Autumn Whitefield-Madrano's Open Salon Blog

You Really Got Me

Thu, 31 May 2012 08:05:16 -0400

I have a regular Mad Men date on Wednesday evenings, which is a fantastic way to have good conversation about the show, but a poor way to blog about it since I’m three days later than everyone else. But this week’s episode was so chock-full of material on erotic capital, beauty, and power, that I’m going to jump in anyway. Do I even need to say there are spoilers here? There are spoilers here.

If Mad Men were a less nuanced show that hadn’t worked hard to win viewers’ trust over the years, this week’s episode might have seemed hamfisted. We have Peggy Olson, the show’s stand-in for feminist career gals, leaving Sterling Cooper Draper Price for greener pastures, or at least pastures with more greenbacks; in the same episode, we have Joan agreeing to sleep with a client, at his explicit request, in exchange for a partnership at SCDP. Joining the two is the winning Jaguar campaign tagline, concocted with the idea that the sleek, expensive, finicky sportscar is akin to a mistress: “At last. Something beautiful you can truly own.”

The idea behind erotic capital (at least how it was presented last year with the deliberately provocative book by Catherine Hakim), is that men suffer a sexual deficit because women have lower libidos than they do, so women can leverage their allure with men in order to raise their “value” in all sorts of market, including the workplace. So if you champion erotic capital, you’re really championing the idea that men just can’t help themselves when the right girl is around. She’s the one who’s really in control, can’t you see? And it’s this idea—that in the face of a beautiful woman, men supposedly cede all their power—that’s at the heart of the Jaguar pitch. With women, even if you control the purse strings, they’re really in control. With a Jaguar, finally, you get to own it. Truly. The ad isn’t an endorsement of erotic capital; it’s an admission that nobody comes out ahead under that system, which is why you need actual consumer goods to fill the gap it creates. But by playing it up—this idea that even though mistresses are “impractical” and “temperamental”and maybe even “lemons,” it’s only “natural” to want to to possess them—the presumed male consumer comes out feeling as though he’s won, even though in reality, any way you play it, he’s lost. It’s a beautiful illustration of capitalism and patriarchy—and screenwriting, because Mad Men gets to have it both ways here. You can see the prostituting of Joan as a tsk-tsking endorsement of erotic capital, or you can see it as a tragic critique of the ideas it embodies. You can see Joan as being the “beautiful thing” that is now owned, or you can see her as deploying her erotic capital to secure her financial future with the knowledge that she’s coming out ahead in the long run, or you can see Don’s pitch as an acknowledgment that there’s a certain kind of man who spends his whole life trying to make up for his inability to own the creatures he covets (and which men in that room aren’t that sort of man?)—enter Jaguar, stage left.

Throwing a wrench in this whole thing is Lane Pryce. My primary argument against the idea of erotic capital as just another form of capital has always been that it keeps power in the hands of people who already have it. I’ll be very curious to see if Joan is financially rewarded for following Lane’s advice to ask for a partnership instead of a good deal of cash (a very good deal—more than $355,000 in 2012 dollars). Given that we know and like Lane but also know he’s been more than a little shady, his moment with Joan is meant to be taken as being both in good faith (for Joan’s protection) and selfishly motivated (for his own protection). We’re not yet supposed to know if Joan’s deployment of erotic capital was a smart financial move, which, for the moment, keeps the focus on the other issues surrounding the choice.

And one of the primary issues about Joan’s choice—for the viewer, anyway—is what message we’re supposed to get by comparing Joan to a very expensive car that someone can “truly” own, “at last.” The comparison is blatant, but I don’t think the two are actually being equated: The point here is that nobody can be “truly” owned. That’s why it’s an effective advertising campaign; that’s why it has to be boy-wonder Ginsberg instead of Don Draper who comes up with it. In the first scene of the episode, we see Ginsberg rolling his eyes at the sleazy mistress comparison; he’s on board but thinks it’s hacky. Later we see him express contempt for not only his colleagues (who are salivating over the woman crawling on the table) but for the idea that Megan can interrupt a meeting, coming and going “as she pleases,” which inspires the winning tagline.

