Femininity (21 page)

Seeking to explain the hairless convention, Hollander and others suggest that because
the erotic essence of a female nude is a harmony of curves that are softly rounded,
a thatch of dark pubic hair could become the unintentional focal point of a painterly
composition. By contrast the highly visible male genitalia could absorb a thatch without
disruption. This is a clever, painterly excuse, but I can’t help thinking that the
great artists felt their omission was a definite improvement over the stuff of real
life. Pubic hair is coarse hair, no matter how fine the woman, and an allegorical,
idealized woman can have nothing coarse about her.

The hairless nude persisted into the twentieth century until pioneers like Degas,
Toulouse-Lautrec and Eakins—who did not deny they were painting mistresses, models
and prostitutes, not Venus, Diana and Eve—chipped away at the convention that Modigliani
and Picasso bravely discarded. Coincidentally, with the development of the camera,
nude photographs without pubic hair were statements of high art, while nudes with
hair, or
women with hair peeping out below skirts that were coyly lifted, signified picture-postcard
pornography, designed to shock the viewer with a realism that was vulgar and naughty.
In an interesting turnabout, the hairless vulva has now become pornographic in a genre
of magazines catering to fetishists enamored of prepubescent girls, and sexual sophisticates
like to scoff at early issues of
Playboy
with their airbrushed centerfolds that look to the modern eye neither honest nor
arty.

But of course we are talking about a weightier matter than the showing of some springy,
coarse hair. Female genitals are not visible unless the body is posed in what the
skin magazines prosaically call a spread shot, and because of this anatomical reticence,
pubic hair has always been a stand-in for the hidden female mystery, the ultimate
secret. Venus plats (Aristophanes in translation) and woody grottoes and sweet bottom-grass
(Shakespeare) were literary euphemisms for what lies within the tangled thicket, like
today’s slangy allusions to “beaver” and “bush.” “Push, push in the bush,” a disco
song of 1979, got a lot of play on the airwaves because its message was rife with
ambiguity and suggestion.

Tampering with the appearance of the female genitals in a given society is more than
a matter of cultural esthetics. In the legends of the Trobriand Islands as told to
Malinowski by his male informants, there once lived a race of beautiful, wild women
who walked in nakedness and did not shave their pubic hair. Fierce with insatiable
desires, they imperiled any sailor who was stranded on their shores. The custom of
total depilation that is practiced in some Moslem countries is consistent with more
serious measures (such as clitoridectomy) to tame female sexuality and keep it in
line. In the Western world, where the rights of women have a happier history, expectant
mothers have shown resistance to the routine hospital procedure of antiseptic shaving,
demonstrating a genuine fondness for their pubic hair as part of their bodily dignity
and mature sexual image. Yet even in Western countries, where genital hair is a familiar
component of sexual expression, the amount of hair and its boundaries are subjects
of intense, self-conscious feminine concern.

In a majority of women the pubic hair confines itself
generally to an upside-down triangle, often with a slight spread past the crease of
the inner thigh. This is known in clinical literature as the “horizontal” or “classically
feminine” pattern. Fifteen percent of all women and 80 percent of all men have a spread
that goes further down the thigh and up toward the navel in an irregular configuration.
Since it is socially acceptable for a man to have hair on his thighs and torso, the
demarcation of his pubic growth is not particularly noticeable, nor does it become
a worrisome problem of indecent exposure. Yet on a smooth-thighed woman, one single
curlecue that escapes the bikini line is a gross affront to feminine modesty, almost
as if her genitals were showing. In one of the strangest games ever played in fashion,
present-day string bikinis and some one-piece suits cut high on the inner thigh are
designed deliberately to cover less hair than most women have. Those who feel their
feminine charms are heightened when they wear the most revealing attire must play
along with this curious rule by which a bathing suit sets the limits on the pubic
zone, providing women with yet another arena in which to feel imperfect as they shave
or wax or undergo extensive electrolysis to fit a designer’s concept.

