"Text"
Went to Nice, had fun. This blog is not about real life events.
These past few years I've been thinking about beauty practises quite a lot. A while ago I came across a book called Beauty and Misogyny, by Sheila Jeffreys. I have a vague notion that the book is partly problematic and not without its critics, and, reading no further than the introduction, I don't necessarily agree that stuff like makeup should be included on the UN list of harmful traditional practises. But it's still striking a chord.In the 1970s a feminist critique of makeup and other beauty practices emerged from consciousness-raising groups. [...] In these groups women discussed how they felt about themselves and their bodies. They identified the pressures within male dominance that caused them to feel they should diet, depilate and makeup. Feminist writers rejected a masculine aesthetics that caused women to feel their bodies were inadequate and to engage in expensive, time-consuming practices that left them feeling that they were inauthentic and unacceptable when bare-faced (Dworkin, 1974). "Beauty" was identified as oppressive to women.
In the last decades the brutality of the beauty practices that women carry out on their bodies has become much more severe. Today's practices require the breaking of skin, spilling of blood and rearrangement or amputation of body parts. Foreign bodies, in the form of breast implants, are placed under the flesh and next to the heart, women's labia are cut to shape, fat is liposuctioned out of the thighs and buttocks and sometimes injected into other sites such as cheeks and chins. [...] These developments are much more dangerous prescriptions for women's health than the practices common in the 1960s and 1970s when feminist critique was formed. It might be expected, then, that there would have been a sharpening of the critique and a renewed awareness of its relevance in response to the more concerted attack on the integrity of women's bodies. But this is not what happened. Instead, the feminist perspective, which caused many thousands of women to eschew beauty culture and products, came under challenge in the 1980s and 1990s.
[...] Liberal feminists, such as Natasha Walter (UK) and Karen Lehrman (USA), argued that there was nothing wrong with lipstick or women making themselves look good, with all the products and practices of beauty culture (Walter, 1999; Lehrman, 1997). Feminism itself had created choice for women, they said, and enabled women now to "choose" lipstick where once it might have been thrust upon them. Meanwhile the influence of postmodern ideas in the academy led to some rather similar rhetoric about "choice", usually in the form of "agency", emanating from some feminists theorists and researchers (Davis, 1995). Bolder propositions were made as well, such as the idea that beauty practices could be socially transformative. Postmodern feminist theorists such as Judith Butler (1990), with their ideas on gender performativity, inspired the notion among queer theorists that the beauty practices of femininity adopted by unconventional actors, or outrageously, could be transgressive (Roof, 1998). Other postmodern feminists such as Elizabeth Grosz argued that the body is simply a "text" which can be written on, and that tattooing, cutting, let alone lipstick, are just interesting ways of writing on it (Grosz, 1994). It is in response to this recent defense of beauty practices against the feminist critique that this book has been written. (Jeffreys, 2005: 1-2)
I've never thought of myself as a radical feminist. It just feels so strange to read about lipstick right up there with breast implants and labioplasty as attacks on the integrity of women's bodies. Isn't this why feminists are said to focus too much on the fem? Isn't this why feminists are said to focus on irrelevant minutiae when there are more important issues to worry about? Like, it's just lipstick right? I suppose it's rhetoric like this is why so many women say they're not feminists at all, because what's wrong with making yourself pretty or letting someone treat you to dinner sometimes, and feminists obviously want us all to walk around braless and with our legs and armpits unshaven. Like, hey feminists, if you hate men so much, why do you want to become men?
But makeup does belong up there. Because it does kind of impede on women's chances of happiness. I mean, from childhood girls are complimented on how pretty they are, whereas boys get any combination of plucky, assertive, smart, etc. As a woman, you can't really leave the house without shaving, coiffing, painting and plucking, and if you don't, for some reason men have the right to comment on how you look. A man may come to work with stubble on his chin, and people won't question whether he's incompetent at his job seeing as he can't even take care of himself. I don't think there's anything wrong in wanting to wear makeup to look pretty, and sure, if you have issues with your tits, sure, put some in, take some out, get glow in the dark nipples, they're your own tits man. But we live in a culture where it's increasingly difficult to establish the difference between doing something to feel good and doing something because the society expects it and generally tends to make non-conformists feel bad. And that's something that doesn't get discussed as much as it should whenever something like titty-implants, shaving or shaping the snatch, or makeup is depicted as emancipatory. Hell, I don't even identify as female, and I sometimes wonder if I should wear makeup of women's clothes, just to fit in better.
