Body Outlaws

Last night I had dinner with a couple of friends. Christine, one of them, had just returned from New York and brought me back a book called “Body Outlaws – Rewriting the Rules of Beauty and Body Image,” a collection of frank, powerful, and sometimes humorous essays about self-image.

I started reading passages from it on the subway on my way home. Carolyn Mackler’s “Memoirs of a (sorta) Ex-Shaver” – about women’s travails with body hair – made a strong impression on me, because the ultimate message is very close to the thesis of The Illusionists.

Here’s my favorite passage:

Why had body hair become such a nemesis for women? It poses no health risks. It is not hygienic to remove; it is not cleansing to shave. Rather, the complications arise during the eradication: cuts, infections, rashes, ingrown hairs, dry skin, burning. Is this hairless ideal yet another variation on the tune of ‘let’s take the best (boobs, curves in some places, hair in very few places) and leave the rest (hips, curves in other places, hair in lots of other places)’? Or is it: ‘Let’s make women look like 8-year-olds so we can treat them as such’? Or is it: ‘If women can fill up their extra hours shaving and obsessing about their bodies, then they won’t have spare time to plot world takeover’? Or maybe it’s: ‘Women are so grossly overpaid and just don’t spend enough on pads, tampons, pantyliners, Ibuprofen, shampoos, conditioners, deodorants, that we should coax them to buy razors, waxes, creams and bleaches.’ A-ha, it’s probably: ‘How about setting another unattainable ideal for women so they will always fall short of the mark.’ I mean, what are women if they’re not feeling insecure about something or another?

Thank you for the wonderful book, Christine!

Link: Body Outlaws on Amazon.com

My Pinkification-Induced Anxiety Attack

This past Saturday I had an anxiety attack: sudden sense of panic, difficulty breathing, head spinning, stone cold hands… the whole deal.

It happened during an afternoon of shopping in Paris. And I can attest with absolute certainty that it was provoked by the painful awareness of the power of patriarchy. I thought of it as my first feminist panic attack. Or, alternatively, my first sartorial panic attack. It was real. It was a bit scary. At first it filled me with a deep feeling of sadness and resignation, which quickly turned into outrage.

Rewind << My Armor

My ideal work “uniform”: crisp shirt, v-neck sweater or vest, scarf, and a classic Banana Republic blazer over jeans and flat shoes.

I have grown to love wearing blazers because of the sense of authority and seriousness they immediately confer. And I could really use that, especially in France, a country with rampant ageism and sexism. I experience condescending and patronizing attitudes from men – and some women – on a daily basis. I’m still getting used to it, since my experience in the U.S. and even Italy had always been quite different – the opposite, actually. But for a female, under the age of 40, this is standard fare in France. Even more so in the film business. Some aggravating elements: I tend to look younger than my age. I have long hair, and the exact body type of my grandmother: your typical Italian hourglass figure, with a large bust and wide hips. Not exactly the body of your token film director.

To compensate, I have always dressed in a modern Jane Austen fashion: classic, elegant, a bit preppy with a modern twist. But above all, Victorian (always proper and covered up, that is).

Working in a creative environment, I never had to don a real business suit. Still, the discovery of blazers was almost earth-shattering. Because whenever I wear them, most often paired with jeans, I feel like I’m wearing an armor, giving me strength and respect in the eyes of others: age and gender boundaries melt away a little. And in sexist/uber-feminine/ageist Paris, I have noticed a distinct change in the way I am treated whenever I wear my blazer uniform.

Since I’m currently having loads of important production meetings for The Illusionists, I thought it would be a good idea, with the weather getting warmer and all, to add a couple of vests to my wardrobe. (Because long sleeved sweaters under a blazer in the summertime indicate a propensity for masochism.)

So last week, on two different occasions, I ventured out looking for a very specific item of clothing: a cable-knit vest (preferably navy blue, crimson, or mauve).

Play > Me vs. French fashion designers

In my experience, after Tokyo the city of Paris is the one offering the richest experience in shopping for clothes. There is so much variety: all the world’s best known brands, along with obscure French designers. Galeries Lafayette and Printemps, on Boulevard Haussmann in the 9th arrondissement, are shopping Mecca with hundreds and hundreds of brands spread out over two entire blocks / seven stories up.

And there I went last Thursday evening. And then again on Saturday afternoon.

To cut the story short: after hours and hours of walking, scanning, browsing, and pulling clothes off of racks, I came up empty handed.