We don’t know enough about Ginsberg to really know his machinations. But he’s pointedly ignoring a half-naked, self-exploitative woman when his creative wheels start turning; whatever regard he has for female beauty, it’s not going to be showcased in this situation. The best writer in the room sees Megan and her friend not as beautiful women but as something else: interruptions, distractions, perhaps threats. So I don’t think his eventual pitch is an admission that we all just want to own beauty. We want to capture beauty, sure—an offshoot of our desire to replicate it—but capture is not the same as possession. The desire to own beauty is less about beauty itself and more about fear: fear that if we don’t own something, cage it, it will not only escape, but it will overpower us. That sounds like less a rapturous affair with Beauty itself and more like the kind of misogyny that masquerades as romance. Beauty here is a stand-in for women—all women, not just beautiful ones, or perhaps women who exist under capitalist structures (which today is all of us), of which advertising is the apex. Whatever Ginsberg thinks about women or erotic capital, he knows how to play it to the hilt, making him a sort of surrogate for the actual Mad Men writers here.

I’m also struck by a certain word choice in his winning tagline. What he comes up with: “At last. Something beautiful you can truly own.” And at another key moment, the end of the episode, we see Peggy’s triumphant exit to the opening strains of The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.” Really, truly: These are words used to strengthen the point, to communicate that no, for real, this time we mean it—we swear. These strengthening words need to be used because the listener has been failed so many times before. You thought you were going to own something beautiful, but you couldn’t; you thought someone had gotten you, but you were wrong. There are two levels of ownership, of “getting” and “owning”: There’s what you think you have, and what you really have, and SCPD (or Ray Davies) is here to tell you which is which. So in actuality, “really” and “truly” here, instead of being speech strengtheners, are speech weakeners. They contain an overassurance, a placation, a soothing of the soul—a technique Joan might have used with a weepy secretary onceuponatime, with just the slightest hint of honey-coated condescension. And I don’t think it’s an accident that these speech weakeners are used here in two key spots, because of what they’re both emphasizing: erotic capital, and erotic dominance. The song in particular has layered meaning: It’s an admission of someone’s power over another, but who exactly are we talking about? Has Peggy “got” Don? Has the ad world “got” Peggy? For a song that’s a paean to the ways women supposedly control men (“You got me so I don’t know what I’m doing”) it’s interesting that it’s used here, with Peggy’s exit, in an episode many would say is about anything but women controlling men. Even Megan, whose balance of control with Don has been a theme this season, is chastised as doing “whatever the hell [she] wants.”

A handful of reviewers have suggested that Peggy is the one who emerges as the only independent woman of this episode, the only who who isn’t “truly” owned by someone else. I disagree wholeheartedly: Yes, Peggy is autonomous in ways that Joan, Megan, and Betty aren’t, but the point of this episode (and in some ways, the entire show) is to show the complexities of autonomy and ownership. Megan can afford career autonomy because Don is paying the bills; Joan, who essentially told Roger to buzz off when he bugs her about helping out with their son, is painted as having made the decision to sell her time only when the price really is right.

The moment when Don kisses Peggy’s hand is a clue that the female roles in Mad Men aren’t so clear-cut as to be Joan = erotic capital, Peggy = feminism, Betty = feminine mystique, and so on. The first time we saw Don’s and Peggy’s hands meet, it was in the very first episode of the show, when Peggy awkwardly places her hand on Don’s, letting him know that she was available to him in any way he wished. Don, of course, refused her advance. As viewers, we quickly forget about Peggy’s confused, fleeting bid for Don’s sexual attention, in part because Peggy and Don themselves appear to forget about it. But it’s there from the very first episode of the show: At one point, Peggy was basically willing to prostitute herself in order to secure power. She would have been paid in sleeping-with-the-secretary currency—a city apartment, or perhaps the home in the country that Joan herself alluded to when she lays out what Peggy could have if she “really” plays her cards right.

So while Peggy is clearly representative of the enormous gender shifts about to happen historically, to pit her in opposition to Joan here is too simple. It’s not a matter of Joan’s personality or character that she agrees to the Jaguar plan. (This would be true even if sex work itself were a matter of “character,” which it isn’t.) It is a matter of age, opportunity, and, as we got reminders of this season, upbringing. Joan’s mother raised her to be admired; Peggy’s mother, as we see through her clenched-jaw protestations about Peggy moving in with Abe, raised her to be valued. It’s ironic that one response to this episode is that Joan, through being admired, winds up being quite literally valued, while Peggy, through the valuation of her work, walks away from Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce with our—and Don’s—admiration.

For as show as popular as Mad Men, it’s interesting that there haven’t been tons of memes and quizzes going around along the lines of “Which Mad Men character are you?” (Searching for “Which Sex and the City character are you” brought up ten times the number of Google results, for the record.) But it’s deeply textured episodes like this that show why, despite our collective eagerness to commodify Mad Men with our SCDP avatars and our Banana Republic styles, we haven’t jumped headfirst into saying which characters we identify with most: We are all Peggy. And we are all Joan.

