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The Limits of “Ethnic” Cosmetics
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha / FALL 2004
 
 
 
I HAVE ONE OF THE MOST COMMON SKIN TONES IN THE WORLD: dark olive, browning to café au lait in summer. Ginger bronze, honey almond, whatever you want to call it, I’ve seen it on thousands of women—on the subway, working in the next cubicle over, and onstage at poetry night. I also have vivid memories of standing with my best friend in a Shoppers Drug Mart as a salesgirl smeared beige crap from a jar onto her berrybrown hand and insisted, “Oh, don’t worry, it’ll blend right in.” How come we had to wait ’til we were in our twenties to find foundation that actually matched our skin? And how come that involved a trip to the MAC counter and shelling out $20 for a bottle of StudioFix, not dropping $5.99 at the drugstore?
But damn, maybe there’s hope. “Find your True Match!” exults L’Oréal’s life-size cardboard display in my local megapharmacy. “At last, a formula that precisely matches your skin’s texture and tone,” coos text accompanied by a row of multicolored cuties, one of whom is even rocking baby dreads and all of whom are darker than usual. Every bit of the marketing is designed to appeal to me and other women of color—from the Asian, Latina, South Asian, and black women on their promo to their subtle acknowledgment that we’re all stressed out from years of staring at a wall of products in “flesh tones” that ain’t ours and never will be.
Visiting the L’Oréal website, however, bursts my bubble fast. I’m greeted
by the same “Find your True Match!” spiel, but now it’s coming from a very pale lady flanked by a row of different, lighter girls than those in the in-store display. Using L’Oréal’s “shade and application advice” tool, I answer the “What is your skin tone?” query with a click on the “deepest” option, and select “cool” for undertone. And my match is … Tawny Beige? Oh, no no nooooo. Let’s try that again. “Deep and warm” gets me Sun Beige, and “neutral and deep” gets me Honey Beige. Needless to say, there is no oak, copper, bronze, dark chocolate, or indigo shade listed in the results.
This isn’t the first time a mainstream makeup company has made a half-assed attempt to capture the women-of-color market. From Maybelline’s Shades of You line in the ’80s to more recent efforts (and sometimes more successful ones—Revlon’s ColorStay goes as deep as Mocha; the trick is finding a drugstore that actually stocks it), boy, have they tried. But either their shades don’t go dark enough or they’re just plain off. In this respect, True Match is nothing new.
The budget-conscious femme of color does have some options—if she’s diligent. Black Opal, which debuted to much fanfare a few years ago, is the first line of cosmetics for women of color to be carried at national chains like Duane Reade and Walgreens. Unfortunately, distribution is patchy, and while their sixteen different shades of foundation are a godsend for darkerskinned women, lighter- and medium-skinned ladies may find them too deep to work. Real Cosmetics, founded by Pakistani former model Lubna Khalid, is still my favorite. She names her foundations after cities and offers colors for girls from San Juan to Harlem, Mumbai to Havana—but you can get her products only online, at some Sephora locations, or at smaller Afrocentric stores in New York. So until Real comes to my town, you’ll probably find me back at the MAC counter … or at the drugstore, kicking over the True Match display.
An Open Letter to Carnie Wilson
Beth Bernstein and Matilda St. John / FALL 2003
 
 
 
