Femininity (6 page)

Of all the fashion changes that revolutionized the female body in the 1960s, the French
bikini deserves special credit, for when this import hit the American shoreline the
reverberations were shocking. Named for an obscure Pacific atoll that was used for
atomic testing, the bikini was considered wildly daring in the Fifties. A decade later
it had become
the
bathing suit of choice. Although European women of all shapes and sizes felt free
to sun themselves in the tiny, unstructured bandannas, a Puritanical American sensibility
viewed the body inside the bikini with a more critical eye. Fleshy curves that spilled
out of the Band-Aid top and postage-stamp bottom looked gross. A less endowed figure
looked more esthetically pleasing. Overall slenderness, not just at the waistline,
became crucial at the beach.

The Sixties also marked a revolution in street wear, made possible by new artificial
fibers. In the designs of Courrèges, Saint Laurent and others, the belted waistline
summarily vanished, and a doll-like thinness replaced the cinched waist with fullness
above and below that characterized the Fifties figure. Pucci’s clingy silk jerseys
looked best with a bra-slip and pantyhose, not with a girdle, and Jacqueline Kennedy
in the White
House, a determined dieter and a conscientious follower of fashion, looked adorable
in A-lines (and later in minis). American fashion in the restless, youth-oriented
Sixties was reaching for a radical ideal, and in 1967 a teenage British model named
Twiggy, ninety-two pounds on a five-foot-seven-inch frame, with no breasts and hips
to speak of, was promoted as the body type of mature women’s desire.

With the passing of the girdle, in part because it spoiled the line as clothes grew
dingier but also because its regimentation was out of keeping with the turbulent times,
the average woman was forced to assume direct responsibility for the shape of her
body. Not since the Twenties had a woman’s figure been expected to stand on its own
without a foundation garment, and the Twenties vogue was not only shortlived, it had
made allowances for hips. Florenz Ziegfeld happened to be right in his ideal proportions.
It is a fact of genetics that most women are built wider below the waist than above.
The war of attrition against hips and thighs began in the Forties when women were
still in the thrall of the two-way stretch. In the full-scale battle that developed,
a campaign of diet and exercise that causes more frustration and tears of self-hatred
than loss of real inches, there is a poignant illustration of the feminine esthetic
at odds with femaleness in its natural state. Bottom-heavy has been out of style for
forty years.

Once it was conventional to think of models as tall young women with good bone structure
who were forced to lose one-third of their normal weight because, poor creatures sipping
their bouillon, the body photographed heavier than it looked in real life. But model
thinness is no longer considered extreme. The Seventies popularized the sylphlike
vision of the ballerina on pointe, and she herself is thinner and more exquisitely
ethereal than ever before in the history of dance, competing for weight loss with
other members of the company and subsisting on Tab and coffee with Sweet ’n Low between
her arduous classes. After her White House years, Jacqueline Kennedy got even skinnier
to stay in fashion, Pat Nixon and Rosalynn Carter matched each other ounce for vanished
ounce, and Nancy Reagan nibbles little more than grapes and lettuce to keep the right
shape for her
Galanos gowns. Presidents’ wives who pose several times a day for photographs seem
no less determined to stay thin than models and ballerinas, or the “new” Diana Ross,
or the “new” Gilda Radner, and they are hardly alone in this intense form of feminine
competition that takes the form of denial of food.

A higher basal metabolism enables men to burn up calories and expend physical energy
at a faster rate than women. Not only can they eat more cake and ice cream to fill
out a larger frame, but because of their dimorphic muscle mass they can eat more cake
and ice cream without its turning to fat. A man may consume 50 percent more calories
than a woman in the course of a day without gaining weight, or at least without worry
that he might be getting hippy. If one likes to eat well and would like to keep thin,
one has to concede that here is an arena in which the male has a decided advantage.
Men and women do not approach the dinner table from a position of equality until they
reach old age, when the metabolic differences taper off. Even when men do decide to
watch their consumption, it is usually fear of cholesterol and heart attack that provides
the impetus—important, life-threatening stuff, not the lack of attractiveness in a
spreading belly. (Gay men worry about keeping their figures “just like a woman.” In
a sexual marketplace controlled by male values, those who are trying to please had
better look good.)