Life at 36: Anne Bancroft, Phylicia Rashad, Reese Witherspoon, and Me

Tue, 29 May 2012 02:05:07 -0400

Thirty-six!

I had a birthday over the weekend, and it’s the first birthday I’ve had where I’ve been remotely tempted to be coy about my age. I’d never understood why anyone, particularly a woman, would lie about their age. I’d heard the classic story about Gloria Steinem quipping to a reporter upon being complimented for looking good for her age, “This is what 40 looks like. We’ve been lying for so long, who would know?” While I loved the story, her reasoning made such innate sense to me that I actually had a hard time grasping its actual importance. Why wouldn’t you claim your age, especially if you’d taken care of your health and pride in your appearance? Why would you say you were younger and risk looking “okay” for, say, 35 but fantastic for 40? It’s not like lying about your age actually makes you younger, after all; it just gives you something else to feel ashamed of.

I’m not ashamed of my age, to be clear; I’m 36 and wouldn’t go back to my twenties if you paid me in rainbows. Still: As of Sunday, I’ve felt the slightest twinge of hesitancy about saying my new age. I’d never lie about it, nor will I avoid the question, but for the first time I’m at the age where I understand the impulse to do so. It’s easy to dismiss such thoughts as vain twaddle at 28. It’s a hair harder as I inch toward 40.

When I turned 30, people around me took delight in saying, “Forty is the new 30,” the idea being that where our parents supposedly had all their shit together by 30, the perpetual adolescence we GenXers had carved out for ourselves meant we had a whole added decade in which to do so. The larger import of this statement is about things beyond the scope of this blog—the ways we’ve reconfigured work, family, geography, careers, the idea of success itself. But there’s something else lurking in the idea of 40 being “the new 30,” and the phrase that keeps coming to mind is, We look younger than our parents.

When I was in college, the hot new face belonged to an actress named Jennifer Aniston, who, at age 25, had found herself with the coveted Rachel haircut and a hit TV show. Thirteen years after my graduation, who do I see on magazine covers? A 43-year-old Jennifer Aniston. And a 39-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow, 36-year-old Kate Winslet, 42-year-old Jennifer Lopez, 42-year-old Tina Fey, and 36-year-old Reese Witherspoon—all of whom were big or rapidly on their way there when they, and I, were in our 20s. Add to that the 38-year-old Elizabeth Banks, 33-year-old Rachel McAdams, 32-year-old Zooey Deschanel, 33-year-old Kate Hudson, 38-year-old Heidi Klum, 37-year-old Christina Hendricks, and 36-year-old Angelina Jolie, and it gets harder and harder to believe that Hollywood truly does fetishize youth as much as we say it does. Yes, there will always be the 18-year-old Dakotas and 22-year-old Kristens, but we’re in an unprecedented age of mature women being construed as alluring in the mainstream press. Julianne Moore is 51. Want to know who else was 51? Rue McClanahan, when The Golden Girls first aired.

Part of this, I’d like to think, is a broadening definition of what beauty and allure actually are, or at least an acknowledgement that women of a certain age have plenty of both, without anyone needing to fetishize the fact that they’re not 22. Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson wasn’t only sexy for an older woman; she was just plain sexy. But there’s something else at play here: People today look younger than people of the same age did a generation ago. Bancroft was 36 when she played Mrs. Robinson; Elizabeth Taylor a mere 34 as the aging Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. There are some technical reasons for this, starting with the greater knowledge base about aging we have available to us today. I may have spent my early years thinking of a tan as being “healthy,” but by the time I was a teenager the anti-sun brigade had thought to add “premature aging” alongside “skin cancer” on the list of reasons not to sunbathe. Same with not smoking, getting my omega-3s, and exercising—I may well have done these things regardless, but vanity is a pretty big motivator.

