Velvet Steamroller

Please visit The Beheld

2011-01-20T13:13:00.000-08:00

I've been shifting my (erstwhile and meager) efforts here on Velvet Steamroller into the considerably more laborious (but more rewarding) The Beheld. If you subscribe here—you know, all eight of you!—please subscribe to The Beheld, my blog focusing on women's perspectives on beauty. In addition to the usual bloggy stuff, it will feature weekly interviews with women, many of whom have professions and passions that lend them a unique viewpoint on beauty. I'll occasionally be posting here as a sort of catch-all for stuff that I just want to get out that has naught to do with lipstick, but if you've ever enjoyed my writing, please visit The Beheld.

I found that while I have things I want to say about the world that have nothing to do with beauty, or nothing to do with women and feminism and publishing, that my most personally rewarding and engaging posts (including ones that never made it on here because they seemed to dwell too much on beauty without critiquing it quite enough for me to put it on here) always had to do with beauty and appearance. Even body image and food issues, as deep as they run, haven't held my fascination as much as the way that we choose to present ourselves and the micro-decisions that go into that. Those issues will come up in The Beheld, I imagine, as well as questions of feminism, masculinity, media, and semantics. I just enjoy having the focus that a "beauty blog" (a term I find funny--I'm the last person you'd ever think would be writing such a thing) gives me.

I hope you enjoy it!

Riding the F Train

2011-01-02T12:13:00.000-08:00

My first bit of unwanted attention in 2011 came last night—happy new year!—from a stranger on the subway. Transcript as follows: "Hey, fatty. Fat fat. Fat booty, fat pussy, I see your fat underneath your clothes, you're fat, I see it. Fat fat fat fat fat."

There was only one other person in the subway car, and the perpetrator had earlier made a point of yelling across the car that "as long as you're with me, you're 100% safe" (perfectly standard behavior for a man who isn't a threat, right?), so I knew not to escalate the situation. At the next stop, I waited until the train doors were already open before striding toward the door, so that he would be less likely to follow me out. He didn't, and that was that.

Except it wasn't. I had no idea how to internally react, even if externally I handled it just fine. My first words to myself were of self-assurance, even if now I wish I could say they were of something closer to anger. The immediate thought process: 1) This is a crazy source, not a trustworthy one; 2) You were sitting down and wearing baggy clothes so he couldn't tell what you looked like anyway; 3) You are well within recommended height-weight guidelines and are emphatically not fat.

This is all fine and good for not allowing myself to use a stranger's comments as an excuse to spiral into disordered eating ("I need 2,100 calories a day to fulfull my body's energy needs--but the dude on the Q train said I was fat, so no breakfast for me, mkay thanks!"). But the fact that my first thought was not upset but reminding myself that I wasn't fat--as if his assault would have been justified if I were--made me think about the power of that word as an admonishment for existing.

That man wasn't yelling at me because of my weight; he was yelling at me because it was New Year's Day and here he was, drunk or high on the subway, skin weathered by years of hard work, unclean, unshaven, and alone, and here is this woman about his age whose hair is in a French twist and who seems like a nice friendly girl because she hasn't had a day's hard work in her life, look at that fair skin, and is that fucking glitter on her eyelids, and she had damn well better learn her place. And whether he consciously knew it or not, he chose to put me in my place with the #1 word that is anathema to women in our culture: fat.

The F-word is anathema because we let it be anathema. We let that word become the biggest insult a woman can hear--I know plenty of women who might doubt their intellect, but none of them cower from the word dumb as they do from fat, even when the former is a greater fear than the latter.

I'm already conscious of trying not to attach negative judgment to the word--if a woman complains to me of being fat, my response, verbatim, is usually "I'm not going to hear that." It doesn't matter if the speaker is overweight. It's a lose-lose scenario, but part of why it's exactly that is because if I were to say, "Okay, you're fat," I would feel like I were telling someone she was all of the things that our culture mistakenly associates with that word--even though I don't believe those things myself. I'm just as unable to truly divorce the word fat from all of its illegitimate siblings--like lazy, poor, uneducated, damaged, self-hating, unprofessional, not to mention ugly, asexual, and unattractive--as the believers who came up with those associations in the first place.

All this is retrofitted reasoning, however. Fat activism was not on my mind in the moment. On top of my self-assurances of being not-fat was a foggy awareness that I was supposed to be having exactly this reaction. I called a friend after I left the subway, and as the words tumbled out of my mouth I found myself becoming more hysterical than I'd initially felt--my voice rose in pitch, the rumblings of indignation changed to a tightly wound self-pity. My friend said, among other things, "That's crazy; you're not fat," and while that was what I wanted to hear, I also felt frustrated that it was what I wanted to hear. It wasn't safe in that moment to say anything back to that man, but I hated that even after he was out of sight, my trembling self-doubt gave him exactly what he wanted.

I was playing the part of the wounded, insecure woman; the supporting role would go to the angry, outraged feminist. But the fact is, both of those were roles; truthfully, I just felt muddled. The word fat is so loaded that I couldn't sort out my authentic reaction to hearing it used as an assault weapon pointed directly at me. Yes, I did immediately reassure myself that I wasn't fat (and I'm not proud of this reaction), but I assure myself of that literally dozens of times a day (which I'm not proud of either). I never really felt angry or outraged or scared; instead, I felt nervous before he said it and numbed thereafter.

What I wish could happen, to me and anyone who hears that word used as a weapon--whether it's as friendly fire from a well-intentioned but misguided family member ("If only you'd lose a few pounds," a mother says), as training tactics ("Melt off that ugly fat! Feel the calorie burn!" yells the Spinning instructor), or as a plain old attack from a sad loner on the subway--is not numbness but neutrality. To react as if one heard not "You're fat" but "Your feet are a size 9! Size 9 size 9 size 9!"--a statement of fact that is either truthful or isn't, and if it isn't can be dismissed with no questions, and if it is true, is a matter between you and your doctor.

I've spent a lot of time trying to recognize that I don't need to artificially manipulate my weight, and I've been somewhat successful at that. And I've spent a lot of time trying to accept my body even in the places where it truly is chubby--recognizing that my little beer belly is the result of a lot of good fun and isn't something I'd trade in for a smaller belt. And I've spent just as much time questioning why it all matters. What I haven't done yet is truly try to not let that word--the fat word--have any sort of stigma within my own mind. And maybe my muddled reaction is testament to being farther along in that than I recognize; I don't know. I want to stop being afraid of not just adipose tissue, but the word itself. Those three little letters carry too much weight.

Cross-posted from The Beheld, a blog with perspectives on beauty.

Ponytail Economics

2010-11-23T07:59:00.000-08:00

For all my rhetoric about beauty-as-commodity, it's chilling to see an aspect of beauty literally functioning as a commodity. In poor regions of former Soviet states, many blond women turn to their hair as a resource, according to this Times piece. There's a huge market (the largest being in America, natch) for hair--particularly blond hair, which is abundant in the region.

There's a number of unspoken notions about beauty embedded into the human-hair industry, and indeed into this article. For one, the unquestioned notion that long hair is desirable; it's not even worth getting into why women might pay hundreds of dollars to cement someone else's cellular matter to their head. (Personally, I'd rather wear someone else's underwear than her hair--the latter seems extraordinarily intimate, don't you think?) For another, the assumption that light hair is preferable. This is practical in part--blond hair is more dyeable than dark, which needs to be stripped of pigment and then dyed in order to be a perfect match for a buyer's own hair. But as one of the hair czars interviewed, Aleksei N. Kuznetsov, says, "honey-hued" hair that changes color in the light is the most desirable hair--that has little to do with dyeability and more to do with what blond hair connotes (more fun, gentlemen's preferences, etc.).

"Why does one woman sell her hair to another? The person with money wants to look better than the person without money," says Kuznetsov in the piece. "Better," in addition to being long-locked and perhaps blond, also means being transformed after three hours in a stylist's chair instead of the nearly three years it would take to grow a 16-inch braid. The industry transforms the waiting game of the growing-out process--the sort that non-impoverished but non-wealthy women such as myself bemoan and cover up with barrettes and headbands when deciding to grow out one's hair--into either a long, drawn-out, passive labor (for the seller) or a non-issue altogether (for the buyer).

Go on, tell me that a lopped-off ponytail isn't a little bit creepy.

This hirsuit surrogacy becomes particularly chilling when you look at other ways in which the region's women make a living: It's estimated that 2/3 of the world's victims of sex trafficking are from former Soviet nations. In those cases, it's sex that's actually being bought and sold; in the case of a blond ponytail, only the symbol of sex is being trafficked. It's also fertile ground for young models to be exported to wealthier nations--another case of women's beauty becoming a sort of natural resource.

And a precious resource at that. Selling one's hair is describe as "a final resource to tap in times of desperation," and once again it's not spelled out why it's a last resort; we're expected to intuitively know, an expectation that is only a responsible assumption if we get that a woman's hair is so deeply personal, so tied to her essence, that to part with it is a newsworthy sacrifice. In fact, some sellers are consciously switching up their style and are just capitalizing on the opportunity, a notion that's squeezed in at the very end of the piece--consciously or not, the writer is urging us to sympathize with the women who sell their hair. The economic desperation is the point of the piece, but it's the understood psychic sacrifice that adds the poignancy here.

I was 8 when I first read Little Women; as every high-spirited girl reader is encouraged to, I adored Jo. That didn't stop me from being furious at her when she sold her hair, "her one beauty," in order to pay for her mother to visit their ill father behind the battle lines of the Civil War. I gave a glance to her nobility, sure, but also privately thought that surely she could have found another way (chop off that little brat Amy's curls, for one). As a third-grader, I understood that Jo was selling more than a part of her body--she was selling her femininity, a choice that made even tomboyish Jo break into quiet tears in the night: "My...My hair!...I just made a little private moan for my one beauty." Louisa May Alcott didn't need to spell out for us why the hair was valued, nor why the choice hurt even a woman as nonchalant toward her appearance as Jo. In the same way, I'm surprised that this story is even considered newsworthy by the Times (though I'm pleased it is); it's just business as usual, right?

Cross-posted from The Beheld, a blog with perspectives on beauty, in development.

Why the Long Face?: Justin Long on Looks-Based Criticism

2010-11-17T13:46:00.000-08:00

It's rare that you see men acknowledge their own doubts about their appearance--publicly, at least. If they do, it's often in this sort of self-deprecating yet self-aggrandizing way (I'm picturing Jack Nicholson chomping on a cigar while patting his swollen belly). So I found Justin Long's candid, heartfelt comment (as in log-in-and-register comment) to a critic who panned his looks--instead of merely panning his performance--engaging.

Background: Film writer Michelle Orange penned a review of Going the Distance in which she wrote of Long: "How a milky, affectless mook with half-formed features and a first day of kindergarten haircut might punch several classes above his weight [he plays opposite Drew Barrymore] is a mystery...we are increasingly asked to accept on screen." Then Long, on the Jimmy Fallon show, spoke about how he internalized Orange's words, prompting her thoughtful essay on the nature of critique, which is certainly worth a read. Mr. Long himself commented on the article (scroll down to comments to read).

I didn't know what a mook was either, Justin.

The real story here is the nature of the critic, and Orange's excellent points about "relatability" and how it's become "a cultural phenomenon and evaluative rubric"--a stand-in for, say, quality. But it's also a rare moment in which a man publicly acknowledges that he's not invulnerable in regards to his looks. Long writes: "I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d get to be in one movie, let alone several ... never had any delusions of grandeur. I always wanted to be a theatre actor...always assuming the movie roles were relegated to the good looking people. ... Then I started idolizing guys like Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Sam Rockwell, Woody Allen, and Philip Seymour Hoffman ... if guys that looked like that could do it, I thought, maybe this milky mook could role the dice."

He continues: "I’m surprised by the amount of stock you seem to invest in my looks. I absolutely agree with you too, I’d be hard-pressed to hold a candle to even a fraction of Drew’s beauty... Is that a message you want to proliferate though? That people of higher aesthetic echelons should stick to their own? Maybe you’re frustrated because it so rarely works the other way – I don’t remember the last time I was asked to accept a female romantic lead who was “punching above her weight class” – though it does happen .... I suppose if it were more commonplace though you, as a woman, wouldn’t be so offended and might have taken it a bit easier in pointing out the disparity of our looks in 'Going the Distance.'"

The turn-the-tables approach here works (often it doesn't, because its users miss that sexism is an institution, not isolated incidents) because we simply don't hear a lot of men discussing their own thoughts and feelings on their personal appearance. Beauty, we think, is the women's realm, and public responses to criticism of women's looks vary from the pile-on ("Worst Swimsuit Bodies!") to the outraged (the collective Internet WTF about Jessica Simpson's supposed weight gain). I've heard women rightfully complain that it's unfair that not-devastatingly-attractive men get to play romantic leads while actresses are held to a different standard; I'd never stopped to think of what it might mean for an aspiring actor to look at a screen and see that he might be able to make it despite being average-looking. I assumed--mistakenly, it seemed--that men just didn't think much about it or took those actors' presence for granted. To hear Long's point of view, though, can be more conscious--more inspirational--and it only strengthens my resolve that the solution to the beauty myth is not to make men our miserable company, but to demolish the myth itself.

Still, it's not all about men. Justin Long has pretty much made a career out of being a stand-in for the everyday, kinda cute guy, one who might be inclined to buy a Mac. He's no George Clooney, yet when he came on the scene women and girls were swooning (I remember a former tech-trainer colleague who'd use his name for her SEO classes because it gave her an excuse to investigate him on the clock). I don't think women are any less petty than men in regards to looks, but can you imagine the reverse happening? Long himself points out that it "rarely works the other way"--a not-stunningly-beautiful woman being paired with a prototypically handsome man. Part of this is the dearth of the working actresses who could fit the bill; part of it is that women are frequently written so one-dimensionally that it's hard to imagine such small niches being carved ("We need a Mac girl! Quick, slap a pair of glasses on Katie Holmes!"); part of it is that the rough equivalent of the girl-next-door is still inevitably filled by actresses who are also conventional beauties. (There's better ink out there than mine on why leading men can be out of shape, balding, and liver-spotted and still play romantic leads, while the world shuts down when Kathy Bates does a nude scene, though, so I'll leave it be for now.)

It's also interesting to note that while Long left the comment early in the thread's life, none of the comments before it commented on his actual looks--but once he piped up, people started saying, "Oh, and yeah, you're actually pretty attractive, bro." Nobody wants to hurt anyone's feelings, and I think by acknowledging that Orange's comments did actually hurt, people had a knee-jerk reaction to rush to the defense of his looks. Which sort of misses the point, but if it helps people think twice before panning someone's looks simply because he's a man and couldn't possibly care, then grand.

Cross-posted from The Beheld, a blog with perspectives on beauty, in development.

My Brilliant Career (cross-post)

2010-11-07T20:19:00.000-08:00

I was set to enter a modeling contest when I was 13. Seventeen magazine was having a contest in which the grand prize was your very own picture in the magazine--yes, in Seventeen itself--and a meeting and consultation with an agent.

Now, I'd never wanted to be a model, not since the age of 5, in which I got a kick out of "modeling" in front of my mother's Pentax and briefly fell in love with the thought of making kissy-faces at the lens for a living; that dream died out within a week, in favor of becoming Linda Rondstadt. But when I saw the callout in the magazine, I felt alight. I wrote about it in a weekly journaling assignment my English teacher made us do: My friends and I are entering a modeling contest, I wrote. (This wasn't true; I didn't dare mention it to any friends.) Of course I know I won't win or anything, but I think it would be fun!

Here's the thing, though: I honestly thought I would win. I couldn't mention that to my teacher for fear of seeming conceited or delusional, but by mentioning it to her I was sort of doing a combination of ersatz progenitor techniques from The Secret and writing the part of my magical dream model story in which I "didn't ever really think I'd win!" It was, of course, delusional: Records from 1989 reflect a round-faced, snaggletoothed girl with a bad perm; models favored at the time resembled miniature Christie Brinkleys--honey-haired, lithe but toned, poreless creatures that I couldn't have resembled less. I didn't see my own image reflected at me in the pages of Seventeen, and certainly nobody had ever put it in my head that I matched those images.

Exhibit A: Portrait of the Modeling Contestant as a Young Girl.

Still, I was convinced I would win. I would spend hours in the bathroom applying makeup, then squinting at myself in the mirror to see how I looked with it on; without my glasses, though, I couldn't tell. But I would see these hints of beauty, these things that signaled to me that if just the right person saw me in just the right way, I would wind up on the pages of Seventeen. My eyes were large and dark; my lips had a perfect Cupid's-bow; my cheekbones--if I sucked in my cheeks just right--were defined. (At one point I put in a single earring, sucked in those cheeks, and fully believed that I looked like 21 Jump Street-era Johnny Depp.)

I look back at that girl making faces at herself in a bathroom mirror--a girl I now see was indeed pretty in an undercover way, though certainly not a girl who had the hallmarks of becoming a great beauty--and marvel. We hear a lot about the nosedive that girls' self-esteem takes in the teen years, and certainly I had my fair share of that. But alongside my shaky self-esteem, manifested in a nascent eating disorder and desperation to make boys like her, was this unshakable--even, yes, delusional--belief that I was absolutely something to behold. A friend of mine--who now, as an adult, has a striking resemblance to Julia Roberts--recalls being 13 years old and thinking she was "the hottest thing ever. And, I mean, I was this skinny, gawky kid with braces and glasses and this terrible perm--I look at pictures now and can't believe how awkward my awkward stage was. But I'd pull back my hair in a ponytail and would walk around like I just ruled the place, and I had no idea why boys weren't interested!"

I wonder how often these thoughts can be articulated by girls when they're actually at that age, but I doubt that my friend and I were the only two definitively awkward teenagers to have this secret pride. And the "secret" is just as important as the "pride"; I would just as soon have died rather than tell even my closest friend, "You know, I think if you get past these Coke-bottle glasses and enlarged pores, I'm actually a total babe." It was essential to not ever be perceived as thinking you might be pretty. The psychology of adolescent girls was in its infancy then; we didn't have Reviving Ophelia and Carol Gilligan yet, which means that while we were robbed of those teachings, we were also sort of unaware that something bad was supposed to happen to us at that age. My friend and I weren't talking ourselves up as grade-A beauties to combat our low self-esteem; it was simply what we quietly, privately believed to be true, whatever we displayed to the contrary, however loud our wails of "I'm so gross!" at slumber-party makeovers. It wasn't that I was unaware of the barriers between me and beauty: the unflattering glasses, the pudge, the perm, the mole--I knew these had to be taken care of before the inevitable Seventeen photo shoot, but I had faith that they would be, and I had faith that until then, people would see beyond those glitches in the cosmic order and see my beauty.

What happened over the years wasn't so much that that mind-set changed--my fantasies of modeling for Seventeen are long-gone (I didn't wind up entering after all--as with many flurries of passion at that age, I simply lost interest), but neither do my insecurities stem from thinking I'm uglier than sin. Instead, it's that I became painfully, painfully aware of how I might appear to others. The fear of seeming foolishly self-deluded had its seed in my disclaimer to my teacher--"Of course I know I won't win"--and festered over the years until I had lost my own gauge of how I actually, inherently looked. Even the word choice is key here: They are called looks because someone is looking.

At 13, I dearly cared what boys thought but hadn't yet had my first kiss--besides, at that age, most boys were still preferring video games to our feminine wiles, much to our despair. I hadn't yet been overlooked by my heart's desire in favor of someone prettier; I hadn't yet been rated, out loud or with a silent, appraising eye, as I walked into a room, and I hadn't yet heard other girls being rated in that same way by boys. At that age, girls were being rated, all right, but by one another--hence the need for my own affirmations about my appearance to remain private. And obviously even the youngest of girls are bathed in expectations around her appearance; by the time I was peering at myself in the mirror and misappropriating the beautiful cheekbones of Johnny Depp as my own, I also believed that smart and pretty just might be mutually exclusive; that thin was beautiful and fat was not; that everything would be better if I were blonde; and so on. But the core ability to look at myself and see what I saw instead of what I thought others might see began to erode not long after that.

That erosion can be another entry, though, or a thousand of them. Tonight I just want to quietly salute that naive girl putting up her hair in her basement bathroom. Between the extraordinarily moving It Gets Better project and the well-meaning but vaguely cryptic Twitter tag of #tweetyour16yearoldself, there's been a bit of noise lately about adults taking time to assure teenagers that, no, really, it's cool, and it all seems awful right now but, well, it gets better. We forget that there's an openness to that age as well, a time in which the smooth, polished orb of our inner selves hasn't been as heavily scratched as it might become later.

Now, it did get better and my 13-year-old self really could use a tweet or two from myself ("No, seriously, pay attention during science class because, fuckin' magnets, how do they work?"). But perhaps, on days when I feel as though the mirror can't be trusted, when it reflects not my face but my looks, I'd like a tweet or two from her in return.

Cross-posted from The Beheld, a blog with perspectives on beauty, in development.

Fat-Hating and Eating Disorders

2010-10-30T16:53:00.000-07:00

Somehow I was not one of the tens of thousands of people who have reacted to Maura Kelly's anti-fat-person blog entry on Marie Claire. The magazine has received 28,000 e-mails about the piece; the initial post itself has garnered 3,000 comments. It's in the Daily News, HuffPo, washingtonpost.com, etc.

Basically, she wrote a hateful post about how it's "aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room"--yes, that is a direct quote--and how even though she has a few friends who could be called plump, she would be "grossed out if I had to watch [fat people] doing anything." It's not hard to see why the fatosphere freaked out. There was even a protest staged in front of the offices on Friday, in which fat people were supposed to gather and make out, or something. (The post was prompted by Maura's editor asking about her reactions to Mike and Molly, a CBS show about two obese people in love. It's ridiculous that this idea in and of itself is a premise, incidentally.)