Dear Carnie,
As fat women, we were seized by morbid curiosity when we heard that you would be posing in the August issue of Playboy. We assumed that, like other celebrities-gone-nude, you were either attempting to maximize your bound-to-be-fleeting fame (see Jessica Hahn) or creating an airbrushed monument to your vanity (see Belinda Carlisle). Imagine how surprised we were to learn that you were doing it for us. In your second weight-loss chronicle,
I’m Still Hungry,
you wrote of the
Playboy
pictorial, “It would be my way of telling women out there that they could change their entire physical body, be the best they could be, and tell their detractors, Ha-ha!”
On behalf of ourselves and other women supposedly suffering from the “disease” of obesity, we beg you, please, stop trying to inspire, redeem, and instruct us by example. We kinda liked you in the early ’90s—it was encouraging to see a fat woman on MTV, even if they did hide you behind a rock in all the Wilson Phillips videos. You made an attempt to address fatphobia and promote size acceptance with appearances in fat-focused magazines such as
BBW
and
Radiance.
Then you went away for a while, and we must confess we really didn’t notice. In 1999 came the news that instead of being just a garden-variety fat person, you had become afflicted with the tragic disease of morbid obesity. Claiming that your size was threatening your health, you underwent a radical,
complication-prone surgery that reduced your stomach to the size of your thumb and connected it directly to your lower intestine. As a public service to educate us about our shared disease, you let your surgery be broadcast on the Internet.
This wasn’t a publicity stunt or a calculated marketing opportunity (even though it was sponsored by a clinic and a surgical-equipment maker). You told ABC News that you’re “not the gastric-bypass girl.” You don’t like it that
People
refers to you as a “famous weight-loser.” To help clear up the confusion, we suggest that you talk to Spotlight Health, the company that broadcast your surgery and cowrote your first book,
Gut Feelings: From Fear
and Despair to Health and Hope,
about changing its website: It’s hard not to think of you as the poster girl for weight-loss surgery when a keyword search for “morbid obesity” brings up your smiling face. Also, you might have considered keeping it to just one book about your surgically engineered transformation. Oh, and not releasing any creative work and focusing solely on your body in interviews may have further muddied the waters as to the reason for your fame.
But you must think it’s worth it to be known more for what’s not there than for what is. Or are you taking all the praise and pats on your newly slim back for us, too? As your latest book tells us, the
Playboy
feature is an “inspiration” for us fat gals; it’s your “final redemption.” And as you told ABC News, “This is for all the women who are ashamed … I’m saying, ‘You can do it. You can let go and be free.’”
Let’s get this straight. You have to strictly monitor your food intake forever to avoid pain, malnutrition, and “dumping syndrome” (cramps, nausea, diarrhea, and more). Your skin can’t keep up with such a rapid and unnatural weight loss and starts hanging on you like a too-big suit, so you have to head over to the surgical tailor to get it taken in. But that’s just the beginning. In addition to having seven pounds of excess skin removed, you also have to undergo a tummy tuck, a breast lift, liposuction, and a repositioning of your belly button. Then more dieting and that thrilling call from
Playboy
—which leads to yet more dieting, because they want you to lose another ten pounds before you pose.
At the shoot, you go through six hours of full-body makeup to cover your scars, then squeeze yourself into corset after corset, showing off your surgeon’s supposed genius with your boobs. In a rare act of modesty, you
don’t display your much-operated-on abdomen. (What’s up, not feeling so free?) Finally, your pictures are subjected to
Playboy’s
requisite heavyhanded airbrushing software.
So break it down for us: Exactly how does following in your footsteps allow us to “let go and be free”? Between the initial surgery, the stringent dieting, and more reconstruction than the post-Civil War South, it smells more like constriction than freedom to us. In
I’m Still Hungry,
you tell us about celebrating the close of this shoot: “Everyone clapped, and I rewarded myself in my favorite way: I ate exactly three peanut M&Ms.” Girlfriend, no wonder you’re still hungry.
The fawning response to your extreme physical transformation is an interesting contrast to, say, the public’s incredulity at Michael Jackson’s. While you’ve both subjected yourself to an alarming number of procedures, Michael seems to be striving for an ideal to which he alone subscribes. (Even those who argue that Jackson wants to look as white as possible would be hardpressed to fully explain the cartoonish results.) In contrast, fatphobia makes your procedures and the results appear agreeable. So we can certainly understand why you’re milking this approval for all it’s worth. Americans have so many conflicts about fat—as a country, we hate our heft yet keep getting fatter—and you offer a tidy external resolution. In today’s bizarre medicalized lexicon, “freedom” now means surgical installation of a radical behaviorist, one who responds with swift punishment when you eat more than your allotted two ounces.
You’ve presented your tale of transformation as something triumphant and radical, but its apparent denouement is the same tired image of the airbrushed blonde with her mouth hanging open. And your tragic attempt at rebellion through extreme conformity is even sadder considering you got bumped from the cover of
Playboy
by the younger women of
Survivor
(“Jenna and Heidi! Their clothes got voted off!”), not even meriting a cover line. Posing nude may give you the stamp of sexy approval, but as a thirty-five-year-old former fat woman, you’re still marginalized.
Which leads us to the dilemma of people’s need to see themselves reflected in celebrities so they’re assured they have a place in the world. As fat women, our choices are getting slimmer all the time, as celebs from Oprah to Ricki Lake to Missy Elliott have trimmed down and renounced their former fat following. But if we find ourselves in need of inspiration, we would
rather look to Kathy Bates, who has refused to make her body the cornerstone of her life’s work or her fame. (And if we need to be redeemed by someone’s nudity, we’ll take Bates’s hot-tub scene in
About Schmidt,
which showed her fleshy, fiftysomething body without comment.)
You could have used your new thin privilege to agitate for better treatment of fat people, but you elected instead to become an advocate for weight loss by any means, at any price. By spouting the company line that fat is unhealthy, ugly, and deadly, you’ve chosen to strengthen the forces that once made you so unhappy rather than work to disable them. So we release you, Carnie Wilson, from the burden of trying to save us fat women from ourselves. Perhaps you can find another group in need of your inspiration and leadership. We hear that Gunnar and Matthew Nelson have resigned as cochairs of the Los Angeles chapter of Narcissistic Children of ’60S Rock Stars in Need of Attention but Unable to Produce Enduring Work of Their Own, leaving a void that surely you fit into at any size.
 
