's Next Top Stereotype: The innovators at America's Next Top Model had the flash of inspiration to ask Mariah Watchman, the first American Indian contestant, to dress as Pocahontas.

By any means necessary: Will street harassment fall under the "verbal, non-verbal or physical" sexual harassment that British Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged to take "necessary legislative measures" against?

Mediate, deregulate: A beauty industry writer on recent deregulation efforts: "These situations remind us the best way to protect our industry and your profession is to make sure we are vigilant, connected and ready to work together at a moment’s notice." Especially in urban areas, the beauty industry workforce is come-and-go, making this sort of mobilization crucial. Meanwhile, Eastern European markets are merging regulatory practices to allow greater fluidity between borders.

Choice bits: The rise of curated subscription purchasing, à la Birchbox, prompts the Guardian to ask why we're so eager to pay people to make decisions for us. "Is this the answer to the tyranny of choice?"

Bitches be crazy!: A L'Oreal sale "turned ugly" as 300 women "stampeded" the event; six police cars had to show up to "tame" the crowds. But reading further into the story, it seems that there were totally unfounded rumors of women punching one another for a better place in the queue; nobody was hurt, it's just that the event got a lot more attendees than anticipated, and chaos ensued, which basically sounds like Saturday night on the Lower East Side. But that doesn't make for a good story, now does it? Especially not one that can conveniently be illustrated with sexy lipstick!

Ways of scrolling: The Spectator asks what we can take from John Berger's writings on imagery and reproduction to apply to the digital age. Which of course makes me wonder how the inevitability of image reproduction affects the ways women perceive themselves as objects. Thoughts?

"Some black and white truths": I know Victoria Coren means well in examining the results of a self-esteem study of black and white American women, which found that black women reported higher self-esteem; Coren theorizes that the lack of diversity in media images is part of that. It's an interesting theory and there's perhaps some truth to it. But utterly absent from her analysis is...black women, which didn't escape the sharp eyes over at We Left Marks. "Beauty myths exist in BME [black, minority, and ethnic] cultures as well as white cultures. What’s more, they are inevitably influenced by the hegemonic white beauty myths. While there are other historical factors around and within postcolonial cultures which affect beauty myths, it would be ridiculous to pretend that people of BME descent living in America and Europe operate in some sort of cultural vacuum immune from ‘Western’ pressures." It's also somewhat self-serving on the part of white women to assume that black women are immune because of their lack of representation; it allows us to fantasize that if only faces like our porcelain visages weren't everywhere (sigh!), maybe we'd feel better about ourselves because we'd have less to live up to. Overidentification with media ideals is certainly a problem, just as much as a lack of identification. But Coren should know better than to make such sweeping statements.

Contestants from 1968, from right: Vida Afshani, Manijeh Etezadi, Parichehr Makooie,
Mehrnaz Jalali Qajar, Mehrasa Khademi, Shohreh Zandi. (via)

Miss Iran: Arresting photos of Miss Iran contestants in 1978, the year before the revolution. (A personal aside: I was pleased to see an entry about the Carlisle Indian School as the following post at Teenage, the blog I found the Miss Iran photos from. It's a questionable episode of American history, but it's also where my great-grandparents met. It's also where my great-grandmother nearly became not my great-grandmother by dating the school's most famous alum, Jim Thorpe. /geneaology)

Too hot to drive: After old colleagues started knowing odd information about her personal life, former cop Anne Marie Rasmusson followed up on a hunch: Her driver's license profile had been accessed hundreds of times by fellow police officers. It's easy to feel creeped out on her behalf, but then I think of what kind of information I casually peruse because I can--Facebook, Googling--and I see how it's a slippery slope for officers, who have taken an oath but are all too human. More interesting to me here is why she became a target: She'd gone through a physical transformation, losing a good deal of weight and entering bodybuilding competitions, and was widely considered to be a catch.

You flirting with me?: Make sure your Flirt is authentic! Customs officers seized a sizable shipment of counterfeit perfume. (Am I the only one who wants to know what a counterfeit flirt smells like?)

Age-old story: Can't decide whether to be pleased or annoyed at this article in which the New York Times recognizes that women over 40 can be pretty. Actually, no, wait, I'm annoyed, as the writer lives in a universe in which L'Oreal should be applauded for choosing Diane Keaton to represent them because the poor lass is "average-looking." We should all be as "average-looking" as Diane Keaton, oui?

Plumb lovely: This story about a young woman who dropped out of beauty school to become a plumber is nice from the human-interest angle, and it's also an opportunity to examine why it's a human interest piece at all. Seventeen-year-olds aren't exactly known for sticking to one profession for a long time (nobody wrote about me when I went from being babysitter to Denny's hostess) but swinging from one end of the gendered-work spectrum to the other? What can we possibly do but write a whoda-thunk piece?!

He who speaks loudest: The whole Rush Limbaugh-Sandra Fluke thing honestly made me wonder if Limbaugh has been setting us up for years as a Colbert-type figure. If only! In any case, Aaron Bady on what Limbaugh's voice means for public voices of women: "[Limbaugh] only has the legitimacy he has, as public voice, to the extent that voices like Fluke’s can be made to lack legitimacy. She becomes a complicating and problematic presence for him because he needs things to seem satisfyingly simple. So she must be excluded, de-personned, rendered a type ('slut') instead of a subjectivity."

Pinned: Nathan Jurgenson on how Pinterest can illuminate feminist theory: "Take Wikipedia: 87% of its contributors are male; a bigger discrepancy than Pinterest by any count. However, when discussing Wikipedia, it certainly is not the norm to go on and on about how male the site is." Plus, he name-checks two of my recommended reads, Virginia Sole-Smith and Simone de Beauvoir, so obvs he's onto something.

Bump and grind: I'm wary of the "burlesque helps your body image!" claim--I know it's done great things for some women (like interviewee and friend of The Beheld Jo JoStiletto) but speaking generally I'm more aligned with Laurie Penny in thinking it's sheep's clothing for the same old song of woman-as-object. That said, I imagine there are a lot of breast cancer survivors who would be happy to take a burlesque class as a way of tuning into a pride about displaying the body, and for that, there's Jo "Boobs" Weldon.

Was it the Paleo diet?: Crap, when did the Care Bears get slimmed down?

Pocket change: Shine.com breaks down exactly how much it costs to look like Jennifer Aniston (cloning not included). The grand total? $141,037.

Girl in Front of Mirror, Pablo Picasso, 1932

Fairest of them all: Why do men like to paint women looking at themselves?

Ladyblogged: Diana Clarke at Dissent adds to the "ladyblogs" discussion spurred by the n+1 essay that got me all frothy: "By titling her essay 'So Many Feelings,' she underscores her classification of the ladyblog as a cozy nest of 'slumber party intimacy,' irrelevant to the outside world. That logic, powerful as it might read, draws a false and harmful division between old and young, lady and woman, frivolity and seriousness."

Want fries with that?: Whaddya know—The New York Times stands up for vocal fry and other linguistic trends pioneered by young women. "They’re not just using [vocal and linguistic characteristics such as 'like' because they’re girls. They’re using them to achieve some kind of interactional and stylistic end," says a Stanford linguistics professor.

A modest proposal: I've long been intrigued by how fashion-conscious women who wish to dress modestly navigate styling themselves. And then, thanks to Sally, I found the modesty archives of Clothed Much.

Beauty machine: I'll admit I'm not entirely sure what this 12-minute film means, but the idea of a "Beauty Machine" scam as a complement to empty self-esteem talk interests me. (Thanks to Sarah for the tip.)

Beauty turnoffs: Emily skewers the notion that there is any beauty mistake in the history of womankind that will prevent a man from having sex with you. Hygiene, sure. But overdone eyelashes? Really?

"Wear more eye makeup than you usually do": Rachel Kramer Bussel on what happened when her date told her to wear more makeup. That's not necessarily as brash as it seems--it was in a command-and-obey kink setting--but it still made her wonder about what introducing a dynamic of dictating one's appearance might mean.

Strike a pose: Sally asks what it means to be a poseur. Interesting comments, revealing that people appropriate symbols for all kinds of reasons. It's making me wonder what constitutes a potentially offensive appropriation versus one that's for kicks. Is it the level of oppression the original owners of the appropriated item face? (Say, "ethnic" prints on sale at Urban Outfitters.) Ceremonial or ritual uses of the appropriated item, like headdresses mimicking various indigenous nations? The self-chosen nature of the world the appropriated item comes from? (You can choose to be a punk, so appropriating punk style seems less disingenuous than appropriating the style of a race of people.)

Thrifting 101: Elissa from Dress With Courage knows from thrifting, and while the advice on her blog is always excellent, practical, and accessible, her new Thrifting 101 book goes even more in-depth, and also features fashion history of the sorts of clothes you'll find while thrifting, maintenance tips, and more.