What's striking me is her apology, made after the post proved explosive. Here's where I should say that I've worked with Maura and have never found her to be anything less than honest, kind, and sincere. (I've also written for Marie Claire and haven't found their party line to be any more anti-fat than any women's magazine, though I wasn't writing about body issues.) When I read the apology, I could hear the words coming out of her mouth; they were in line with the person I know.

The post itself was anything but. I kept reading, waiting for a disclaimer better than "some of my best friends are fat!" and never got one; I kept waiting for the big reveal to this obviously farcical post (right? right???) and was left hanging. But as her apology makes clear, this woman has been in the grip of an eating disorder. It's behind her now--that is, she is no longer engaging in eating-disordered behavior--but manalive, do those mind-sets ever stick.

I'm sympathetic to how this grossly myopic view of fat people might be a symptom of an eating disorder. I don't want to believe that Maura's actual feelings are anywhere near as hateful as her words. So then I asked myself: Do I, deep down--as someone who's had an eating disorder--have the same reaction to seeing morbidly obese people? The answer was a swift, decisive no. I felt relieved to answer this honestly--rather, to come to that answer honestly--and vaguely righteous, suspicious that maybe Maura's post wasn't about her eating disorder at all but about something closer to bigotry.

But then I remember my mother and the mustard cape.

There was no plus-size store within driving distance of the South Dakota town where I grew up, so when I was a kid the only time my morbidly obese mother purchased clothes was during our annual summer visits to my grandparents in Dallas. These visits were as shrouded in mystery as her annual visit to the gynecologist: I knew it was something adult women did, specifically something my mother did, and it had something to do with something I wanted no part of. I pictured these stores--we didn't have words like "plus-size" back then; my father referred to it as the "big woman" store, and my mother didn't refer to it at all--as somehow dark, dank, with lighting that was harsh and low at the same time. I pictured eerily large dressing rooms with mean, ugly mirrors; I pictured elephantine, kindly saleswomen who were all very careful not to mention the fact that this was a "big woman" store. I pictured women filing out of there not delighted with their purchases, nor even relieved at having gotten it done, but furtive, ashamed. I absorbed so much shame from the very idea of the store that the thought of going there with her seemed like a punishment devised especially for me, designed to make me see my fate as a woman.

We eventually moved to an actual city, one with "big woman" stores of its own. My mother's shopping trips went from an annual basis to an as-needed one. It became a bit of a treat, actually--the best store (possibly only, even in the early '90s) was at a mall an hour's drive away; every so often after school she'd pick me up and announce we were going to that mall. I would go into Claire's and pick out cheap earrings, and would meet her back at the store. The first time she suggested this I felt squeamish, literally sick to my stomach at the thought of going into that store with her; she may as well have suggested we go to a sex-toy shop as a mother-daughter team. But it made the most sense, and I acquiesced; imagine my surprise when I saw that the store was just like any other, just with added digits on the clothing tags. If anything, they were preferable to the cheap, gaudy places that catered to teenagers like me. I read the simple, sunny decor and the saleswomen's perky attitudes as disguising shame. Perhaps it was simply maturity.

On one of her trips--one without me--she purchased a mustard-yellow cape. Why, I have no idea. She wasn't a dramatic dresser--the flashiest she gets even now is a red blouse instead of a black or forest green one--nor did she and my father go out to the sort of places where a cape would be appropriate. I suspect she just saw it and was in a good mood; the saleswoman probably told her it looked good on her. I can hear it now: Most people can't wear that color--but you! with that red hair! those hazel eyes! you owe it to yourself!

And the thing is, it did look good on her. I can see that now. At the time, though, all I remember was my mother showing off her purchase, twirling around the living room in a cape, and being horribly, horribly embarrassed. Embarrassed for her, that she was taking delight in an outlandish garment when she hadn't earned the right to do so by being thin. Embarrassed for myself, for being her daughter. Embarrassed that capes meant for big women even existed; embarrassed that there were fat women walking around out there right at this very minute wearing mustard capes and thinking they looked fabulous.

It became crucial to not allow my mother to wear her mustard yellow cape. Words I used include ridiculous, weird, how could you, terrible. Words I did not use include fat, fear, and I. I was 15. It was the same year I stopped eating breakfast, and lunch. Yes, fat people made me very, very uncomfortable.

I wish I could tell you that my mother heard her petulant 15-year-old daughter protesting her fashion choices and catalogued it along with her other sins, sins like making me use coupons if I went into the grocery store for her and calling parents of friends just to make sure that yes, a responsible adult would be there for the Friday night sleepover. Instead, she took off the cape, put it in its bag, and stuffed it into her closet, where it stayed until they moved out of the house.

I tried once, post-college, to try to get her to wear it. By then I could see my mother for who she was: a flame-haired, hazel-eyed woman with just the slightest hint of Texas twang whose charm lay partially in the fact that she didn't know she had any. I knew by then that the mustard cape would bring out that flame, highlight that hazel, and maybe send her a quiet alert about her own charisma. I took it out of its bag and brought it out casually. "You really should wear this, Mom," I said. "I know I made a big deal out of it when you got it, but" [it's not about fat, it's not about weight, it's not about you] "I was a teenager and anything out of the usual was mortifying. But try it on--I know it'll look great."

She laughed. "I don't know what I was thinking when I got that thing," she said. "Who am I to try to wear a cape?"

Maura, Maura, how could you not have seen? How could you not have known your own history so? How could you have looked at your own reaction--and for the record, while I find your reaction sad and even abhorrent, it's also an authentic reaction and I'm not going to ask you to deny that--and stopped at its face value? How could you not have put it together that a revulsion of fat people might not be about fat people at all, but about your own relationship with your body? You're a smart writer and a smarter lady, and this wasn't your best. It wasn't even your worst. It was your sickest. I have no idea where you're at in your recovery, only that you write about your eating disorder history as being in the past. And the eating may be, but the disorder lingers.

Long Hair on Older Women

2010-10-24T20:37:00.000-07:00

A lovely essay in the Times about older women having long hair. (Bonus: She mentions the no-'poo technique at the top of the second page!)

It's interesting to think of our older sex symbols (I really, really don't ever want to hear my father say the words "Helen Mirren" again, but of course the woman is incredible) and see that whatever physical attributes they may possess that land them in that category in the popular mind--sultry features, a certain grace, a conspicuous absence of fat accumulation around the middle--long hair isn't among them. The door is the tiniest (tiniest!) bit open for us to think of older women as sexy--I suppose it's the one upside of the whole "cougar" thing--but, despite the very agency that these women have that makes them so appealing, there are certain things that we collectively expect women to give up. We shift our definition of sexy to include a very select handful of women of a certain age, but even there the Iron Maiden prevails; there's not enough space around the head for long braids, or a ponytail--if you want in, shoulder-length is the most you can hope for, even as your above-the-knee skirt reveals a shapely calf and your smile lines belie your temperament.

The long-haired women over 50 I know--my flame-haired mother included, not a gray hair on her head--may have beautiful hair, but there's also an air of rebellion about it. I find that the women who have long hair at that age are also less likely to do the extreme sort of things that less self-assured counterparts might do--plastic surgery, an overuse of makeup, etc. So I don't know if the rebellion is because they're saying to hell with trying to look younger (but look girlish anyway, tresses flowing), or because of the juxtaposition of a slightly weathered face and bouncy hair, or because they're simply doing as they please. But in any case, regardless of the sex appeal of long hair, rebellion can be sexy as hell too. Cougars they might not be, but I salute the long-haired lionesses among us.

Cross-posted from The Beheld, a blog with perspectives on beauty, in development.

Jodie Foster Defends Mel Gibson, and Why I Think That's Okay

2010-10-20T10:02:00.000-07:00

Jodie Foster, in her impassioned defense of Mel Gibson's character, unintentionally proves a point about domestic violence awareness: "incredible," "loyal," "loved" people are capable of being abusers.

I am downright bored by depictions of abusers as one of two types: 1) the bad-boy clod who gives "wife-beater" shirts their name (prototype: Stanley Kowalski), or 2) the "surprise!" abuser, who is the golden boy on the outside and a sadistic freakshow the minute the front door closes. And those types exist, sure, but the fact is that abusers are indeed, as they say of serial killers, "just like everyone else." Which is to say: Abusers, "just like everyone else," can be genuinely likable, and not in a false golden-boy way, but in a nice-guy-who-will-help-you-move sort of way. You can't spot them by the color of their eyes; you spot them when they start trying to control your actions, or shame you for yours, or when they push you, or more. There are certain red flags, sure, and I believe that intuition can serve as a strong guide here. But still: seemingly nice guys--vulnerable, witty, intelligent, accomplished, flawed, silly, helpful guys--aren't exempt from being abusers.

It's essential to ending domestic violence that we recognize this. As eye-roll as it sounds to someone who hasn't been there, it can actually be pretty hard to recognize abuse even when it's happening. Typing abusers means that the victims may be more willing to write off episodes of abuse as isolated. (Just as the "type" of victim--passive, weak, uneducated--means that every lengthy discussion I've had with an abuse victim has seen her say, at one point, something like "I couldn't believe that it was really me down on the floor/at the emergency room/actually saying that I'd fallen down the stairs.") Abuse is about the action, not about the entirety of the person, which is why it's impossible to use handy stereotypes for abusers. There is a definite cycle of abuse that's out there, and that template might not vary that much, but that cycle does not define the person; it defines the abuse, and that's what we need to focus on.

So: Mel and Jodie. I'm not thrilled to see anyone defending the character of Mel Gibson, who appears to be a racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semite. But it's noteworthy that she's not proclaiming his innocence or even saying that his character as she knows it means that certainly he is incapable of doing such horrible things. She's not accusing Oksana Grigorieva of lying. She's talking about her friend as she knows him, and is saying that she hopes to stand by him during his "dark moment." (I reckon that the allegations against him compromise more than a moment, but whatever.) And I think that's actually admirable in a way. Abusers don't need complete ostracization in order to change; they need intelligent support from people who are willing to give it. Abusers abuse because, among other reasons, they feel utterly powerless; it's a cheap route to feeling utterly powerful, even if only for a split second. Just as victims need a safe place to go, abusers need a safe--though not oblivious--place to process their actions if they're ever going to be able to heal. Shame is part of the reason abuse is kept secret; the longer that we insist upon letting shame be the only legitimate response to abuse--even as, finally, the shame is being pointed in the better direction (instead of backward at the victim)--the longer we'll keep the abusers, and the abused, in the closet.

Jodie Foster, by all accounts, is a smart lady. I have zero idea what she sees in Mel Gibson, and zero idea of why she's breaking her usual low-key-media mode for this. But it's important to her, clearly, and if Mel Gibson is ever going to get his shit together and stop abusing women, he's going to need the smart, tough love of one smart, tough lady. Jodie, don't let me down.

Makeup Ads and Self-Esteem

2010-10-19T14:23:00.000-07:00

The conclusion of a recent study in Journal of Consumer Research—that ads for beauty products make women feel worse about themselves—falls squarely into the category of duh, along with "Clumsy Kids Less Popular" and "Eating Healthfully and Exercising Is Good For You."

What’s interesting to me is not the grand conclusion but the smaller conclusions of each experiment. Participants were shown a variety of images: “beauty-enhancing” products like lipstick and eye shadow, and “problem-solving” products like acne concealer and deodorant. Both types of products were shown both in a neutral image (white background, no type) and embedded in an ad, with all its seductive additional imagery and words.

Unsurprisingly, seeing the enhancement products in an advertising setting made women feel the worst about themselves, when compared with the same products in a neutral setting, and the problem-solving products in both settings. But in addition to participants reporting thinking worse thoughts about themselves, they were thinking more thoughts about themselves. Their self-consciousness increased when being posed with a product that, ostensibly, was to make them more beautiful. It strengthens my resolve to do my best not to check out my reflection in every shiny surface available. (I got some excellent beauty advice once, which was to look in the mirror as little as possible because then you can think you’re as beautiful as you’d like, even if you see hard evidence otherwise. Oh but to stick to it!)

The study participants’ self-esteem remained the same when shown the problem-solving products, a wild difference from the beauty-enhancing products, whether within the ad setting or in a neutral one. A logical but counterintuitive—counterintuitive to me as a woman, anyway—response to these experiments might be surprise. Wouldn’t a product whose very nature was calling you flawed—zitty, stinky, and flawed—make women feel worse about themselves than a product promising the fantasy playland of glossy lips and tinted eyelids? Can’t makeup be some exquisite place of luxury and pleasure? (Certainly that’s often how it’s sold to its consumers.)

But as the target of these ads, I know right away why the “beauty-enhancing” products made women feel worse. We know full well we’re not the ethereal creatures we see in the advertisements. We know we sweat in an unattractive fashion; we know we get pimples and ingrown hairs, and that our teeth get stained over the years, and that our hair falls out of place. We might get frustrated about it, but we’re also terribly matter-of-fact about it. Problem-solving products don’t promise to turn us into something we’re not; they guide us to a sort of place of neutrality. Give me the right product and I turn into a purer version of myself, a non-acne-scarred woman whose hair doesn’t slip from her ponytail, non-coffee-stained teeth gleaming. It’s corrective measures that feel like beauty work nonetheless but that ultimately are only letting me know that I’m human.

Let forthright beauty enter the picture, though, and things shift: Suddenly, instead of simply looking like a non-zitty version of myself, I might be able to look like Brooke Shields—except I’ll never look like Brooke Shields, of course, even at my non-zittiest and whitest-toothed. The beauty-enhancing products take us from the realm of humanity into some other realm where we’re supposed to transcend ourselves, with our just-bitten lips, just-pinched cheeks, miraculously blue lash lines.

The results—of beauty-enhancing products decreasing women’s self-esteem while problem-solving ones had no effect—stayed true whether or not the ad featured a person. This did surprise me; I’d always championed the Clinique makeup campaigns because they were selling me a product, not the implicit promise of looking like Salma Hayek (a Photoshopped Salma Hayek at that). It’s the lure of glamour and beauty, whether it comes from a stiletto or a glamorous actress, that leaves us feeling deflated. Now I sort of feel duped, like Clinique hired a smart, well-meaning woman to reinvent the beauty ad (Dr. Faye Miller?) for women like me who think we’re too savvy to be taken in by a bevy of starlets peddling their sheen to us. I look at Clinique’s thin sans-serif lettering, which somehow looks elite; its artful styling of products in ads. Their ads are as close as can be to the neutral-background approach used in the study, actually. So maybe they’re lowering my self-esteem less than Maybelline—but I hardly walk away a winner.

Cross-posted from The Beheld, a blog with perspectives on beauty, in development.

Assorted Thoughts on Domestic Violence Awareness

2010-10-18T12:14:00.000-07:00

I'm way behind on the feminist chatter regarding the "Love the Way You Lie" domestic violence-themed music video starring Megan Fox and Dominic Monaghan, but in part that's because I was approaching it from a critical viewpoint from the beginning. I saw the video and immediately critiqued it for its cowardice (Rihanna, a known victim of violence, sings--but doesn't dare to act in the video, as it would be all too real for the audience), for its stereotypes (ooh, Megan Fox is craaazy in that, man!), for its leading man (Eminem: not exactly known for being a friend to the ladies). It wasn't until I saw this ridiculous anti-DV PSA starring the Cox-Arquette clan (with a special appearance by Kenneth on 30 Rock) that I recognized how complex and potentially effective the Rihanna/Eminem video is. As Kate Dailey points out in Newsweek, "almost no one disagrees with the notion that domestic abuse is 'just wrong.'" (The conceit of the PSA is that married people joking about their furries fetish is "just wrong," as is--yes--domestic violence.)

Part of the reason domestic violence hasn't just vanished is not that it's invisible, but that it wears a big ooga-booga-scary mask when really abuse is a small series of tears that get bigger and bigger, almost imperceptibly, to both the perpetrator and the victim. And people don't want to admit that those tears go both ways--that two people fighting is still domestic violence, and that a woman can instigate violence, and that one person's violence doesn't excuse another's. I don't know how common actual mutual abuse is--abuse being the systemic breakdown--but mutual violence is common in DV relationships. To see Megan Fox's character spit in her lover's face: It's ugly; it's gross. But you know what? That's one way domestic violence works. The problem with well-meaning ads like the Cox-Arquette PSA or this chilling, albeit confusing, ad from the UK starring Keira Knightley, is the assumption that roles in violence are black-and-white (literally, with this cinematography)--that DV is a woman cowering in the corner while a big bad man kicks her. That happens--horrifically, that happens--but every single woman I know who has been in a violent relationship has reported something much murkier, much more difficult to report and still expect sympathy, something much more difficult to put in an PSA and not have people scratch their heads and wonder whose side they're supposed to be on.

That was sort of my first reaction upon watching the Eminem video, but the more I hear the song the more I think that's actually effective. I can be at the gym and hear Rihanna's pleas to stand there and watch her burn, and I think of the dead-eyed stare she had in the days after her very public attack, and I get chills. I don't like the sort of glamourized prettiness of the video--especially because given that Megan Fox is supposedly the hottest woman in the galaxy, we see the erotic element of the violence as something we're supposed to understand--but I like that it's confusing; I like that it's not cut-and-dried; I like that it's gross.

I wonder about the premise of the Newsweek piece, though--"Can PSAs End Domestic Violence?" the headline reads. Obviously PSAs can't end all social ills; really, all they can do is raise consciousness and possibly garner funds. Anti-violence campaigns are often critiqued for targeting victim instead of the abuser, but I don't know how to raise the consciousness of abusers, given that very few abusers think of what they're doing as abuse--it all makes a sick sort of sense in the moment. This British PSA (courtesy of a related Jezebel thread) is one of the few ads targeted toward abusers that I've seen, and while I can't speak to its actual effectiveness, I think that it gets at the heart of the matter--that abusive relationships are, well, relationships: that the people in them cuddle and hang out and spat, and that the abusers actually aren't irredeemable and that the victims aren't just interchangeable blanks. (Which is possibly what I hate most about the cowering-woman type of awareness ads--no victim of abuse wants to identify with her, so what awareness is raised, really?)

The True Tale of an Unwashed Woman

2010-10-13T13:45:00.000-07:00

I’ve stopped washing my hair. And my face, for that matter. The inspiration was an episode of Mad Men in which an unseen character is reputed to not wash her face, but she’s French so it’s obviously good advice. (Thus proving that the national girl-crush on French women went back at least to the ’60s.) It reminded me of something I'd heard once -- that if you entirely stopped washing your hair, after a few greasy weeks a small miracle would occur atop your head; oils from your scalp would work their way down your strands to protect them and lend a glossy sheen, and your hair would then have reverted to its original, intended condition. Or something.

One of my more feline preferences is that I detest showering -- I do it, but it always feels like a chore, and its pain-in-assiness factor is exponentially increased every time I have to wash and dry my hair. Plus, I’m mostly working from home these days, so if my unwashed-face-and-hair plan were to wind up making me resemble a calzone, embarrassment would be minimal. So a month ago, I swore off shampoo and face washes. I use a boar-bristle brush frequently, as it’s supposed to help with the miracle part of this whole no-washing thing, and I’ve also rinsed it twice in water; I splash my face twice a day with lukewarm water.

Surprisingly -- or unsurprisingly, depending on whom you’re asking -- I look fine. My skin looks better, if anything, but really just looks the same; my scalp looks greasy sometimes but it’s nothing a quick brush, hair powder, or updo can’t fix, depending on its severity. The hair itself looks better than ever; it magically places itself exactly as it was cut, with no styling necessary.

The real surprise, though, is how smug I’ve found myself about it. It’s not simply feeling pleased that I’ve freed myself of some beauty labor; it’s that I feel self-satisfied to a degree that surpasses how one should ever feel about one’s hair. I’m enthralled with the idea that by doing absolutely nothing, I manage to bypass all these beauty systems and look exactly the same. Behold the ne’er-washed scalp – quiver at my sebum! I alone see the forest through the trees of toners, moisturizers, cleaners, foams, and conditioners – I alone see the folly of the industry!

Except I’m not alone. When I Googled “not washing hair” and “cleaning hair without water,” I was stunned by the number and intensity of people who’ve dabbled in the realm of the unwashed. There’s a woman who, years after writing an article about the “no-’poo” method, returns to answer questions from commenters. There’s the 213-page discussion on the Long Hair Community forum, which features a litter of vaguely creepy userpics of long-haired women photographed from behind. Their inspiration seems to be Penny Weynberg, who hasn’t washed her hair for 11 years and claims it’s now as “soft as dog fur.” That's not counting the HuffPo blogger, the folks in the Times article, and various British columnists. They take a sort of defiant, proud stance, posing theories about the body’s natural equilibrium and animal fur. They have to say it loudly: They’re not dirty even if they’re unwashed; they’re, in fact, possibly cleaner than you, with your overproduction of scalp oils and chemical conditioners. They have to say it loudly because if they don’t, then they’re just dirty, and nobody will want to sit next to them at lunch, grody grody grosspants.

I’m tempted to become one of the no-’poo evangelists (and indeed simply by writing here, I suppose I am), but it seems a little to me like those slim actresses who jabber on about how it’s totally genetic and they, like, love cheeseburgers and never work out. But I look at the incessant interest these people have in their own lack of shampooing, and I wonder what sort of need it’s fulfilling. For the women on the forums in particular, the amount of discussion surrounding the no-wash method seems to surpass that of conventional hair care. It’s like there’s a certain amount of time and energy that must be devoted to our tresses, and once the actual hair-washing is skipped, the discussion of the absence of hair-washing takes its place. Participants talk of “preening” their strands, break down various scalp-massage methods step-by-step, and test water temperatures for optimizing rinses. They use acronyms particular to the method: SO for sebum-only, WO for water-only, ACV for something I can’t imagine. They assure one another that they’re not “cheating” if they use an herbal rinse on occasion.