Love,
Beth and Matilda
Outgrowing the Shame of Female Facial Hair
Aimée Dowl / SPRING 2005
 
 
 
IN JOHN CROWLEY’S 2003 IRISH ENSEMBLE FILM
INTERMISSION,
twentysomething Sally has an atrocity on her upper lip: a modest but noticeable mustache. The furry growth incites her mother’s consternation and symbolizes the extent to which the brokenhearted character has allowed herself to fall apart. After enduring her mother’s exhortations to remove the unsightly dark hair, Sally asks a bus driver if she has a “Ronnie,” Irish slang for mustache. When he replies in the affirmative, but adds that she’s no Tom Selleck, Sally retreats even further into her shell. It’s not until Sally sees herself interviewed on television that she acknowledges the Ronnie. “I didn’t see it,” she explains as she weeps in her mother’s arms.
Sally’s facial hair is meant as a symbol of her character’s emotional state, yet it also highlights the reality of many women who do not recognize their “excess” facial hair until it becomes glaringly apparent in a photograph or in the comments of others. For other women, the scene acknowledges an equally uncomfortable reality—that the removal of facial hair has become a bona fide female rite of passage.
According to a 1999 Bristol-Myers Squibb study, forty-one million American women between the ages of fifteen and seventy-four have removed unwanted facial hair within the past six months, and approximately twenty-two million American women remove facial hair at least once a week. Whether it’s the translucent, downy hairs that appear on women’s upper
lips during adolescence or the darker, coarser hairs that ebb and flow with hormonal adjustments in their twenties and thirties, if it’s there, it’s “unsightly”; if it’s unsightly, it’s gone. But these numbers bring up another question: If so many women have facial hair, why is it considered abnormal? And if so many women are removing their facial hair, then isn’t facial hair as genuine a part of the female experience as it is of the male experience?
When humans first walked across the plains in all our hairy glory, the fight for daily survival—to say nothing of the lack of reflective surfaces—presumably superseded the desire to present a soft, smooth countenance. Somewhere along the evolutionary way, women lost much more of their hair than men, and what some women didn’t lose, they were eventually compelled to remove themselves. Since at least the time of the Egyptian pharaohs, women, beauticians, and doctors have devised methods to remedy the “problem” of facial hair: shaving, waxing, plucking, trimming, bleaching, and even scraping. It was in nineteenth-century France that a doctor first wrote about the procedure of cauterizing follicles with hot needles in order to remove unwanted hair—a procedure that may sound masochistic by current standards but was the antecedent to today’s electrolysis.
Although many cultures across the ages have idealized hairlessness in women, modern American culture has perhaps more than others maniacally sought the hairless ideal through the relentless application of facial- and body-hair removal techniques. In the 1930S, upper-class women were so distraught about their “superfluous” facial hair that they fell victim to quacks who sometimes subjected them to carcinogenic X-rays that resulted in burns, scars, and death.
During this time, female hirsutes—defined as women with heavy hair growth on the face and body—removed their unwanted beards and mustaches; those who allowed their hair to grow often ended up in circuses, where they were displayed in sideshows as bearded ladies. These days, women sporting overt facial hair may not be confined to a tent, but they are still considered a freak show. The many ways women bleach, tweeze, and pluck their hair out of existence are more often than not played for either laughs or pity. In
Reality Bites,
we’re treated to Winona Ryder’s character Lelaina hurriedly bleaching her mustache before a date; Rosie O’Donnell, back in the days of her talk show, joked about stringing beads onto her chin
hair. On the pity end of things, makeover subjects on Extreme Makeover and The Swan are shown in “before” montages staring morosely at their mustaches or wispy goatees in the mirror while a voice-over details their daily shame. Advertising for hair-removal methods both high-tech and old-school (laser hair removal has become increasingly widespread, while in some urban areas, the traditional Indian process of threading has come into vogue) urgently targets women, with occasionally brazen insults. (One recent advertisement for hair-removal services in a San Diego weekly newspaper used a photograph of a gorilla.)
Male-focused makeover shows like Queer Eye have brought the term “manscaping” into the pop lexicon with segments about back waxing and eyebrow plucking, suggesting that there’s nothing strictly girly about men curbing their body and facial hair in order to enhance the overall package. But there’s no female correlative, no suggestion that a little extra underbrush on the ladies is okay, too; if anything, the body-grooming imperative has intensified for women as it has been normalized for men. So it’s hardly surprising that a masculine/feminine dichotomy still plagues the topic of facial hair, and for women this means a barrage of assumptions about power, sexuality, and—most of all—“normal” femininity.
During World War II, American women gave up their stockings to save silk material for the war effort, leading to a widespread appeal for bare, hairless legs. This look, which emphasized women’s skin, and hence their femininity, also emerged at a time when women were entering the workplace and adopting traditionally male roles. These days, women’s removal of their facial hair is just another concession in the militarized zones of masculine and feminine, where women must still conform or confront considerable judgment and ridicule.