The Grandiose Vacuity of "Rock the Lips"

March 8, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Body Image Warrior Week

March 2, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

Earlier this week I shared two Body Image Warrior Week pieces that particularly resonated with me, but I took something valuable from each post I read related to the project. Whether it’s Caitlin Constantine’s questioning of “the single story” of the female body, Rosie Molinary’s challenge for each of us to find our “announcement,” Patti Gibbons’s raised eyebrow at the lingo about “problem areas,” or Blossoming Badass’s revelation that sharing body image woes can lessen one’s private burden, this week I’ve had the privilege of reading body image stories all over the map. Below are snippets from BIWW participants—it started with a group of 11 bloggers; these are the ones I haven’t yet featured individually, plus two bloggers who joined in throughout the week who are on my reading list. Here's a list of all known participants. Enjoy, take care of yourself, and remember that this is merely the week in which we're reminding one another about body image. The truth of the week doesn't end here.

Caitlin Constantine, Fit and Feminist:
I reflected on a TED talk given by writer Chimamanda Adichie in which she spoke about the “danger of the single story.” She described growing up in Nigeria and yet writing stories in which her blonde-haired, blue-eyed characters ate apples and played in snow. Every book she had read was written by British authors about British life, and as a result she hadn’t realized it was possible to write books about her own life. She thought the only way to be worthy of literature was to be a foreigner. … I thought about her words and I realized that we as a culture had accepted the single story of the “ideal body” so thoroughly that no room remained for alternate definitions of female beauty. … The “ideal female body”—a slim figure with breasts that aren’t too big and thighs that don’t touch and a butt that isn’t too flat and nothing that jiggles too much—is desired with such single-mindedness that the non-cosmetic benefits of weight training are dismissed without a second thought.

Margarita Tartakovsky, Weightless:
When we love someone—a boyfriend, a best friend, our parents, our kids—we love them unconditionally. We don't keep track of random criteria that the person must fulfill. We don't think about them earning our love—whether at the gym or at the dinner table. We don't think about their qualities, especially their physical traits, as currency. … Our loved ones don't need a six-pack to gain our respect. They don't need muscular legs, thinner thighs or chiseled cheekbones to have our appreciation and utmost love. … So why wait to respect our bodies based on a singular, random ideal? A standard essentially set by the very companies that profit from our insecurities, hang-ups and regular body-bashing?

Rosie Molinary:
What is your announcement? You are being given, over and over again, an audience of one. Every single person in this world is going to sit down in front of you and give you the time you need to make your announcement. What is it you must make sure each person knows. What do you need him to understand? What do you need her to grasp? What is your announcement? It doesn’t have to be earth shattering. You don’t have to be the only one saying it. It simply has to be yours, the natural gift you bring to the world in your own unqiue way. … My announcement, boiled down and stripped bare is this: the world needs each one of us as an essential element in its healing—in our healing. And to do that, we must get on with our own healing, live our passion and purpose and give our gifts to the world. We must begin administering our particular brand of CPR to the world and its suffering.

Virginia Sole-Smith:
I started saying: “I can’t wait to get my body back.” By which I meant my 145-pound body that could hike up hills without a problem and do headstands and backbends in yoga or even, my 135-pound body that once ran two half-marathons. … It was like I thought someone had come along and zipped a fat suit up over my real body, leaving me with this 165-pound+ version that I couldn’t—or didn’t want to—recognize. … And for the first month or so after I graduated, and life went back to “normal,” I kept waiting for someone to come along and unzip the fat suit so I could have my real body back. … But then about two months later, I was at yoga and I did a completely kick-ass back bend. I mean, five-year-olds and tall dogs could have run under the arch shape that was me without having to duck. Everyone oohed. … I was confused. I still weighed at least 160 pounds. I thought only my “real” body could do cool things like backbends. And my clothes kept telling me that I didn’t have my “real” body back yet. And that’s when I realized: This was my body, too.

Kate Fridkis, Eat the Damn Cake:
I write about body image because I got a nose job because my big Jewish nose seemed like the opposite of beauty. Because when I told people that famous, beautiful women never have big Jewish noses, they always said, "What about Barbara Streisand?" and that was a long time ago. No one can think of anyone more recent. And also, because when my boyfriend who became my husband told me over and over that my nose was beautiful, I didn't really believe him, even though I should have. … I write about body image because people make fun of people who get cosmetic surgery, even though when I got cosmetic surgery, there was nothing funny about it. I hated my face. I wanted to destroy my old face. … I write about body image because when I was a little girl, I thought I was gorgeous. I thought that I was gorgeous because I was me.

Sally McGraw, Already Pretty:
What if you forced it? What if—on those days when you looked in the mirror and saw Grendel—you made yourself don a flirty frock, curl your hair, and slip on a sassy set of boots? Would it help or hurt how you felt about your body and face and overall self? Swear I’m not going all Fernando Lamas on you. Just hear me out. We’ve already established that the cycle of self-loathing is inextricably linked to the cycle of self-neglect: Feel bad, look bad, feel worse, look worse, and on and on. But I maintain that a cycle of self-love can be perpetuated by a cycle of self-care. If you feel awful about how you look and allow yourself to LOOK as awful as you feel, you spiral down. But if you feel awful about how you look and work against that negativity—beautifying yourself with the tools you have at hand—you spiral up.

Patti Gibbons, Not Dead Yet Style:
The cheery host or model points to the latest tunic top (two easy payments!) and delivers the good news: it covers all those problem areas! I know they mean our midriffs, in this case. Other garments mercifully cover over our problem hips, "derrieres", thighs and upper arms. Sometimes the salespeople make little unhappy faces as they mention the offending body region, or they smile ruefully and pat their own (perfectly nice) hips. … My thighs are not a "problem," however! Sometimes my finances are a problem, my cat having allergies can be a problem, and new construction making me late for work is a . . . problem. My pale, slightly dimpled thighs are just mine.

Elissa Stern, Dress With Courage:
Your body image is how you perceive, think and feel about your body. This may have no bearing at all on your actual appearance. I've been feeling really crappy about my appearance lately, but while I'm struggling, I'm trying to figure out what has triggered these negative thoughts. My two friends mentioned the anxieties they're currently struggling with—work stress, and shame for having not attending college. I believe there's a direct correlation between how we see our bodies and external stress.

Kjerstin Gruys, Mirror Mirror Off the Wall:
I remember, several years ago, feeling incredibly proud of my hard-earned health and balanced life, but sobbing in my therapist's office because I was scared I'd never find a loving life-partner if I wasn't very thin. … I KNEW I was objectively lovable (indeed, probably more lovable without my rigid obsessions), and I also KNEW I was in good health, but I still wasn't comfortable in my body. I wished for my exact life, but thinner. And that's where Truth #4 showed up: “My body is perfect, my mind could use improvement.” It became my survival mantra. I still repeat it to myself during moments of weakness and frustration, (i.e., if I ever feel tempted to go on a crash diet, or want to spend 3 hours at the gym). And, slowly but surely, my mind IS improving.

Alexa, Blossoming Badass:
When I told all of my friends how much I hated my body at a sleepover in ninth grade, no one freaked out. Most of the other girls admitted that they’d felt the same way, which shocked me. Most importantly, all of those girls are still my best friends, and at times that my body image was particularly negative in the future, I’ve found friends to go to that make me remember that weight isn’t important. That’s something I know for a fact—that every girl is beautiful—but sometimes I forget it about myself. When I finally made this confession, though, something unanticipated happened—my body image improved dramatically and I was so much happier. It wasn’t because people had assured me that I wasn’t “fat”; it was because a secret that had seemed so dark and embarrassing to me really wasn’t so powerful anymore.

Beauty Blogosphere 3.2.12

March 2, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

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

Like this, but on your head, and $400 an hour.

From Head...
Cinnamon bun: Why did so many Oscar hairstyles resemble baked goods?

...To Toe...
The pedicure that hate built: Need a new shade for your pedi? Try Santorum. I think this nail polish, from ManGlaze, a nail polish company targeting men, is hilarious. It also makes me wonder why no nail polish aimed toward the vast majority of its wearers—you know, women—did this first. (Of course, the company's other offerings include names like Lesbihonest and Butt Taco, so it's not like they're necessarily freedom fighters over there at ManGlaze HQ.) There's plenty of humor to be found in shade names for women's cosmetics but I can't think of anything explicitly political (however crude) offhand. Anyone?

...And Everything In Between:
Dr. Daddy: I really try not to get too judgmental about media-circus parents who take questionable action regarding their children's appearance. As Virginia Sole-Smith put it, "By focusing only on these extreme, headline-grabbing stories, we get to outsource the issue and blame the victims"—instead of examining our larger cultural attitudes toward beauty. Caveat over? Okay! So, which is more gross: Performing cosmetic surgery on your daughter, or naming her Charm?

Lady resources: Not directly beauty-related (I stumbled into it when sniffing around for info on Procter & Gamble), but fascinating for its insight into gender essentialism: How human resources departments went from being male-dominant to female-led in a fairly short span of time.

Pro-recovery: Tumblr has banned pro-eating-disorder content, as well as other content promoting self-harm. And, you know, I hear all the "this is a slippery slope" arguments, but frankly the slippery slope I'm really worried about is the harm that pro-ana sites contain. There will always be a home for that kind of stuff on the Internet, but brava to Tumblr for recognizing that it doesn't need to be a part of it.