There seems to be a sort of disciplinary aspect to these communities, a proud self-flagellation in the face of having found a way around the time normally spent washing and drying one’s hair. Do we really want to be released from the bonds of beauty? I’ve found that while overall I’ve saved time by not shampooing, I’m also peacocking in front of the mirror more. I’ve started carrying my boar-bristle brush in my purse and find myself calculating activities based on its affect on my hair (“I’m working out tonight so it’s a good night for a rinse”), something that I didn’t do before. It actually reminds me of the paleolithic movement. A friend of mine has “gone paleo,” eating raw meat, volunteering to help people move because that’s how cavement stayed in shape or something, going on barefoot runs through Central Park, etc. It’s helped her lose weight, has cleared up her skin, and has rid her of depression—this after years of veganism, so it’s not as if she was walking around in a McDonald’s daze before going paleo. As she spoke, I did indeed see a glow come over her, but I suspect it was less due to raw meat and more because she had discovered a sort of shortcut to the tangible benefits of good health promised by every blaring magazine cover. It’s basically the Atkins diet from what I can tell, but whereas Atkins sounds old-fashioned and dangerous, the caveman diet sounds old-fashioned and totally fucking awesome. There’s something appealing about the idea that by going out on a primordial limb, you can magically wind up ahead of the game and can loll about at the finish line while the vegans, South Beachers, 5-A-Dayers, and master cleanse folks gasp their way to you.

Or, in my case, I can sit atop my shampoo-free perch and watch as other denizens of the beauty game fret about conditioners and gels, knowing all the while that my hair magically creates its own mousse.

Cross-posted from The Beheld, a blog with perspectives on beauty, in development.

Celebrity Lookalikes

2010-09-28T08:50:00.000-07:00

At a party I attended several years ago, someone told me I looked like Drew Barrymore. I thanked her. As the night went on and she drank more, she kept telling everyone else how much I looked like Drew Barrymore, and people would look at me, cock their heads, squint, and agree or disagree. The party eventually dwindled down to five people surrounding the kitchen sink, gulping water out of plastic cups, talking about ways in which I looked like Drew Barrymore. I was being studied by these strangers, who were talking about the size of my eyes and the shape of my upper lip, in this sort of detached but warmly appraising way. Is it terrible to say I loved it?

Since then I’ve been told I resemble various others, all of whom look so different from one another that the comparisons are void. What I realized somewhere between Catherine Zeta Jones and Jeanne Tripplehorn was that it didn’t matter who the comparison was; I was being complimented. I took an inordinate pleasure in being told I looked like these women, even if I didn't agree--it meant someone was taking notice of how I looked and drawing an association with someone more familiar, if less intimate, to them. Actresses and the like have been given a sort of official stamp of cultural approval: Nicole Kidman may not be your cup of tea, but she’s certainly someone’s; ergo, to be told you resemble Nicole Kidman is an endorsement of your looks, a way of saying that you’ve been sanctioned as pretty, without the speaker having to risk saying something inappropriate. It can be awkward to tell a woman straight-up that she’s beautiful--if you’re a man, it’s assumed you’re hitting on them (which you might be, but you might not be); if you’re a woman, there’s this unspoken sort of question left hanging in the air (“you’re lovely, now what about me?”), an awkwardness resulting from having testified to someone else’s beauty.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been with a group of people and someone will point out someone else’s resemblance to a celebrity, and suddenly the room is taken over by Julia Roberts and Bridget Fonda look-alikes. To report to others whom you’ve been compared to is a chance to talk about our striking features without appearing as though we’re bragging; hey, I didn’t come up with this comparison myself, you came up with it (or a stranger on the street, or a woman at a party, or a lookalike generator program), so it’s not like I’m saying I’m all that, right? To say forthrightly, I am beautiful is taboo. But remove it a bit—Yes, as a matter of fact, I have been told I resemble Charlize Theron—and you’re just stating a bare fact, reporting an incident, most likely with a mildly self-deprecating eye roll. Best yet, there’s a safety involved: If someone retorts that no, you do not indeed look like Charlize Theron, you’ve risked nothing. You laugh it off, saying you didn’t think so either. You haven’t risked actually saying, You know, lots of people think I’m beautiful; you’ve said something smaller, more innocuous.

It’s notable that this happens to women much more often than it happens to men. Men might be told that they look like a celebrity if they genuinely do (one sharp-featured man I know was eminently thankful when the Pulp Fiction era passed so that he wouldn’t have to hear anymore how much he looked like Quentin Tarantino), but a quick survey of some male friends told me that most of them had been told one or two celebrity look-alikes, if any, and only rarely.

The biggest, and most obvious reason, for this is that we’re all simply more used to assessing women’s looks. But another reason comes to mind, one involving a man: Several years ago, I was walking with a white man in a predominantly black neighborhood. We passed a black man a bit older than us who turned to my companion and said, “Hey, it’s Ben Affleck!” We didn’t get that he was talking to us and kept walking. He shouted it louder this time: “Hey, Ben Affleck! Check it out! It’s Ben Affleck!” he called out to nobody in particular. Now, my companion looked like Ben Affleck only in the most cursory sense: a lean-jawed white man with dark hair. He didn’t look like Ben Affleck; he looked like a generic white guy who was momentarily in this fellow’s consciousness, a stand-in for every lean-jawed white man with dark hair on the planet. In other words, he was a type.

I don’t actually look much like Drew Barrymore, but I do give off a candid warmth. I’ve heard Jeanne Tripplehorn--rather, “the other chick from Basic Instinct”--twice now from strangers while wearing a red trench coat; it’s not my face, it’s the femme fatale signifier. A cynical, wisecracking, bespectacled friend of mine used to be told she looked like Daria, as in Daria the cartoon character. It’s not about what we actually look like; it’s about what we stand for, what vibe we put out into the world--or rather, what vibe is received from the viewer. There was an edge to the stranger’s voice as he walked alongside us, urging other passersby to come check out “Ben Affleck.” In a country as racially divided as America, it’s not hard to imagine that my companion became, for a moment, the embodiment of the establishment that kept this neighborhood in poverty; by singling out the only white man on the street as being one of the most successful people in Hollywood, a division between the haves and the have-nots was clearly drawn.

Of course, since I don’t actually have a striking resemblance to any celebrity in particular*, it’s easier for me to pick up on the meta-message being sent by these comparisons. I wonder what it’s like to actually resemble someone--my best friend from high school actually is a dead ringer for Nicole Kidman, and has been compared to her ever since Days of Thunder, even winning a local lookalike contest as an adult. We’re not in touch anymore, but I wonder: Does she take this in and feel good (“Hey, I’m constantly compared with a woman who’s been on People’s Most Beautiful list eight times!”) or resentful (“Can anyone ever just tell me I look good and be done with it, without this Australian chick coming into the picture?”)? Does it ever backfire--does she wonder on off-days if there’s a constant …except not as pretty lurking in the air, given the much-recorded beauty of her famous counterpart? Or is her self-image intact enough to simply take it for what it is: a statement of fact, a reportage from others—you have red hair, you have fine features, you are tall and slender—and not much else?

*Except for Laura Kightlinger, whose brief reign on taxi-topper ads for The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman assured that for a period of four months I was told biweekly, by strangers, that I resembled “that comedian who’s on the taxis,” only to have disappeared from the public eye, ending my single bona fide celebrity resemblance.

Cross-posted from The Beheld, a blog with perspectives on beauty, in development.

Welcome to the Dollhouse: Men and Cosmetics

2010-09-02T14:18:00.000-07:00

I don't know what the answer to healing the relationship so many women have with beauty is, but I've long maintained that the answer decidedly is not to invite men into the pool along with us. So I read today's New York Times story about men's cosmetics with interest. What jumped out, though, was this quote from the founder of a men's personal care line:

“Women use cosmetic products to beautify, but men have a totally different approach and totally different goals,” said Mr. Hewryk, who holds degrees in applied chemistry and biology. “Men use cosmetic products in order to cover up or correct imperfections, not to enhance beauty.”

One glance at the makeup counter shows that women's products "enhance beauty" in a dizzying number of ways, including everything from peacock jewel-tone eye shades to Day-Glo nail polishes--that is, colors not found in nature, much less on even the most beautiful of human bodies. But to so firmly divide the covering or correcting of imperfections with the enhancement of beauty seemed odd. I feel this immense pressure to not only be beautiful but to appear as though it's utterly effortless, as though I just happen to have skin that's entirely unmarked by adolescence or hormones. "Maybe she's born with it, maybe it's Maybelline"--the company's winking ad let us know that if we used their products, the world would assume the latter while they played knowing big sister behind the scenes.

I've always sort of envied women whose use of makeup is obvious--green eyeliner, turquoise shadows. Some might see them as kowtowing to the beauty imperative; I do see that, but depending on its wearer I also see a sort of fantasy space, a sort of storybook land in which we have jade eyelids instead of pearlized fairy wings. It's saying: I am unnatural; I am parading; I am painting myself; I am artist and subject at once. It's taking

But I don't think that Hewryk is restricting his comments to outlandish, playful colors when he refers to women using cosmetics to "enhance" their beauty. I think he is referring to things like mascara that makes our eyelashes appear dark to their tips, lipstick that makes our lips appear just-bitten, blush that makes us look like we've just been engaging in some particularly blush-worthy activity. These things indeed enhance our beauty. And yet, when I read Hewryk's words, I immediately thought of my pale-tipped lashes, my deadened cheeks, and thought of those as imperfections to be corrected, not beauty that merely needs to be enhanced. This is the effect of the beauty imperative: normal becomes imperfect, not a baseline. One of the prime tools of any woman's makeup box is called, after all, concealer.

"Enhancing beauty" sounds much more fun than "correcting imperfections," doesn't it? I wonder how many women think of their daily routines as enhancing their beauty versus correcting their imperfections. Hewryk's statement is more affirming than what I'd think of as the standard makeup-hawker's line, and what much feminist theory has us believe of advertising: If our beauty is lacking, and if our beauty is essential, then makeup will always, always sell. It's nearly optimistic in a way, but at its core the idea still makes me sad. In Elizabethan England, women of a certain class wore facepaint made of egg whites; the idea was to create a glazed, porcelain look--an obviously false, even inhuman, ideal. Men wore cosmetics in that era as well, but they were seen as vaguely immoral because of the deception involved: If you look at a woman with a shellacked face you know that she was not, indeed, born with it (maybe it's Maybelline?). If you look at a man who appears to be brimming with vim and vigor, however, you might well feel tricked if you found out he got it from a jar. I don’t wish for men to jump into the beauty myth along with women; I’d prefer that they instead cast about life preservers to help those of us who are mired in it get out. But if they must join, I’m just saddened by the idea that because of the restrictions of manhood, they would still be unable to seize the sort of cultural permission that women have to actually enhance our natural beauty, instead of being limited to correcting “imperfections.”

Cross-posted from The Beheld, a blog with perspectives on beauty, in development.

Freedom '90

2010-03-21T11:58:00.000-07:00

George Michael is everywhere. In the cafe at my school, in the grocery store, in the pivnice I go to after classes to drink cheap pilsner and eat pickled cheese. "Freedom '90" in particular, a song I enjoy, but not as much as "Faith" or even "Father Figure."

I wrote it off as "one of those things," the aftermath of jokes about "being big in Europe"; the inexplicability of why some acts take off in foreign lands. Jerry Lewis in France, David Hasselhoff in Germany, The Eagles in Vietnam. George Michael in the Czech Republic, why not?

It's funny what stands out in a culture that's foreign to us. For me, in Prague, it is things like: the number of people who get on escalators and just stand there. The crazy burgundy hair color on what appears to be one of every five women over 40. The oddity of how in a country known for its beer, you're lucky if a place offers more than three varieties, draught or not. The funky eyewear. I absorb it, and then eventually, through conversation and reading and deduction, the cultural reasons behinds these little "huh" moments become clear.

In the Czech Republic, those reasons often circle directly back to the communist era. The escalators: Time is much less useful as a commodity when your activities are restricted or you're literally forced to do a job that has nothing to do with your interests; why not stand on the escalator, and why give up space to those uppity types who are in a hurry? The hair color: The chemical industry would go through times in which they wouldn't have the supplies to make any kind of hair dye other than--you guessed it--burgundy. The fashion stuck. The choice of beer? Fairly obvious. (The funky eyewear remains a mystery. I chalk it up to that European je ne sais quoi.)

I've never known anything but utter democracy, so I'm fascinated by these stories. The details of day-to-day life in the Bolshevik era rivet me. All a Czech person has to do is say the word communist and I'm a puppy-dog at their feet, waiting for morsels of life under that exotic era, that time when our schooltechers told Americans that "people 'over there' have to wait in line eight hours just to get a loaf of bread." I can't get enough of hearing the places my teachers' visions intersect with reality and the places in which they wildly diverge. "The old women at the grocery stores will look at you like you're a low-life if you tell them you didn't bring your own bag. In the communist days there weren't bags; why should there be bags now, they think," my landlady tells me. A classmate on the blander parts of the Czech diet (i.e. knedlicky): "Under communism, food was just something you ate to get by. You didn't want to be seen taking pleasure in it--that was decadent. That would get you noticed."

I'm a good listener; I'm not the sort who will top your tale with one of my own, eager to make the conversation all about me. But in my head, eventually that's exactly what it becomes: I immediately contrast these exotically grim experiences with my innocence of democracy. I picture my classmate growing up eating stale bread dumplings in shades of gray, while I remember slumber parties at which we'd sort M&Ms by color before funneling them into our mouths by the handful; I imagine how his bread dumplings affect him to this day, and how my overfed rainbow youth affects me still. I like to think that I'm respectful of people's experiences, but in my reverence of What It Must Have Been Like, and trying in my paltry way to compare and contrast my own experiences with those of whose culture I've only skimmed--well, I know I can't deeply research every culture on the planet, but let's face it, I'm sort of playing cultural hopscotch here.

I went to the Popmuseum, which is dedicated to Czech rock and pop music. "We made the best guitars," the long-haired, aging rocker dude manning the place said to me. "George Harrison's first guitar was Czech." He fires up his computer and finds a photo of the Beatle playing a Futurama. "The Bolsheviks think rock was shit, though." He grins. He's showing me around the exhibit--a punk-rock-style collection of photocopied images and cut-and-pasted captions of the rock music of 1990. Every Western musician wanted to hit up the newly freed countries. In 1990, Prague saw: Paul Simon, the Rolling Stones, Frank Zappa, Frank Black, Joan Baez, Michael Stipe, Iggy Pop. More; I can't remember them all.

The exhibit was well-done, if low-tech, but I was amused by what seemed to be a secondary showpiece of the exhibit: a wall listing dozens of albums of the era, no commentary. Jesus Lizard, Pure. Cocteau Twins, Heaven or Las Vegas. Fine Young Cannibals, Young Raw & Cooked. Girl You Know It's True, Milli Vanilli. I laughed inwardly, picturing this curator--whose English was broken but who still managed to liberally sprinkle his speech with slyly enunciated expletives--printing out lists of albums of 1989 and 1990, cutting them into strips with his scissors, gluing it onto construction paper. It seemed charming in its simplicity.

So today, when "Freedom '90" came on while I was looking at the enormous variety of yogurts in the Albert supermarket, I laughed again, noting that I couldn't escape this damn song. And only then did it hit me: This song is from 1990. This song has Freedom in its title. This song is important. I blinked, looking at the yogurt, spoiled for choice--hazelnut, passionfruit, espresso, pear, cream top or no cream top, mix-ins or no mix-ins, rice-based, for kids, chocolate, tiramisu, strawberry, blackberry, kiwi, pineapple, peach, cinnamon, banana, Balkan, plain.

But you can't buy a roll of paper towels.

The relationship of the past to the present is difficult enough to figure out in your native culture. Maybe in some ways it's harder; how am I to notice the things we Americans do that are peculiar? Europeans used to spot us by our jeans; yesterday in my class, all the Czech students but two were wearing jeans. But at least I always have a wealth of knowledge to turn to. Friendly, suspicious pioneers, we are, eager to save the world but too interested in getting somewhere bigger and better to bother with the skills to do it properly; at ease around foreigners--after all, they've invaded our country, right?--but wearing our money belts because you know how those people are. (And they are, at least in our country--look at our crime.)

Here, I don't have that information. I try my big, floppy, Muppet-like American best to get it right. I'm trying to understand whether the people in the apartment above mine play the same song over and over and over again because once upon a time they didn't have options, or because they're just those kind of people.

The Czechs say that Prague was founded by Princess Libuše, when she stood at the fortress of Vyšehrad and had a vision: I see a great city whose glory will touch the stars. Archeaological evidence shows that the timelines don't correspond; the princess was nowhere near Vyšehrad. It didn't even exist during her reign. But it's legend, therefore it stays. So when I read of the Velvet Revolution and think of the students being beaten but showing up again day after day to fight for their freedom, I see Princess Libuše pointing skyward. And then I talk with a classmate who tells me that her husband was one of the protesters. "You want to know what Velvet Revolution was? Velvet Revolution was a bunch of students in the pub, going to visit a bunch of other students in the pub, then doing it again the next day. They were beaten, yes, but they came back because they knew that Communism was on its way out. Every year my husband goes out and drinks to mark the anniversary," she says, then rolls her eyes. Archaeological evidence.

At first this makes me sort of laugh, thinking of how my history books are just like me: wanting to take this Second World story and make a sort of darkly romantic tale, when it was really just the wheels of history chugging along. But then: To her, the fact that her husband was beaten and went out again the next day to protest all over again was a sign that it wasn't a big deal, because "Communism was on its way out." She thinks that because during the time of the Velvet Revolution, she implicitly knew--at age 14--that not long ago there were people who had protested and had much worse things happen to them. Just a beating? Why wouldn't you go out again the next day?

Shall I believe the legend or the evidence? Or is the legend unfinished, waiting to be impressed upon by the living evidence at hand? Perhaps it's not a legend at all, just a collection of bits and dates and hair-dye boxes, Princess Libuše nowhere in sight.

Estonian Tech Wizards and Universal Access

2010-03-08T01:41:00.000-08:00

Given that in the States we have people arguing that receiving basic health care isn't a human right, it's a relief to read that most people globally feel that another sign of developing civilization--Internet access--should be a right.

But what really caught my eye here was that Estonia, of all countries, is one of the places that has already ruled that it actually is a human right and has wired the whole country (including mobile access). I know next to nothing about Estonia, but one of the facts I do know is that it ranks extraordinarily high in its proportion of women in technology. Nearly 70% of those employed in science and technology in Estonia are women. I don't exactly think that the high proportion of women in tech is the cause of the advanced thinking on global information access...or, well, maybe I do. It makes sense that a country that sees technology as not being gendered would see it as being plain old human, much as our need to drink water and transport ourselves. By not having vague implicit ideas of restricted access by gender (which most of us in the States have--when was the last time you heard "tech gal" instead of "tech guy"?), restrictions are lifted across the board.

There's also a chance that the very notion of universal access in places that place a premium on gender equality in tech is shaped by the actual women in the field. Most of the open-access zealots I know are men, but then, I'm American. Despite this field of advancement, Estonia is far from a women's paradise, so I can't help but think that women in comparatively privileged positions (tech) would feel strongly that global information access is a necessity, for very concrete reasons in addition to tech-utopian ones.

"We Are They": The Blame Game in Unrealistic Images of Women in Fashion

2010-02-11T11:02:00.001-08:00

Fascinating rundown at Jezebel of a panel for the Council of Fashion Designers of America's Health Initiative, started in response to the eating-disorder-related deaths of three young models. (And having little result, per Anna Wintour.) Jenna and the commenters bring up pretty much everything I have to say on the issue, so I won't comment too much except to say that I'm relieved to read that so many people called bullshit on the neverending blame game.

Magazines say they "can't" feature models whose bodies are above the sample size (which is very small), because designers don't provide them with sample sizes in, say, size 8. Designers say they "can't" make their samples larger because they are responding to the norms of the industry. Which is dictated by...magazines and other designers. Model agencies say they provide prepubescent girls as models because that's what the industry demands, and hell, there's just so many of them from countries with shaky economies (unsurprisingly, often the same countries where sex trafficking is an enormous problem for this same demographic). The models themselves say they are powerless to stand up for their bodies' needs, because they often have families back in their native country to feed, and there's always another girl who will live on cigarettes to fit the norm to take her place.

I wish I knew the identity of the female fashion designer who said during the Q&A portion of the panel: "Trends start by agreement. We keep saying 'They started it,' but we are 'they.' We are they." I'd buy her clothes in a size 8 minute.

Binge Eating Disorder: It Officially Exists!

2010-02-11T09:27:00.000-08:00

The American Psychiatric Association recently announced their officially proposed updates to the DSM-5. The mental health professional community had already let it be known that the addition of binge eating disorder would likely be among the changes--it's the APA's rationale that's news to me. (In the DSM-4, BED was listed as a variant of eating disorder-not otherwise specified; this change would make it a discrete diagnosis.)

*BED tends to run in families yet is not a simple familial variation of obesity.

*BED has a greater likelihood of male cases and a later age of onset than other eating disorders.

*Compared with obesity, BED sufferers have greater concerns about shape and weight and a higher likelihood of mood and anxiety disorders.

*BED is associated with a lower quality of life than obesity.

*BED has a greater likelihood of medical comorbidities than either other eating disorders or obesity.

*BED has a lower level of diagnostic stability and a greater likelihood of remission.

*Individuals with BED have a more positive response to specialty treatments than to generic behavioral weight loss treatments.

I’m hoping that BED’s inclusion helps with the last two items in this list. If mental health providers are more aware of BED and know that it is a treatable condition, it makes sense that patients will get care more swiftly--and that the care will be more effective--than they would were they to follow standard medical advice given to those whose primary issue is that they’re overweight, not that they suffer from BED. I wonder if the “later age of onset” for BED is actually “later age of diagnosis.” Of BED sufferers whose personal histories I know, their behaviors began in childhood, even if they didn’t reach clinical frequency until adulthood.