But the larger reasons are generational. With delayed marriage and childbearing—and, of course, the increased acceptance of saying no to either or both—comes a loosened idea of what adulthood itself really is, and its subdivisions are looser still. Age is just a number, but not because of what that Hallmark adage was designed to signify. It’s “just a number” because our conception of youth and aging is relative. There’s no such age as “old”; we collectively decide what “old” means, and within that we collectively decide upon the million variations of oldness: old enough to know better, too old to dress that way, old ladies. And because it’s relative, it’s always shifting, often without our consent. So the idea of a 40-year-old woman looked like one thing when I was 20, and another thing to me today at 36; what’s more, had I been 36 in 1982, a 40-year-old woman would probably have looked quite different than my conception of a 40-year-old woman today. There is no Platonic Form of a thirtysomething woman; she must be relative and known to us through cues and sensations, not as some pure ideal of Thirtysomething Woman. Her template changes all the time: Not all that long ago, it wouldn’t be terribly unusual for a woman my age to not only be a mother but a grandmother. More recently, Jacqueline Kennedy’s pink suit and “helmet hair,” forever memorialized as the distraught First Lady, belonged to a 34-year-old woman; Meredith Baxter-Birney and Phylicia Rashad were 35 and 36, respectively, when Family Ties and The Cosby Show hit the air. It’s hardly a surprise that when I want to dress conspicuously adultlike, I often find myself reaching for clothes that recall another era, one with lines drawn more strictly for women versus girls—my tailored pink Jackie O-style sheath, my surprisingly demure leopard-print dress with a 1940s cut.

Of course, all those are things I can change—my clothing, my hair. My face, not so much. I’ve done many of the things that one is supposed to do for “anti-aging” (a nonsense term if there ever was one). But so have most other 36-year-olds, so all that my efforts mean is that I look like other middle-class 36-year-old women in The Year Our Lord 2012, instead of looking like I might have as a middle-class 36-year-old in 1971. Collectively, we’ve decided that today’s 36 looks younger than our mothers did when we were in fifth grade, or even our surrogate TV mothers; instead, our 36 looks more like Kate Winslet, even if we don’t. The things keeping us from looking like Kate Winslet are more along the lines of professional beauty treatments (and, um, genes), not some magical anti-aging potion. She looks her age. Most of us do.

All of this should make aging as we know it easier, and I suppose it does; I’m thankful that with some styling I can achieve the womanly look my grandmother had at my age, and thankful that I can shake loose of that consigned womanhood and wear some of the same things I might have in college without being considered inappropriate or, worse, pathetic. But underneath that is a cognitive dissonance with what I know up-close to be true: I am aging. And while the reconfiguration of adulthood has liberated women like me from making semi-permanent life choices too early, it’s also easy to take from that liberation a free-floating fear or denial of aging and what aging actually looks like. There’s far less shame about the number of aging than there used to be—truly, the twinge of hesitancy I feel about saying I’m 36 is just that, a twinge. The greater fear is not saying I’m 36 but acknowledging that I’m 36—which, all told, isn’t seen as young but is hardly seen as old—and therefore have some of the signs of what we associate with actual, undeniable oldness. Battle-won crow’s-feet are one thing. Knee wrinkles are quite another.

Aging “gracefully” is part of it, sure, but I’m less afraid of being seen as clinging to my fading youth than I am of being seen as having lost some sort of essence. I’m less concerned about wrinkles than I am about things I’ve never had to think about before because they came naturally, like “tone” and “texture” and “radiance.” My most pronounced signs of aging haven’t been things that should rob me of that radiance; if anything, with age I have more energy, more vigor than I did when I was 24. I drink less, I sleep more, I exercise, I eat my greens. I’m far more nourished now in every way than I was then. And it shows—by nearly every conventional measure, I look better now than I did then.

But there it is, looming, unfair: No matter what I do, no matter how impeccable my self-care, there is a quality I had at 24 that I will never have again. I’ll happily take the tradeoff age has offered me—please, don’t miss that point—but it seems like a joke to me somehow. I want the vitality my skin had at 24 not only because it looks “better” but because I feel like it’s rightfully mine. I feel more vital now; I feel more radiant. I hadn’t earned the look of vitality I had when I was 24, and I didn’t realize I hadn’t earned it; it was only when it began to slip away that I recognized that I’d been working on a pay-it-forward system that I hadn’t signed up for and couldn’t reneg on.

Thirty-six years young; today is the first day of the rest of our lives; it’s never too late to learn; you’re only as old as you feel. I will take these cheap sentiments over what people, particularly women, were faced with not so long ago, like marrying by 30 or resigning oneself to lifelong spinsterhood. But an unintended side effect of age positivity is that we’re left with a clashing of ideals: If age is a state of mind, what do I do about the tangible ways in which that “state of mind” is showing up on my body? Without the other markers of adulthood, the ways I mark my age are internal, amorphous; I say I “feel” differently now than I did at 26, and I do, but I’d be hard-pressed to tell you exactly what that difference is. The biggest differences between my life now and my life when I was undisputably young are inarticulate—I still sleep on a futon, I still consider reheating Indian food “cooking,” I’ll still stay for one more drink—but there’s a definitive articulation of aging on my very form. The occasional thread of silver in my otherwise dark hair, the darkness beneath my eyes that never quite goes away, the way a day in the sun now makes me look haggard instead of bursting with California-kissed good health. It’s not that any one of these is so horrible but rather that it runs right up against my idea of myself as someone who’s aging but not, you know, really aging. I’m not afraid of getting older; I’m not afraid of looking my age. But it was a lot easier to say that more loudly before I began to learn that “looking my age” would mean looking older in ways that so far had applied only to other people.