Ode to an Eating Disorder: Elizabeth Nolan Brown examines the real fallout from eating disorder literature. I'm thrilled to see someone taking a sharp view on this—my own experience with ED lit mirrors Elizabeth's, varying between using such books as dirty little guides to tips and tricks, and using them as actual support. In fact, I once pitched a piece about this to a teen mag and it was flatly shot down with, "There is no way in hell we can run a piece like that." But Blisstree can! Yay Internet! (Actually, Blisstree overall seems to be offering smart content for NEDA week, sharing the real story behind sensationalist recovery tales and featuring an interview with Carrie Arnold, one of the best ED writers around.)

Case study: You've followed my advice and read Ashley Mears' sociological study of the modeling industry, Pricing Beauty, right? Good. Then you have context for this lawsuit in which a model is suing a low-prestige cosmetics company for unauthorized use of her image.

From the history files: Meet the Anti-Flirt Club, a group of women from the 1920s who banded together to organize responses to street harassment, or "embarrass[ment] by men in automobiles and on street corners," as they put it. As with plenty of anti-harassment measures the onus was on the women, but I love these ladies nonetheless. Rule 1: "Don't flirt: Those who flirt in haste oft repent in leisure." (via my momma)

Beauty beyond the grave: From mortuary anthropology blog Bones Don't Lie comes the rundown of a recent archaeological paper on the role of cosmetics in funerary rites in central Mexico.

Eau de Die Hard: Interesting/hilarious marketingspeak about celebrity fragrances, pinned to—I am not making this up—the new fragrance Lovingly by Bruce Willis. (Bruce Willis! Smell like who Bruce Willis loves! L'objet du desir d'Officer John McClaine!)

In the beauty parlor: Yolanda Gibson gives a salute to black cosmetologists and hairstylists, from the legendary Madam C.J. Walker to the Bronner Brothers Hair Show to founders of makeup lines for dark-skinned women.

All the world's a stage: HuffPo looks at the role of physical transformation for actresses receiving Oscar nods. Putting aside for a moment the notion that part of acting is physical transformation (and that it's actually refreshing to see actresses make that transformation instead of just playing pretty—or playing "ugly" as with Charlize Theron in Monster), the point is a good one. The piece quotes John Berger's Ways of Seeing: "Men act and women appear." Are male actors allowed to just inhabit their craft while women have to become visions—or is the physical transformation of female actresses more of a reclamation of the outside-in approach to acting? I'm not sure.

Being liked, being known: Is the Internet still aflutter with the Pinterest-is-for-the-ladies discussion? Either way, I'm entranced with this essay about the ways that Pinterest and other sites of self-curation wind up hiding, not revealing, ourselves, and why that matters in particular for women. I don't agree with everything the author says here but as someone who suffers from a chronic case of pleaselikemeitis, this piece resonates. (via Marginal Utility)

On Whitney: I'll be frank: I didn't understand the intense outpouring over Whitney Houston's death. Until I read this. "Outside was a culture that derided black girls as hoes and welfare queens. Inside we were fed 'positive' messages, by black women who swanned around in gowns and updos—female performativity, as Judith Butler would have called it. They were overly feminine and overly dignified so as to prepare us for a world that believed we were neither. Before we went out into the world, we needed them to show us how to behave. That’s why we took Whitney’s decline so personally. Our model wasn’t supposed to deviate from the script. Now who would show us how to be beautiful and poised? If she could succumb to the familiar stereotypes—the drugs and the thugs—what in the world would become of us?" (via Britticisms)

Where the bois are: Thanks to reader Felix for pointing me toward Butch Sightings, a blog of...butch sightings. It's interesting to see photos of women proclaiming the butch identity, all over the spectrum, from butch women to bois to simply genderqueer to women who present as men.

Finis: What exactly is the namesake behind Danielle Meder's wonderful blog, Final Fashion? "The instance where fashion fails to impress and instead absurdly breaks its own spell is the beginning of the end of a trend. That is final fashion."

Product reviewers needed: Want to review beauty products for Prevention magazine's beauty awards? Their beauty team (helmed by a friend of The Beheld) wants to cast a wide net of reviewers so that they're not sitting around having 19-year-old interns test wrinkle creams. Enter to be a tester here; you get five full-size products to review.

Body Image Warrior Week: Mara Glatzel

March 1, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

As a part of Body Image Warrior Week, a collective of style, beauty, and body image bloggers is sharing content in order to promote various perspectives on body image. Mara Glatzel from Medicinal Marzipan has long been one of my favorite body image bloggers, in part for her worldview and in part for her graceful, inspirational prose. But what strikes me most about Medicinal Marzipan is its honesty: Glatzel shares her vulnerabilities as well as triumphs in the route to wellness, including mourning the loss of comfort of emotional eating and acknowledging that nobody is going to give you permission to eat--so you've got to give that permission to yourself. She understands that in working one's way to body love, sometimes a prolonged stop in the land of neutrality is required--and with that, I give you:

* * *

Body neutrality: Be your own Switzerland!

It’s like--my body is over there, spilling over into the room around it, and my head is over here, chatting with you and looking pretty. We’re two totally different pieces. Can’t you see? But, I love my body, can’t you tell?

It took me a long time to realize that loving my body meant something quite different than leaving it alone and letting it run the show however it so pleases. That loving the skin that I was in had absolutely nothing to do with “throwing all the rules out the window,” or saying f*&$ you to society and their idealized beauty norms.

It means: You only get one body. One. It is your home, your rock, your ally--and treating it like a dumpster or ignoring it, hoping it will just go away already--is not helpful.

It means: respecting the skin that you’re in.

I get a lot of people writing me emails about loving their bodies, wanting to know please God body love seems so far away when I hate my body so much--to which I reply let’s start with body neutrality.

Yes, body love is the wonderous state where everything is wonderful and you skip around in a field of flowers, blissed out and having nothing but compassionate thoughts about your authentic self. But for many? We just aren’t there yet.

Body neutrality is a state of contentment. It is dead smack between I hate myself with every fiber of my being and I couldn’t possibly love my body any more. It is a white flag thrown into the ring. It is the gauntlet thrown down when you realize that what you’re doing? It just isn’t working for you.

For me, body neutrality means cultivating a short set of guidelines within which I know that I will feel relatively good--and sticking to them, no matter what. These rules include simple things (the kind we all know that we should do, but never get around to) like starting my day with 32 oz. of water pre-coffee, getting at least seven hours of sleep, buying underwear that fits, having sex with moderate regularity, and trying to fill up half my plate with vegetables of some variety.

It’s not really a write home worthy list, but it works. As someone who is recovering from a lifetime of compulsive and emotional eating--these guidelines keep me in a window of containment where I am able to make decisions that aren’t warped by mood swings or panic. They save me from the very dangerous place of: How did it get this bad? I am so terrified and feel so disgusting I don’t know what to do next.

These guidelines put my head back on my shoulders, reconnecting it with my body--after twenty years of stuffing my feelings down with food. It reminds me that my body is here to support me as I move about the world--and that is something that should be celebrated. It reminds me that we are on the same team, and that developing a baseline of self-care means that we both win.

And for someone who is just beginning to delve into the world of self-love--it is a perfect place to begin.

Mara Glatzel is a body image warrior and self-love coach. She spends the majority of her time causing a ruckus on Medicinal Marzipan, where she blogs (almost) daily about correcting your relationship with your body and food, creating relationships that are fulfilling, and manifesting your dream life. Catch up with her body loving updates on Twitter, Facebook, or send her an email. ___________________________________________________________________

Complete (for now! anyone can participate!) list of Body Image Warrior Week participants:

Already Pretty // Beautiful You // The Beheld // Decoding Dress // Dress with Courage // Eat the Damn Cake // Fit and Feminist // Medicinal Marzipan // Not Dead Yet Style // Rosie Molinary // Virginia Sole-Smith // Weightless

Leah Smith, Public Policy Ph.D Student, Lubbock, TX

February 29, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

The first time Leah Smith saw a little person, she turned to her mother and said, “So that’s what I’m going to look like when I’m an adult?” Her mother said, “Yeah,” to which Smith replied, “I think that’s okay.” Now vice president of public relations for Little People of America, a support group and information center for people of short stature, Smith works to let others know what she intuited in that moment. (Smith is speaking here on her own behalf, not in her public relations role with LPA.) She’s also working toward her Ph.D. in public policy, with a focus on disability policy, including discrimination and employment policy for people with disabilities. Her first love, however, was fashion design, in which she earned an associate degree. We talked about redefining fashion to include little people, the division between feeling beautiful and receiving romantic attention, and pretending to be Julia Roberts. In her own words:

On Pride
I know that people are looking at me all the time, and you have to find a way to process that somehow. When I was 7, I kind of pretended that I was Julia Roberts. I mean, obviously I don’t do this now, but as a kid I’d read or heard somewhere that every time she would go out, people would stop and stare because she was so pretty. And I was like, “That’s what I face every day, so it must be because I’m pretty.” In my little 7-year-old mind that’s how I processed it. That kind of shaped who I am, and I started dressing to fit the part. I’m not saying I’m any Julia Roberts; it’s just that I wanted to dress in cute or nice-looking clothes, so when people do stare I can be like, Oh, they’re looking because they like my outfit, or they think I’m cute, or whatever. People are going to stare either way, so you’ve got to bring some sort of confidence to it.