The proposed change is important for another reason: It would lessen the frequency of ED-NOS diagnoses. Right now, ED-NOS is the most fatal eating disorder, yet is the least-known—and, because of its breadth, perhaps the least understood. Given that BED has a greater likelihood of medical comorbidities than other eating disorders, this could shed some light on the actual risks of ED-NOS. Right now, ED-NOS is a sort of catch-all diagnosis; it’s actually the most common diagnosis at the Renfrew Center, a leading treatment facility. An ED-NOS diagnosis can mean anything from a binge-starve cycle, to chewing and spitting, to food rituals that disrupt one’s life, to purging disorders (purging without bingeing). It can also mean anorexic, bulimic, or binge eating behaviors that do not meet the criteria for frequency or severity: for example, someone who binges and purges twice a month as opposed to twice a week (required by DSM for a diagnosis of bulimia), or someone who restricts her food, has an intense fear of gaining weight, and has body dysmorphia but has not dipped below the 85% of appropriate body weight, as specified by DSM for a diagnosis of anorexia. (It’s noteworthy that another proposed DSM change removes the requirement for amenorrhea for being diagnosed with anorexia; this criterion “disqualified” a lot of anorexics from being diagnosed as such, and I’m glad to see it removed.)

I would love to see more research into ED-NOS, for a variety of reasons. Because of its breadth, it can be more difficult for sufferers to recognize themselves and seek help. (What I listed above—someone who restricts her food, has an intense fear of gaining weight, and has body dysmorphia without going below 85% of her appropriate body weight—applies to a lot of women who wouldn’t think of themselves as having eating disorders.) I’m still wrestling with the question of biology, and whether eating disorders are on a sliding scale or on an on/off mode—like, is a woman who perpetually diets actually a woman with a mild (or not mild) case of ED-NOS, or is there another factor--possibly a biological one--missing from the plain old dieter that she’d need to be considered an ED patient? (Carrie Arnold wrote about this much more clearly here.) And is ED-NOS actually, depending on the symptoms, a “touch” of anorexia or bulimia? (I don’t think that’s the case, but if the sliding-scale theory is correct, that’s a logical conclusion.)

What the DSM-5 proposed changes do for BED is begin to legitimize it. I’m sure that eventually the fat-haters will laugh at the diagnosis (“Put down the potato chips, honey, that’s your prescription!”) but I’m confident that it will encourage more sufferers to recognize that they can seek appropriate treatment, and that with time even some of the haters would see that treating BED as a psychiatric diagnosis instead of as mere obesity (all the better if more non-overweight BED sufferers speak up) is a better cure for both the symptom and the cause. I hope that eventually these changes will lead to the same for ED-NOS as well.

Spinning Is For Crazy People

2010-02-09T19:35:00.001-08:00

I hereby withdraw everything I wrote about Zumba. (Inauthentic re-creation of the joy of dance; robs us of both discipline and the state of non-disciplined flow; etc. etc.) Because I just did spinning for the first time. Spinning makes Zumba look like a Grateful Dead show, as far as authentic expression of joyful movement.

Does anybody actually enjoy being told to visualize that they're making a right turn on an imaginary bicycle (well, a stationary bicycle, but its motion is imaginary)? I felt like I was in crazy-person-land. Merely by going to the gym, I'm conceding a nice chunk of my humanity: I'm acknowledging that I'm so far away from the life the human body was meant to live that I am going to put on special clothes, pay money to repeatedly lift heavy objects, get on a machine that makes me run but doesn't let me go anywhere, and maybe even imagine making a right turn on my imaginary bicycle.

I do go to the gym, though, and I even sort of enjoy it. It's my place to simultaneously zone out and tune in; I don't follow a punishing routine; I feel fantastic afterward. When I first started going, I was on guard for being hit on by men--I'd imagined that it would be one massive meat market, full of grunting men ogling women in purposefully revealing Spandex unitards. And while I've occasionally been approached at the gym by men, that's far from my usual experience there. (Why do men think that a nifty way to hit on a woman at a gym is to correct her form? Is this related to the insult-her-then-build-her-up routine in the Player's Handbook?) I can do my workout in peace, slipping in and out of the shared, sweaty space with nary a peep to the people lifting around me. I don't talk to anyone, male or female. And they don't talk to me.

Today, for the first time, that began to seem, well, weird. I don't know if it was going on a fake bike ride with a bunch of strangers or what, but suddenly I started to feel sort of antisocial for sharing space with these people, doing these intimate things eighteen inches away from them, and having absolutely no clue with whom I was sharing that space. The original gymnasiums in ancient Greece were places of not only physical exertion, but intellectual exercise--formal education actually took place in the gymnasium, in addition to sports training. I know a lot of people would be disgusted at the thought, but I sort of wish that we could make a return to that. There's a lack of options for adults to just hang out in public without paying a lot of money or screaming at the top of their lungs (a bar that learns that not all customers like the music at top decibel, that's my bar). When you're exercising, there's a focus point; when the conversation wanes, you can quietly retreat into your chest flys, or talk about them if you're grasping for small talk. (Maybe that's what the dudes who correct my form are after.) A vague sort of intimacy can develop when you're working toward a common but highly individualized goal--my boyfriend and I began as running partners, not partner-partners.

Group sports seem to be the immediate antidote to all this. But, see, I hate group sports--maybe it's leftover gym-class phobias of fifth-grade jock boys yelling YOU CAN'T BE AFRAID OF THE BALL when I'd run away from the kickball, not toward it, but the thought of other people depending on my physical prowess in order to have a good time terrifies me. Group sports introduce a whole other dynamic of community--one that I theoretically welcome, but in practice dread. I'm happy doing my individual activities, and I will always love the times when I'm wholly focused on nothing but my body mechanics. If we had more shared spaces maybe the idea of social gyms wouldn't seem as appealing to me. Maybe I just need to go to parks more.

Women and Men Eating

2010-02-08T21:53:00.000-08:00

Criminy, I hate lazy scientific conclusions. Researchers at McMaster University found that when college students eat together, women eating with men consume fewer calories than they do in the presence of only other women, whereas men's caloric intake remained unaffected.

The Guardian's take on this somewhat unsurprising finding is that women are choosing to eat less in the company of men in order to appear more sexually desirable. The study hints at that too, citing research about how minimal food intake is viewed as feminine, and the correlation between thinness and desirability. I'm not disputing those supportive theories wholesale, but I'm surprised at the lack of discussion and citations for other reasons that women might eat less in front of men.

Even though much of our focus on food is at face value--nutrients, taste--it will hardly surprise you to read that food has potent social value and can easily function as a stand-in for emotions or actions. Food means that you’re taking up space: your body, your plate, your palate, your scent. Food means that you are fulfilling your own needs, which pushes others out of the way for the time being. Food means sex, food means submission and rebellion and lust and awareness. And not all of those things are necessarily encouraged in women.

Women talk less in mixed groups--not because we don’t have anything to say to men, but because we're more self-conscious. While for some women this might lead to eating more (their mouths aren't otherwise occupied), for many, like me, a decreased caloric intake correlates to the same self-consciousness that silences us. Women's caloric intake went down with the number of men they was eating with, just as my voice tends to get smaller and smaller depending on the number of people around me who have rarely gotten the message that what they have to say might not be taken seriously.

When I was being treated for an eating disorder and was forced to examine what food really meant to me beyond calories and carbohydrates and fat grams and fat on my body, what I kept hearing from myself was: I don't have the right to eat. I repeatedly heard this in treatment from other patients too. Somewhere along the line, we had learned that food was something we had to earn--not something our bodies needed in order to function, or a pleasure that was ours to savor whenever we wished. But the thought of having the right to eat what I wanted because I am human had literally never occurred to me until I got help. I remember the first time I bought breakfast cereal (something I'd never managed to "earn") after entering treatment: I felt giddy, dizzy, teary, standing there in the grocery store aisle and realizing I could eat what I wanted. Something shifted--I could literally feel it in my gut, the sense of relief that came with letting go of the idea that every bite I ate was going not into only a caloric exchange, but a moral exchange. When I began to see that food was not punishment or reward for my earthly deeds or thoughts, I took a major step toward recovery.

Now, I had an eating disorder, so my feelings about the right to eat may have been more extreme than the average woman's. But I don't think it's a big leap to think that the women who were being observed were feeling something akin to what I was: That food was something you might not have full rights to, and in the company of people whom, rightly or not, we're told are somehow worth more than we are, you don't exercise your rights to the fullest extent. (The study cited research indicating that women may lift these self-imposed restrictions when they're with intimates, including husbands and partners--presumably, hopefully, the people that women do feel they're on equal footing with.) Also, it's hardly news that eating disorders are rampant; more than that, the overwhelming majority of women I know have some sort of disordered eating pattern going on. That includes imbuing food with values other than physiological need and pleasure…and it includes not eating normally in front of men.

I'm sure there are women who, consciously or not, restrict their intake in front of men in order to either appear or feel more desirable. But I'm guessing that it actually has more to do with feeling desirable (thin, virtuous) than actually appearing desirable: Call it the dietary arm of female chauvinist pigs syndrome. I know I'm not the only one who has eaten conspicuously non-diet food in order to impress a man (and the Times backs me up). Only the most Cathy-comic-strip-minded of women would ever consciously believe than a man would be turned off by her eating a hearty meal; every male-quote roundup about "what men REALLY love about women" inevitably mentions how hot it is when chicks eat steak.

It’s notable that men’s caloric intake was unaffected by either the number or sex of people they were eating with. It’s almost as though they feel they have the right to eat whatever they want. Imagine that.

Miniature Tales of Resistance

2010-02-08T18:48:00.000-08:00

I picked up The Impostor's Daughter by Laurie Sandell, a graphic memoir (as in, memoir with pictures, not as in memoir with heaving bosoms, though there was some of that too) about how she dealt when she realized that her larger-than-life father was a fraud, in so many senses of the word. It was a good read overall, but its relevance to this blog lies in the depiction of a conversation the author had with, of all people, Ashley Judd.

Laurie (a writer for a women's magazine) goes to Ashley's mansion in rural Tennessee in order to interview her about her beauty routine, i.e. what makeup companies she's willing to shill for.

Laurie: So, what's your biggest beauty secret?
Ashley: Serenity.
Laurie: OK, um, what's one beauty product you never leave the house without?
Ashley: My higher power.
Laurie: ...OK, so what would be your go-to beauty tip?
Ashley: Go to rehab for depression.

Leaving aside any question of the liberties Sandell took with the conversation to make it work in her 2"x4" colored panels, it bespeaks one of the paradoxes of women's magazines, which is that they are forced to have content that nobody cares about besides beauty companies. Ashley Judd has largely made a living off of being beautiful (she now has her own makeup line), so I'm doubting that her answers had anything to do with giving the beauty industry the middle finger. Rather, I'm guessing that, just like many a hapless women's magazine editor, she had more interesting things on her mind--maybe including resistance to the magazine industry, which isn't always kind to celebrities.

It got me thinking of those small beats of resistance I've seen in my time at women's magazines, the urges that never manage to make it into the pages.

*A battle between the photo department and an editor when the former wanted to airbrush the skin of a woman who had been severely disfigured in a car crash and had had skin grafts over nearly 80% of her body. The story was about being comfortable in your skin.

*A health editor trying to write about a little-covered eating disorder that is more fatal but less "glamorous" than anorexia and bulimia (ED-NOS, eating disorder-not otherwise specified) and being told by one of her higher-ups that because nobody knew about it, they shouldn't write about it.

*A beauty writer saying "Can't we just tell them to use soap and water?" in a fit of exasperation when the product she was supposed to be pushing cost over $40 and didn't do squat. (The question, we both knew, was rhetorical in that world.)

*Staff members protesting when they were told--not asked--to be photographed to be candidates for "staff makeovers," which showed up in the magazine pages. "I'm fine with the way I dress," said a staffer who lived in sweaters, jeans, and sneakers. "And I don't want millions of women judging me for it."

*A writer who was crushed, and furious, when her editor said that the subjects she had picked for a story about inspirational life turnarounds weren't "relatable" to the reader; she knew it was a superficially kind way of saying "not pretty enough." (I was once featured in a glossy mag, but was only photographed for it after the designer of the page had come by to snap a Polaroid of me to prove to the editor that I was "pretty enough" to be pictured. The article in question? I'd won the staff brownie contest.)

I'm not trying to make excuses for women's magazines; I'm trying to list ways in which I've seen that the very people responsible for stuff I consider damaging are on the right side. (You know, my side.) I stopped blaming the individuals years ago--not just to protect my sanity (by working at these magazines, I'm a part of it too, after all), but because I saw daily, firsthand proof of what Gloria Steinem was writing about in the essay from which this blog takes its name. The machine of women's magazines will never change. The best we can do is move on.

Superbad Superbowl

2010-02-08T09:21:00.000-08:00

I'm just as disgusted as the next feminist by this year's Superbowl ads. What's striking me more than the rotten way women were portrayed in the alternate universe of SuperbowlLand is the way the target audience--men, presumably--was depicted.

The Dodge Charger ad begins with men talking about not women, but The Man. The actors were shown giving a litany of promises: I will be at work by 8 a.m.; I will sit through two-hour meetings. It quickly becomes clear that being good middle managers is only part of the deal, though, as the list grows to include "watching your vampire movies," recycling, and other things we're supposed to see as tedium.

I often wonder who these sorts of overtly pandering ads are pandering to, exactly, since nobody I normally hang out with thinks that way, at least not openly. I watched the Bowl with three men, all of whom are thirtysomething beer-drinking football lovers--the Bowl's target audience--and the irony of hearing them groan just as loudly as I did at these ads was not lost on me. But reading reactions from car geeks and Twitter reactionaries (annoyed Tweeters appeared to be men and women in equal measures) revealed that it wasn't just my little self-selected group of men who were turned off by the blatant appeals to an outdated mode of thinking.

I'm guessing that the thinking of the ads creators went something like this: The economy ain't so hot >> men's status as breadwinners is suddenly in jeopardy >> ergo, men must be in an ENORMOUS PANIC about this >> let's assure them they're still men by getting them to spend money on these terrifically masculine products >> Dove body wash. (I bring this up not because body wash is gendered, but because the ad, even in pushing a product that has feminine connotations, relied on such lazy stereotyping of what it means to be a man--this from a company that has done some decent work in trying to show a more authentic version of its customers than most companies would dare. The Dove ad was by far the least gross of the don't-worry-you're-still-totally-dudely genre, but still.)

But what is so shortsighted about this is how A) outdated, and B) erroneous it is. Let's look at the erroneous part first: Yes, men have lost out financially more than women in this recession. But the logical way to assure dudes that they're still manly is not to tell them to either spend more money or treat women as the enemy: It's to widen and reconstruct what manhood is. Any man who has been in an equitable relationship that is supported by his peers knows it's a helluva lot more fun to have partner-as-partner, not partner-as-enemy. And you know what? Women who don't act as harpies and rip men's balls out via forced Twilight viewings? We, too, like to have sex, and it will be more fun than it would be with the constructed harpy, because neither party will secretly be dreading the act. (I'd bring up other benefits of equitable relationships--relationship health, stability--but as we learned from the Megan Fox Motorola ad, really all men can think about is sex anyway.) As for the other things that are supposedly culturally castrating men--the job, the recycling, the responsibility--those are no longer merely the province of men.

Which leads me to how outdated this line of thinking is. I'm reading The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight From Commitment by Barbara Ehrenreich, which was written in 1987. It's, in part, about how constructed masculinity led to the epidemic of middle-aged crises among men, during which our fathers and grandfathers supposedly ran out, bought sports cars, and had affairs. I haven't finished the book yet so can't say what Ehrenreich's thesis is and how it stands up to today, but what's striking me is how much of what she's writing about applies to everyone now. Most women are in the work force now and are often the sole breadwinner. Escapist fantasies written by and for women in the '50s and '60s--when the men of 1987 were growing up--by and large reflected a desire to escape the monotony and drudgery of housewifery, because that was the feminine sphere then. There's no absence of that kind of tale today, but there's acknowledgement that women's lives outside of the home can feel like a trap too. I'm imagining an ad geared toward a unisex audience using the Dodge Charger premise: A series of close-ups of men and women listing the series of compromises they are willing to make in the world at large so that they can have this one amazing thing that will make them feel glad to be alive. That ad would be able to keep the marginally creative conceit without assuming that the audience secretly hates their lives. Hell, if you must, you could even still make it gendered by adding in the sort of daily work that is still often left to women (diapers come to mind). It's still gross on a consumerist level (whose life is made better for longer than a week by having a really cool car?), but it's not offensive.

I also don't think that the men-trapped-by-their-lives idea the commercials were promoting is as effective in 2010. Generation X supposedly created the nation of prolonged adolescence, without shame. Much of what Ehrenreich addresses as the cause for the flight from commitment is our idea of what constitutes "maturity," which doesn't have much latitude according to the rules that she cites. But with men and women getting married and having children considerably later in life, and with "bachelor" no longer being a euphemism for "homosexual"--indeed, "bachelor" now has a ring of glamour to it--men who once would have been considered hopelessly flighty or immature because they're choosing not to "settle down" now seem normal. As I wrote above, women are just as tired of men as the corporate grind--but more importantly, tales of alternate, noncorporate lifestyles aren't exactly hard to find these days. We're supposed to take glee in the fact that even though we may be married and bear children and maybe even actually like our boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife, we're still cool--isn't that why Judd Apatow movies exist? Isn't that why people liked Juno? Because they prove that we're different somehow from our yuppie parents? Maybe the answer is that as Generation X ages, we realize that we're not any different--maybe the Dodge ad is more relevant than I want to acknowledge.

There's another big loser in the Superbowl, besides men, women, and the Colts: creativity. I really couldn't care less about football; I watched it for what was supposed to be the showcase of America's collective advertising talent. (And for The Who. Which, really? No. Just, no.) I don't think the process of advertising can ever truly be creative, but from journalism school I do know that there are some brilliant creative minds working in advertising, and this was supposed to be their time to shine. I remember watching the hysterical Emerald Nuts commercial during the Superbowl a few years ago and thinking for the first time that maybe I was actually missing out on occasion by not watching more television ads. Last night, I kept waiting for the "real" ads to start--many of the ones that weren't ugly with sexism were just confusing instead of clever (why was there a whale? why was he pretending to be dead while eating Doritos?) or plain old boring (Shape-Up shoes couldn't have come up with something remotely clever?); and according to my fellow viewers, several of the ads weren't new at all. I get that this was a tough year for advertising, but c'mon! When Charles Barkley offers the evening's best non-football performance, something is amiss. At least he was just lovin' on tacos, not hating on women. Or himself.

random thoughts on paid childcare

2010-02-05T19:51:00.000-08:00

I'm surprised that this NYTimes article about nanny-mother communication didn't mention, at all, what to me seems to be the heart of the issue: women paying other women to do what is traditionally women's labor. I'm neither a mother nor a nanny, but it seems obvious that the troubles relayed in the article belie a deep uncomfortability with paying someone to take on what may have been conceived of, initially, as love-labor.

I suspect that there's a strong cognitive dissonance between what any mother experiences as a mother and what she experiences as an employer: She presumably has children out of, in part at least (I hope) love, and introducing paid work into the equation makes it clear that it's not just love-work, it's work-work. The mother is simultaneously handing over one of the most important things in her life and reducing it to figures. The article doesn't mention fathers, and that seems deliberate: While I'd like to think that many fathers deal with nannies too, that simply might not be the case--and even in households where it is, the fact of woman-woman communication in a traditionally female realm is what complicates the issue.

In this context, Clay Shirky's recent call to arms to women--we need to act like dicks, he says--is exposed for the (somewhat) empty entreaty it is. Yes, mothers (indeed, all parents) and nannies should have clearer communication; I'm sure many a nanny could benefit from being more aggressive with her employer, especially given the race, class, or age dynamics often present in these relationships. But aggressive approaches aren't as effective outside of non-corporate work environments. Paid labor that complements love labor is no less a job than any other, of course, but the tactics Shirky recommends women adopt to get ahead in the workplace apply to men's work spheres (in the traditional sense--the outer sphere--not, say, Chippendale's), not women's. I want every qualified nanny to know her worth; I want every woman hiring that nanny to articulate her needs--and nowhere in there would I ever want a nanny saying she knew how to prepare nutritious meals if she didn't, or have a mother acting like a blowhard when negotiating the care of her child.

To ignore the love part of the love-labor that is being paid for in a nanny-parent relationship is to reduce an enormously important job to its parts instead of looking at it as a whole. Excuse me for being a hippie, but this is what utopian visions of collectivized child care take into account that the nanny arrangements described in the article seem to be trying to avoid: That when both parents wish or need to work outside the home, the day-to-day care of a child, by necessity, requires labor that is fairly compensated and that allows the caretaker to use skill, intuition, experience, and whatever version of love there may be involved to do the job.

I'm babysitting this weekend for very close friends of mine. In the various times I've come over to learn the bedtime routine, my friend has asked me if I'd like to change the child's diaper so that I can get hands-on experience. Besides the fact that changing diapers is generally unpleasant, I've hedged on this. Now, I probably changed my first diaper when I was 11 years old and got my first babysitting gig. (The thought of anybody hiring a sixth-grader to care for their children seems wholly absurd to me now, but it subsidized my Mike & Ikes throughout junior high, so.) Part of my hesitancy stems from simply not wanting my friend to see me be "all thumbs," as one of the mothers in the Times article describes; I would also feel foolish having her watch me install an air-conditioner for the same reason. But the thought of being watched--even by a dear, loving friend--at this task in particular makes me uneasy, because there's this idea that somehow I should naturally be good at this. I feel pride when I am able to soothe my friend's son when he gets fussy; it somehow makes me feel like a better person, as though I have some magical, mystical ability. I don't want to be caught in the act of totally not knowing what I'm doing--even though I do--and I wonder if it's because I've carried with me the idea that it should come naturally despite not being a mother myself, or wanting to be one.