A study conducted in 1998 by Susan A. Basow and Amie C. Braman asked 195 undergraduate men and women to watch two videos of a woman drying off after a swim. In one video, the woman’s legs and armpits are hairy, and in the other, her body is shaved. The hairy woman was seen as significantly “less friendly, moral, and relaxed,” and “more aggressive, unsociable, strong, nonconformist, dominant, assertive, independent, and in better physical condition.” While the positive and negative meanings of these descriptors depends on individual perceptions, their gendered connotations cannot be mistaken.
But it doesn’t take a social scientist to document the social disapprobation—from disgusted looks to job discrimination to outright violence—accorded to women who, by refusing the pressure to remove their body hair, dare to transgress into “masculine” territory. A small but growing subculture of lesbians and transgendered persons are proudly embracing facial hair as a marker of desired female masculinity, but homophobic confusion and ignorance in the larger culture have reinforced perceptions of this follicular reclamation as haplessly unfeminine rather than purposefully subversive. And in mainstream pop culture, especially as typified in shows
like The L Word,
lesbians are just as prone to normative femininity as straight girls.
Still, for some women, facial hair is simply a proudly revealed part of the female, even feminine, experience. Teresa Carr, a fifty-year-old consultant and poet, has not shaved since 1973, when she discovered hairs growing on her chin. Strangers regularly inquire about her beard—which she describes as a Ho Chi Minh-style goatee—with questions that are genuinely inquisitive and sometimes rude. Jennifer Miller, forty-four, director of Circus Amok, a politically progressive circus that addresses current events through age-old acts, has reinvented the tradition of the bearded lady, developing the persona of the “bearded woman,” which she wears proudly both in the circus and in her day job as an adjunct professor at several colleges and universities. The bearded woman doesn’t wear hyperfeminine clothing as former bearded ladies did, nor does she cloister herself within the circus sideshow tents; instead, she offers a positive, unapologetic image of bearded women in a world of the plucked, shaved, and waxed.
Miller recognizes the pressure women feel about facial hair growth—“women have fear of not being seen as women, fear of not being cleanskinned, fear of being a freak,” she notes—but for both her and Carr, growing their substantial facial hair sends a message to others about the realities of women’s bodies and personal freedom. “Socially,” Carr states, “the discrimination is meant to proscribe the footsteps of women who choose to walk an alternative, self-determined path. I think that wearing your facial hair is an announcement of that self-determination.”
Our culture sees too few women like Carr and Miller who choose to draw attention to their “abnormal” facial hair—and even when it recognizes
them, does so in the service of further marginalization. An article on Miller that appeared in
The New York Times
almost a decade ago was titled “Step Right Up! See the Bearded Person!” and, though it quotes Miller as saying that she doesn’t see her beard as a problem and doesn’t care what caused it, the article makes no effort to position female facial hair growth as a common experience. We’re even willing to revise history: Deeply carnal, famously mustachioed Frida Kahlo, for instance, was literally cleaned up for her transition to the big screen in 2002’S biopic, the mustache she immortalized in so many self-portraits nowhere in sight.
If the recent normalization of cosmetic surgery has shown us anything, it’s that people will go to great lengths and take big medical risks in order to conform to cultural beauty standards, and that women in particular seem sadly susceptible to the shame marketing that characterizes electrolysis, waxing, and laser hair-removal services. And though ideas of normative masculinity and femininity are questioned more consistently now than they were when doctors were scarring women with painful follicle cauterizations, the standard of hairlessness has a particularly tenacious hold on many cultures that, for lots of women, may never loosen.
But there are those who challenge it. Carr and Miller are joining women like Trish Morrissey, an artist whose photos of women with facial hair function as a direct confrontation with the idea of femininity, hair, and power. Her subjects stare unflinchingly into the camera; neither sideshow characters nor politically motivated facial-hair activists, they simply are—and by simply being, are a challenge.
Then there’s
Intermission’
s Sally, who, after overcoming the denial of her Ronnie, tells a man to whom she is obviously attracted that she is going to have the mustache waxed at a spa. In this moment, when Sally is starting to recover her emotional strength, the fellow says, “What mustache?” Although he finally admits that he can see the facial hair, his kindness makes a big difference to the fragile woman. The audience doesn’t get to see Sally remove the Ronnie—although she does—but, as for many women, knowing that some people accept her natural hair makes the plucking and prodding far less painful.

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