These past few years I've been thinking about beauty practises quite a lot. A while ago I came across a book called Beauty and Misogyny, by Sheila Jeffreys. I have a vague notion that the book is partly problematic and not without its critics, and, reading no further than the introduction, I don't necessarily agree that stuff like makeup should be included on the UN list of harmful traditional practises. But it's still striking a chord.In the 1970s a feminist critique of makeup and other beauty practices emerged from consciousness-raising groups. [...] In these groups women discussed how they felt about themselves and their bodies. They identified the pressures within male dominance that caused them to feel they should diet, depilate and makeup. Feminist writers rejected a masculine aesthetics that caused women to feel their bodies were inadequate and to engage in expensive, time-consuming practices that left them feeling that they were inauthentic and unacceptable when bare-faced (Dworkin, 1974). "Beauty" was identified as oppressive to women.
In the last decades the brutality of the beauty practices that women carry out on their bodies has become much more severe. Today's practices require the breaking of skin, spilling of blood and rearrangement or amputation of body parts. Foreign bodies, in the form of breast implants, are placed under the flesh and next to the heart, women's labia are cut to shape, fat is liposuctioned out of the thighs and buttocks and sometimes injected into other sites such as cheeks and chins. [...] These developments are much more dangerous prescriptions for women's health than the practices common in the 1960s and 1970s when feminist critique was formed. It might be expected, then, that there would have been a sharpening of the critique and a renewed awareness of its relevance in response to the more concerted attack on the integrity of women's bodies. But this is not what happened. Instead, the feminist perspective, which caused many thousands of women to eschew beauty culture and products, came under challenge in the 1980s and 1990s.
[...] Liberal feminists, such as Natasha Walter (UK) and Karen Lehrman (USA), argued that there was nothing wrong with lipstick or women making themselves look good, with all the products and practices of beauty culture (Walter, 1999; Lehrman, 1997). Feminism itself had created choice for women, they said, and enabled women now to "choose" lipstick where once it might have been thrust upon them. Meanwhile the influence of postmodern ideas in the academy led to some rather similar rhetoric about "choice", usually in the form of "agency", emanating from some feminists theorists and researchers (Davis, 1995). Bolder propositions were made as well, such as the idea that beauty practices could be socially transformative. Postmodern feminist theorists such as Judith Butler (1990), with their ideas on gender performativity, inspired the notion among queer theorists that the beauty practices of femininity adopted by unconventional actors, or outrageously, could be transgressive (Roof, 1998). Other postmodern feminists such as Elizabeth Grosz argued that the body is simply a "text" which can be written on, and that tattooing, cutting, let alone lipstick, are just interesting ways of writing on it (Grosz, 1994). It is in response to this recent defense of beauty practices against the feminist critique that this book has been written. (Jeffreys, 2005: 1-2)
I've never thought of myself as a radical feminist. It just feels so strange to read about lipstick right up there with breast implants and labioplasty as attacks on the integrity of women's bodies. Isn't this why feminists are said to focus too much on the fem? Isn't this why feminists are said to focus on irrelevant minutiae when there are more important issues to worry about? Like, it's just lipstick right? I suppose it's rhetoric like this is why so many women say they're not feminists at all, because what's wrong with making yourself pretty or letting someone treat you to dinner sometimes, and feminists obviously want us all to walk around braless and with our legs and armpits unshaven. Like, hey feminists, if you hate men so much, why do you want to become men?
But makeup does belong up there. Because it does kind of impede on women's chances of happiness. I mean, from childhood girls are complimented on how pretty they are, whereas boys get any combination of plucky, assertive, smart, etc. As a woman, you can't really leave the house without shaving, coiffing, painting and plucking, and if you don't, for some reason men have the right to comment on how you look. A man may come to work with stubble on his chin, and people won't question whether he's incompetent at his job seeing as he can't even take care of himself. I don't think there's anything wrong in wanting to wear makeup to look pretty, and sure, if you have issues with your tits, sure, put some in, take some out, get glow in the dark nipples, they're your own tits man. But we live in a culture where it's increasingly difficult to establish the difference between doing something to feel good and doing something because the society expects it and generally tends to make non-conformists feel bad. And that's something that doesn't get discussed as much as it should whenever something like titty-implants, shaving or shaping the snatch, or makeup is depicted as emancipatory. Hell, I don't even identify as female, and I sometimes wonder if I should wear makeup of women's clothes, just to fit in better.