Ah yes, indeed, but if I happened to have hair that crept down my thigh or up my stomach,
I know I’d be knocking at the electrologist’s door. Women do what makes us feel normal
and pretty and competitively equal, and the historic taste-makers in art and fashion
have imbued us with the notion that beyond a certain arbitrary cutoff, body hair is
a flagrant violation of feminine beauty and sexual appeal, if not an outright repudiation
of gender. When the boundaries get switched around or narrowed, they present an exacting
new challenge to those most eager to please.

As a matter of principle I stopped shaving
my legs and under my arms several years ago, but I have yet to accept the unesthetic
results. The prettiest clothes rely on hairlessness to complete their effect, and
there are many designs I no longer can wear. Actually I’ve reached an accommodation
with the hair under my arms, at least when I’m not wearing a sleeveless blouse, and
especially when I’m not wearing anything at all, since it balances nicely with the
hair down below, but I look at my legs and know they are no longer attractive, not
even to me. They are simply legs, upright and honest, and that ought to be good enough
but it isn’t—not when they are viewed against the smooth, sleek limbs of high art
and high fashion or the high-stepping gams of a chorus line. To ease my dilemma, in
the summertime I bleach my leg hair to a golden fuzz, a compromise that enables me
to avoid looking peculiar at the beach. Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only woman in
the world who puts color into the hair on her head while she takes color out of the
hair on her legs in order to appear feminine enough for convention. To defy the rules
and still get by is a worthy intention. However it seldom works.

“Color her feminine.” Color her eyes, color her lips, color her cheeks, color her
fingertips and toenails. To dress up grandly for the first day of high school, I put
on a lipstick called Tangee Natural. On the second day, when the boy sitting next
to me in Latin leaned over to whisper, “Hey, you forgot your makeup,” I knew I had
crossed a significant bridge into the world of grownup masculine expectations. And
so for the next twenty years I colored my lips pink, orange, wine red or frosted,
according to the current fashion, making the classic faces into the mirror, pressing
and blotting, wiping the smear off my teeth, repairing the damage after a meal, removing
the smudges after a kiss, etcetera. Although I delighted in the thick, gleaming tubes
of pure, intense pigment and can reel off the names, in sequence, of my next five
shades (Pixie Pink, Goubeau #2, Cherries in the Snow, Snow Rose, Where’s the Fire?)
while I remember nothing of Latin declensions, I never believed that a brightly painted
mouth did anything positive for my face, my conversation or my kissing.

From lip color it was an easy jump to fooling around with foundation, powder, and
rouge, to compacts, tweezers, eyebrow pencils, lash curlers, liner, mascara and eye
shadow, to moisturizers, pancake and liquid bases, eye creams, night creams, glosses,
blushers, nail polish, perfume,
et al.
But while I’ve bought each of these items at least two times and some of them many
times over a period of many years, selecting the most famous names and the prettiest
jars and bottles, except for lipstick I’ve never
really worn makeup at all. At the start of the women’s movement I put away my crayons
and paints and haven’t bothered with them since, although I keep a bottle of Revlon
Touch and Glow and a blusher stowed away in the medicine chest for use on stressful
occasions, since I know by the face that stares back at me in the mirror that a few
strokes of base and a blush of color on my cheeks can mask the human failings of my
skin and help to hide the characteristic signature of my features, a weariness under
the eyes.

There is no getting around the fact that I have an anti-makeup bias, believing with
as much objectivity as I can muster that I have one of those faces that simply do
not benefit from an application of paintbox color. Long before there was a women’s
movement to reject artificial beauty or to decry the judgment that a woman needs to
“fix herself up” through camouflage and trimmings, I had come to detest the stuff
and the convention that said I had to wear it.

An unadorned face became the honorable new look of feminism in the early 1970s, and
no one was happier with the freedom not to wear makeup than I, yet it could hardly
escape my attention that more women supported the Equal Rights Amendment and legal
abortion than could walk out of the house without their eye shadow. Did I think of
them as somewhat pitiable? Yes I did. Did they bitterly resent the righteous pressure
put on them to look, in their terms, less attractive? Yes they did. A more complete
breakdown and confusion of aims, goals and values could not have occurred, and of
all the movement rifts I have witnessed, this one remains for me the most poignant
and the most difficult to resolve.