Dressing well has been huge in my life. The comments and the stares could have been really easy for me to internalize if I weren’t careful. I feel like my clothes are a way of putting up a shield against that, of saying to the world that the things people might believe about LPs aren't true. That's not who I believe I am—this is who I am. There’s a level of pride in being able to wear a cute outfit, wear my hair cute. It says that I’m proud of this body, and that it’s not something I want to hide or cover up. Because I am proud of my body—I’m not ashamed of it in any way, and I don’t want that to ever be something I portray with how I present myself.

My style is pretty feminine—dresses, cute sandals. There are very few days when I don’t dress up, and people joke that my hair is my biggest priority in my life, which obviously isn’t true, but I do pay a lot of attention to it. I’ve wondered if I would give my appearance as much thought if I were average-sized, or if it’s just a part of who I am. Sometimes I have to remind myself, “Leah, it’s okay if you don’t fix your hair every single day.” I consciously stopped styling my hair on Sundays—I still shower and whatever, but I just don’t fix my hair, to remind myself that I mean more to people than just what I look like. If you’re going to feel beautiful you’ve got to feel beautiful when you’re naked too. It can’t just be all about your clothes or what your hair looks like; it has to start from somewhere else.

On Speed Dating
It can be hard for LP women to navigate male attention. LPA has an annual convention, so you go from having never been hit on by a guy, and then you go to convention and all of a sudden all these guys are thinking you’re really attractive. How do you figure that out? What do you do with that attention once you have it? I almost feel like it’s a bit delayed for us, whereas most people kind of grow up learning those things. As soon as the girls are about 16, suddenly it’s like, “Whoa, these guys think I’m hot—what do I do?” As a part of the leadership at conference, you get to see the ins and outs of what’s going on, and one year there was a guy who was hitting on this girl, and she didn’t really do anything to stop it. He continued and continued, and then all of a sudden she was like, “Wait, I’m not comfortable at all,” and he was like, “Well, you never said no.” She said, “Well, yeah, because I liked it!” Everyone has to learn to deal with those situations, but it happens in a concentrated way at conference. You go from holding hands for the first time to kissing within a week. She had to learn: Okay, I can like this but still have limits here. For me, watching it was like, Oh, man! It was like seeing my own teenhood.

Feeling beautiful and getting male attention were two very separate events for me. Male attention was a once-a-year expedition for me, whereas looking my best was an everyday thing. At convention I’d get dressed up and be thinking about meeting a dude, but that was more of a mind-set shift; I was already dressing in clothes I thought were cute. I started paying attention to my clothes and fixing my hair around seventh grade, so about the same time as most girls, but dating didn’t factor into it like it might have for someone else. Dressing up was just who I was, and it had nothing to do with guys. Maybe if I hadn’t done that and had started being active dating-wise later, the two would have become linked—I don’t know.

There’s this epiphany for some women when they come into LPA, like: “Oh! There’s LP guys who like this body.” There are some women you talk to who have repeatedly been given the message that they are or should be asexual. You hear, “I can’t imagine a guy ever wanting to be with me,” or “I’ve been told my whole life that I’m not what guys want—I don’t have long legs, and an average-size guy would never want to date me.” But then on the flip side of that there are times that LPs have been hypersexualized and some women who take that to its extreme: There are groups of people who have a fetish with little people, specifically LP women. You see some LP women who have internalized this idea and believe that they should take this idea as their role. Sexuality can be very tough for someone who has seen these two extremes. On the one hand, we should be asexual, and on the other hand we are a fetish object. There’s a fine middle line somewhere in there.

On Being Little and Badass
Clothes are such a hard thing for LPs, because so often you have to buy a pair of jeans for $100, and then you have to go get them altered for $150, so that really limits your ability to buy a number of outfits. You’re spending twice as much on one item rather than getting two or three items. I actually do all my own alterations. With achondroplasia, the type of dwarfism I have, our torso is basically the same as an average-size person’s, so I’ll buy clothes that fit my butt and breasts and just alter the arms and legs. For most LPs, I’d say it’s about half and half—some do their own sewing, and the rest get it altered.

I went to fashion design school in Dallas. I really wanted to create a line that allowed LP women to express their inner beauty. At the time a lot of my friends in LPA were dealing with the same thing I was: We were young adults in the world, and asking ourselves what it meant to not be at home anymore, protected by our parents? How do we be adults and be little at the same time? So I started trying to design clothes that expressed the feelings I wanted to express at the time. If I felt badass, I would try to create a badass outfit. Even if nothing about the outfit shouted badass, if I could associate that feeling with the outfit, that’s what mattered—that’s kind of where I was going with my designs.

Going to fashion design school was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I was studying fashion design and trying to redefine fashion at the same time, and it really made some people uncomfortable within the school. I experienced a lot of discrimination there that I’d never experienced before. At the time I thought it was because I was little, but looking back I don’t know if it had anything to do with me being little so much as it was I was questioning the paradigm.

For example, we had to create our own line for our final project and do a whole business plan. I wrote that my goal was having a fashion line that would help LPs feel beautiful in their own bodies. My teacher marked that out and wrote on my project that LPs were not beautiful, that they’re not tall, that they don’t have long legs and this is an impossible thing for you to be trying to pursue or to try to make them feel. I was furious. This was after other things had happened—for example, I’d asked for a stool because some of the tables we worked on were really high. They were like, “Well, I guess we have to offer it, but we can’t promise it will be here every day. It’s not our fault if someone steals it.” I was like, “It’s my stool, I’m here all the time, everyone knows I use it, and I can’t imagine why someone would steal a stool.” And every single day it was gone. The other students were the ones who suggested I have a stool to begin with, and I couldn’t imagine any of them would be that vicious. It was that kind of thing that kept going and going, and that comment on my final project broke the camel’s back, I guess. That’s when I started going into policy and the legal side of it. This is a much bigger problem than what we’re wearing, or even what we can legislate. This is a societal problem, that women who are short-statured aren’t seen as beautiful. That’s what we’re up against. When you’re 22 and you’re out to change the world, nobody tells you the world is not an easy place to change. I mean, I’m still out to change the world. Maybe I’m just a bit more realistic with the ways that’s going to get done.

Body Image Warrior Week: Decoding Dress

February 28, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

Yesterday I wrote about the need to not conflate body image and eating disorders, something that's too easy to do and that doesn't help us get to the root causes of eating disorders. But that doesn't mean that body image isn't also a crucial part of the puzzle. When Sally McGraw of Already Pretty reached out to a group of body image bloggers about the possibility of banding together to do a project under the umbrella of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, I saw that she wasn't positing body image as being the end sum of eating disorders, but rather as something worthy of discussion in its own right. And thus, Body Image Warrior Week was born. Throughout the week I'll publish a handful of pieces written by different members of the inaugural collective—which you can be a part of. Click here to find out more about how to participate.

Today I'm thrilled to host Decoding Dress, who faithful readers will recognize from her many appearances on my weekly roundups. With her consistently keen insight, balance of analytical thought and sly humor, and a gift for sharing her views without ever seeming dogmatic (and some pretty fabulous outfits too), Decoding Dress has become one of my favorite reads. And with this essay, she just might become one of your favorites too.

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Next week: Grooming tips from our man in Athens. (Those curls!)

The Ideal Form of Me, or, How Plato Turned Me into a Body Image Blogger

I didn't set out to become a body image blogger. I just wanted to write about clothes.

Well, that's not really sufficiently precise. Lots of people write about clothes. I wanted to write about my own clothes. Of course, lots of people do that too. What I really wanted to do was to write about my relationship with my clothes. Back when I started my blog, Decoding Dress, I couldn't find anyone else who was doing that, which made it seem like the perfect niche for me. And by "niche" I mean "Does anybody other than me actually care about this stuff?"*

It turns out it was the "my relationship with" part that got me into trouble. By inserting myself so intentionally into the mix I pretty much guaranteed body image would become a major theme of my writing, whether I intended it to or not.

To wit: most outfit blogs are, of course, about the outfits (shock-n-awe!). Note, however, that for those of us with the good fortune to have been born into situations of privilege in one of the world's highly developed nations, the clothes we wear are rarely about protection from the elements or adherence to social norms against public nakedness; they are, rather, the real-world projection of our inner sense of self.** (That’s why we compliment a friend’s outfit by telling her, “That’s so you,” or return a piece we’ve tried on to the rack saying, “It’s just not me.”) In other words, our outfits occupy the narrow frontier separating our real, physical selves from our mental images of ourselves. So you can talk about the clothes all you want, but as soon as you bring up why you chose them, what you loved or hated about them or how they made you feel, you're talking about body image.

It took me a while to figure that out though. It wasn’t until I dragged the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (c.428-c.348 BCE) into a post about miniskirts and red lipstick that the extreme to which my entire blogging project was going to revolve around body image started to become clear to me:

The lovers of sights and sounds like beautiful sounds, colors, shapes, and everything fashioned out of them, but their thought is unable to see and embrace the nature of the beautiful itself […] In fact, there are very few people who would be able to reach the beautiful itself and see it by itself. Isn’t that so?
— Plato, The Republic

See what Plato’s doing there? He’s drawing a distinction between the things we perceive as beautiful and beauty as a thing in and of itself. This is his way of introducing what has become known as his Theory of Forms.