I am thankful beyond words that women before me have lived their lives so vibrantly as to make it clear that life doesn’t end at 30, or 35, or 55, or 75. Without them, the choices I’ve made in my life—to remain single, to freelance, to live alone in an urban space far away from family, to not have children, to be a lousy housekeeper—are largely viewed by those around me, and by myself, as choices, not as some unfortunate thing that’s befallen the poor thing. But within all that positivity, I want to create a sliver of a space for mourning what has slipped away from me with age. Not so I can dwell on it, or long for its return, but so that I can honor this quality I had at a time in my life when I had every right to feel young, vibrant, and carefree but rarely consciously felt any of those things. In truth, what looked carefree at 24 was more often than not merely chaotic. I had no idea that despite that chaos, I carried with me a radiance that was mine simply by dint of being young. There is no way to say this without speaking in a cliche, so forgive me, but: I didn’t know what I had until it was gone. My hope in allowing myself to mourn these small losses is that I’ll create room for the conscious recognition of what I have now, at a perfectly fine 36, that I haven’t yet recognized. What those gifts are, I’m not entirely sure, but I trust in their existence nonetheless. Perhaps the moment I stop doing so is the moment I really will grow old.

Beauty Blogosphere 5.25.12

Fri, 25 May 2012 03:05:03 -0400

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

From Head...
Chinese beauty: This piece on buying habits in China gives beauty products only a passing mention, but it's worth reading if you're interested in international consumerism. Particularly of note here is the Chinese emphasis on conspicuous consumption—goods seen in public are far likelier to be luxury brands than goods consumed privately, which puts beauty products (consumed privately but seen publicly) in a sort of odd zone. The article makes note of how beauty products must help a woman "move forward"; coupled with the Chinese preference for natural-looking beauty products, Chinese women may be in even more of a product paradox than Americans.

Next up: Shampoo and cuticle-cutting video games.

...To Toe...

Pedigame: Team Beheld, I'll be honest and let you know that sometimes it's hard to find pedicure-related news every week to keep up this "from head to toe" business I started lo so many months ago, and now that I've gone and made fun of the faux newsworthiness of men getting pedicures, it'll be even tougher. But my other go-to pedicure news bit is pedicure video games, of which there are many, and this interview at The Mary Sue with the curator of FEMICON, "the feminine computer museum," is juuuust tangentially related enough for me to include it here. Moreover, it's fascinating (this from someone who hasn't played a video game since Super Mario Brothers). "With FEMICOM, I want to provide a historical snapshot, a catalog, that says, 'Here lies the evidence of several decades of video game and software and web media that attempted to inspire and delight.' If we’re confronted with a pile of harmful stereotypes, let’s talk about that. If we’ve been wrong to criticize a game for not being more like Halo, let’s talk about that, too."

...And Everything In Between:

On the stand: The witness list in the trial of Rajat Gupta, former Proctor & Gamble executive who was arrested for insider trading, is basically a cast list of major players in the world's biggest personal-care company. I usually try not to be a bloodhound, but: Let the game begin!

On the money: The friendly folks at NASDAQ break down American beauty companies' positioning in emerging global markets. And in what is surely a first, a business writer focusing on the beauty industry resisted all urges to indulge in bad wordplay ("the stocks got a makeover"! "It's face-forward for Avon"!) in (her?) prose.

Northern light: Are Northern European women more likely to embrace natural and organic cosmetics? All signs point to yes. (Side note: The Swedish city of Malmö has a goal of having only organic food served in its public catering by 2020? As someone who lived in a city that cut out recycling for a while because of budget cuts, my jaw is on the floor.)

Sunny days ahead: The FDA ordered comprehensive new sunscreen regulations last year, but recently gave the industry six more months to implement them—i.e., past the summer, when Americans get the most sun exposure. And manalive, some senators are pissed.

