Femininity (17 page)

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Many languages of the world use masculine, feminine and neuter genders in their grammar.
In the dim origins of speech when few words and sentence constructions were in circulation,
it is possible that grammatical gender had an actual basis in perceptions of sexual
difference. This tantalizing thought has occupied the reveries of language historians.
But a principle that explains to one linguist’s satisfaction why the Spanish words
for city and mountain are feminine (they are round and large) fails miserably when
applied to German or Hebrew. Otto Jespersen, a renowned philosopher of language, was
forced to conclude that no single principle governs the chaos of grammatical gender.

D
URING A SEASON OF
public exposure when I traveled the country in leaps and bounds, one pale, imperceptible
hair on my chin, lighter than an eyelash and less significant than a freckle, abruptly
multiplied into two, then four, sturdy dark bristles that thrust themselves forward
with pushy vigor. This uninvited quartet grew more swiftly than any hair that had
ever been mine. Offended, I wiped the slate clean with a razor. Two days later the
stubble reappeared.

Stubble! Only men had stubble on their chins! I was growing whiskers! One night I
dreamed that a stiff black moustache had sprouted above my articulate mouth, a dream
so frightening that I awoke in panic.

In the neutral light of a hotel mirror I contemplated my mortification. Were the hairs
on my chin a warning or a retribution? Had my unholy ambition tapped some dormant
source of testosterone within my system? Had I unlocked a reserve tank of hormonal
assertion to which only men were allowed the key? Whatever the cause, I knew with
certainty that I would now be packing a razor whenever I traveled, and that I would
feel for the trace of coarse hair in odd moments, just as a man absently strokes his
chin for signs of five o’clock shadow.

Some months later I furtively visited an electrologist. She peered through a magnifying
glass and pronounced her judgment: “It’s a mole.”

A mole is a great relief when a woman fears that her drive for success has sprouted
whiskers.

Beyond the many diseases of the skin itself, from psoriasis
to venereal infection, a change in complexion may indicate a threat to life. There
is the ashen face of a person in shock, the blue coloration of cardiac failure, the
jaundice hue of a liver infection, the pigmented moles of cancerous melanoma. A ravaged,
pitted skin marked the survivors of the virulent, epidemic smallpox that decimated
populations and affected the course of world history.

Skin also functions as a means of social communication. Newborn babies that are not
picked up and held may die. A rash or an outbreak of pimples can indicate an emotional
upset or an allergic reaction. Profuse sweating and strong odor are a common response
to stress. Hairiness that is normal for one ethnic group may be esthetically offensive
to another. Job and housing discrimination on the basis of skin color has been codified
by private covenant and public law.

A four-year study of skin disease in the United States reported the following: Nearly
one-third of all Americans suffer from some sort of skin condition; pathology increases
with age; and more males than females are subject to major and minor disorders, for
reasons of heredity and hormones. Yet to judge from the multibillion-dollar cosmetics
industry, the persistent rash of books on skin care, and the popularity of dermatologists,
plastic surgeons and skin clinics that cater to the problems of beauty and aging,
improving the texture and quality of the skin is a basic feminine obligation, while
for men it remains an optional or irrelevant concern.

Fair skin of the sort that poets have praised—pale beauty, white shoulders, a complexion
of peaches and cream—is more than a matter of health and cleanliness, although the
anxious regard for a clear complexion found in descriptive reports sent to kings in
search of a royal wife no doubt was inspired by fear of the pox and its deadly contagion.
Beautiful skin—sweet-smelling, lily-white, rosy-cheeked, soft and dewy and free of
blemish—is a sentimental attribute of virginal innocence and aristocratic fragility,
historically defined by that complex mixture of exaggerated anatomical difference,
evidence of a sheltered life and male sexual preference for a serene young female
in mint condition.

“The Princess and the Pea” by Hans Christian Andersen tells of the wonderful good
fortune that befalls a bedraggled young girl who knocks on the door of a castle during
a rainstorm. She is shown to a bed piled high with twenty mattresses stuffed with
feathers under which the queen has placed a single pea. In the morning the girl confesses
to have spent a sleepless night. Her entire body is black and blue, and, without wishing
to offend her hosts, she thinks she must have been lying on something hard. The king
and queen are filled with joy. They have found a proper wife for their son at last,
for “Nobody but a real princess could have such delicate skin.”

