I’m in the process of moving and have just started packing up all the beauty products in my bathroom. I have, ever since I can remember being aware of myself as distinctly female, had a complicated relationship with beauty. When I was a teen, I spent more years than not shifting between thinking I was offensively ugly and okay-looking. I remember hesitating to wear makeup because I feared it symbolized a mark worse than failure: hopeless effort. I was tortured by my desire to be pretty and my inability to do anything about it. I cycled through feminist literature finding myself in reluctant agreement with Friedan and Dworkin — beauty and the maintenance of it seemed a heavy distraction for women from things of importance and further contributed to our othering, our objectification. From Sontag’s essay ‘A Woman's Beauty--A Put Down or Power Source’:
“It does not take someone in the throes of advanced feminist awareness to perceive that the way women are taught to be involved with beauty encourages narcissism, reinforces dependence and immaturity. […] For the ideal of beauty is administered as a form of self-oppression. Women are taught to see their bodies in parts, and to evaluate each part separately. Breasts, feet, hips, waistline, neck, eyes, nose, complexion, hair, and so on—each in turn is submitted to an anxious, fretful, often despairing scrutiny. Even if some pass muster, some will always be found wanting. Nothing less than perfection will do.”
Like many women I found myself going through phases, largely at the whim of beauty influencers and magazines. One month I renounced makeup and anything form altering, a few months later I was dutifully watching youtube videos on how to do a cat eye properly, wearing foundation and heat-styling my naturally curly hair everyday. At one point, I deemed the second-wave feminist rhetoric I once adhered to misogynistic.
I wonder if I would have been so fixated on my appearance as a teenager had I not felt that adhering to a standard of beauty was critically important to my identity? Now I think I have a more normal relationship with beauty, I no longer care as much. Still, when I dig through my products, I see signs of my relentless consumerism and inability to resist marketing targeting insecurities I didn’t know I had. And yet I continue to hold onto the 5 Rom&nd tinted lip balms whose shades differ so subtly it’s stupid. The anti-aging body creams. I know the concentration of the hyaluronic acid in the Charlotte Tilbury lipstick is nil but I continue to use it anyway. We all buy into a fantasy and we all consume to placate. 10-step skincare routines and buccal massage facials have us thinking we’re doing good for ourselves, we’ll be pretty longer and beauty is currency. I think it’s healthier to buy into the aesthetic of a product vs. the aesthetic a product promises you because the latter is often a claim with a moving target. Few things desirable now will be desirable tomorrow and few of these products even work.
There is a clip that’s been going around on Tiktok of a girl on a podcast saying that women “should always have their nails and toenails done—they should take pride in that.” The funny thing is that I’ve had similar thoughts (though only directed towards myself), feeling guilty over letting my manicure chip into nonexistence until I finally accepted that I’m perfectly fine with bare nails. It’s that same voice in my head that sometimes makes it difficult for me to leave the house without makeup—the voice that chides me to at least draw on my eyebrows, claims I “need to be presentable.”
It’s no new revelation that for women, simple maintenance is unending labor. Women use blowdryers, flatirons, curlers, to alter their hair texture. Women have complicated 12-step skincare routines, put on concealer to go to Target. Women get Botox and filler and plastic surgery.
I was revisiting the late Lauren Berlant’s blog Supervalent Thought the other day, and can’t stop thinking about this post about her mother. I’m going to reproduce most of it here, because more people need to read it:
My mother died of femininity. I told her that I would say this about her. She had said, “Will you write a book about me?” and I asked if she wanted me to. She said “Yes. I want you to say that I left the world a better place because I had you!” I said I thought that this was a bad idea: people would think it an excuse to write about me. She said, “Can you think of another topic?” I offered this phrase about femininity, and explained why. My brother-in-law thought that it would be better to say that my mother died from vanity rather than from femininity. I can see why he would prefer that story; it’s interesting to see how a label shifts the implication.
In her late teens she took up smoking, because it was sold as a weight-reduction aid. When she died she had aggressive stage 4 lung cancer. In her teens she started wearing high heels, to enhance the back arch and ass-to-calves posture whose strut transforms the whole body to a sexual tableau, shifting between teetering and stillness. Later, she had an abortion and on the way out tripped down the stairs in those heels, hurting her back permanently. Decades later, selling dresses at Bloomingdale’s, she was forced to carry, by her estimate, 500 lbs. of clothes each day. Shop girls, you know, are forced to dress like their customers. They have to do this to show that they understand the appropriate universe of taste, even while working like mules in that same universe, carrying to their ladies stacks of hanging things and having to reorganize what their ladies left behind on the dressing room floor. She liked this job, because she liked being known as having good taste.
These tasks threw her back out anew, and the result of this was an overconsumption of painkillers that ultimately blew out her kidneys. She had to go onto dialysis: she died three days after turning off her dialysis. In the meantime, more comically, she had two fingers partly amputated because her nails got infected by a “French wrap” gone wrong, and she was too ashamed to tell anyone about it, numbing the pain of infection with Anbesol, which she had also used for many years to avoid going to the dentist. This is not the half of it: ok, maybe it’s half.
She died of femininity. What a line. How true, and how sad. Femininity is not just work that we expect women to perform diligently, we scoff at them for the damage they incur. You too have surely marveled over the formerly-gorgeous housewives of certain suburbs of LA who in their 40s have accumulated so much filler, so much cosmetic intervention that they look bloated and strange. Or the older Asian women who have blue eyebrows from faded microblading. Women with traction alopecia from wearing weaves or extensions. Women with breast implants that bulge at the edges, women who can’t move their foreheads. We scoff at women who fail to age and perform beauty the right way, who let their efforts show.
I have come to realize as I age that feminine beauty is a solved game with no winners yet I know I am never going to be immune to the desire to be beautiful, to keep up. It’s too deeply imprinted on me, as it is in almost every woman. (A friend to me offhandedly, years ago: “Oh, she has an eating disorder. But what young woman doesn’t?”) But as I age, the desire to not die of femininity has become stronger. I no longer want to go on crash diets, laser off my own skin, guilt myself over not being “more presentable.” And yet, I still might.