This all may sound abstruse or even arcane, but you employ this theory all the time, probably without even being aware of it. How do you know that an apple—this particular apple—is an apple? You know it because you have in your mind the image of an apple—not of a particular apple, in this case, but of a general apple with a set of characteristics common to all apples. Students of platonism have traditionally referred to this general apple as the Ideal Form of an apple (after Plato himself) or as “Appleness.” (Seriously.) Platonism holds that this ideal form of an apple isn't merely an image, but actually exists (though not in any way that can be conventionally perceived by our senses). Every particular instance of an apple, then, is understood as just an approximate expression of its Ideal Form, inherently flawed. The same goes for everything you experience or imagine...including yourself.

And that’s where the problems start.

This framework, which has come to govern so much of how we understand and experience the world, tells me that there must exist an Ideal Form of DeeDee—DeeDeeness, as it were. And what are the characteristics of DeeDeeness? For some weird reason,*** in my mind the Ideal Form of DeeDee isn't characterized by the wrinkles that seem to be multiplying exponentially around the corners of my real mouth. It doesn't include the flab around my midsection or my size 11 feet either. DeeDeeness is hourglass shaped, smooth skinned and wears a size six shoe comfortably.

In other words, with alarming frequency, the characteristics I use to recognize myself aren't necessarily characteristic of the real me. They represent someone that I not, have never been and likely never will be. It’s like trying to recognize myself—judging the validity of my own claim to be DeeDee—based on some other person’s attributes. In doing so I treat an image of some other body as if it were the platonic Ideal Form of my own—only acknowledging myself to the extent that I embody the characteristics of this alien image. Where I do not embody them I consider myself flawed, approximate.

What. The. HELL? Where does this even come from? It's the syllogistic equivalent of judging something to be an apple by the extent to which it is small, round, blue and goes well in pancakes. I’m way too smart to be doing this, way too smart to be doing it to myself.

But I am doing it. After nearly a year of considering these issues critically under the glare of a flaming introspection fetish and far more education than is generally good for me, I’m still doing it.

The dirty little secret of Decoding Dress is that about 90% of the time, the answer to the question upon which I’ve based the whole project, “Why do I wear what I wear?” is simply “So that what I see in the mirror might more closely approximate this Ideal Form of me.” But unless and until I can acknowledge the irrationality of the Ideal Form I’ve chosen and embrace in its stead one that actually has some significant essential connection to who I am, I will never see myself as more than an approximation. I’ll never actually become myself.

And so I think (and write) about my body image, my mental projection of myself, in the hope that someday the image will fall into line with the reality. Perhaps, if I am diligent and do not cease from my self-exploration (as T.S. Elliot might say), then “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

I wish the same for you.

*Apparently a few people do. The really cool ones.

**If that sounded like I was riffing off a Matrix quote, that's because I was.

***I’d love simply to blame this on patriarchal culture, but I’m pretty sure it’s more complex than that.

DeeDee is a yearling fashion and beauty blogger endlessly fascinated by why we wear what we wear. She’s still not sure where all this is headed.

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Complete (for now! anyone can participate!) list of Body Image Warrior Week participants:

Barefaced and Beside the Point: Appearance Anxiety in Eating Disorders

February 27, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

In preparation for National Eating Disorders Awareness Week—which starts today—the Renfrew Center sent out an interesting press release, one you’d think would be right up my alley. “Barefaced and Beautiful,” a campaign from the Renfrew Center, one of the best-known eating disorder treatment facilities in the United States, is encouraging women to post photos of themselves on various social media without any makeup. The point is to...well, they sort of lost me on that. I think the idea is to display pride in one’s natural, unadorned self, the idea being that...you don't need to...adorn yourself....with an eating disorder?

Yes, I’m being intentionally dense here. Obviously the idea was to touch on the role of appearance dissatisfaction in eating disorders, using something plenty of people wear—makeup—as an entryway to talk about the larger issue. (Certainly it’s more on point than cryptically posting the color of your bra on Facebook for breast cancer awareness.) And for something like a week designed to raise awareness about eating disorders, you need a campaign that's simple, accessible, and attention-grabbing. But not only does it willfully ignore the myriad reasons women wear makeup in favor of a one-dimensional shame-based explanation, it treats bodily dissatisfaction as the cause, not a symptom, of eating disorders. And if we keep the focus of eating disorder conversations on women’s bodies, we’re doing exactly what women with eating disorders do to themselves.

Obviously I think body image is pretty important. Hell, my contribution to National Eating Disorders Awareness week, other than this post, is with a project called Body Image Warrior Week project, which will show up here later this week. But I’m wary of conflating body image and eating disorders, and I don’t think that they’re nearly as connected as they’re made out to be. It’s not like she who has the worst body image develops the worst eating disorder, or that people whose body image is average are immune from eating disorders. (I have yet to meet a woman with an active eating disorder who has a good body image, but then again, I don’t know tons of women with a good body image to begin with.) I’m baffled that Renfrew chose the makeup hook for their NEDA campaign, unless the idea really was just to raise awareness of the existence of eating disorders. (“Anorexic” has been a coverline of enough celebrity magazines that I don’t think we need any more awareness of that elementary sort, but I digress.) Makeup is deeply tied to our ideas of self-presentation, yes. It’s also a way of controlling the way the way you’re seen, and eating disorders are rooted in control. But none of that shows up in the Renfrew campaign; instead, it’s all about appearance dissatisfaction, as though that alone can prompt a disease that ravages one’s life.

Eating disorders are complex beasts, with not-great recovery rates and the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. We don’t entirely know what causes eating disorders, but last year when I interviewed Sunny Sea Gold, author of Food, the Good Girl’s Drug and a recovered binge eater herself, she broke it down nicely:

Therapists pretty much agree that there are three main causes of eating disorders, and most of us who get them have a combination of the three. One is your genetics. Second is your physiology, like the biology of your actual brain—your personality.... The third thing is environment. Environment is broken into two parts: the environment of your home, what your mom and dad said to you, the behaviors they modeled. The other part of environment is culture. So about one-sixth of eating disorders can be blamed on cultural environment, like the pictures we’re shown.... If we magically were able to suddenly change the images we see in order to be diverse in all ways, gradually that part of the pressure would relieve itself. But it wouldn’t relieve that need of a girl to control her food intake because she can’t control her life.

It’s that last part that continues to get short shrift in popular media treatment of eating disorders. And I get why the media might latch onto images and the thin imperative as the root cause of eating disorders: Media outlets love nothing more than to generically critique themselves (what women’s magazine hasn’t covered the problem of unrealistic body ideals formed by...the media?). Less cynically, poor body image is something most of us have experienced at some point; using this as a hook for readers to empathize with eating disorder patients works beautifully. Plenty of people have dieted to lose weight for aesthetic reasons, and the disordered thought loop that makes a satisfying eating disorder story—I was obsessed with food!—is mimicked in the dieting mind-set. So the average reader may think she’s identifying with the subject, not realizing that what she’s identifying with are the symptoms of an eating disorder: the restriction of food, or the overconsumption of it, the vigilant attention paid. But the eating disorder doesn’t lie within its symptoms. It lies within its causes.

Listen, I’m not saying that there’s no connection between appearance and eating disorders. Of course there is. And body image is an essential topic to so many women’s lives today—including women who have never exhibited a single eating disorder symptom in their life. Do I even need to point out the ways in which having poor body image is a drain of resources? Of enormous intellectual and psychic energy? Of time, of money, of already precious resources? Of emotion? Do I need to ask how many times women have asked “Do I look fat in this?” because we lack the words to ask for support and tenderness? As long as we have poor body image, we walk through this world ashamed. Shame isn’t what I want for any person on this planet; it’s not what whoever/whatever created us probably had in mind; it’s not what any of us want for the people we love. Yes, we need body image work, and we’ve needed it for a long time. And a week devoted to eating disorder education is a good time to reinvigorate that conversation.

But eating disorders do not run parallel alongside a track of bodily dissatisfaction, and the more we conflate the two, the less we’re tackling the true complexity of eating disorders, and the less we're looking at the other threads that unite patients more deeply than hating their thighs. We’re not looking at perfectionism, or the twin sisters of compliance and rebellion, and how all of these play out in the lifetime of an eating disorder. We’re not looking at biology, or heredity, or giving proper diligence to plain old depression and anxiety. Hell, we’re not looking at stress. We’re not looking at choice, autonomy, or modernity. We’re not looking at the role of trauma, or sex, or comorbidity with addiction. And it is impossible to treat eating disorders without treating all of these as seriously—no, more seriously than—body image.

It’s one thing for the media to treat body image with greater weight than, say, family dynamics in eating disorders. It’s quite another for a treatment clinic to do the same. The Renfrew Center certainly doesn’t take this approach in treating its patients. When I was treated at Renfrew for my own eating disorder a few years ago, I was repeatedly struck by how little body image came up as a topic, both from the counselors and my fellow patients. That’s not to say it wasn’t important; it was more that we’d all thought about our bodies so fucking much by the time we landed in treatment that we were chomping at the bit to give voice to the things that we truly needed to be able to speak of. I could deconstruct body standards before treatment as fluently as I can now. But before entering Renfrew I had no words to tell you about the factors that took me 25 years deep into an eating disorder before I committed to getting help.