A night of caring for my friends' child is, for me, a labor of love, and were I a professional (beyond junior high, that is), I would likely have the skills and confidence that would allow me to not give a shit (heh) about having anyone watch me change a diaper. The mild feelings of mild unworthiness as a woman--and those feelings are indeed mild, and something that I recognize as a holdover from my mother's era, not from expectations put upon my demographic of 30something New York professional unmarried women--can, for me, be fleeting, because my labor is valued elsewhere. It's a lark, a date with my favorite nine-month-old. But were it anything else, I would hope that the peculiarities of paid childcare within a labor context were evaluated holistically instead of being parsed in the way the subjects of this article seem to do.

Food Trends

2010-01-08T12:23:00.000-08:00

Somehow I got on a PR mailing list that sends me press releases on a variety of things. (My favorite thus far was the "Sugar Daddy Ken Doll" press release sent out by Mattel.) I recently got one about food trends of the decade: cupcakes, sliders, açai. Some of the trends I did indeed recognize as trends (serious, what is up with the hipster bacon thing?*); others were baffling (whole grains and olive oil--even with the attention paid to HDL vs. LDL cholesterol, since when is olive oil newsy?).

I've never wholly understood how foods become trendy, at least not without an invention or clear-cut reason for the trend. Arepas were trendy for a while during the "wait, Latinos are EVERYWHERE!" media blitz a few years ago; likewise, while kombucha tea has been around for centuries, it wasn't until G.T. Dave came along that the market for commercially produced kombucha expanded to the point of a trend, at least in NYC. Sometimes the reasons for food trends are buried deeper in shifts in trade policies, agriculture, and production technologies--I remember reading a story in the business section of the Times in 2001 or so about how California was growing its non-artisinal large commercial batch of pomegranates, and sure enough, in 2002 Pom hit the shelves and became a bartending favorite.

Curious geneses aside, food trends strike me as problematic because food is nourishment above all else. Food is also fun, and fun to talk about, and with the widespread advent of "food porn," fun to look at--I get all that. And food trends aren't mutually exclusive with proper nutrition. But A) describing food as a "trend" socializes food outside of our intimate circles (food as social event with friends and family can be good; food as something to be parsed for its trend value is not), and B) in hyping up these food trends, lazy food writers (of which there are many) will reach for the easy instead of actually investigating why a certain food is becoming trendy. We're in a recession, have some mac'n'cheese (which had nothing to do with the recession and more with the idea of a recession); hey, superfoods are a great way to lose weight.

It's sort of related to the problem I have with the fetishization of the slow food movement--except that I do endorse the values of slow food, and don't endorse the values of the PR machine**. Once we take something that we need for human sustenance and make it a value in and of itself--a political value, a trend value--we continue to view food as something other than sustenance. And while it can and should be more than a mere collection of nutrients, I'd like to see more of those values accumulate organically rather than being told by a publicist that I should be eating kashi because it's trendy.

*Full disclosure: I have made both bacon baklava and bacon-infused bourbon. I am a part of the problem, not the solution.
**Except when it comes to the #4 "Food Influencer of the Decade": Food Safety. I mean, really.

Demise of the Magazine Industry, and What It Means for Health Information

2009-12-10T21:55:00.000-08:00

This entry at Weightless got me thinking about the role of Internet reporting and blogging in the way that health information is disseminated among women. (I'm copping out of answering the question posed in the headline, because while I don't think that the master's tools will dismantle this particular master's house, I do think that progress is being made--I'm particularly pleased to see that Marie Claire fashion blogger Ashley Falcon is not only regularly blogging about plus-size fashion for a major women's magazine, but is actually plus-size--so much body image focus has been on women who are "in between," which is important to look at but doesn't really further the goal of body acceptance for all.)

I fear that the movement away from traditionally produced magazines toward user-generated content and free labor will only make things worse. There will be voices of sanity out there, but the very nature of the web--bits and clips that will grab our attention and make us want to click--ensures that the holistic nature of any health plan will be diluted to the point of being lost altogether. Say that a women's health website has good intentions. In order to generate daily content, they will need health news. Health news comes in bits and pieces--this nutrient was proven to reduce this symptom in this study; this study showed a reduction in X when subjects did Y. In the minutiae, the essence of health is lost. The holistic approach to health--i.e., the healthy approach to health--isn't sound-bite-friendly. Scientific studies, by their nature, are extraordinarily limited in scope. They often isolate one cause and one effect in order to contribute to a larger body of study.

Print isn't immune to this, naturally: A good magazine editor wants to maximize the takeaway her readers will get from every word of information printed, especially in bitsy, designy pages (like the health content of most women's magazines). So if there's a study about how depression is a risk factor for osteoporosis, an editor might want the takeaway to be about getting enough calcium if you're depressed--it's something that the reader can take action on immediately. The problem, of course, is more complex: If you're depressed, you're less prone to do exercise, especially of the osteoporosis, weight-bearing kind; you're also less likely to feed yourself properly, including getting enough of the nutrients that would not only help with your brain chemistry, but also with your bone health. Treating the depression could lead to a reduced risk of osteoporosis, and treating depression requires a holistic approach, often combining psychotherapy, medication, behavior and lifestyle changes...that is, nothing sexy, or new, or saleable on the newsstands. But "The Secret Disease You Don't Know You're At Risk For, p. 147" feels like all of those things.

Now: A magazine editor who is trained for her position and makes a living at her craft is also conscious of the true needs of her readers--it's part of what makes a good editor. But web laborers, even those who are skilled writers, editors, and curators, are also more at the mercy of the attention economy than print journalists. And those reductive views of health information are worth more in such an economy.

It goes the other way too, happily: A peek at the number of bloggers committed to creating a dialogue about health, body, food, eating reveals that the two-way information flow can also easily lend itself to a more complete understanding of those issues. I don't know enough about the arc of the web to predict what effect Internet info will have on health reporting and writing, or of readers' understanding of health. But I know enough about the print world to say that the constraints it's under don't set a template of optimism.

Legitimizing Binge Eating Disorder

2009-11-24T20:58:00.000-08:00

This L.A. Times story about whether to include binge eating disorder in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has been making the Internet rounds, usually with a sufferer refuting the supposed claims in the article.

But the piece suffers from a case of badius journalius: In a piece with the headline "Is binge eating a psychiatric disorder?", there is exactly one source who cautions against adding BED to the DSM--and he's a professor of literature. A literature professor with an emphasis in psychology, yes, and the author of books about the evolution of diagnoses (his book Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness is his sole given credential in the Times piece), yes, but a professor of literature nonetheless. Not a clinical psychologist; not a treatment practitioner. Christopher Lane isn't even representing the voice of the trollish Everyman who hangs out on fat-acceptance blogs to harass the participants. His main argument against making BED an official diagnosis is that it would medicalize a complex behavioral disorder, encouraging treatment practitioners to shove pills down a patient's throat instead of look at the underlying issue. In other words: His problem with BED as a diagnosis is a problem with the contemporary direction of psychiatry.

(Side note: What's interesting to me is that patients with eating disorders usually develop their behaviors to mask the underlying issues of anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc. In other words: binge eaters are already medicating themselves. I wholly believe that psychiatric medications are overprescribed, but if someone is numbing themselves with food or the absence thereof, I'd rather see the needs unmasked in an appropriate, monitored setting--and if medication rather than binge food is the prescription, so be it.)

I wish that the Times piece had dared to interview people willing to give voice to the true stigma against pathologizing BED. That is, what the Internet trolls pop up to say on fat-acceptance sites: That it's just gluttony, plain and simple. In the heat of the debate over the "obesity epidemic," the rush to judge what those evil, evil fat people who will make everyone's health insurance rates rise, the thought of legitimizing what may appear to be sheer gluttony seems absurd. First you want us to accept fat people, and now you want our insurance to cover their treatment--not for weight loss, but for a "disorder"? Yeah, buddy, I had a "disorder" last night at Cold Stone Creamery, knowwhatimean? Because that, I believe, is the starting point of having an actual dialogue about whatever controversy may surround BED's possible inclusion in the DSM. (That is, assuming there actually is a controversy; since the article didn't interview anyone with any power within the American Psychiatric Association, it's hard to tell. I can only go on the word on the street.) If detractors--or, hell, even the writer of a piece for a major newspaper on something that directly affects 3% of the population--had dared to be honest about the gut feelings against BED's inclusion, the myths could begin to be dispelled. (For starters: BED sufferers aren't eating out of a love of food, or a lack of willpower; they're not all overweight, and not all overweight people have BED; treatment for the disorder, not weight loss, is the goal.)

Anorexia and bulimia are widely recognized as legitimate disorders. I don't know if there were professional skeptics on the matter at the time of inclusion in the DSM, but I imagine that public acceptance of the legitimacy of these disorders was aided by the misperception of glamour surrounding them. As a culture, we have a fascination with thin women--even those who are clearly ill. (One sweep of the newsstand proves that.) There's even sort of a casual, ignorant envy of some patients--I've heard people say they wished for "a hint of anorexia," when clearly what they mean is a hint more thinness, or a desire to eat whatever they wanted without worrying about their weight. But nobody glamorizes someone lying on the couch downing 15,000 calories in a sitting, especially if that person is overweight. I'm beginning to suspect that BED won't be legitimized until our culture's fat hatred is eradicated. And that, my friends, spells a quiet death knell for its acceptance.

Delta Delta Delta May Just Help Ya Help Ya Help Ya

2009-10-20T18:24:00.000-07:00

A sea change is coming. For as long as I can remember, my friends and I have talked about body image--it’s hardly news that women are both aware of and angry about unrealistic body standards. But this has been a beat I’ve been personally following since I was, oh, twelve, and I haven’t seen action like what has been happening in the past few years.

*Dove’s Real Beauty campaign: Flawed because it exists to sell products to women, but the shock of seeing “real” women with “real” bodies being used as models to sell those products was a righteous thrill.

*Glamour’s Woman on Page 194: I was skeptical of the magazine’s promises regarding the overwhelming response to the size-12 model who graced their pages, but it was not a publicity stunt (disclosure: I have worked at the magazine), and from what I’ve read of the editor-in-chief’s vows, they are specific, smart, and correct.

*Germany’s most popular women’s magazine, Brigitte, has banned professional models from its pages, citing promotion of unrealistic body standards as the reason.

And now Delta Delta Delta, the sorority of Saturday Night Live “can I help ya help ya help ya” fame, has launched Fat-Talk-Free Week as one arm of its Reflections: Body Image Program.

What’s finally beginning to happen is that body image is no longer being seen as some sort of angry feminist issue. It’s being seen as a community issue. The quickening pulse of body image talk had me wondering if women had finally just Had It, but it wasn’t until I heard about the Tri-Delt program that I began to see the sea change as something that was being tackled by a larger force with a strategic plan.

Community service has long been an essential component of the greek system, but it was service of the most neutral sort: Big Brother/Big Sister programs, serving at the soup kitchen, breast cancer walks. I remember my dorm roommate, a Tri-Delt, coming home tired after picking up trash in the park for her sorority’s “community service day,” which was indeed a day and happened once a semester. It was community service that nobody could make an argument against. What could an opponent say--hungry people shouldn’t have soup? (Breast cancer aid may have once been controversial because it forced people to see how grossly underfunded women’s health issues were, but it’s morphed into a way for people to feel like they’re doing something good when they buy a pink spatula at Bed Bath & Beyond.) More than the essential neutrality of these moves (Democrats and Republicans alike join sororities, after all), it was the utter removal of these actions that bothered me. Big Sister programs maybe, but my roommate could have cared less about the park; I doubt her sisters felt much differently than she did. It was a way to fulfill a requirement and provide some rationale to the university for the existence of the greek system, not much more.

The fact that Tri-Delt has mounted a strong campaign about body image says that the topic has become both politicized and de-politicized: politicized because it calls for specific action and is framed as something that’s a community problem, not simply that of an individual woman who needs to “get over it”; de-politicized because it’s loudly proclaiming that body issues are our issues. They are not a fat woman’s problem or an ugly woman’s problem; these are issues that plague virtually every woman in this country to some extent. And by bringing an explicit agenda to the table, Tri-Delt is saying that because this is something all women deal with, it is therefore a community issue. It’s not something that only self-help books or Post-It notes reading “you’re beautiful!” pasted on your mirror can help. It requires more.

I’ve always half-heartedly defended sororities, because I liked what they ostensibly offered: a community of women devoted to each other and the community at large. The image of ditzy, superficial, drunk girls who pledged greek for the frat parties alone wasn’t exactly what I saw on my campus, but it’s not an entirely erroneous image either. (I watched my roommate morph from fresh-faced ponytail girl in jeans to eyeshadow-wearing lady in pearls and pumps over the years -- her sisters made her over.) Even with more and more greek systems going dry in order to return to their service roots (and avoid lawsuits), it’s probably too late to entirely overhaul the system’s ways -- there are plenty of informal ways to serve the community and make friends, so if that were the only draw to pledging, numbers would dwindle beyond the point of return. But this program forms a community service project that is near and dear to the hearts of the volunteers -- which is an integral part of a formula that works. And it is indeed near and dear to the sisters’ hearts: The flipside of the pretty-perky sorority image is the intense body focus that comes with being in a circle that places heavy pressure on its members to look a certain way. The horror stories of senior members taking Sharpies to pledges’ underwear-clad bodies during initiation rites, marking where pledges needed to lose weight, may be urban legend -- but in an appearance-focused subculture in an already appearance-focused culture at large, it’s safe to say that the de facto effect is the same.

I applaud the strides the magazines I mentioned above have taken, but at the end of the day women’s magazines have an investment in keeping their readers shackled to a certain body ideal. (Refusing cigarette ads is one thing; refusing diet products and makeup would sink the business entirely.) But sororities aren’t selling anything here -- it costs money to join, but the prestige the greek system has in many circles is enough to assure that membership won’t plummet anytime soon. (And certainly our culture has enough ways to be elitist that even if all sorority sisters suddenly gained a permanent 20 pounds, there would be new bars to entry.) I’d love to see this be the beginning of the one case where the master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house. We’ll see.

Zumba, Dance, and Flow

2009-09-08T20:14:00.000-07:00

I've been taking Zumba classes at my gym lately. It's a workout class along the lines of Jazzercise, but with international dance steps instead of jazz-style dance steps. The focus is Latin dance (the word itself, pronounced like rhumba with a Z, connotes the buzzing of a bee in Spanish), unsurprising given that a Colombian fitness instructor developed it; more than half of the steps are Latin-dance-inspired, though India, the Middle East, Spain, and West Africa make an appearance. (It's also notable that Zumba became popular in the U.S. when it was picked up by Special K in a promotional effort targeting the growing Hispanic consumer population.)

I loved the class at first. I'm an international dance dilettante -- I've taken classes in flamenco, belly dance, Latin, Slavic folk, West African, Argentine tango, and have mastered none. My thrice-weekly runs were getting stale, so when my gym started offering Zumba classes I thought I'd give it a shot. I picked up the moves immediately -- partly because I recognized basic steps like salsa from my dance dabblings, but mostly because the steps are designed to be picked up easily by anyone who happens to wander into a class. I left class drenched in sweat, feeling endorphin-chipper; I liked catching glimpses of myself in the mirror, hips twitching to a merengue beat, belly undulating to a Middle Eastern rhythm. The dances I like the best are the ones in which I know the actual steps. I could add in the little salsa kick even though the instructor leaves it out; I can do finger placements I learned in Middle Eastern folk dance classes when we're on the ersatz belly dance song. But when the faux Hindi song comes on (a Zumbafied version of "Jai Ho" from Slumdog Millionaire, chosen presumably because it's the only song most American Zumbaers would recognize as Indian), my lack of background in Hindi dance meant that I found myself essentially doing the Pony during the eight-count side-to-side. I was getting my cardiovascular fitness in, sure -- but it ended there. I don't usually look at the other dancers because I'm too in the groove, but I did then, to see what I was missing -- and saw that we were all doing the Pony. What had initially seemed like something invigorating and, hell, sassy, began to seem fraudulent.

The whole idea of Zumba is that you're supposed to be having so much fun that you forget you're also getting a workout. But the only way to forget that you're doing something is to be wholly engaged in it, in a state of flow. And flow comes only from something that can be expanded, or from being in the moment once you've mastered something that was once complicated -- once you can tinkle out a Beethoven sonata on the piano, you've stopped expanding, but the autopilot your mind and fingers enters can still tap into a space that is eluded with other sort of autopilot activities like watching a movie you've seen before. Repetition can be a part of flow, but mere repetition can't be, unless the goal is something larger (like the followers of Sri Chinmoy who run for weeks on end to complete the "Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race").

Once the novelty effect wore off, I realized that I was learning nothing. The Zumba moves, while based on dances with more organic roots, aren't exactly going to make me feel comfortable at a salsa club. (There's one point in a salsa sequence in which Zumbaers hold up their hands in a partner-dance stance, which feels ridiculous when we're all salsa-ing solo.) They're created as a workout, complete with lots of squats to strengthen quadriceps -- and as a workout that everyone can follow, which means that the ceiling for expanding your moves is uncomfortably low. There was nothing to keep me expanding, which meant that instead of reaching the state of flow that would have actually made me forget I was getting a workout, I was checking the clock and getting tired.

Rob Horning at Marginal Utility labels this "the alluring danger of dilettantism," specifically in the context of Guitar Hero. "If you want a more interactive way to enjoy music, why not dance, or play air guitar? Or better yet, if holding a guitar appeals to you, why not try actually learning how to play?" he writes. Commenters who were fans of the game argued that playing guitar and playing Guitar Hero were two utterly different things, which makes sense to me. (I once attended a party where some members of a rock band who were coming back from a gig decided to wind down by playing Guitar Hero.)

In the same way, Zumba is not meant to be a dance class; it's meant to be a fitness class. The classes are offered at gyms, not clubs or dance studios. But that makes it even more of a threat to authenticity than Guitar Hero, because dancing is fitness. Even with the stops and starts of a dance class for novices, even without kicking your way across the floor in a complicated combination, I -- a dance dilettante extraordinaire -- have never left a dance class in any less of a good sweat. Horning's argument about the pleasure of mastery comes into sharper relief here when you look at the Zumba steps for, say, Argentine tango (which is used as a cool-down):

...and then look at the intensity of actual Argentine tango:

These are advanced dancers, sure, but even in a beginning class you learn enough to pull off a few sultry moves. It's not so much that Zumba will never teach you the moves the latter pair are doing; it's that you miss the opportunity to imagine yourself having the kind of heat that accompanies even basic competency of the tango. Zumba instructors are trained -- mine is a pleasure to be instructed by and to watch move -- but they are not dance teachers. You might move your arms up and down with the beat, but the subtle stylings that make a dance a joy to, well, dance, are totally absent.

When I was in my flamenco stage, I took a class that consisted entirely of learning how to stamp my foot. I never shimmied across the floor; I never whirled into a staccato eruption; I didn't even do any faux toreador moves. I stood there for an hour stamping my foot over and over again while the teacher shouted instructions while squatting at my feet. By the end of that hour, I was drenched in sweat, muscles clenched and aching, convinced that my toes were now only a mash of blood and tissue. "You had perhaps six good stamps today," the instructor said. "Six?" I asked. She smiled. "Six. That's promising," she replied. I forgot the aching muscles, didn't focus on the rate of progress -- I had learned something. (It was also a helluva workout.)

But the comparison isn't exactly fair. What's fairer is looking at another dance/fitness gathering I attend, Dance Dance Party Party. The idea couldn't be simpler: A bunch of women get together in a dance studio, turn down the lights, and, for 90 minutes, do nothing but dance. There's no instructor; the only thing we follow is the rhythm. Everyone chips in a few dollars to cover the cost of renting the studio; the music is DJ'd by whoever volunteers that week, meaning that the DJ brings a CD and plops it into the boombox the coordinator brings every week. The only rules: No boys, no booze, no judgment.

The DDPP crew tends to turn up in sneakers and sport bras, just like Zumbaers (though some DDPPers prefer long skirts and bare feet -- anything goes). But after five minutes the reason for that becomes clear: We're wearing gym clothes to dance because you sweat. We sweat not because we're doing squats to a merengue beat; we sweat because we are doing our best Molly Ringwald, or vogueing, or the Pony, or just grooving in the corner. For 90 minutes, we are one big dance machine -- people leave to refill their water bottles or take a breath by the air-conditioner, but then they rejoin the mass. There's an utter lack of self-consciousness that is pleasant at first, then intoxicating: It's a dancer's high, the sheer joy of moving your body however it wants to, surrounded by people doing the same.

You can walk in without knowing a single move and leave feeling like you're a dancing queen. You get a workout without feeling like you worked out. It's fun. In other words, it's what Zumba claims to be -- but instead of being the Guitar Hero of cumbia, it's your own version of, well, whatever.

There's one way in which Zumba matches DDPP and actual dance classes -- a sense of community. Our country has few social dance outlets left for adults -- we can go to nightclubs, sure, but then we have to deal with the set of accompanying social pressures. (This is why I'd be happy to see square dancing come back into vogue. Can some hipster take this up as an ironic cause already?) While men are welcome at Zumba (though not at DDPP), I've yet to see a man take the class -- except for one, who showed up drunk and ogled the instructor's butt. When she kicked him out and the class erupted into applause, I realized that part of the appeal of Zumba was that a bunch of women got to do quasi-Latin dance both by themselves and socially, without having to either coax a male partner into going or showing up solo and hoping to find the occasional partner with no motive further than a good cha-cha. (I know there are men who like to dance with no further agenda, and that women can have dance agendas beyond a quick-step -- but I've never had a man suggest to me that we salsa the night away.) Without a traditionally structured dance society, women who like to dance outside of a club setting are sort of stuck either going to solo-oriented dance classes or chancing it at partner ones . . . or going to places like Zumba or DDPP.