The American feminine obsession with weight goes beyond sexual differences in caloric
conversion, beyond the issue of sex appeal, and beyond the intriguing question of
how to cope with a female reproductive tendency toward fleshiness in a fast-moving,
self-conscious, much-photographed era. In
Competing with the Sylph,
Dr. L.M. Vincent makes the sage observation that slenderness and refinement have
become synonymous to striving women. Indeed, the saying attributed to socialites,
“You can never be too thin or too rich,” seems to illustrate this theme. Dieting is
an act of choice confined to privileged people who have access to a surplus of good
food. When there is not enough food to go around, emaciation is a sign of poverty,
not of willpower or chic. The typical adolescent anorectic usually comes from a privileged
background and she is often described as an overachieving perfectionist whose obsessive
pursuit of thinness
has crossed the line into self-destruction. In a characteristically feminine way,
ambition in women frequently expresses itself in meaningless or destructive exaggerations
of the cultural ideal: the smallest foot, the narrowest waist, the biggest breast,
etcetera. Granted that the anorectic suffers from a deep psychological disturbance;
but if she lived in another age, perhaps the one that Zola brought to life in
Nana,
she might stuff herself with cream-filled cakes and hope the poundage would settle
gracefully on her thighs, or chest, or arms or wherever it might win approval.

Most women do not carry the desire for slenderness to anorectic extremes, but fad
diets and wonder plans usually are not unknown to us, and we maintain an eternal vigilance
against the slice of bread, the potato chip, the plate of fettuccine or the extra
mouthfuls of steak that we know would make us happy, at least while we were chewing.
I rarely consume as much food as I would like to. An excellent dinner in good company
is one of the rewards of life that never fails, but I am too competitive to stand
by and watch my middle thicken while other women parade their thinness like an Olympic
medal. Dieting is the chief form of competition among women today, at least among
upwardly mobile women who strive to perfect the feminine illusion as they strive in
other ways to achieve success.

Despite genetic variation, rarely is more than one type of female physique given sexual
adulation in a given age, and the imposition of a single ideal pits woman against
woman in a peculiar form of physical struggle. A popular chorus in traditional blues
music goes like this: “I’m a big fat mama with plenty of meat shaking on my bones,
and when I shake, a skinny woman loses her home.” The skinny woman and the big mama
are competitors in song because with each change in the standards of attractiveness
they are competitors in life, vying for attention as a means of survival.

Hippy or scrawny, busty or flat, the general principle governing the feminine body
is not subject to change. How one looks is the chief physical weapon in female-against-female
competition. Appearance, not accomplishment, is the feminine demonstration of desirability
and worth. In striving to approach a physical ideal, by corsetry in the old days or
by a
cottage-cheese-and-celery diet that begins tomorrow, one arms oneself to fight the
competitive wars. Feminine armor is never metal or muscle but, paradoxically, an exaggeration
of physical vulnerability that is reassuring (unthreatening) to men. Because she is
forced to concentrate on the minutiae of her bodily parts, a woman is never free of
self-consciousness. She is never quite satisfied, and never secure, for desperate,
unending absorption in the drive for a perfect appearance—call it feminine vanity—is
the ultimate restriction on freedom of mind.

I
HAVE BEEN AT
odds with the hair on my head for most of my life. Neither straight nor curly, it
is merely wayward. Left on its own it is messy, unkempt. People have said nice things
about many parts of me but no one, not even my hairdresser, has ever said that my
hair was my crowning glory.

I harbor a deep desire to wear my hair long because, like all the women I know, I
grew up believing that long hair is irrefutably feminine. I could certainly use the
advantage that long hair confers, but I happen to look terrible when my hair is long.
I know what some people think about short hair—they say short hair is mannish, dyky.
I could risk wearing my hair quite short if I wore makeup and dresses, or put on some
earrings, or if I weren’t a feminist and an ambitious careerist, or if I were married
and had two children, but close-cropped hair on someone like me adds to an image I
do not mean to project. I am aware of the conflict. I need to go my own way, yet I
also need to stand on the safe side of femininity. So I keep my hair at a middling
length and fret about its daily betrayal.