I still don’t have all those words, or at least I don’t have them in the ways I’d need to in order to share them here. That’s part of why I don’t usually write here about my eating disorder. The other parts are that while I’m doing really well, recovery is a long process and I’m not at the end of it, and I can’t get all meta on my recovery by writing about it. (I have a story coming out next month in Marie Claire about my experiences, and while I’m glad I wrote it and my editor was great, it was also emotionally taxing.) I’m sharing it here because it would be disingenuous to write an 1,900-word essay on eating disorders spurred by an action of the place I was treated without disclosing my personal stake in untangling the essence of what eating disorders are all about.

But the larger reason is that while I’m an advocate for looking at media images critically, and for improving body image in general, I don’t want to do anything to further the problem I’m writing about here. This is a blog about beauty, and while eating disorders have a role in that discussion, that connection is already so firm in the public mind that I feel my role here is to give a little whisper of Wait. I want us to wait before we draw connecting lines too heavily, and instead ask that we look at the connection between eating disorders and appearance as thematic and dynamic, not as an arrow from point A to point B. The connection isn’t that one causes the other; it’s that they’re both partly rooted in expectations of properly gendered behavior. (It’s worth noting here that while plenty of straight men develop eating disorders, gay men are at higher risk.) To untangle the social angle of eating disorders, we need to look beyond the mere existence of the thin imperative and look at what it says about the role of women: that we are to be perfect, controlled, managed, and compliant—themes that come up repeatedly with eating disorder patients, themes that get to the crux of the matter more directly, without taking the meandering detour through our bodies.

Makeup, too, can say a lot about those issues. It’s not the worst motif Renfrew could have chosen for their campaign. Nor is it the best. I’m no PR expert; I have no idea how the clinic could have better channeled their extraordinary work into a simple campaign for the public to engage with. I just know that by the time I was discharged from Renfrew, I’d finally begun to learn that my dissatisfaction with my body wasn’t causing my eating disorder; it was merely a symptom of it, like restricting my food intake or binge eating. I’d begun to take the focus off my body and put it into understanding the roots of my perfectionism, my people-pleasing, my family history, my silent shrieks of rebellion.

I’d begun to understand that loving my body wasn’t the point. The point wasn’t even to like it. The point was to learn how to eat.

Beauty Blogosphere 2.24.12

February 26, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

Apologies for the late roundup; I was having technical difficulties with Blogger on Friday and then was on vacation with no Internet access. Enjoy!

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

From Head...
Mad women: Pillbox hats off to The Gloss for not going gaga over the Estee Lauder Mad Men collection. I love the show and am writing this sporting a smock and a beehive, so I'm not opposed to aping the style. But as Jamie Peck points out, "I’m wary of mindless nostalgia for an era that was actually pretty terrible for women in a lot of ways, ways Mad Men examines with unflinching honesty.... I worry some women might be taking the utterly wrong message from the show if thinking about Mad Men gets them in a happy, makeup-buying mood and not a gutted, 'this shit’s not fair, why won’t they let Joan fulfill her intellectual potential?' mood."

...To Toe...
Shaq attack: I'm over male celebrities getting pedicures. But I'll always have room for male celebrities giving pedicures, especially when it's Shaq.

...And Everything In Between:
Hungry eyes: Perhaps capitalizing on the PR boost about the whole Hunger Games nail polish saga, one arm of the movie's publicity is a spoof campaign for men's cosmetics. "Official Eyeliner of the 74th Hunger Games" reads the tagline for a golden eyeliner sported by one of the characters. The "ads" are spooky because of the story of the Hunger Games—but they're also effective in showing how language used in actual ads (geared toward women, not men in a dystopian future) is a little spooky in its own right. "The Secret Weapon Used by Professionals" makes sense in the Hunger Games context, but given that "secret weapon" is used in plenty of beauty marketing copy, it gets downright weird.

Cruelty workaround: Estee Lauder, Avon, and Mary Kay are considered cruelty-free by PETA, after making commitments way in the 1980s to end animal testing. But according to the animal rights organization, Avon and Estee Lauder have quietly complied with Chinese laws that mandate animal testing before products can be sold in China. (Mary Kay has been more proactive in resisting efforts; it's unclear how much they're allowing animal testing.) I'm no fan of animal testing, but I'm really no fan of corporate workarounds.

Organic chic: Bobbi Brown seems like a cool chick and all, but what kills me is the lede of this Times profile of her that posits her as some sort of freewheeling bohemian compared with Estee Lauder. "When I interviewed Estée Lauder in 1985, we lunched on grilled flounder at Le Cirque surrounded by excited socialites. ... She was often at the Reagan White House, tight with Nancy and Ronnie. When I interviewed Bobbi Brown, we ate organic vegetables in her kitchen in Montclair, N.J., while her nephew noodled on a laptop nearby. She wore J. Crew pants, a Uniqlo sweater, sneakers and her hair was in a ponytail." Do they really think their readers don't see that organic vegetables in Montclair are the new flounder at Le Cirque?

The house that beauty built: If you have a spare $3.3 million lying around, you can buy Mary Kay's mansion in Dallas, which hit the market last week.

Show dog: You haven't gotten your canine fix from me this week, have you? Check out Show Dog by Josh Dean, a colleague of mine who (unbeknownst to me until this week) spent two years going behind the scenes of dog shows for the book—which, naturally, is being billed as a literary answer to Best in Show. (Did you know that poodles take a good four to five hours of grooming to get ready for show day? "And you thought women had it bad!")

Museum muse: Anyone near South Bend, Indiana, who enjoys this blog may well enjoy this exhibit: "Gizmos, Corsets & Concoctions: Our Obsession with Health & Beauty." Elixirs, advertisements, and a "permanent wave machine" are on display.

I really, really, really, really, really hope this trend dies, like, now: Teenagers posting YouTube videos of themselves asking commenters whether they're pretty or not. The curation of the self through social media is one thing. Asking others to curate for you is heartbreaking.

Working girl: After Cindy Crawford's 10-year-old kid modeled for Young Versace, Crawford put the kibosh on her daughter's career, saying she was just too young. Which is nice, and almost makes up for the fact that there is a Young Versace.

Paging Downton Abbey fans: Aaron Bady on the masculine crisis and faux aristocracy of Earl of Grantham. "His wife didn’t want a real aristocrat; she wanted a modern simulacrum." And if you wanna know how Lady Grantham might have smelled, check out this Mimi Froufrou post on historical scents of the era—and which perfume the actresses actually wear to get into character.

Modesty: The nonsense surrounding a man who handed a (very reasonably dressed) female college student a note about how her outfit was inciting lust is terrifically upsetting. But I love that it's prompting young Christian women to speak up about the role of women's clothing in desire, as Lauren Nicole does here. "Dear men: If you believe my neckline is causing to stumble, you have bought into the lie that women are the problem, NOT YOUR LUST. Dear women: If you believe you are responsible for your fellow man's sins, you have bought into the lie that YOU are the problem, NOT SIN." (via Hugo)

Video star: Franchesca Ramsey, the mind that brought you Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls, takes us through a new apocryphal tween video game that's scarily on-point.

Lady indexes: Jenna Sauers looks at the myth of the hemline index—the idea that hemlines mimic the economy, rising with good stock prices and falling with bad—using a piece in Business Insider as a hook. The irony here is that Business Insider reran a piece of mine about how the lipstick index has been debunked. They know better!

The history of women and botany: "Women's botanical activity raised concerns because it removed them from the domestic sphere and because it placed women within a heretofore masculine network of plant fanciers."

The scent of money: Lady Gaga working with a Swiss fragrance company to develop a perfume that would make its wearers smell like an "expensive hooker." Because the nose knows? (via Tits and Sass)

Tuning in: Wait, is Saturday Night Live on a funny phase again? On the advice of Gala Darling I dared to click through to this clip and possibly died laughing: "Bein' Quirky With Zooey Deschanel." Between that, the Lana Del Rey "interview," and the Maya Angelou Prank show, things seem to be picking up.

Out of the box: Can we get all meme-deconstruct here? I'm getting a kick out of the "What People Think I Do" meme. The beauty blogger and fashion writer speak to me, since I'm really neither but am sort of both. In particular, the fashion writer meme shows that we believe ourselves to have a certain amount of Vreeland-esque gravitas, which belies the notion of the fashion writer as, well, Cher from Clueless. It's a sliver of insight into the world actually inhabited by women concerned with fashion and femininity. (Although based on my own experience, certainly the head-on-desk is indeed the most realistic image of all.)

Expiration date: What happens to models when they "age out"? This article looks at how successful models have to work from the near-beginning of their careers to ensure they'll have careers after age 22. Telling quote: "You’d be stupid not to think you have a shelf life,” says Iman, 56, who now runs a $25 million cosmetics company. “I knew I had to become a brand. And that brand was me.”

Miss Navajo Nation: A peek into pageantry that has nothing to do with swimsuit competitions: Miss Navajo Nation. It's interesting to see what's valued in this pageant—Navajo language, traditional skills (contestants must butcher sheep)—alongside beauty, not in an either/or construct.