Everything was ULTRA-feminine, almost in a caricature sort of way: skirts, dresses, frilly tops with plunging necklines. Think: Hawaiian vacation more than a day at the office. EVERY SINGLE BRAND had a slight variation on this ultra feminine theme, but no one offered an alternative. There was simply no choice.

I stared in horror at linen (LINEN!) blazers at Galeries Lafayette.

A ray of hope came from the Italian brand Benetton, which offered one short black blazer and a few shirts (long and short sleeved). But no vests.

This came as a surprise because a month ago I was in Milan, Italy, and I visited the biggest Benetton store in the city center. Displayed prominently everywhere were business suits, shirts and pants (along with feminine items, of course, but the business attire was there and was abundant). Why didn’t I purchase anything then? (Because I’m an idiot. And because they didn’t have any vests. I’m obsessed with vests, if you couldn’t tell)

Back in Paris: Zara, Naf Naf, Kookai, Esprit, Benetton, Sisley, BCBG, H&M and GAP for women are all about flowing, wide cotton shirts most appropriate for sunny weekend afternoons. On the male side, on the other hand, there is always a vast choice of sharp business attire: shirts, sweaters, elegant shoes. I know because in the three years I’ve been living in France, I get envious whenever I go shopping for presents for my boyfriend. There is so much to choose from – and the fabric is comparatively better. Zara for Men looks almost upscale and preppy, with a vast selection of affordable cashmere sweaters. Zara for women has cheap looking Nylon sweaters scattered on the floor. Grrrr.

So, what kind of adjectives can best describe the woman of French fashion boutiques?

Breezy.

Carefree.

Young.

Extremely feminine.

Sweet.

Sexy.

Non-threatening.

You see where I’m going?

I don’t want breezy and sweet. I want professional and serious. A quasi-unisex uniform. And I couldn’t find any of that after surveying more than a hundred different brands. I wanted a simple vest! GAP was the only store that carried one, but it was pale pink and thus too feminine for my taste.

Golfing equipment came close, but not quite. Sleeveless cotton shirts with the swoosh logo were not really my thing. Plus, if I’m in a meeting asking for film funding, I want to look like Allison Janney/C.J. Cregg from The West Wing, not like Michelle Wie.

The sportswear section of Printemps offered a few options: Ralph Lauren cable-knit sweaters, but they were long sleeved, came in hot pink or orange, and at 170 Euros a pop, they were waaaay out of my range.

The panic attack gradually set in about 5 hours later, after wandering aimlessly from a uber-feminine boutique to another. I shivered at the idea that French society would push me to adhere to this caricatural model of femininity. And so my head went spinning. And my hands turned stone cold.

Backlash

The recurring thought of the panic attack was that the pinkification of young girls has spread to older women. Society wants us to look like non-treatening child-women. And it’s starting with clothes.

While walking down rue St. Antoine, after a quick visit to the GAP (where I had seen the only vest of the day, pale pink, which screamed “Barbie girl”) I suddenly remembered a chapter about fashion in Susan Faludi’s wonderful book “Backlash.” To make a long story short, in the 1970s and early 1980s in the United States, business suits for women became extremely popular. There were loads of stories in women’s magazines about “Dressing for Success.”

A book about this issue – a survey of hundreds of women working in the corporate world – revealed that:

[Women] who wore business suits were one and a half times more likely to feel they were being treated as executives – and a third less likely to have their authority challenged by men. Clothing that called attention to sexuality, on the other hand – women’s or men’s – lowered one’s status at the office. “Dressing to succeed in business and dressing to be sexually attractive are almost mutually exclusive.”

Fashion houses started to promote in an enthusiastic way business suits for women. Open any woman’s magazine from the late 1970s–early 1980s and you will see for yourself.

Faludi then noted:

But in their enthusiasm, fashion merchants overlooked the bottom line: dress for success could save women money and liberate them from fashion-victim status. Business suits weren’t subject to wild swings in fashion and women could get away (as men always have) with wearing the same suit for several days and just varying the blouse and accessories – more economical than buying a dress for every day of the week.

Clothing sales plummeted in the 1980s. The fashion industry faced the worst crisis since World War II. And so, in the late 1980s, merchants, with the help of mass media, literally set out to kill the “dress-for-success” loudly proclaiming a return to femininity. Mademoiselle had a story about “The Death of Dress for Success” – and other obituaries in Vogue, Elle, Cosmo and other major publications followed suit.

So, it makes economic sense to keep women away from business suits. That realization managed to dampen my panic attack. It was rational. Awful, but rational, and driven by the economy, just like the beauty myth. I took the bus home and called it a day.