My hair and I have been struggling toward a feminine accommodation since I first discovered
boys and bought a white angora sweater. I was clever in school but I did not excel
at pin curls. When technology advanced, my girlfriends became adept at big rollers
but I could not learn to sleep eight hours without moving my head. There was a time
that stretched over many years when I placed myself in permanent bondage to Elizabeth
Arden. There, two lunch hours a week, I was shampooed and curled with setting lotion,
winding papers, plastic rollers and metal clips, gently cushioned around the ears
and forehead with
absorbent cotton, tied in a pink hairnet and placed under a hot dryer for thirty-five
minutes. Mercifully released, I was unpinned, unwound, brushed out, teased and fluffed
into a fair approximation of the season’s latest fashion. After a blast of noxious
spray I was sent out the door in a forged state of feminine chic that lasted for the
rest of the day—that is, if it didn’t rain. I always felt like a poseur at Arden’s.
Not once did I let them shape and polish my nails, not once did I submit to the ritual
of the pedicure, the waxing of the legs, or the mysterious rites of the Full Day Treatment.
They must have sensed my lack of commitment. But they had a powerful hold on my hair.
They tugged at the roots of my deepest insecurity.

At Arden’s my feminine insecurities changed with each new style. When the look was
sleek my problem was too much volume, which required thinning. When I wore the pixie
cut my problem was a low, untidy hairline at the nape of my neck which required shaving.
When the style turned bouffant I was informed that backcombing disguised a certain
flatness at the back of my skull but the scraggly wisps on my forehead were hopeless.
When the blunt cut became the rage my hairdresser threw up his scissors in disgust.
My wayward waves would not be blunted. I crept out of his presence defeated, for my
worst nightmare had been realized. Despite the best professional help my hair was
a failure.

In the 1960s the balance of power between client and hairdresser subtly shifted. When
the hippies let their hair grow long, nobody was more surprised than I that some of
the young men had beautiful tresses while some just looked messy like me. Black women
were letting their hair go natural, creating a more permissive attitude for all women,
and the hand-held dryer offered liberation from the beauty parlor wash and set. Finally,
the feminist movement made the entire matter of bandbox neatness, the “set” look,
seem ridiculously old-fashioned. In principle, a good cut and a blow-dryer were all
one needed.

But just when the winds of change were finally blowing in my direction, my hair was
struck by a cruel new problem. It is called premature graying—is graying ever not
premature to its victims?—and it requires the application of a color solution that
comes in a bottle. I did not come easily to the decision to color my hair despite
those persuasive Clairol commercials. I thought, and still think, that artificial
color is a shameful concession to all the wrong values. Wasn’t it high time, I argued
to my mirror and my friends, to put up a fight against the unfair double standard
that says some gray at the temples makes a man look wise but makes a woman look like
she doesn’t care about her appearance? But it wasn’t pleasant to bear living witness
day after day in all sorts of social encounters to the sorry fact that gray hair does
not look youthful, dazzling, feminine, with-it. I hated my martyrdom. I needed to
look as good as I could. I wanted to look pretty. Vanity (or was it competitive pragmatism?)
won out, with a big assist from a determined friend who came over to the house one
Christmas and with lots of teenage giggling poured a bottle of Loving Care on my head.
My ambivalence vanished with the first simple one-step application.

From time immemorial, hair has been used to make a visual statement, for the body’s
most versatile raw material can be cut, plucked, shaved, curled, straightened, braided,
greased, bleached, tinted, dyed and decorated with precious ornaments and totemic
fancies. A change
in the way one wears one’s hair can affect the look of the face and alter a mood.
A uniform hair style can set a group of people apart from others and signify conformity
or rebellion, devotion to God or indulgence in sensual pleasures. Hair worn in a polarized
manner has served to indicate the masculine and the feminine, the slave and the ruler,
the young, the old, the virgin, the married, the widowed, the mourning.