Natural's Not In It

[happiestsadist]

This one's been floating around for a long, long time. But, as these posts often do, it takes a specific thing to make me point out, once again, that the game is fucking fixed.

So yeah. Makeup. And this damn thing. Ten "scary celebrity closeups" *cue spooky theremin*. All I'm seeing are nine women who adhere to the standards of beauty and Iggy Pop

Comments

[arthur_sc_king]

The only comment I can think of would be to grab this paragraph from towards the end of Atwood's The Edible Woman, where Marian (the protagonist) gets all dolled up by her friend:Marian stared into the egyptian-lidded and outlined and thickly-fringed eyes of a person she had never seen before. She was afraid even to blink, for fear that this applied face would crack and flake with the strain.
        - Atwood, Margaret, The Edible Woman, 1969, p.232.
I suspect most of y'all have read this already, but if you haven't yet, do so. Trust me.

[happiestsadist]

I think there's both a lot of truth to it, and a lot of internalized misogyny and femme-hatred. The enforcement of one ideal of femininity is as much of a problem as the strict enforcement of any other.

I have stayed femme by choice, and at the cost of getting taken seriously as my actual gender. That should mean something.

[kankurette]

I have. I love that book.

[ms_daisy_cutter]

I'm with happiestsadist. Atwood has many good things to say, but that passage displays the Second Wave aversion to any sort of adornment and, more deeply, internalization of society's disdain for anything marked as "feminine." She's echoing the misogynist meme that a woman who wears makeup is somehow deceiving others.

In a way, it's understandable: Women were just coming out of the Mad Men era. But that was a while ago, you know? And I should point out that self-adornment is not strictly female. Consider European courts of the 18th century. Consider tattoos, piercings, and other body mods.

I'm someone who more or less ignores fashion, but I think it's important to distinguish between human desire to dress up on the one hand and the fashion industry (and associated industries like the diet industry), plus social pressures on all women to conform to a very narrow range of options, on the other.

[ms_daisy_cutter]

Also? I have to say, your comment's pretty tone deaf to the point of this post. It's as if happiestsadist had put up a post explaining how any sort of body policing is wrong, and you'd decided to "reassure" us all that "real women have curves."