12-14 Year Old American Boy

I eventually found my cable-knit vest. Courtesy of Ralph Lauren. Ralph Lauren Junior, that is. The boys’ collection. I had to effectively cross gender and age lines to find something suitable.

The girls’ collection – just like the women’s – was full of dresses and frilly, sweet things. But the boys’ was Mecca to me. Lots of elegant sweaters, polo shirts, and, above all, cable-knit vests in navy blue, black, red and mustard yellow. My size corresponds to a boy, age 12-14. In the eyes of Ralph Lauren, it’s a boy full of promise: an active boy, future Ivy League graduate, on the road to becoming a brilliant doctor. I like that. I like that far better than the clothing for a submissive, dressing-to-seduce woman clinging desperately to her youth.

So, underneath a Ralph Lauren vest made for a 12-14 year old American boy is a bra, and underneath that bra is a heart, still yearning for the big dreams and aspirations of a young girl, now a grown woman. She was never told by her parents that, because of the genitals she was born with, she had to settle for less. And she won’t.

Princeton Study: “Men view half-naked women as objects”

From the Daily Princetonian.

Doug Eshleman writes:

Some men may view scantily clad women as objects rather than as people, a recent study found. The research, conducted by Princeton psychology professor Susan Fiske, Mina Cikara GS and Stanford psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt, was performed on 21 undergraduate male students at the University who identified themselves as heterosexual. Fiske’s team used an MRI machine to scan the brains of the students while they viewed a series of photographs of men and women, some of whom were fully clothed and others of whom wore only swimsuits.

The pictures of bikini-clad women activated brain regions associated with objects or “things you manipulate with your hands,” Fiske said. The students also remembered the photos of the half-naked women better than they did any of the others, she added, noting that the subjects remembered the bodies, not the faces, most clearly. Fiske said the results indicated that some men may objectify or dehumanize partially clothed women, though further research is needed to confirm these findings.

[...]

“I think [the study] does relate to the effects of having pornography and sexualized images of women around and in the media because they spill over into how people treat women in general,” Fiske said, adding that these images may dehumanize women and encourage men to see them as objects. “You have to be aware of the effect of these images on people,” Fiske explained. “They’re not neutral. They do have an effect on how people think about other women.” 

 

Full article here.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution: HDTV drives search for complexion perfection

Excerpt:

Actors, models and television personalities are accustomed to leading on-air lives in soft focus. But with the advent of all-digital television next month, the stage is set for unforgiving high-definition broadcasts, and even everyday people want to look airbrushed to perfection.

In our hyper-magnified world where HDTV, HD camcorders and point-and-shoot cameras with auto-airbrushing functions are becoming the norm, a blemish here, a pockmark there or even a wisp of a wrinkle is unacceptable.

In theory, the sharper images transmitted over high-definition digital television mean the skin has to look almost perfect. Which is to say that it has to look natural, fresh and dewy, not powdery and masklike as it did in the analog days.

Full article here.

Breasts. Then and Now.

The number of breast augmentations performed in the United States has skyrocketed in the past two decades. Statistics from the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery show the following:

Number of breast augmentations performed in 1992 : 32,607

Number of breast augmentations performed in 2007 : 399,440

That’s an increase of 1225% !

As Naomi Wolf explains in The Beauty Myth,

Culture screens breasts with impeccable thoroughness, almost never representing those that are soft, or asymmetrical, or drooping, or mature, or that have gone through the changes of pregnancy. Looking at breasts in culture one would have little idea that real breasts come in as many shapes and variations as there are women. [...] Since beauty censorship keeps women in profound darkness about other women’s real bodies, it is able to make virtually any woman feel that her breasts alone are too soft or low or sagging or small or big or weird or wrong.”

This sense of shame and inadequacy fuels the cosmetic surgery industry. As Wolf explains in her book,

“Modern cosmetic surgeons have a direct financial interest in a social role for women that requires them to feel ugly.”

For pictures (and stories) of real breasts, visit this site: 007b.com (NSFW, obviously)

Ms. Magazine : “Out-of-Body Image”

Speaking of onslaught (see yesterday’s post): the spring issue of Ms. Magazine carried a powerful article by Caroline Heldman on self-objectification:

A steady diet of exploitative, sexually provocative depictions of women feeds a poisonous trend in women’s and girl’s perceptions of their bodies, one that has recently been recognized by social scientists as self-objectification—viewing one’s body as a sex object to be consumed by the male gaze. Like W.E.B. DuBois’ famous description of the experience of black Americans, self-objectification is a state of “double consciousness … a sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”

Read more here.