Mad man: Adman David Leddick—who was gay and out during his career, which spanned the same era as Mad Men—shares what it was really like being gay in the industry at the time, and in doing so gives a few colorful anecdotes about major beauty clients. (Among them: "Miss Arden, you are a tyrant.")

Superbeauty: The site of Ray Kurzweil, champion of the singularity, turns its cyborg eye onto enhanced beauty products. I'm more interested in this in a meta sense than for anything the article actually says, because none of what's in this piece is news in the least if you're a reader of women's magazines, but here it's being treated as something with potential instead of something already available. The singularity just may be cosmetized.

Bad girls go everywhere: xoJane.com beauty editor Cat Marnell in a Vice interview on the impossibility of being a beauty-industry bad girl: "Bad girls don't get to splash water on their faces and say 'Almay.'"

Hard as nails: Scratch that. If you're hell-bent on being a beauty bad girl, you can shoplift $12,500 in products. I'm fascinated by this: Most beauty shoplifting of this scale is part of a crime ring, but it seems this woman just really liked nail polish.

Batik!: Refinery 29 has a guide to prints often lumped together as "ethnic" or "tribal," which is wildly encouraging. Most of the time fashion pages think they're being socially responsible if they feature a fair-trade necklace; this takes less of an Othering stance while recognizing that most of their readers probably aren't versed in Chinla vs. Ganado. (I certainly wasn't.)

Butt-shaped beauty products: Is there anything more I can really say about this?

Book, cover, etc.: In reading this piece about the role of awe in cosmetics packaging, I found myself feeling a tad smug, because I, of course, never fall prey to "awe-inspiring" packaging, preferring packaging that's cleaner, more clinical, tidier, minimalist. Which isn't me falling for marketing at all! (Pop quiz: Where do butt-shaped beauty products figure into marketing and awe? Go.)

Beauty products of 1812: "Two ounces of oil of sweet almonds, ditto of spermaceti; melting them in a pipkin over a slow fire." Of note in this piece about 19th-century beauty concoctions is a Canadian company called The Herb Wife, which bases its handmade products on recipes from medieval days. Zounds!

Literary makeovers: Attention New Yorkers: A night of makeovers, courtesy...the New York Public Library. June 22. (And hey, if you're not in New York, just swing by the splendid collection of literature/film character makeovers at Literature Couture. There's a whole series on Norse mythology makeovers!)

The black beauty standard: Tami Winfrey Harris skewers the whole "black ladies loooove their bodies!" thing. I see why the story is perpetrated, particularly by white members of the media: When, as a teenager, I first heard the whole "black girls like their bodies more than white girls" thing, it acted to soothe my privileged white guilt, like, "Oh, okay, so black women on average make less money than white women and are more likely to be victims of violent crime, but hey, they like their bodies, so at least there's that." That is: It told me more about my own relationship with my own body, and about my level of privilege, than it did about the experience of black women. It was shortsighted of me (to say the least), and really I wish I'd had these counterpoints available to me then.

On authenticity: Terri, one of the most thoughtful fashion bloggers out there, asks if it's possible to be authentic in the world of social media and self-branding.

"Our bodies are integral to our selves": Sally's gentle yet forceful litany of why body image matters made me catch my breath: "Because we are told that a certain weight, a certain set of proportions, a certain body type or shape will unlock happiness, and that we should do everything in our power to achieve those things." Even with the work I do here, I still fall into that trap of thinking my body can unlock happiness—if I can comfortably wear a dress I purchased 10 pounds ago, if my thighs become diminished like they were when I did little other than obsess about my food intake. I know better, but I don't always know better, and this post is a much-needed reminder.

Rule-breaking: Angie's characteristic way of striking the sweet spot between style guidelines and body positivity shines through in her musings on going beyond body type dressing.

Beauty U: Kjerstin Gruys shares her syllabus and gives a mini intro to her "Gender, Appearance, and Inequality" seminar, which is sort of making me edu-drool with discussion topics like beauty bias in romantic relationships, employment, and medicine.