I'll probably go to Zumba again -- it's free at my gym (most dance classes run $15-$25 a pop), and it's nice to shake up my running schedule with a different cardiovascular workout. But I'll look at it as just that -- a cardio workout. And in a way, I'm glad I lost my zeal for it. I'd forgotten the joy I used to take in dance classes. Something always came up to prevent me from pursuing any one dance in particular -- I moved too far away from my belly dance teacher to make it worthwhile; proper flamenco shoes were too expensive; my lower back is too inflexible to even mimic West African dance. Zumba should seem like the antidote to all those little problems -- but instead, it illuminated how trivial those problems are when the reward is authenticity.

The Obesity Justification

2009-09-04T08:02:00.000-07:00

Dr. Jon LaPook asks over at Huffington Post, "Could the Obesity Fight Backfire?" -- as in, could it create a hyperawareness of one's weight and lead to an uptick of eating disorders?

Well, duh. It doesn't take an M.D. to recognize that the demographic that is vulnerable to restrictive eating disorders will jump upon the antiobesity train to justify their own behavior, and that those with nonrestrictive eating disorders -- specifically binge eating disorder -- are not going to be helped by the antiobesity's focus on portion control and food choices. (The problem for most of those eaters isn't nutrition ignorance; it's addictive behavior, and without addressing that, the idea of three square meals a day goes out the window.)

But more specifically, what I've seen is an ever-widening justification of the overwhelming body focus in women's magazines. The surge of eating-disorder awareness in the '90s meant that most of these magazines had to shape up their nutrition coverage. They never stopped telling you to lose weight, but in the past decade I've seen advocacy of liquid diets replaced by advocacy of wholesome meals. The glossies' words are telling us what our doctors are: Eat balanced meals and exercise, ta-da! (The magazines' images tell a different story, naturally. As much as editors crow about how they're forced to use thin models because designers make samples in size 4 -- maybe that's why size 12 Glamour model Lizzie Miller was naked? They couldn't possibly find clothes to fit her! -- the deeper reason is that if women suddenly started feeling like they didn't need to change their appearance, they'd stop buying the goods that the magazines advertise.)

Then along comes mass awareness of the obesity epidemic. Suddenly, instead of couching weight loss in terms of fitting into your college jeans, magazines could soberly proclaim that really, it was about your health all along. Instead of focusing on waistline measurements, a new set of statistics are of importance: cholesterol, body mass index. It's no surprise that the circulation for a magazine titled Women's Health has skyrocketed 30% in the past nine months (this is an enormous spike). Looking inside Women's Health, though, it's the same-old, same-old. Lose your belly (join the magazine's "Belly Off Club")! Conquer your cravings (food producers engineer processed foods to be addictive -- so make these cheesy fries instead! That'll conquer your cravings, right? But wait -- the website hosts a list of the "125 Best Packaged Foods for Women," so don't get too tied to the idea that you should be making your own meals)!* Ad pages for Women's Health competitors have dropped during the same period, despite containing similar content. It's possible that editors at Women's Health are sharper than the average bear; it's also possible that the mere presence of the word "health" makes it more appealing to the first-time reader. (A friend of mine was given a gift subscription by her aunt, an avid magazine reader who said, "I know you don't like women's magazines, so I got you this instead!")

This should all be good news, given that 2/3 of Americans actually are are overweight (and logically a good percentage of the readers of these magazines are as well); ideally the "health" tips surrounding weight loss would be targeting them and not the readers who don't need to lose body fat for health reasons. But women are reading these articles in fashion magazines, where "overweight" is invisible -- even the now-famous size 12 Glamour model, at 5'11" and 180 pounds, qualifies as "overweight" on the BMI scale by exactly one pound. So the weight-loss material pointed at the "overweight" reader is pointed at someone who isn't visually represented. Since "overweight" in our culture isn't neutral but a synonym for everything from sloppy to out-of-control to poor, all readers are left swimming in a sea of "health" advice. I think back to a conversation I had with my doctor at my last checkup. Like some magazine had directed me to do, I'd written out The List of questions I had about my body so that I wouldn't forget to ask them: Should I be concerned about my creaky knee; my mother is diabetic, could you check my blood sugar. As I pulled the piece of paper out of my pocket, the doctor sighed. "Ah, The List. You all have them. All you young, healthy women come in here with The List. And you know what? You're all healthy. The people who don't make The List are the ones who aren't."

Let's also not forget that the amount of space these magazines devote to weight loss hasn't increased proportionately along with America's obesity epidemic; magazines from 1992 have roughly as many pages devoted to weight loss as those today. The justification for those pages has changed, not the pages themselves.

The funny thing is that women's magazines aren't using the "epidemic" as a hook on their covers. It's still "lose weight fast!" on the cover; it's only when you look inside that the health angle is laid out. It's the same tactic used by best-seller Skinny Bitch, a book billed as a weight-loss time that turns out to be a treatise on veganism. It's a weird sort of whiplash: The hook still has to be the bottom line in order to catch one's attention -- lose weight now! But then the chatter itself turns out to be sensible in content, even if its context prevents it from being neutral.

And that's the very reason that Dr. LaPook's suggestion holds water: We don't live in a weight-neutral society, where "overweight" really does just mean "at increased risk for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, et al." And until we do, weight loss directives pointed toward women will, unfortunately, seem anything but neutral. Women with fully intact self-esteem remain unharmed; the rest, whether overweight or not, hear "health" advice and suffer.

*Lest I seem too harsh on Women's Health: Their relationship and sex advice is commendable for its focus on the reader and on strong communication. For example, a feature about "enjoying your breasts," which I expected to be about peekaboo push-up bras, was actually a list of ways to increase your sexual pleasure from your breasts (though the piece's subheading is pandering: "Guys get off on the sight of breasts -- no surprise there. But who knew they can double your pleasure too?").

What Is Normal Eating?

2009-08-30T21:53:00.000-07:00

I was sitting in McDonald's eating an Oreo McFlurry when I first read Tara Parker-Pope's Wellness blog entry titled "What Is 'Normal' Eating?" I was on a "working vacation" in a town where the best option for Wi-Fi was Mickey D's, and after four hours of copy editing when I really just wanted to be at the beach, I was irritated and thought an Oreo milkshake-like concoction would soothe my soul. In the piece, Parker-Pope quotes a definition of "normal eating" as given by nutritionist Ellyn Satter:

Normal eating is going to the table hungry and eating until you are satisfied. It is being able to choose food you like and eat it and truly get enough of it—not just stop eating because you think you should. Normal eating is being able to give some thought to your food selection so you get nutritious food, but not being so wary and restrictive that you miss out on enjoyable food. Normal eating is giving yourself permission to eat sometimes because you are happy, sad or bored, or just because it feels good. Normal eating is mostly three meals a day, or four or five, or it can be choosing to munch along the way. It is leaving some cookies on the plate because you know you can have some again tomorrow, or it is eating more now because they taste so wonderful. Normal eating is overeating at times, feeling stuffed and uncomfortable. And it can be undereating at times and wishing you had more. Normal eating is trusting your body to make up for your mistakes in eating. Normal eating takes up some of your time and attention, but keeps its place as only one important area of your life.

In short, normal eating is flexible. It varies in response to your hunger, your schedule, your proximity to food and your feelings.

I had a strong gut reaction (heh, heh) when I read Parker-Pope's main question: What is 'normal' eating? And I couldn't have scripted it better, what with the cultural and personal issues leading me to make unhealthy food choices: I don't usually eat at McDonald's, but there I was for lack of a better option -- not foodwise, but convenience-wise. And I was stressed and feeling put-upon and not doing a great job of walking the work-life tightrope, so I displaced my stress with food. But from the comments on the thread -- nay, from the existence of the post itself -- it was clear that my Wi-Fi McFlurry was far from some little blip on my own little trajectory. Satter's words should sound as ridiculous as "Normal breathing is through the nose, or sometimes the mouth..." -- but they don't. The mere fact that "normal" eating has to be written out in such a careful way shows how something that appears utterly achievable is, in fact, unachievable for so many.

The comments on the post (which garnered more than double the amount of comments of any other recent post on the Times Wellness blog) are frequently exactly the contrary to Satter's wise words. Among them: Eat only until 60% full. No snacks. No omega-6 oils (I didn't know what those were either). Go vegan. More than half the comments are basically echoing what Satter is saying, but given the essence of the post, the number of rules posted is interesting.

"Why can't eating be flexible and fun?" the author of the World of Psychology post that Parker-Pope points to, Margarita Tartakovsky, writes. Here's why: Because in the face of the actual reasons that drove our culture to become so messed-up about food, inflexibility and rigidity became concrete tools we could use to make sense out of it all, to feel as though we were taking some sort of action, however minute, to combat the poisoned mind-set we're in. We've got the industrialization of food production; the lack of community togetherness that drove us from bridge clubs to our television sets and bags of Doritos (related to McDonald's willingness to step in as community center, complete with Wi-Fi for working vacationers); the families of all socioeconomic classes trading home-cooked meals for "home meal replacements"; the sedentary jobs; the Coke machines in the middle schools; the beauty myth; the focus on restrictive eating; fat as a feminist issue. So you beef up on your Michael Pollan and "Fast Food Nation" and maybe read your Susie Orbach -- and then what? Awareness of the issues is a great first step, but it leaves the individual sort of in a no-man's land, aware that you're not eating "normally" but grasping in the fog for a way to begin doing so. The easiest navigation tool around is those food rules, especially if the sociological food issues you're steeped in have served to make you one of the majority of Americans who are overweight. Stop drinking soda. Don't eat after 8 p.m. Park your car farther away in the parking lot. These rules do some good, sure -- at the very least they don't hurt -- but for so many they're placeholders for the real issues that feel too enormous to even attempt to tackle.

I joined a CSA as one leg of my personal/political combat against being messed-up about food. It has undoubtedly made me a healthier eater; every week I have fresh kale and cucumbers I've gotta use or waste my money. But it has done crap to make me a normal eater. Even in my conscious attempt to personally contradict industrialization and depersonalization of food, I find that I'm still left swimming in the dark. I make my kale, then binge-eat sweets -- because that is my abnormality, the way I've chosen, albeit without ever meaning to choose it, to deal with my set of personal and cultural circumstances in regards to food.

I would love to be Satter's mythical "normal" eater, but I see her as exactly that: mythical. I picture her as the sort of person who can buy a Kit-Kat bar and save half of it for later -- and who, more importantly, would be prone to forgetting about the bar until she stumbled across it wrapped up in her desk drawer the next day. But then I think of my friends who can do exactly that, and they're not "normal" eaters either: I remember watching one of them plug all of her daily food intake into a nutrition tool on the web and reciting the day's vitamin intake out loud as though this were just what everyone did at day's end. Even the people I know who naturally gravitate toward a healthy diet yet don't preoccupy themselves with nutritional natter or body checks have their own food-control issues: I think of my father, one of those lucky folks, who gets fussy if foods of different consistencies wind up comingling in the slightest on his plate.

All this is to say that I wish to sign on to Satter's plan. I wish to sign on in ink and blood -- I just don't know what to do to make it a reality. My own signing on becomes an act of resistance, not an act of forward motion: I resist against the abnormal eating that has surrounded me as an American, as a woman. Every part of Satter's credo is so general, so obvious to anyone who has not been steeped in a food-crazy culture, that I have trouble navigating it without rules. There's no magazine cover line called "10 Ways to Have a Normal Relationship With Food." And if there were, I'm sure it would work as well as "Lose 5 Pounds in 5 Days" -- that is, not at all.

Glamour Plus-Size Model, Supposedly

2009-08-21T12:28:00.000-07:00

Gasp! A size 12 woman is on the pages of Glamour! I wish this weren’t news, but it is -- and readers are noticing, to the point where editor-in-chief Cindi Leive wrote about the reader response on the magazine’s website.

Specifically, the piece the photo originally appeared in is titled “What Everyone But You Sees About Your Body.” The article coaches readers to “look through the eyes of these experts, who recognize the beauty and sexiness you don’t.” And to illustrate the concept, they use a professional model who happens to have a little tummy pooch. Are we supposed to somehow think that this model -- with glowing skin, a radiant smile, and an hourglass figure -- does not recognize her beauty and sexiness? Or are we supposed to play the role of the expert and see her beauty through the gentle padding, implying that there are others who don’t see the beauty of a woman who makes her living off of looking beautiful?

The magazine is between a rock and a hard place here as far as feminist critique goes -- had they illustrated this piece with a standard-sized model, the piece would have lost credibility; and as much as I’d love to see this magazine (or any other) use women who are actually plus-sized as models (as opposed to “plus-size models,” many of whom would be hard-pressed to find anything that fits them in a plus-size clothing store), we’re light-years away from that. The image was a good choice. But the attention it’s gotten forces me to look at it with a critical eye. I’m pleased to read that so many other women felt affirmed by the image. Me? I felt like I was being tricked, like when a saleswoman compliments you in order to sell you more clothes.

I’m guessing that Leive is correct when she writes that the image struck a chord because we have lost contact with what other women’s bodies look like. From the way people are reacting, you’d think that the model was as overweight as the average American woman and therefore a true reflection of what we look like (her BMI puts her at barely overweight, which, given the fact that nobody in their right mind would look at this model and call her overweight, goes to show how ridiculous BMI is as a measure of health; for more on that, see Kate Harding’s BMI Flickr collection). Still, people are reacting, and strongly. I would a zillion times rather that these images appear than not appear. I don’t think they do harm, and reading the testimonials that are on the magazine’s site, it seems that they are doing a powerful good for a lot of women. But one picture does not a revolution make.

I hope to see Glamour follow up this piece and the attention it’s getting with not a stronger message, but one that’s, in some ways, subtler. Using non-standard-sized models in neutral editorial pages (that is, in pictures that accompany an article on, say, dating, as opposed to fashion or body-image pages). Not insisting that models larger than a size 6 are automatically blessed with hourglass figures. (I mean, kudos for the Queen Latifah cover -- brown-skinned AND plus-size! -- but don’t tell me that the Queen’s waist is actually cinched in like that when Photoshop isn’t around.) Basically, what needs to happen for the all-shapes-and-sizes message to appear authentic is that women of, well, all shapes and sizes need to be represented in ways that don’t make it seem like they’re somehow anomalies.

Glamour has a halfway decent track record on this; I’ve seen one neutral editorial image of a model who was maybe size 12 with no comment or text about body image or her size. (Which sounds paltry but is one more than I’ve seen in any other mainstream women’s glossy.) Their woman-on-the-street Dos and Don’ts pages pay attention to the fashions their unwitting subjects are wearing, not the body sizes of the people photographed (yes, they show plump women in white pants, heavens be). And the May 2009 swimsuit spread was a fantastic sprint on the issue: The piece mentions what fabrics “camouflage lumps and bumps,” yes, but it’s the only time I’ve seen a plus-size model (the stunning Crystal Renn, who makes a living as a plus-size model) in a piece that’s not about plus sizes but about average sizes -- which, at size 12-14, Renn and most other “plus”-size models are. But now that the editors do have that track record and people are noticing, they have a responsibility to set a new, higher standard for themselves.

Belly Flop, Still

2009-08-19T19:40:00.000-07:00

Still seeking the hordes of pot-bellied men on the street, and failing. I'm pretty convinced that the Times trend story on pot bellies story was a non-story, but it's been nagging at me. Part of me wonders if it is a trend and women have gained weight over the past year too--the recession upsizing--but that it would be seen as distasteful or disingenious, or even cruel to run a piece in the Times about the increase of women's hip size.

Overall, though, I don't think that the en vogue body has anything to do with how people actually shape their bodies, to the degree that we have individual control over it. That is, we appear to shape our bodies via all sorts of tricks, but the bodies themselves change due to circumstances that have little to do with the "in" body. Female models are as whippetlike as ever, yet Americans are heavier than ever. The "in" body shapes how we think of the ideal, and the emotional reaction we have to it, but it hasn't shaped America's bodies.

Movie starlets of old Hollywood were somewhat heavier than those of today (though not to the degree that some would have it--the whole "Marilyn Monroe wore a size 16" thing is totally bogus, and there's been no time in the past century when the weight loss industry wasn't around, so it's not like women saw The Seven-Year Itch and let out their breath). The average American woman was somewhat thinner than she is today; she weighed 140 pounds in 1960, and 164 pounds in 2002, according to the CDC. Despite the group of people who react to "thin is in" by regimenting their bodies to an unhealthy degree, American women have reacted to a shrinking ideal by getting bigger, not smaller.

The reasons for the expanding American waistline have been plundered from just about every angle--it's processed foods, it's failing communities, it's the income gap. Two possibilities come to mind here:

1) American women are reacting to unrealistic body standards by eating more. Emotional overeating hasn't been explored as much as I'd like as a cause for rising obesity rates, in part because it's hard to identify and examine objectively. But it makes sense that this is at least part of the equation--compulsive overeating is an eating disorder, after all, and it's taken for granted that media images play a significant role in the development of eating disorders that have been explored more thoroughly (anorexia, bulimia). But instead of reacting to images of rail-thin women by starving or entering a binge-purge cycle (and you'd be pressed to find a compulsive eater who hasn't at least tried purging in some way, whether it be skipping meals to "make up" for a box of cookies or by more drastic method), some may just say, "Fuck it" and skip the purging part. Not all overweight or obese people are compulsive overeaters, of course, but a good percentage are. (I've found statistics stating that anywhere from 10% to 30% of obese individuals are compulsive overeaters--the disparity suggests not necessarily bad methodology, but the difficulty in categorizing binge eating, which is only now being considered for categorization in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.) And compulsive overeating is caused by all sorts of things, not just reactions to Gwyneth Paltrow. But if there is a correlation between the expanding American body and the shrunken ideal, it could be here.

Or,

2) More likely, the relationship between the supposed ideal and the average has nothing to do with hipster rebellion against Obama's abs, and more to do with a desperate need for a style story. Or maybe men are just taking the lead in this recession on the big body = wealth equation instead of leaving it to Depression-style shoulder pads or the stimulus package (note the National Recovery Administration logo on the bottom of this 1934 weight-loss ad, pointed out by Karen Sternheimer at Everyday Sociology. Or maybe Guy Trebay is mistaking unemployed bankers for hipsters, and he's just spotting the laid-off dudes who are suddenly eating mounds of Cheetos instead of managing hedge funds.

Belly Flop

2009-08-17T21:22:00.000-07:00

Like 85% of all style stories, I suspect this New York Times story about how men's potbellies are "in" was pulled out of the writer's ass. Or maybe there is a paunch trend--I haven't noticed it, but then I didn't notice depression chic anywhere either, and apparently that was huuuge. But check out the photos accompanying the story. I just can't see women's bodies--women's normal, "flawed" bodies, captured by a street photographer--ever making it onto the style pages. (I don't want them there, of course; the thought of being told that thick ankles are "in," accompanied by a smattering of poolside photos, is unsettling. Bodies are bodies, not trends, but that's another post.)

There's this assumption that men are "jus' folks" while women are supposed to be on the catwalk 24/7. Every so often you do see a trend story about how "curves are back" for women--always accompanied by photos of "curvy" celebrites like, oh, Scarlett Johansson, or basically any female celebrity who has breasts larger than a B-cup. The Times piece, however, is accompanied by headless shots of paunchy dudes--real people, that is, captured on the streets of New York simply looking like themselves. "Real women" graphics in this style only show up in a dos-and-don'ts formation--never, in my memory, have a collection of headless women a body-shape trend make. (Unless we're talking about Kate Harding's "headless fatties.")

The closest equivalent women have is the tired trend story about Michelle Obama's arms (though the link is to an L.A. Times piece that actually looks at the issue sociologically and with a feminist eye instead of a fitness piece on "How to Get Michelle Obama's Arms!"). Obama here is a stand-in for the headless, sculpted women who might otherwise make it onto the style pages--but, of course, she's anything but anonymous. Even in a piece that might actually be a women's body trend, we're still told to look upward, not sideways, for our mirror.

A quick thank-you to--never thought I'd say this--Quentin Tarantino for the only contemporary ode to the female potbelly, which starts at 2:30.)

Slow-foodrexia

2009-08-10T10:38:00.000-07:00

This post about the de-skilling of food production and consumption got me thinking about one of the biggest ways that that de-skilling affected America: women's labor, and what happened once food industrialization allowed women to not spend their days canning and grinding wheat. In the 1950s, the post-war food market gave housewives the "gift" of packaged foods (which eventually, of course, led to recipes centered around creative uses of those packaged goods). An essential part of "the feminine mystique" was about what happened when homemaking went from being considered skilled labor to being transparently not-as-skilled, what with all those food processors and washing machines. Homemaking is indeed very skilled labor, but suddenly all those women with educations and/or common sense realized they were bored when staring at the spin cycle. From that (plus maybe another thing or two), we got the women's movement.

And from the women's movement, we got the beauty myth, which has it that cultural overattention to women's appearance rose in direct proportion to the amount of actual power women had in society, in order to maintain status quo. So when we stopped relying as heavily on individual women to be skilled food producers, thus began our journey toward becoming de-skilled food consumers. But the slow food/organic/localvore movement has had popular and practical success in urging a return to skilled production; it's probably the most successful such movement in the culture at large. (Alice Waters might not quite be a household name, but she'll draw a larger crowd than any, say, artisan cabinet-maker.) So we -- and by "we" I mean a fairly privileged group of people who have the time, money, education, and social investment in eating a meal prepared entirely out of local ingredients instead of one from Subway -- are back in the kitchen again, men and women sharing a sort-of-equal stage this time around, happily chiffonading our fresh basil.

Except that the beauty myth still exists. So women are back in the kitchen, but poured into a size 4 apron. As evidenced by the popularity of Julie and Julia, it's not like modern proponents of the slow food movement are skimping on the butter. Au contraire -- the slow foodies I know (of both sexes) are sipping the cream from local cows and kissing dishes with (Dean-and-DeLuca-procured) olive oil. But the body imperative remains, and slow foodies aren't exempt. I'm wondering if this attempt at re-skilling food production and consumption is leading to a subset of overskilled food producers -- slow-foodarexics?