As told by the brothers Grimm, the story of Snow White is similarly instructive.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of us all?
The queen had grown accustomed to a reassuring answer.
You,
the mirror always replied,
You are fairest of them all
—until that terrible day when the mirror spoke another truth:
Snow White is fairer than you.

This happens predictably to aging queens. They are no match for dewy-skinned challengers.
The mirror does not lie, and emollients, moisturizers and wands of magic color are
insufficient measures for dealing with crow’s feet around the eyes, furrows on the
brow, enlarged pores, brown spots and loss of elasticity. But for the young as well
as the old, advertisements for commercial skin-care preparations and advice columns
in the women’s magazines spell out an impossible prescription: Clear, fresh, firm
and youthful. Soft and smooth in texture like a baby’s. Lighter in color than a man’s.
No freckles, no pimples, no blackheads, no wrinkles, no frown lines, no dryness, no
sag. No oily condition, no sallow complexion, no glisten and shine of perspiration,
no bags or shadows under the eyes. No scars, no birthmarks, no pits, no pockmarks.
No bulging blue veins, no broken red capillaries, no liver spots, no white spots,
no open pores, no blotches. No unsightly facial hair, no hair on the legs and other
proscribed places. No crepy neck, no scaly, callused heels, no coarse, rough elbows,
no dishpan hands. In short, a skin that shows no sign of physical maturity, hard work,
aggravation, exhaustion, hormonal changes, the effects of pregnancy or the normal
wear and tear of daily living.

Minor skin troubles are a fact of life for more men than women, but they are rarely
a disqualifying factor in terms of sexual appeal. A boy may suffer acute social mortification
from a severe case of blackheads and pimples, but the pits and scars of his youthful
acne may be perceived as ruggedly masculine when he reaches maturity. A girl will
have no such respite. She will pathetically try to hide her “angry” eruptions under
a thick cover of makeup that is guaranteed to aggravate her condition, and later on
may become an eager candidate for medical dermabrasion. Similarly, the deep furrows
that signify concentration, sensitivity and interesting experience in a man of middle
years are the subject of massive emergency measures at their first sign of appearance
in a woman, who embarks on her desperate maintenance program of moisturizers, facial
masks, wrinkle creams, and perhaps some subcutaneous injections of silicone or collagen
and a facelift. In a culture that glorifies youth, men are hardly immune to the anguish
of aging, but they have yet to resort in large numbers to the illusory feminine procedures
for stopping the clock, even as they continue to judge women by standards they would
not be foolish enough to apply to themselves.

Belief that a woman’s skin should be lighter and more perfectly smooth than a man’s
has had a tenacious hold on esthetic convention. A dark/light palette to indicate
sex difference was used for ancient Egyptian wall paintings; yellow pigment was applied
to female bodies and reddish brown was the standard color for males. A flawless shell-pink
body was the romantic convention for female nudes in Western art, while earthier flesh
tones portrayed the masculine complexion. To this day, theatrical makeup remains divided
into a range of shades by sex.

In biological fact there is no natural difference in skin color between men and women.
Darker skin has a greater concentration of the pigment melanin in the epidermis, but
while melanin has an obvious genetic correlation with race, a connection with gender
does not exist. A comparative study of skin tones in a sample population in Michigan
reported that men did appear to be somewhat darker about the chest area than women
but
concluded in its wisdom that men often worked or sunbathed without a shirt while women
did not.