On elegance: Lauren Cerand, who careful readers will remember from her musings on "glamour" a few weeks ago, writes a splendid essay on elegance. It touches upon class, of course, but Cerand makes the case that elegance is more about sadness, boundary-setting, privacy, and perhaps men who don't wear their own tuxedos.

Blogger space: If you didn't get enough of little old moi from the two interviews I did last week, check out my contribution to "Blogger Space," a rotating feature from writer Pauline Gaines that asks bloggers to share pictures and reflections of their writing space. I get all evangelical (sort of) about my standing desk.

Under pressure: The responses to Sally's question of "Do you feel increased pressure to look chic?" are fascinating.

Thoughts on a Word: Nappy

February 22, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

With a tagline like “Not your average beauty blog,” it’s hardly a surprise that I’m a fan of re: thinking beauty. Yassira L. Diggs’s experience as both a makeup artist and writer ensures her work has a candid, sharp, informed insight; in particular, her breadth of work on natural hair has heightened my understanding of the issue. After reading a piece in which she mentioned her thoughts on the word nappy, I asked her if she’d be willing to elaborate on her ideas surrounding this ever-potent word--and much to my delight, she agreed. Besides maintaining re: thinking beauty, Yassira also writes about thrifting at The Thrifted, and you can learn more about her skills as a makeup artist at carbonmade.

Nappy is, at the very least, to be handled with caution. It may mean diaper in some parts of the world, but that’s not the case at all, in these our United States of America. Here, nappy is combustible. Not everyone can say it and come away unscathed. Say it to, or even just near, the wrong person and it might just blow up in your face. In 2007, shock jock Don Imus found that out, and reminded us all about it, when he called the Rutgers University women’s basketball team “some nappy-headed hoes.” The firestorm that ensued left him jobless in its wake. At the time, Lanita Jacobs-Huey, an associate professor of anthropology and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, expressed a view common among many African-Americans when she said, “When I hear it from someone who doesn’t understand the depth of pain, they just don’t have the right to say it.” See, nappy is a huge snag in the idea that we live in a post-racial society, because in large parts of the African-American community, nappy is a deep, deep wound rooted in slavery and Jim Crow.

To understand the sensitivity that nappy requires, one must understand how the word went from its original meaning to this explosive place. Nappy came from nap, a noun that refers to a fuzzy raised surface on fabric. In the beginning, nappy was a texture, and that was the whole truth. During slavery in the United States, however, nappy became a tool in dismantling self-esteem in the slave population. In a world where the feminine beauty ideal revolved around long straight hair, fine features, and fair skin, slave owners, supported by so-called “scientific” claims, pathologized African people’s dark skin, broad facial features, kinky hair textures—basically, everything about them. In order to oppress people you must believe that they are inferior, somehow less human than you, and you must convince them that their (supposed) inferiority is the truth. The message—that their woolly, nappy hair was proof that they were sub-human—was naturally and tragically internalized by black people during slavery. To understand the button that nappy pushes among many African-Americans today, one must consider the overwhelming force of cultural power, and how unconsciously it is passed down through generations.

Nappy’s trauma still lingers, even now in the midst of what seems like a natural hair renaissance in the African-American community. I still hear fellow African-Americans throw around the term “good hair” to reference, compliment, and/or envy straight or loosely curled hair, as in not nappy. I have an aunt who, during one of those family moments when my choice to wear my hair in long dreadlocks was being questioned, heartily defended me with “Leave her alone, one day she’ll decide to fix her hair!”

Nappy is easily misconstrued. People who don’t understand nappy often think it’s another word for unkempt. Hence, nappy has been accused of having an unprofessional appearance, and deemed inappropriate for many a workplace.

In 1998, all hell broke loose when a New York City parent found copies of pages from the book Nappy Hair, by Carolivia Herron, in her third-grader’s folder. Alarmed by what she saw, and without reading the whole book, she made copies of the pages and passed them out to her community, with a note about the white teacher who was supposedly teaching their black and Hispanic kids racist stereotypes. Parents who didn’t even have children in Ruth Sherman’s class protested and demanded she be fired. At a public meeting they shouted over her, threatened her, and cursed her, rather than let her speak. She had to be escorted out by security. When the dust settled, Sherman, who had been ousted, was offered her position back. The shouting died down. The book had always been a celebration of nappy hair. Nappy is that loaded.

My relationship with nappy is complicated in its own way. While I didn’t grow up hearing or using the word, I can’t say I didn’t know it. It was just not used to demean me. I did, however, grow up around relaxers. I came into the world surrounded by black women who straightened their hair. I idolized my mother and aunts as a child, and joined them in the practice as soon as I could. By the time I was 12, I could do my own touch-ups. Every 6-8 weeks, from childhood to my early twenties, my roots got “relaxed.” Maybe that’s why I busted out laughing when my aunt threw her arm around me and planted a kiss on my cheek after her passionate defense of my dreadlocks: I remember what it was like, before I got curious about my own hair texture and stopped using relaxers, when fixed and relaxed meant the same thing to me. So I know how deeply she meant no harm with her words.

I suppose my semi-neutral background with nappy is why my views on the word continue to be semi-moderate (I think). I am not offended by nappy per se. At the same time, I can’t unknow what a hot potato it is in our society, so it would give me pause if someone addressed me with nappy, in reference to my hair. My reaction would ultimately depend on who was addressing me and my perception of their intent in using the word, because with nappy, context is everything. I can’t foresee it happening, though. I mean after all, nappy is the elephant in our societal room, and we, the ones who circle it, go under it, and make our way around it every day, are well versed at leaving it out of the conversation. It’s so much easier to get through the day that way. We are far from being at a point with nappy where it can slide by whimsically in a sentence, unnoticed.

Most of the time, we tip-toe around nappy, leaving it out of conversations, especially in racially mixed circles. There are those who want to see the word gone from the dictionary. To some people, nappy is the other n-word, the utterance of which is at least cause to feel offended, or even bad about themselves. Others, like natural hair crusader Linda Jones, founder of A Nappy Hair Affair, celebrate nappy. Fighting word or reason to smile, nappy has a long ways to go to find peace among us. It can, however, be an opportunity to communicate, and to learn about each other, and ourselves. That’s my favorite way to think of nappy these days.

Best in Show: Prize Dogs and the Women Who Love Them

February 21, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

I don’t particularly like dogs, at least not as a species. Some of them are perfectly lovely creatures I’m happy to share space with on an as-needed basis; others are sources of anything ranging from annoyance to terror.

So it wasn’t the dogs that got me into the Westminster Dog Show the other day, not exactly. I was on the treadmill at the gym, which is where I watch things I normally wouldn’t, like the news, or CSI, or the Westminster Dog Show. It was basically the only thing on that had nothing to do with Rick Santorum (shudder!) or sports (men throwing things at other things, why do I care?), so the kennel club it was.

I wound up enjoying it from a sort of removed, absurdist standpoint, made all the easier by the fact that I was watching the toy dog competition. I know next to nothing about dogs, and certainly know even less about toy dogs. (For those of you who are as clueless about dogs as I was a mere eight hours ago: Toy dogs aren’t actually toys, they’re live, just very very small.) Most looked like extravagant motorized dust ruffles to me. But of course, it’s not the dust ruffles that intrigue me; it’s the handlers behind them.

Showing animals is peculiar, sartorially speaking: You have to be dressed spiffily enough to pay proper homage to the event (teenagers showing sows at 4-H shows will put on their best cowboy boots), but comfortably enough to run, jump, chase, and otherwise wrangle potentially unpredictable creatures. You don’t dress to complement yourself; you’re dressing to complement your charge: “I never want to blend in with my dog,” says a handler in this article, which also advises dressing to distract from dogs’ flaws if necessary—the canine equivalent of wearing vertical stripes, I suppose?

In some ways it’s no different than the boardroom, if, in the boardroom, one were expected to frequently bend over and kneel, and to have liver in one’s pocket to keep a senior executive in line. The result is that the conservative look required can easily devolve into frumpiness—a fact not escaped by the Facebook group Dog Show Fashion Police, which has more than 17,000 “likes.” Shoes in particular stood out to me: Not a single woman handler was wearing heels. There may be a regulation about this, actually, in order to protect the flooring (does anyone know?). You mostly only see handlers from the knee down, and it’s rare to see images of women’s legs without them ending in either sky-high stilettos or a perfectly pedicured toe. Nothing like that here—just one pair of legs after another, revealed so matter-of-factly as to make us barely register them as women’s legs, de-eroticized as they were.

Reading the close-captioned narration onscreen cracked me up at first, these traits the announcers were attributing to dogs—docility, hospitality, even luxury-loving, all with a distinct emphasis on their impeccable breeding and their place in the social order of onceuponatime. (They didn’t need to spell out the connection of dog breeding to modern-day class systems; that part was clear.) But as I watched pair after pair of flats-clad human legs scurry alongside these moving dust ruffles, it struck me what a role reversal dogs shows are for female handlers. Here you have women displaying something to be judged on its looks, genetics, and breeding, and it is not her. She holds the dog out as an offering; we look at the floor-length hair of the Pekingese, the bouffant (hairdo?) of the shih tzu, the perfectly manicured puffs of the toy poodle, and we literally judge the animal based solely on how it appears to us. The words used to describe the dogs—affable, trusting, companionable, lively—also happen to read as a checklist of traits for the ideal woman. The dog receives the burden of absorbing the attitudes we normally direct toward women, leaving the handler oddly free to trot alongside her charge. For once, she is neither being judged nor judging. For once, she is an active participant without being looked at, and without the wallflower’s shame; she must be a wallflower in order to let the canine star shine.