Ideally, the slow food/localvore movement would have its followers to naturally follow a sensible eating plan: Eat wholesome, nutritious foods when hungry; stop eating when you're full; eat from every food group. I'd like to think that's not even "ideal" so much as it is natural -- by paying attention to our food preparation, we naturally pay attention to our consumption. But paying attention to one's food has never been a problem for women who suffer from eating disorders. The rough demographic for eating disorders also happens to be largely the same group most likely to jump on the slow food train -- again, relatively privileged folks.

There's a leisure-time gap between the olden days we want to emulate, and the days we live in. Our approach to food is wildly different than that of our great-grandparents -- it simply can't be as, well, organic (mentally organic, that is). My grandfather recently told me a story about canning foods when he was a kid. He was canning food so that they would have food in the winter, not because it was a fun family activity or because the tomatoes were local (what else would they be?). Those were happy byproducts. He talked about the way the machinery worked, not about how delicious the finished product was. I don't know what was on his parents' minds when they were canning, but I'm guessing they were thinking about the sort of things I think about while mopping the floor. That is, they were thinking thoughts one thinks when one works. Our great-grandparents didn't put as much investment into food as we do because it was a chore. For us, it's a pleasure, so we look forward to spending a lot of mental energy on it. Which is an enormous part of the problem of the American approach to food. People assume that the reason we have an obesity epidemic is because people are undereducated about nutrition. That's true for some, but every obese or overweight person I've heard talk about their weight knows full well that an emotional engagement and preoccupation with food is what added on the pounds, not a lack of knowledge of the fattening properties of Ben & Jerry's.

So I wonder if localvorism isn't for some, in a way, a faint shadow path running alongside the trail of a full-blown eating disorder. If that sounds far-fetched, or even just utterly harmless, consider orthorexia, an obsession with healthy eating. Orthorexics physically aren't usually in danger (unless it's accompanied by overexercising), but mentally they're swimming alongside anorexics, bulimics, and compulsive overeaters. I'm reading Living on Live Foods by raw foods guru Alissa Cohen, and she claims that when she went from a conventional diet to raw foods, she lost her obsession with food. This in a 500-plus-page book about eating nothing heated above 116 degrees. She makes her living off being a raw foods coach. And she's not obsessed with food? Similarly, how could slow foodies not be obsessed, or at least preoccupied, with food? Most people I know who align themselves with the movement (myself included) have a glut of cookbooks, and a blog reading list full of "food porn," and claim to "worship" slow food celebs like Alice Waters.

There's no doubt that the de-skilling of food production and consumption is an ugly path for the American diet. But we live in a culture that allows us the luxury of takeout, a culture ambitious enough to begin the industrial revolution that led us to this place -- a culture that now, as a result, leaves us with a lot of spare time on our hands. Time that is easily spent obsessing over food.

Slow foods at their best help us reclaim pleasure in preparing our own meals, pleasure in eating them, and pleasure in sharing with our communities of choice. But we're not a culture at our best, and I'm not sure if the glut of conversations and blogs surrounding egg custards in Perigordine sauce and pecan-encrusted skate put us any closer to being there.

Street Meat

2009-07-01T10:21:00.000-07:00

Interesting article about the new food vendor battles: White-collar (and often white-skinned) types setting up shop with newfangled food carts, disrupting long-held traditions of food vendors who have been on the market for a while.

I don't know enough about free market vs. black market economies to really say, but it seems that the black market has functioned as a free market for food vendors for a long time. The actual provisions put into place by the city--permits and waiting lists and inspections--weren't serving the needs of either provider or consumer, so vendors took matters into their own hands and created an economy that allowed them to bypass the official system. The black market has been the de facto system for a while, it seems.

So while I want everyone to play by the rules (hopefully while holding hands), I can't help but get angry when I read reports of newcomers entering the market and using their privilege to upend this de facto free market. It's a helluva lot easier for an NYU law school grad to navigate the official city system and appear sympathetic to the authorities than it is for a middle-aged Lebanese dude with broken English and possibly limited business skills. (So says science, with this study of how people are more empathetic to the pain of people in their own social group. It takes a generation or so for the latest immigrant wave to have enough footing to be in any spot of political power; City Hall isn't exactly teeming with, say, Middle Eastern men.)

If the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, what happens in cases where the master's tools have been seized by the workers and refashioned according to their actual needs? It seems that the long-standing traditions created by the immigrant vendors--including passing down prime spots from generation to generation--have been working just fine. I don't like seeing anybody bullied either; I just think maybe it's time for the system to be reexamined, incorporating the perspective of people for whom it's been working for decades.

Or maybe that's just me speaking from my end of the market, where I know where to go for the best falafel plate. I admit that there's some simple bias coming into play here on my part. I love adventurous yuppie food as much as (or more than) the next white middle-class city transplant--bring on the lemongrass cupcake with basil buttercream! But what I love more about the city is its multiculturalism--it's the lifeblood of New York, and has been since it was New Amsterdam. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, the story goes--yet I can't help but begrudge the people who "make it" here at the expense of people who have farther to climb. Arguments for and against gentrification here are tiresome, but what's remarkable here is how the area being gentrified is...Sixth Avenue. In a way, the hot dog vendors being eradicated in favor of organic cupcakes would just cross the i's on the signing papers of the Brooks Brothers army that populates the neighborhood. But letting that happen seems like it's a resignation of what has made this city great--the huddled masses can stay in Queens, kthanxbye; we'll stick with our own kind here.

The Michael Jackson Post

2009-06-26T10:03:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be understood by another person. When I was younger, the Great Dream was to find someone who understood every part of me, without me having to communicate it (which made me an excellent girlfriend at age 14, I'm quite sure). It took me years to tame the excitement I'd feel when someone would say something that made me feel utterly understood, like finally I'd found a truly kindred spirit. A cute boy would have been ideal, but really, anyone would have been fine. It was a big lure of online relationships at first--I remember reading a post on a bulletin board about how this woman gagged every time she brushed a certain quadrant of her teeth, and how she thought it was linked to some sort of psychological trigger, and I thought, Omigod, someone ELSE thinks that and omigod I've totally found my Other. She wasn't my Other. Nor was the woman who talked about "the sadness you feel in your arms," or any guy I've gone out with, no matter the quality of our 2 a.m. lights-out pillow talk, hands held, bodies swaddled in each other, hearts open. The best I could hope for was those moments in which you hear someone, or they hear you, and you know that the other person, in that moment, in that context, really does understand.

And now, I'm fine with that. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that because no person can ever be truly known by another, "A good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his or her solitude." I'm unmarried, but I've found a guardian of my solitude; in my close friends, I've found still more. We get each other, in part because we get that neither of us will be wholly "gotten" by the other--not because of our failings but because of our humanness. The parts of me that my guardians don't get, I look to affirm in, say, literature. Or good movies, or family, either through their "getting" it too or through their intrinsic understanding of my history. Or posts on bulletin boards, or a stranger at a party who says one comment that I haven't heard before except in my own mind. There are plenty of people who echo my inner voice: There are many who are creative but hampered by lack of direction; dilettantes but wanting to be more; natural optimists with depressive tendencies. I've never had to fear being, well, un-understood. And the parts of myself that I haven't heard anyone else "get"? I keep them dear to myself, usually not out of shame--occasionally, sure--but more often because secrets are precious; because the murky, unknowable parts keep us from being a string of personality DNA, jigsaw puzzles of other people.

I can't imagine--really, cannot imagine--what it would be like to be in a world in which the number of people who understand fundamental things about you is infinitesimally small. Because you're famous--wildly famous--because the world watched your self-hatred morph and expand the way I watched my neighbor boy grow up from four-year-old to a young man whose voice changed last summer. Because your predilections are immoral, criminal, yet your status allows you to shield yourself from getting the kind of help you would need to reconcile those desires with your similarly true desires to do the right thing. Because we all know about your family; because your pill problem is on the front page; because you are loved and hated in equal measures; because the mere whisper of your presence brings electricity.

So you meet a certain cache of people who understand what it's like to be wildly famous. You find people who are self-proclaimed freaks, and buy skeletons of the freaks who can't speak with you about what it was like for them. You find children who understand what it's like to lose a childhood; you find children who, you think, can give that back to you. You find beautiful, troubled people, and try to collect them. But even then, you are too big for them.

Michael Jackson was so large that his death prompted not a reaction of sadness but of--not quite humor, but of archness. I wasn't cracking jokes or anything, but his death immediately became a ludicrous event. My best friend was late to meet me for dinner. "Sorry, I got caught up at work," she said. "Don't lie; you were composing yourself after mourning for Michael," I said. And we laughed.

His death came up a few times over dinner. And finally, she casually said what we say of sick old people and dogs: He's out of his misery now. And instead of it sounding like a cliche, something you say to excuse a possibly sad event, it was the absolute truth. I was never a crazed fan; I liked him like we all did, no more. I've talked about the tragedy of Michael Jackson before--how can you not, in order to keep the mix of fame beyond fame and awful acts against children from being just overwhelmingly depressing--but it wasn't until I connected him with Rilke that I saw that perhaps his biggest tragedy was that he was given both too much solitude and never, ever enough. He needed a guardian too.

Give Me Snickers Or Give Me Death

2009-06-23T10:23:00.000-07:00

Food manufacturers are, according to the head of the FDA, manipulating foods to make them taste so good that you can't help but want more. Their tactics include: hitting a "bliss point" of fats, salt, and sugar (the FDA head, Dr. David Kessler, cites a Snickers bar and the way it melts in your mouth while still providing crunch); not overdoing any of the pleasure points so as to avoid creating consumer overwhelm; designing foods with layers of taste to engage our brains. Companies "design food for irresistibility... It's been part of their business plans."

To which I say, no shit? As opposed to the food companies that create foods that don't taste good, in order to get you to consume less of them?

Listen, I'm all for companies taking responsibility for agitating addictive behaviors in order to exploit the public. (See also: the tobacco industry.) But there is a huge difference between a company manipulating data about their product (or hiding said data, or creating marketing terms that imply something the product isn't) and manipulating the product to make it, well, better. I'm glad to see legislation passed to ban the marketing of "light" cigarettes; I was steamed when it came out that low-fat frozen dessert CremaLita was a flat-out lie. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the anti-McDonald's crusade--I hate that McDonald's has become a go-to meal option for so much of America, but it's not like most people get a triple-decker with fries because they think it's the most nutritious option available to them. Still, I see the point of the crusade: In a lot of communities, especially poor communities where the immediate stress relief of a milkshake is a helluva lot more appealing than a spinach salad, McDonald's is a social center; by keeping their nutritional data hidden, they're doing a public health disservice. Fine.

But to accuse companies like Mars (which makes Snickers) of "manipulating" products so that they taste good is flat-out ridiculous. I'm well aware of the ways that sugar acts upon the nervous system, creating an addictive pattern of sorts--and the high-fructose corn syrup found in these products raises this pattern to a new level. But sugar is not crack, as much as some people would like to have you believe, and junk food is designed to taste good, and that's not manipulation--that's the nature of junk food.

America's food landscape is outrageous--of this I have no doubt. But I recently spent six weeks in Vietnam. And you know what they have in stores there? Candy bars, and boxes of cookies, and loads of candy. Coffee is consumed there with sweetened condensed milk, making our milk-and-sugar habit seem downright pure. Vietnam is a poor country, so people can't afford to gorge themselves on cookies, but that's not all of the equation. Americans are fat because we take emotional refuge in our excess; it's how we express both the pride and ennui that being the first of the first-world nations brings. Companies might exploit this tendency, but they are not creating it. I guess I'm coming down on the libertarian side of junk-food regulation at last.

8 Days a Week

2009-06-09T13:08:00.000-07:00

I've worked in personal finance magazines for about six months now. And in that six months, my guardianship of my own personal finances has swelled--if not in quality, in quantity. I check my bank balances more frequently even when I know nothing has changed; I peruse my decimated 401(k) account; I idly poke around to find favorable money market rates. I'm not doing anything that differently than I did before working in personal finance mags. I'm not even thinking that differently about my finances--I've never been an out-of-control spender, nor miserly, and my interest in investing in anything beyond the rudiments is roughly equivalent to my interest in, say, bass fishing.

The difference is that I'm thinking more frequently. Money has been added to the treadmill of mundane questions that take up space in my mind: what am I doing tonight; what will I eat for dinner; should I go for a run later; what's my bank balance. It only made sense--I was suddenly reading about IRAs and financial solvency all day long, for my job. During my breaks from reading, my mind didn't easily make the switch to reading the headlines or composing an e-mail--it needed a transition, and checking my own financial solvency provided it.

A few months into this, on a day when I was checking my checking account balance for the third time that day, it hit me: If my new gig brought about a sudden uptick in my financial self-awareness, what had ten years in women's magazines done to me? A decade of reading about "loving your body" next to diet tips; of the assumption that whether to pain ourselves for beauty is not the question, but rather how much; of staying within the comfortable universe padded by birth control and makeup removers and 12 blouses I needed now.

Granted, what brought me into personal finance publishing was being unexpectedly laid off--hardly an event that brings out my financial devil-may-care side. And it wasn't like I had no idea that working in women's magazines had done a number on my head. But I didn't realize how insidious the damage could be until then. As a feminist I consciously strained against several tenets of women's magazines; I read relationship columns with a wry eye and treated beauty pieces as foreign-language copy as much as I could. But that's just it: as much as I could wasn't ever going to be enough to truly shield me from absorbing the messages I read all day long.

Hmm, could I get therapy bills for body dysmorphia covered under workman's comp?

Particularly helpful Webster's definitions, II

2009-04-14T13:38:00.000-07:00

ri•pie•no \ri-'pya-no\ n: TUTTI

Joke's On You

2009-04-06T10:27:00.001-07:00

Something about this April Fool's Day joke by Improv Everywhere really irks me. The group is known for pulling outlandish pranks in public places--they're most known for their annual no-pants subway ride, which began with a group of people coordinating to ride the subway together, in January, without pants, while pretending not to know each other or even notice that something strange was afoot. (It's now sort of an annual parade, with thousands of participants in cities across the world.)

The joke was that they posted on their website that they crashed a funeral: They claimed that they selected a funeral in which the deceased had few family and friends, and then showed up en masse to make it the "best funeral ever." They didn't actually do anything so crude, of course; the joke was not on the nonexistent grievers, but on the viewers of the website. It's a clever conceit--here's a group known for doing mildly outrageous things, and so it's plausible that aficionados would believe that they'd do something like crash a funeral. (A local news channel even covered it--funnily enough, acknowledging the funeral-crashing as an April Fool's joke but apparently unaware that the whole thing was a setup.)

But here's the thing: I was suckered in for a minute or two. But instead of thinking, "What assholes" (or, as some misguided commenters on the site wrote, "How thoughtful"), I thought, "They really don't stop at anything, do they?" Something as intrusive as crashing a funeral somehow seemed like a natural extension of the invasive things this group does, in the name of fun.

I used to support the idea of public pranks, probably because I appreciated their revolutionary roots. When Joey Skaggs took a busful of hippies to a residential area of Queens in a faux-tourism program, he was highlighting the ways in which mainstream culture attempted to marginalize revolutionary forces by turning the freak flag in the other direction. Robert Delford Brown's "Mr. Jesus Christ Contest" called attention to the sexism (and general ludicrousness) of the Catholic church. (In writing this I learned that Mr. Brown recently passed away; here is his obituary.)

There's still some of that: Evan Roth's TSA Communication project, which utilizes flexible sheets of stainless steel to communicate messages to airport security workers viewing X-rays of your luggage, highlights how ridiculous this aspect of the "war on terror" really is. Improv Everywhere commandeered the flagship Abercrombie & Fitch store (which hires live shirtless male models to stand around the store during business hours) with dozens of shirtless not-models, a funny juxtaposition of images of physical ideals. And there's nothing wrong per se with the pranks designed simply to amuse or delight--Improv Everywhere's most delightful mission to date has been the "freezing" of Grand Central Station, in which 200 people simultaneously froze in place for 60 seconds in the bustling station, bringing a sense of wonder to all who were lucky enough to witness it.

But then there's the crowd who gathered to cheer on a random dude as he ate a sandwich. And those who welcomed back total strangers with balloons and signs at the airport. Some of the people surprised in these videos appear vaguely pleased--all seemed bewildered--but they all sort of reassure the videographer, "Oh, this is so nice of you." Self-indulgent seems the better word here--while the strangers chosen at random to be participants came away from the episodes with a story, none of them seemed, well, happy about it. The improv agents, however, seem supremely thrilled.

It's interesting that so many of these pranks revolve around singling out a person and turning them into a public spectacle. It's hardly news that our culture has gotten more and more celebrity-happy, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that not everybody wants that. Being a celebrity because you choose it is one thing; being cheered on by a group of strangers as you try to finish your sandwich is another. There's zero collective spirit involved in this--instead of making passersby ponder what's going on (which was the beauty of the Grand Central Station freeze), it's all about pointing the finger, turning on the camera, and forcing people to make a go of it, like it or not.

There's another strain of prank that engineers public spectacles of supposedly sentimental events. The fake subway wedding proposal, which roped in passersby to hold up "Will" "you" "marry" "me?" signs. The staged romance of leading a cab driver believe he's helping two star-crossed lovers find one another. It all seems harmless enough, until you think of how that driver might feel were he to discover that he was duped into thinking he was performing a small miracle, when really he was a hipster puppet. More than that, however, it takes away from the feats of daily magic, small and large, that are real: seeing two dear old friends run into each other on the bus and watching one of them cry tears of joy when the other announces her pregnancy; witnessing a small act of grace as a woman in a business suit wordlessly hands a crying teenager a packet of tissues in the park; watching as two subway musicians stroll into the same subway car from opposite ends and proceed to perform an impromptu duet.

[Final crank side note: The Urban Prankster site gets negative points for having a background that appears to be smudges. Amusing idea, except for those who actually smudge their screen trying to wipe away the nonexistent dust. (It was merely an annoyance to me, but I know graphic designers who depend upon a pristine screen to do their job smoothly and would find this downright meanspirited.)]

Reasons to Be Pretty

2009-03-17T18:17:00.000-07:00

I went into Reasons to Be Pretty, the new Neil LaBute show on Broadway, expecting to hate it. The show is about what happens when Greg, our protagonist, offhandedly tells his douchey friend that his girlfriend's face is "regular" (instead of beautiful) -- and she finds out. It has all the ingredients of a LaBute sexist cocktail, in the vein of In the Company of Men and The Shape of Things. The surprise here is that in dealing with the beauty myth, one of the most enduring facets of sexism in America, he managed to create a work that wasn't sexist.

Part of me wants to know what Reasons to Be Pretty would be like if written by a woman -- someone who lived with the beauty standard inside and out, every day. But part of LaBute's point is that men, because they are outside of the beauty standard, cannot understand; instead, they have to try to grasp the significance to the women in their lives of something as potent and volatile as beauty. Women may have to deal with it in a harsher, more daily light, but because of that we intrinsically understand it, even if we're left inarticulate of anything but academic-critique language to describe its effects. Men are left to watch. (Or exploit. Which LaBute, true to form, shows with Greg's buddy Kent, who will surely be played by Aaron Eckhart in the movie.)

It's rare to see tales of the beauty myth from a personal perspective in anything other than a story about overcoming self-hatred. That tack is important, but it doesn't come close to belying the acute pain that the beauty standard brings; we know our own worst moments, but we don't know those of others. Reasons to Be Pretty would be absurd if Steph were freaking out over a female friend saying she had a "regular" face. The play works because the beauty myth creeps into intimate relationships, preying on the very uncertainty that often accompanies romance. Instead of verging on cries of "reverse sexism," as The Shape of Things did, LaBute manages to show why he, as a man, is uniquely qualified to tell this story about the beauty standard.

When, in the play's climax, Greg tells Steph that he was ambivalent about his feelings for her -- it comes off as a stroke of love, believe it or not -- we're left wondering if he's lying in order to sever their tie so that she might be able to embark on a new relationship where the word regular will never cut like a knife. In his author's note, LaBute writes that Greg "just might be one of the few adults I've ever tackled." I can only hope that LaBute himself is growing up and that he can continue to add to the growing number of men in the public eye who are examining gender and sexism with openness and concern for both themselves and the women around them -- not defensiveness.

McCain Wins

2009-03-16T10:39:00.000-07:00

I just want to give props to my favorite McCain, Meghan, who wrote this straightforward response to Laura Ingraham's commentary on McCain's weight. (McCain criticized Ann Coulter for her, well, Ann Coulterness; Ingraham then criticized McCain on her radio show for her attack on Coulter -- and, in doing so, made a total non-sequitur reference to her weight. Which is, for the record, a healthy one.)

One thing I'd like to note, though, is that this is widely being seen as a critique of McCain's weight -- which Ingraham undoubtedly intended it to be. But what she actually said was that McCain was too heavy to be a contestant on The Real World. Putting aside the general ridiculousness of using anybody's supposed unsuitability for The Real World as an insult, this isn't a critique of McCain's weight; it's a vocalization of the sheer facts. McCain, simply by being a normal-sized adult woman (at a self-proclaimed size 8, she's still smaller than the average), probably is too heavy to be in contention for the "hot chick" role on those sort of shows, in the same way that most plus-size models are actually too slender to gracefully wear plus-size clothing. (Industry standard for plus-size models is size 12; Lane Bryant sizes begin at 14.)

I'm sure that Ingraham had zero intention of semi-critiquing size standards in the media, but in a way that's what she did. The insult wasn't "You're fat," it was "You're too heavy to be on reality TV." (It could also be read as a notation on why one's suitability for television is the beauty standard, or the ridiculousness that anybody's real body could be considered too big for "reality" TV.) No credit goes to her, though; I'm saving that for McCain. I love how she consistently kept the focus on Ingraham and the ridiculousness of her comments, instead of falling for the bait and wailing about how she's not really fat at all. She also took the opportunity to note that even though she wasn't overweight, that didn't matter; it's the critique that's wrongheaded, no matter the size of the target body.