If women’s faces are supposed to benefit from cosmetics, the underside of the equation
is that the wearer of makeup dislikes her face without it, believing she is wan, colorless,
uninteresting, flat, an insignificant blob of blemished skin with eyes that are too
small, a nose that is too broad, cheekbones that are nonexistent and a mouth that
fails of its own accord to whisper of sexual desire. This is the central contradiction
of makeup, and the one I find most appalling. Cosmetics have been seen historically
as proof of feminine vanity, yet they are proof, if anything,
of feminine insecurity, an abiding belief that the face underneath is insufficient
unto itself.

As it happens, some women look good in makeup—in societal terms I will even say that
they look
better
in makeup; I’ll grant them that, for who among us has not been trained to discern
beauty in women in terms of professional, expensive glamour—the actress, the model,
the President’s wife? When my cosmetically adept friends complete their conjurer’s
art of creating their faces, I marvel at the finished picture, the makeover, the transformation:
an even, glowing skin, a widened eye, a richly defined and luscious mouth. In short,
a face that has responded to the age-old injunction of man to woman: Smile. A made-up
woman does not need to be inwardly happy to give the impression of ecstatic pleasure,
nor does she require expressive, mobile features to project the illusion of vibrant,
animated life. To the contrary, facial mobility is a detriment to the made-up face,
and makeup in turn inhibits genuine facial mobility. This is why, I think, the best
models usually have vacant expressions and why it has become the fashion for them
to scowl when they pose for the camera. A scowl on an artfully made-up beautiful woman
may look petulant or cute, but it cannot be construed as a serious emotion or an unpleasant
threat.

Of course there is nothing wrong with wanting to look attractive. I am the last person
in the world who wishes to look like a little gray wren, and I take many steps to
keep up my appearance, but I think I am right to prefer my own authentic countenance
and the authentic countenance of others—with breathing pores, a living map of human
experience and admitted vulnerabilities—to the impersonal cosmetic mask of smooth
polish and bright color. Makeup has been touted for centuries as basic feminine allure,
but the allure is homogenized and distanced through the medium of routinely processed
markings. Are men less fearful of women when they come all done up in festive wrappings?

My made-up friends are defiantly pleased with their feminine tricks of beautification.
They are in step with the Eighties, brave and chic, women on the go, and I am the
one who feels defensive and left behind, suffering from self-doubt. My
unadorned face, the free-spirited look of a decade past, now appears stick-in-the-mud,
frumpy and prim: I am the dowdy feminist, the early Christian, the humorless sectarian
who is surely against sex and fun. My congratulations to the cosmetics industry—they
weathered the storm. Makeup doesn’t even have to look “natural” any more. Women are
proudly celebrating the fake.

It was probably inevitable that the anti-makeup forces should lose. We were bucking
too much of history. To tell people not to do something that makes them feel better
is always suspect, and to suggest that women throw away their mascara and file down
their nails in the name of liberation casts the feminist movement in a repressive
light. In past centuries and present totalitarian regimes, those who have harangued
against cosmetics have been grim moralists who have sought to control or crush the
sexuality of women, equating the age-old tools of feminine decoration with worldly
decadence, immodest pride and the devil’s lure. By contrast, the artifice of cosmetics
has represented good times and luxury, an emblem of physical indulgence for its own
sweet delight.

“War paint” is a snide term for cosmetics that women dislike, for it brings to mind
one version of the battle of the sexes in which the conniving female prepares her
trap to ensnare and capture the unwitting male. The ritual of making up has only a
vague connection with the primitive painting of face and body before the hunt or the
fight, arming the warrior with magical signs to ensure his survival. For women the
armor of cosmetics is more typically a defense against imperfection and aging, against
looking plain or tired or defeated. In the 1920s, rouge was fondly called “the little
red box of courage,” a tribute both to Stephen Crane and to the secure feeling that
comes from putting on a good face.