I’m afraid this reads a bit like parody, the idea of the Westminster Kennel Club as fertile ground for an act of feminist visibility, and I admit it’s a little ridiculous. (Though if there’s a strain of radical feminist dog handlers out there reading this, please do let me know.) But when the narrators are saying things that we so blatantly reserve for women, how could my thoughts not wander in that direction? At one point an announcer unblinkingly proclaimed about a certain breed, “It’s not just hair and glitz—they’re actually really pretty.” Even dogs are being judged as either glamorous or “natural” beauties; as leaning on the artifice of hair and glitz or being genetically gifted enough to be “really pretty.” And given that women are compared to so many animals anyway—we’re kittenish, or have birdlike appetites; we’re foxy little vixens, unless we’re heifers or, well, dogs—suddenly it doesn’t seem terrifically far-fetched to wonder if there’s a bit of relief in establishing oneself as the mistress of another who is definitively there to be judged. Dogs may be man’s best friend, but perhaps they’re also woman’s best diversion.

Beauty Blogosphere 2.17.12

February 17, 2012 Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

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

From Head...
Headucation: African-American hair salons have a long history of being hotbeds of activism. That thrives today, but the Beauty Is It salon in Staten Island is making it official with a news exhibit called "Black Women in American Culture and History"—including, of course, a nod to Madame CJ Walker.

...To Toe...
The pedicure of the future: When the Burgundy Girls dreamed up this galactic nail treatment they were picturing it for manicures, but I'm more apt to go wild on my toes than my hands. Am I alone on this? Either way, this look is glittery gorgeousness.

...And Everything In Between:

Girltanked: Know some young female innovators? (Of course you do.) Girltank, a new think tank of young female social entrepreneurs across the globe, wants to know about them. There are so many young women doing incredible things worldwide; Girltank aims to help them connect with one another and give them access to opportunities and resources that help shape communities and conversations across the world. This might not seem to have much to do with beauty, but it does: The public perception of young women is that they're there to be looked at, or that they need "our help." Girltank aims to change that perception by showing young women as change-makers and contributors to society. If you know of any women who fit the bill, visit Girltank's Facebook page and let them know! (There are raffle prizes too, as added incentive, including a $100 package from Lush.)

Corrupt much?: The beauty biz leads in consumer complaints in Singapore, beating out even the sleaze-ridden timeshare industry.

If you've got a problem, yo I'll solve it: I will forever get a thrill out of reading marketing analysis, as it reveals exactly how campaigns are designed to work on us. This one comes from market analysis firm NPD in regards to men's skin care: "There is a feeling that facial skin care products are not needed unless you have a specific skin problem... For men to use a product, he first must be aware that there is an underlying need that requires addressing," says industry analyst Karen Grant. That is, tell him what's wrong with him, then fix him. Sound familiar?

Sample sale: Birchbox-like cosmetics sampling services are catching on in Korea—because the sale of samples was banned last year.

Swift justice: Twenty-five years after being arrested for selling cosmetics fakes, a New Delhi man has finally been sentenced to a year of community service.

Straw feminist: I've been reading the Tumblr Pop Feminist Perblog for a while, and this screed shows why. I don't agree with every word she's saying here but she succinctly breaks down the dangers of posing the performance of traditional femininity as subversive for its own sake, and also lays out a point that's frighteningly easy to overlook in appearance-related discussions of feminism: "Show me a feminist who is saying we can't be feminine. Seriously, show me a feminist who is saying we can't be feminine."

Meow: Intellectually, I buy the argument that Hello Kitty might contain hidden forms of cuteness-as-power in a postindustrial society. Practically, I can't stand the little bitch. Either way, this piece is interesting. "The gift under capitalism is the moment that circulation is affected by the introduction of an irreducible social aspect. As the gift of cuteness, then, Hello Kitty becomes a sort of value-analog that works by exempting itself from circuits of valorization."

Бунт Grrl: If you doubt the potential for the forcefulness of feminine motifs, check out Pussy Riot, a Russian feminist punk band protesting the current political climate under Putin. These summer-dress-clad performers are downright fierce, and the potency of their message has more weight than all too many punk bands in the U.S.

Stolen pink: I've been turned off "breast cancer kitsch" for a while, but if I hadn't been, the lede of this Anna Holmes piece in Washington Post would seal the deal. Apparently the pink ribbon was a grassroots effort from a survivor; when Self magazine and Estee Lauder asked if they could co-opt it in their campaign, she turned them down, fearing commercialization of her ordeal. But the show must go on: They tweaked the color, put pink on parade, and now we can all buy pink products (with nary an assurance a dime goes toward cancer research).

Economic models: The Economist covers the trend within the modeling industry of hiring "more aspirational young women" rather than the "very young, impressionable models" that have overwhelmingly composed the modeling workforce—think students and do-gooders. I think Sally Davies is onto something when she casually posits (and by "casually" I mean "on Twitter," where she called my attention to the piece) that "Maybe beauty's social premium has gone up everywhere, so industry trades prestige for pay and also creates more internal hierarchy."

Muslim makeup: Halal cosmetics and toiletries make up 9% of the global halal market, and demand may be growing. Halal cosmetics are basically vegan cosmetics with certification, so I'm surprised we don't see more "certified halal" branding. Oh wait, never mind.

Prioritizing biology: The writer of this Slate piece is talking about Cynthia Nixon's statement that, for her, being gay was a choice—and that that shouldn't matter. But the larger point ties into the idea I was getting into earlier this week: Why do we prioritize biology over all else? In the gay rights movement certainly it was helpful at one point to frame sexual orientation biologically; it helped plenty of people understand that it was no more a choice than heterosexuality is for the majority of the population. But just as biology isn't what makes sexual orientation a perfectly fine way to live, neither do biological tendencies to prefer symmetrical faces or whatever mean we shouldn't question social construction of beauty. (Thanks to Rachel for the link.)

Default browser: Baby boomers buy more cosmetics online than other age groups, which makes total sense to me. I wouldn't buy makeup online unless I knew it was exactly what I wanted: exact shade, exact consistency, exact size, etc. And I'm guessing by the time I'm 50, I'll have damn well figured that out.

What would the Venus of Urbino look like with a tummy tuck? Find out here.

Photoshopesque: We've heard ad nauseam about how classic paintings depicted fuller-figured women than what we tend to favor now—but this collection shows us, by retouching everything from Botticelli to Velazquez. Yikes! (Thanks to Meaghan for pointing me toward it.)

The loss of addiction: Medicinal Marzipan on the feeling of loss that comes with healing from emotional eating: "I miss the quick-fix, the bowl of beans and rice, the easy remedy that I could provide myself with the contents of my cupboards. Yes, I always knew this fix was fickle and short-lived, but in that moment, cheese solved most problems." It's a painful part of recovery, that sense of loss, but it's important to talk about.

What does "flattering" really mean?: "To me, flattering is another form of size policing and body fascism." I don't entirely agree with this piece at Persephone—I use the word flattering to mean I look how I want to look, and sometimes that absolutely includes concealing certain parts and highlighting others, which, you know, conforms to beauty standards. But the article is thought-provoking, and I know that I make a point to never use "flattering" as code for "It makes you look thinner" when talking to someone else. (So why use it for myself? Hmm.)

Books abound!: Congratulations to Elissa at Dress With Courage for her soon-to-be-published Thrifting 101, and to Kjerstin Gruys, who just signed with Penguin to publish a book about her year without mirrors. Excellent, excellent!

More of me: Don't believe a word you read about me in Us magazine, the damned vultures. Instead, read these two interviews with me from two excellent organizations: Ma'yan, a research and education nonprofit examining identity issues facing Jewish girls, and Radar Productions, a literary nonprofit founded by Michelle Tea focused on giving voice to LGBTQ experiences. I don't blog much about blogging, because I gather that's not what you're here for, but if you're curious to know more about my thinking on what goes on The Beheld you may find them interesting.

Podcasting: Sally McGraw for Strong, Sexy & Stylish leads a discussion on the connection between looking great and feeling confident. She's pretty much the master of demonstrating why looking your best is a beginning, not an ending, to being your best self, so tune in, eh?

Comfort and style: Decoding Dress continues her series on discomfort and fashion by engaging with readers' comments to surge toward a thesis of fashion and comfort as social control. (Have I mentioned lately how much I think you all should be reading her?)

Have you ever seen a dermatologist?: Courtney at Those Graces asks why we're more willing to cover up our skin than to fix it. Yes, "fix" is a loaded term, but the point is that plenty of women spend money on concealers and foundations instead of going to a dermatologist, when really, if you have a genuine skin problem, that's where you should be going. Is it the paperwork? The hassle? The fact that it's less fun to visit a doctor than play at Sephora?

Like, layperson linguistics, totally: How does your voice influence the ways people think of you? A Valley girl thoughtfully shares her story.