A Partial List of Male Celebrities Who Have Given Or Received Pedicures

Thu, 24 May 2012 03:05:00 -0400

Will Arnett, actor
Howard Stern, radio personality
Charles Barkley, former basketball player and sports analyst

Ptah hotep, vizier during reign of Djedkare Isesi

Brendan Fraser, star of Encino Man

Nick Gonzalez, kickboxer

Dave Navarro, musician, goat
Len Wiseman, director

Mel Gibson, actor (note: only expressed wish to pedicure; actual pedicure status unclear)
Shaquille O'Neal, rapper, Shaq Diesel (1993)
Anthony "The Man" Mundine, boxer

Cristiano Ronaldo, soccer player

Larry Malitzsky, urban hero

Roger Huerta, MMA fighter

Jack Black, actor

Dwayne Wade, basketballer

Maddox and Pax, citizens

Dean McDermott, actor
Ndamukong Suh, football player

50 Cent, musician

Tim Tebow, Tim Tebow
The good soldiers of Forward Operating Base Marez
Twiggy Ramirez, musician
Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana
Conrad Murray, physician to the stars
JC, lower primate
Bob Saget, comic

~~Newsworthy.~~

The Sweet Smell of Sexcess

Wed, 23 May 2012 03:05:00 -0400

(via)

Nefarious may seem a strong word to apply to cake-scented perfume, but bear with me for a minute, okay? Years ago, I was copy editing at a women’s magazine, and one of the beauty pages was all about food-scented products—lemon cookie body souffles, cotton candy lip gloss, caramel body polish. Something about it just nagged at me, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. The promotion of these products felt somewhere between belittling, infantalizing, and placating—even as I admitted they smelled nice—and though I’d never really thought much about the products on an individual, something about seeing all of them grouped together on the page vaguely unsettled me.

I tried articulating this to a friend, who then got worked up because she was a fan of (the pretty awesome) Lush, which liberally uses food scents in its collection, and before I knew it I was on the other end of the feminist beauty argument than where I’d prefer to be: I was saying there was something politically off-putting about a grown woman smelling like cake, and she was saying that the right to revel shame-free in sensual pleasure was something feminists had fought for, and I think we settled it by meeting midway at peppermint foot scrub, but I don’t really remember.

It stuck with me, though, in part because one of the arguments I’d used fell flat when I gave it more thought: I’d argued that foodie products were pushed as an alternative to actually eating food. And you do see some of that, to be sure, tired blurbs about how slathering on a cupcake body lotion will “satisfy—without the calories!” But it usually seems like such a desperate bid for beauty copy that I have a hard time believing anybody actually uses sweet-smelling body products in an effort to reduce sugar intake. (Besides, logic would dictate that it would do the opposite, right? If I smell cookies, my instinct hardly to sigh, “Ah! Now I don’t have to actually eat cookies!” but rather to optimize cookie-eating opportunities.)

But it wasn’t until I read One-Dimensional Woman by Nina Powers that I realized what it really is about foodie beauty that gets to me. Powers on chocolate:

Chocolate represents that acceptable everyday extravagance that all-too-neatly encapsulates just the right kind of perky passivity that feminized capitalism just loves to reward with a bubble bath and some crumbly cocoa solids. It sticks in the mouth a bit. … I think there’s a very real sense in which women are supposed to say ‘chocolate’ whenever someone asks them what they want. It irresistibly symbolizes any or all of the following: ontological girlishness, a naughty virginity that gets its kicks only from a widely-available mucky cloying substitute, a kind of pecuniary decadence.

Which, coming from a voice as right-on as Nina Powers, makes me want to host some sort of sit-in at Cadbury HQ*, but let’s face it, I’m not an organizer. So take that sentiment and add it to not even actual chocolate but things that just smell like chocolate (or cupcakes, or buttercream, or caramel, or any other boardwalk treat) and that are meant to make you feel and look soft and pretty—harmless, that is—and yeah, these products carry more than a hint of unease. Foodie beauty products are designed serve as a panacea for women today: Yes’m, in the world we’ve created you have fewer management opportunities, the state can hold court in your uterus, there’s no law granting paid maternal leave in the most powerful nation on the planet, and you’re eight times more likely to be killed by your spouse than you would be if you were a man, but don’t worry, ladies, there’s chocolate body wash!

I’ve no doubt that the minds creating these products are doing so because they seem like they’ll sell, and less importantly, they seem like fun. Hell, they are fun: Sweets are celebratory, and why shouldn’t we remind ourselves of celebration, especially with something as sensual as scent? But the motive needn’t be intentional to be nefarious. Men like food too—remember that study about how the scent of pumpkin pie made them horny?—but it’s not like companies hawk products to men that smell like food that’s been successfully gendered via marketing.** (I mean, certainly there are men out there who dab barbeque sauce behind their ears and fill their sock drawers with sachets of crushed pork rinds, but marketers haven’t caught on. Yet.) Food-product marketing is specific to women (mint, ginger, and citrus scents aside), for we’re the ones still connected with the domestic sphere and all the “simple pleasures” it brings. Men get forests, the oceans, the dirt of the earth itself. We get flowers and a birthday cake.