Spending more of the day out-of-doors obviously contributed to the artistic convention
of the “naturally” darker male, but even more significant to the evolving values of
femininity was the earnest conviction that persons of royal heritage possessed a lighter,
more delicate skin than commoners. This flesh-tone convention of the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance can be seen in Spanish and Venetian art, in the brilliant portraits
of nobility and their servants by Goya and Pietro Longhi, where a pale, glowing skin
visually directs the eye to the people of importance, an artist’s trick of great technical
merit. An elitist approach to skin color was not restricted to the painted canvas.
In real life, the aristocrat’s fair complexion was a lofty sign of noble lineage and
gentle breeding, as opposed to the dim, thick-skinned lower orders, the swarthy peasants
who labored under the sun. “Sunburnt” carried the meaning of rude and uncouth, as
“redneck” does today.

Ladies and gentlemen powdered their faces (and often their hair) to achieve the starchy
whiteness that symbolized their elevated station. To preserve or encourage a fine,
noble pallor, complexion masks of paper and cloth were worn out-of-doors to protect
the fair face from the rays of the sun while a creamed, perfumed glove protected the
fair hand from roughness and chapping. For cases where a dusting of white lead powder
could not disguise certain misfortunes of birth such as ruddiness, freckles or an
olive complexion, there were recipes for blanching the skin with a glaze of egg white,
tartar, lemon juice, mercury and the sap of the birch. Elizabeth of England was so
intent on preserving her whiteness, a quality she shared with her father, Henry the
Eighth, that in her old age she painted blue veins on her royal forehead to promote
the illusion of translucent splendor.

Parasols and sunbonnets were standard regalia for would-be ladies in the American
colonies who sought to emulate the upper-class customs of England and France, and
both sexes in the upper reaches of society powdered their hair and their faces. It
is difficult to pinpoint the precise moment when men abandoned
whiteness as a mark of quality—the French and Industrial Revolutions were urgent catalysts
in the decline of extravagant dress and cosmetics as symbols of masculine power—but
by the late nineteenth century a fair, light skin was exclusively and enviously feminine.
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If an “interesting pallor” could not be achieved by powder, tight-lacing and strict
avoidance of the sun, some desperate beauties resorted to eating small quantities
of arsenic, a cause for alarm in the medical journals.

Associating pale skin with aristocratic refinement was not restricted to white-skinned
people. Ivan Morris records in
The World of the Shining Prince
that among the nobility in feudal Japan, the physical ideal was a round, white face
and a heavily perfumed body, removed in countenance and scent from the sweaty, sun-scorched
laborers of the rice fields: “In paintings of gentlemen and ladies of the court, it
was conventional that people of higher rank had fairer faces. Since nature could not
always be relied on to respect these distinctions, generous amounts of powder were
used in order to produce the fitting degree of pallor.” The sun parasol that is such
a charming fixture of Japanese art was used by both sexes, and as late as this century,
long after upper-class men had given up the convention for themselves, Japanese peasant
women covered their faces when they worked in the fields to preserve a light complexion,
a custom they shared across continents and cultural barriers with identically swathed
peasant women in Italy and France.

There are many poetic terms of praise in India for the light-skinned woman, who is
highly valued for her beauty, an aristocratic tradition that predates British rule,
but the emphasis on light-skinned feminine beauty among American blacks has been one
of the bitter fruits of racism, the imposition of one culture’s values on another.

In slaveholding America, within one generation light color became a pragmatic asset,
as it subsequently did for Cubans and Puerto Ricans, since looking “more white” was
a passport to
economic and social mobility. Black aristocracy in Harlem and elsewhere had always
been light; however, for women “bright-skinned” or “high yaller” (those semicontemptuous,
semiapproving Southern terms) meant being singled out for sexual attention, a boon
or a misery depending on circumstance. But the passport of light skin was held by
only a few; for the majority of black women in America, a general negation of good
feelings about their dark looks found expression in the lyrics “What did I do to be
so black and blue?” “All the fellers go for the high yallers.” Billboard and magazine
advertisements in the 1940s and ’50s for Nadinola and other skin lighteners held out
the romantic promise “Now you can be lighter than he,” in the same way that Adler
Elevated Shoes assured men, “Now you can be taller than she.” According to Michele
Wallace, author of
Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman,
despite attempts by cultural nationalists in recent years to extol the image of a
dark African Queen, and despite the success of a few dark-skinned actresses, models
and singers, in white America a light-skinned beauty remains the ideal.