Now, at this point, Dear Reader, I have a confession to make. Actually, I have at least seven confessions to make, starting with: As a teenager, I used vanilla extract as perfume. Which is not to say I haven’t also purchased a bevy of vanilla perfumes over the years—for I have—in addition to gingerbread body scrub, brown sugar lotion, a chocolate body oil that inexplicably made me sleepy, an angel-food-scented bar of glycerin soap with a plastic cutout of a slice of birthday cake floating in the middle, and a “Fortune Kookie” body gel that I finally discarded, at age 33, not because of the scent but because of the accompanying shimmer. So I’m not immune to the charm of smelling like Betty Crocker. I wore these products most frequently as a teenager but carried some to adulthood and why not? They do smell good, after all; that’s the whole point. And they trigger something that on its face seems harmless: Part of their appeal lies in how they transport us back to an age when all we needed to be soothed was a cupcake.

At the same time, they don’t actually transport us to being that age; they transport us to a simulacrum of it. When I was 6, if I wanted to smell like anything it was the Estee Lauder perfume samples my mother got free with purchase. Smelling like fake food was for the only thing more powerless than a 6-year-old girl—Strawberry Shortcake dolls. I loved the scent of those dolls but never wanted to smell like them myself; it wouldn’t have occurred to me. It was only when I was a teenager and began to actually walk the line between girlhood and womanhood that I suddenly became obsessed with smelling like a Mrs. Field’s outlet—and sure enough, there’s that “naughty virginity” Powers mentions. I wholly bought into what she outlined: Smelling like cotton candy let me put forth the idea that I was the kind of girl who would enthusiastically dig into a vat of the stuff, i.e. the kind of girl who liked to have a good time, but not that kind of good time, except of course it was that kind of a good time, because the biggest thing that had changed from the 14-year-old me dragging torn-out magazine samples of Red Door across her wrists and the 15-year-old me dabbing vanilla onto my neck was intimate knowledge of what an orgasm was. I liked feeling a little hedonistic, in the most good-girl way possible. Smelling sweet at 15 was lightly naughty without being seamy in the least—if anything, its naughtiness was so covert that I didn’t realize that scenting myself as a Sweet Young Thing had any implications other than, well, sweetness, even though my near-panic whenever I came close to running out of my Body Shop oil should have alerted me that I had more invested in this whole vanilla thing than I could articulate at the time.

Which is not to say that every teenager—or every adult woman—who spritzes on a little angel food perfume is a wanton Lolita, or that even if they are, that we should raise our eyebrows about it. Certainly I was better off expressing my “wantonness” (can you be wanton if you went off to college a virgin?) through vanilla perfume than I would have been by expressing it with anyone resembling Humbert Humbert. And as much as this blog might imply I believe otherwise, sometimes a candy cigar is just a candy cigar. The perfume I wear most frequently now*** is indeed a hint sweet—carnation, rose, bergamot, milk, and honey—and while I’m not so arrogant as to think the 15-year-old me had complex sociological-developmental motivations for wearing vanilla perfume but of course the 35-year-old me just likes what she likes, the fact is, I do wear it because I like it. I don’t want to imply that any of us should stop using lemon cookie body souffle or toss out our Lip Smackers—joy can be hard enough to come by plenty of days, and if it comes in a yummy-smelling jar, well, that’s reliable enough for me not to turn my nose up at, eh? I just wonder how harmless something can actually be when its existence is predicated upon announcing just how harmless it really is.

*On chocolate, briefly: I do like the stuff, though have never lived for it; I’d rather have lemon, caramel, or coffee-flavored confections most of the time, and I really only like chocolate-chocolate, not chocolate cake or chocolate ice cream or whatever. That hasn’t stopped people around me from assuming I have a great love of chocolate and furnishing it to me as a treat, to the point where I myself forgot that it’s not my favorite sweet and found myself falling into some sort of cocoa zone where a chocolate bar became a reward for a job well done, or for 24 hours fully revolved, whichever came first. It was only upon realizing that the fellow I was dating looked forward to our shared chocolate bars more than I did that I realized I’d talked myself into becoming a chocoholic, and I haven’t looked back since. I maybe buy one Lindt bar every other month?

**There is, of course, the curious case of Axe Dark Temptation, a cocoa-scented body product line for men whose commercials featured women gnawing at men enrobed in chocolate, elevating depravity to an entirely new level.

***Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab's Alice, since you asked.