Why Did the Feminist Cross the Road?

2009-03-04T10:24:00.000-08:00

I'm sort of left speechless by this Germaine Greer piece about how women aren't as funny as men. Well, she says that's not what she's really saying, but she penned the piece to clarify what she meant when she said exactly that, in those words, on television.

What's interesting about this piece is that, as Kate Harding points out at Salon, "Greer keeps offering great setups for an analysis of why women are culturally discouraged from developing and displaying robust senses of humor, then following them up with conclusions that amount to, 'We're from Venus -- whaddaya gonna do?'" If this were someone who hadn't made a living via feminist writing, it would be forgivable--I'd think that the author simply hadn't immersed herself enough in basic feminist tenets to recognize how close she was to articulating why women are funny instead of why they aren't. But this is Germaine Greer we're talking here. I'm puzzled. (I'm doubly puzzled by her bizarre claim that female comics marry themselves off, and maybe that's why they don't thrive in the comedy world. When the female Muslim comic she referenced, Shazia Mirza, commented that she'd be able to afford getting off the comedy circuit tomorrow if only she could marry a rich man, Mirza was making a joke -- one Greer clearly missed.)

Specifically, she writes:

Women are at least as intelligent as men, and they have as vivid and ready a perception of the absurd; but they have not developed the arts of fooling, clowning, badinage, repartee, burlesque and innuendo into a semi-continuous performance as so many men have

.

Let's say for the sake of argument that she's right (which she's not), and that women can't do a good pratfall, because our vaginas get in the way. This allows zero room for a cultural feminist analysis of humor; she just assumes that what's traditionally been seen as funny is what's funny, period. Not only does this imply that "droll"ness, which she readily admits at the end of the piece is where women thrive, is humor, not a sidecar to it, but it's a wholly outdated view of humor on the whole. Alternative comedy has been thriving for more than a decade, and while the male-female ration is still far from 50/50 within it, it's also no accident that female comics like Janeane Garofalo, Beth Lapides, and Margaret Cho sprang from alt-comedy. Are they making Jim Carrey goggly-eyes or Denis Leary-style rants? No. They're still funny as hell.

Funnier, in fact, than jokes. When was the last time you genuinely laughed at a joke with a punchline, the type one learns and repeats? There are some amusing ones out there, but none will inspire the kind of laughter that is bound to happen when I get together with my friends and we riff on each others' words, or simply alight on a moment of lunacy and find ourselves doubled over in laughter. This sort of leaves Greer's claim that women aren't that funny because we "famously cannot learn jokes" flatter than a Polack joke. (Yes, let's not forget that an enormous subset of jokes play on power structures. Women aren't immune from telling racist jokes -- or sexist ones -- but it makes sense that we'd have a natural aversion to jokes in which our disenfranchised group could easily be subbed in. See also: dumb blonde jokes.)

Greer states that men develop humor as a survival tool for acceptance within his peer group: "...the other roles in the group are not accessible to him, perhaps because he is weaker or poorer or less imposing than his peers." That's the closest she has to a solid argument here: Women have a small but clearly defined arsenal we've been told to turn to in discomfiting peer groups, and humor isn't in that toolkit. But more than that, she's illuminating that humor is a weapon of competition for men. Women have largely been removed from competing for role of "funniest" (instead, we're encouraged to race for the booby prize of "prettiest"). But what that means in real life is that instead of one-upping each other with one-liner zingers, my female friends tend to be funny in a more collective way. They bring up an incident from the past and exaggerate its ludicrous details; we get "the giggles" together; we hopscotch from one person's joke to another, building a central "inside joke" that we created together. (Well, "inside jokes" are a well-known tool of competition amongst preteen girls--it's unbearable to a seventh-grader when your two friends have a joke they repeat that excludes you. Luckily it circles around to being a cooperative event in adulthood.)

I might be so defensive of female humor because my best friend is a stand-up comic. The first time I saw her perform, I was struck with awe -- not just at the pride I felt at seeing my best friend handle the crowd with ease, but at hearing what it was like to hear stand-up performed by a feminist: as if women mattered, which is basically all feminism asks of the world. It wasn't exclusive humor -- the men in the crowd were laughing just as hard as I was at the way she lampooned health-care policy that covers Viagra but not the Pill. But it's not just her. I've laughed too hard with so many women -- and inspired the same of them -- to think Greer's view is anything but a joke.

taste tested

2009-03-03T09:27:00.000-08:00

I've never really understood acquired tastes. I have them, of course--beer tastes a lot better now than it did 15 years ago, when I first swilled it. And while beer has the benefit of getting one tipsy, it's not like there aren't other beverages that do the same, so there's something else that makes beer worth going back to frequently enough that I worked through the grimaces and began to genuinely enjoy it. Part of that was drinking better stuff (I developed my beer taste buds in Oregon, aka Beervana, so this wasn't hard), but even that took a while. I kept trying beer because it brought me a certain social cachet.

I thought of this when I read this Science article about a dog food tasting. The experimenter, as a lark, conducted a blind pâté tasting with his friends. He included two expensive pâtés, two cheap imitations, and one dog food (the testers knew there was a dog food in the mix). The taste ratings perfectly correlated with the price -- the priciest spread averaged the highest ratings; the cheapest (the dog food) rated the lowest. That's semi-surprising, given that wine prices have little to no correlation to quality--it's tempting to lump all connoisseur fetish items into one category and feel smug for just shopping at K-Mart.

But what's really surprising -- and what made me think of acquired tastes -- is that even though most tasters rated the dog food the lowest, none of them were willing to guess which pâté was actually dog food. The tasters didn't trust their own preferences enough to assert the logical conclusion -- that dog food must taste worse than chicken pâté. Obviously there's no social cachet in professing to like dog food, but there is negative social cachet in admitting to preferring dog food to chicken pâté. Blind taste tests are usually meant to discourage tasters from being influenced by the loaded message a brand may carry -- the quintessential taste test experience is that the unknown brand surpasses the Cadillac of cola, or brownies, or whatever. That's not what happened here: The tasters knew unilaterally that the inferior brand sucked, but they wouldn't make the proclamation. (You could argue that they just didn't know what dog food tasted like, but it's hardly a stretch to think that it probably tastes like, well, dog food.)

So both the dog-food tasters and people who develop acquired tastes aren't sticking to their initial impressions about food, at least in part to maintain or improve their social stance. It makes me wonder about all of my preferences: Do I love my Oregon beers because they're made by superior brewers, or because I want to maintain my claim to the Oregon psyche? Do I actually love Big Macs and have merely convinced myself that they're chalky and gross because it's fashionable in my Fast Food Nation-revering crowd to think so? Inversely, do I actually like foie gras, or do I eat it when I want to shirk my mantle of liberal-ecoconscious-friend-to-all-creatures political correctness, and just eat a fatted liver already?

A touch of class

2009-02-12T22:14:00.001-08:00

This study about socioeconomic status and body language doesn't necessarily track to me. The study authors posit that people of higher socioeconomic status are able to be, well, rude when speaking to others -- not maintaining eye contact, grooming themselves during conversation. People of low socioeconomic status, however, are forced to curry favor by actively engaging others in conversation.

It's unclear in the study summaries available (the actual study is for APA members only, unfortunately) whether the participants were paired with people in their own socioeconomic bracket. That's an enormous factor, I'd imagine -- I'm not sure if two high-socioeconomic-class folks in a room together would let down their guard and breathe easy at being among their own (I think of Eddie Murphy in his "White Like Me" sketch on Saturday Night Live), or if perceived competition would force them to up their "I can't hear you nyah nyah nyah" game. Surely the Guggenheims don't all sit around grooming themselves whilst avoiding eye contact and not smiling. (Or maybe they do? I wouldn't know.)

But what I'm really curious about here is A) class guilt, and B) how and when we bury our social cues. Surely I can't be the only middle-class bleeding-heart liberal who probably errs on the side of being patronizingly friendly to those at an obvious disadvantage to me. When I'm talking to someone who is clearly several rungs below me on the socioeconomic ladder, I become acutely aware of my privilege and become more solicitous than I would be of another white thirtysomething lady on the subway -- it's some sort of backward way of showing that we're all in this together, or something. I'm painfully self-aware of this tendency -- it's painful because the fact that I know that I'm doing it means that my kindliness is motivated not by my common bond with all humankind but by a form of patronization -- and I've always chalked it up to white middle-class guilt.

I also wonder how this intersects with the findings of another study: That women are hard to read. Apparently neither men nor women are accurately able to judge the level of interest a woman has in a dating prospect (interested men are supposedly easy to spot -- my hunch is that they're just trained that you've gotta be aggressive to get a date, which may be why some of them seem to think that catcalling might actually be a nice way to meet someone special). Body cues, language cues -- they're all ambiguous with the ladies. I suspect that women learn a dual set of social codes: How to act by your class, and how to act with men. If we're hard to read, maybe it's because our sex overrides other social groups we might be a part of, regardless of whether we realize that's what's going on.

Hairy Times

2009-02-06T07:07:00.000-08:00

I hope that this Freakonomics blog entry is the last we'll see of the idea that the length of women's hair is tied to the health of the economy. But since beauty editors are starved for fresh takes on the same old stuff (there are only so many ways to apply lipstick, but editors have evermore pages to produce -- and if those pages can have some grounding in research instead of fashion whims, they'll even get the whiff of legitimate news instead of product shilling), I'm sure some enterprising beauty editor will fashion a short-hair story around the Dow.

The whole concept irks me. First of all, it's based on Japanese research, and superimposing Japanese cultural and beauty norms onto European and American ones doesn't track. We're talking about a nation whose women have the lowest perception of self-beauty in Asian countries -- and a culture in which youth is highly prized as a mark of beauty (scroll down to the "I Think a Woman Can Be Beautiful at Any Age" chart). What signals youth? Long hair. Certainly the U.S. isn't suffering from an abundance of old women who they're they're the shizznit, but Japan has its own rigid set of beauty standards that can't be applied to the west.

Then, this is a mighty convenient way to potentially get women to actually spend more. Short hair requires more maintenance, both in frequency of haircuts and in the number of products the average woman requires to make it look good. Sure, foot-long tresses require greater quantities of, say, shampoo and hairspray -- but they don't use pomade, or waxes, or "hair muds," or any of the number of products that exist for short hair. Short hair may project the image of being carefree, but in my experience it's very easy to make it require as much or more work than long hair. With luxury sectors -- like, say, $150 haircuts -- plummeting, it only makes sense to suddenly hype short hair.

But really, what's upsetting to me about this idea is that it illustrates how women, for all of our mighty advances, are still thought of as chattel. The past American century can be charted by the idealized shape of women's bodies: boyish, bound-breasted women of the 1920s (when the economy was flush and women were doing novel things like voting); ampler bodies in the Great Depression; girdled, heavily maintained hourglasses of the 1950s, when America was collectively holding its breath during the beginning of the Cold War.

One of the greater achievements of third-wave feminism is calling attention to the beauty standard, most tragically reflected in the eating-disorder epidemic. We're still a long ways from the goal (to wit, Jessica Simpson's "weight battle"--good thing we have Pete Wentz to give us voice!), but at least now women by and large know that there's a huge cultural effect on the way we're encouraged to eat, exercise, and shop. So it would be a wee bit suspect if suddenly "curvier" women (like, you know, Jessica Simpson) were suddenly being hailed as recession babes.

Instead, we get to wear the recession on our heads, supposedly. But hair length is intensely personal for many women. In the algorithm of what hair length feels right at any given time, you'll find femininity, maintenance, male attention, weight, breakups (and, for some, Jennifer Aniston). There's no denying economic influence on fashion -- pajama and lingerie sales aren't suffering as much as the rest of the fashion market, because people want to stay at home, either on the couch or in the boudoir -- but for something we wear literally every day whether we like it or not, we're less likely to even unconsciously succumb to the need for variety among visual pleasures (which is the reasoning the cultural economist in the Independent article provides for the supposed trend). We're not stupid, after all -- if the need for variety increases in dark times, we're not going to seek that variety in the form of $45 haircuts every six weeks. If anything, the women I know are finding ways to eke out their styles so they can go to the salon as infrequently as possible. (Me, I'm pulling the French-twist trick, in which I wear my hair up every other day, a style I can't do with short hair. This also means I don't have to wash it on French-twist day, which means decreased shampoo costs! Recessionista, c'est moi!) Note that the term "lipstick index," for the totally bogus idea that women buy more lipstick in poor economies, was termed not by economists but by Leonard Lauder, chair of Estée Lauder.

We also can't forget that ever since codes of women's appearance relaxed to the point where it wasn't unseemly for a woman to go out without a salon-perfect hairdo, there hasn't really been such a thing as "long hair" and "short hair" trends. Sure, sweeping trends like The Rachel dictate a certain length. But Twiggy's uberfeminine pixie is just as emblematic of the late '60s as Catherine Deneuve's flowing tresses in Belle de Jour, or the totally free Mama Cass-style locks. Even in the 1980s, the epitome of big hair, the world's leading style icon was short-haired Princess Di. Once the rule of long hair for girls, short hair for boys had been broken, American women haven't really looked back as a mass trend. To say that short hair is suddenly a trend, especially as a response to the economy, smacks of engineering.

I can't help but feel like the reporting of this trend is simply serving to highlight the notion of women's appearance as being less about our own desires and more about literally being a commodity. (Quick, invest in Frederic Fekkai!) The numbers show that we buy according to climate -- that's the whole idea behind the stimulus package, after all. But it's suspect that women -- we silly, frivolous women who have done things like paint seams on our legs to mimic pantyhose in past times of distress; we vain women who might be laid off but supposedly are jumping at the chance to join the short-hair bandwagon -- are being painted as being the ones to act illogically in these times.

Particularly helpful Webster's definitions

2009-02-04T08:54:00.000-08:00

no-see-um \no-'se-em\ n (1842): BITING MIDGE

cupcake parade

2009-02-02T12:24:00.000-08:00

Women's magazine office rule: The more body-dysmorphic the reader, the more food there is in the office.

The feminist magazine I worked at [as in, the kind of feminist magazine that interviews bell hooks, not the kind that tells you it's your hard-earned right as a modern woman to buy lipstick (Rosie the Riveter Red, $18, sephora.com)] had no food lying around the office. Somebody baked Mexican wedding cookies and brought them in once, I think. The national women's fitness magazine, however, in one day alone had a 24-count box of chocolates, two plates of cut-up chocolate-coated energy bars, a bowl of tortilla chips, and 12 jumbo cupcakes.

Part of this is simply the swag factor: Magazines get a lot of free crap from companies, both for review/promotional purposes and as gifts from companies. If Mary Kay has an anniversary, it sends out a dozen pink-topped cupcakes to any publication that might feature Mary Kay products -- that sort of thing. It's not like staffers are bringing in batches of homemade cookies; it's built into the whole schema of the industry. Since magazines that have less investment in making women feel bad about themselves -- i.e. magazines that aren't shilling beauty products -- aren't getting that kind of swag, the majority of random food lying around a parallel office simply doesn't exist.

But it goes beyond that. The level of discussion about food goes beyond what I imagine would be present at a food magazine. Not questions of "Ooh, where did this come from?", but terms like good, bad, shouldn't. By sitting near the designated "free table" where cookies and the like are left to be snatched up, you figure out pretty quickly which staff members have food issues. Which staffers walk by and vacuum-suck a cupcake into her long sleeves so as to avoid being caught; which staffers come by repeatedly and stare, walk away, and return; which staffers come by and illustrate infinitesimal sums by halving the same piece of cake over and over again until only an ant's feast remains.

Two hours sitting next to the "free table" would be enough to convince anybody that women's magazine editors are simply not able to do what they do best any better than they already do. Arguably the most positive effect women's magazines have had on their readers is an expanded knowledge of their body functions. Most women I know are reasonably fluent in talking about their hormonal cycles, their reproductive organs, their basic health stats. Women's magazines can claim a good amount of credit for spreading reliable information about contraception, even today -- I didn't find out about Plan B from my gynecologist; I found out about it from Mademoiselle.

When the industry began to be heavily targeted for encouraging unhealthy diet and exercise habits in the name of "dropping 10 pounds -- now!", the glossy pages began to couch food in terms of nutrition, not "diets." No longer was it just calorie counts accompanying recipes; sodium, iron, calcium milligrams popped up too. More than that, however, magazines began to superficially refute the idea of thinness as the ultimate goal by proclaiming that we should all love our bodies. I clipped a Self article from 1990 because it contained a righteous essay about the anger the writer felt about hearing friends talk about their "dream bodies" -- spending energy on pursuing a bodily idea when their own bodies were healthy, adequate, beautiful. But on the reverse side of the page was the "action plan" designed to help me achieve my dream body, supposedly because I "deserved" it.

Even the laziest critical reading of women's magazines shows that this is a refutation in name only -- the images of unrealistically thin models haven't changed, the weight loss emphasis is still a large part of the "nutrition" pages, the fitness pages still frame strength training in terms of sleekness, not strength. But I'd always argued that the health aspect of women's magazines made headway, however small, on redeeming their other sins. The more I think about the way so many of the very women who write these words are treating food -- to my eyes, anyway; they may simply be playing along with the idea that fussing over food is more appropriate than lusting over it -- though, the more I begin to see their honest nutrition info as being empty calories for the mind. The only attention these magazines pay to the emotional aspect of eating is to tell readers not to do it, offering cheap tricks for avoiding it or, more frequently, replacing "bad" foods with "good" foods in emotional eating. (My favorite to this day is a tip I read on Glamour's website about drizzing Diet Cherry Coke over a baked apple -- "Tastes just like apple pie!")

Yet the anxieties that go into producing women's magazines surely drive their staffers to emotionally eat. When you're forced to treat your readers as though they are vehicles for shoes and makeup; when you're airbrushing perfectly lovely women to looker sharper, thinner, because the nefarious "they" will surely demand the image retouched later anyway; when you're forced to paint readers with such a broad stroke that you erase the complexities of the women you know, talk to, live with, love -- a cupcake seems like a good way to make it through the day.

Inauguration Blah

2009-01-19T20:20:00.000-08:00

I'm not terrifically excited for Obama's inauguration. I'm excited for his presidency, to be sure, for all the reasons we all are. I have no doubt that the upcoming years will lead the nation toward a greater truth and existence than we've been able to see since 2000.

But I'm one of the factors that led to his election. Not me personally, but that looming 7.2% unemployment figure. The day I got laid off, I went out with my colleagues (our entire staff was cut by the company) and got hammered. I remember sitting on a curb with my oldest, dearest work friend, hopelessly inebriated, smoking cigarettes (neither of us smoke normally, under employed conditions) and shouting to passersby, "WE'RE A STATISTIC! VOTE OBAMA!"

Our plight, and the plight of hundreds of thousands of others--and the wars and the restriction of choice and the Patriot Act and the blunders and the squandering of goodwill and the lack of tolerance and the and the and the--led to exactly that. We, as a nation, made the right choice. I'm proud of us. I look forward to being proud of our leader.

None of this helps me feel excited for the day we've all been looking forward to, though. I will be sitting at home, typing with a vague sense of futility; I will be organizing my apartment; I will be cooking; I will be exercising. It will be just another day one has when one is unemployed. I've been lucky enough to find enough work to get by just fine--but my sense of professional purpose has been dashed. When the thing getting you up in the morning is only inward, it's hard to feel a connection to the larger world and current events. Socioeconomic groups on the poorer end of the scale are sometimes criticized for not doing enough for themselves (thus leading to a backlash criticism when the loudest voices heard are those of white middle-class well-educated citizens). I've never been one of those critics, but I'm more likely now to vociferously defend the appearance of inaction of those groups: When your free time is a mandate, not a luxury, you use it both more carelessly and less so. My instinct is to use this time for myself, to better my condition--in the short term. Write a pitch, network, get a job. My instinct is not to go to a champagne brunch and celebration like the rest of New York.

I've got plenty to celebrate, yes. I'll just do it when I have a job.

toxicity

2009-01-19T19:21:00.000-08:00

I just found a slip of paper inside a book I'm tossing in my grand get-rid-of-everything fit (The Temple of My Familiar, a lovely book but a far cry from The Color Purple)--my induction into Greenpeace.

Well-meaning college students canvass for Greenpeace in New York, bombarding young professionals on the sidewalk during lunch hour. One day--July 23, 2001, to be exact--one of them caught me at the harmonic convergence of feeling financially secure, consumerist-guilty, and whimsical, and I joined. Fifteen dollars a month until I say nay. I've considered saying nay several times--I get so much damn mail from them that I can't help but think that my membership is actually hurting the environment more than my $180 a year is helping--but what the hell, good works and all.

Anyway, apparently at one time I held the e-mail address toxicartemis at hotmail.com. So any mocking I've done of pained gothy girls should be null and void, because nothing cries out I AM SO IN PAIN PLEASE SAVE ME like an e-mail address containing the word "toxic."

Facts I Have Learned From Strangers, part I

2009-01-15T07:52:00.000-08:00

Fact: Esperanto was invented in a town in Poland that is primarily known for something else: Bialystok, home of the bialy.

Fact-sharer: Postal worker Alex, a middle-aged fellow who advised me on the risks of sharing eye shadow with my sorority sisters. (Really, I was selling off my leftovers from my Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab perfumes to gothy teenagers via eBay, but you're not supposed to ship liquids, and certainly not to people you don't know.) He believes that Yiddish would be a better global language than Esperanto, and said that in the meantime we should all just "speak jazz."

Fact-checked: True, as per Wikipedia. Bialystock is also home to Boris Kaufman, cinematographer for On the Waterfront, and a handful of Soviet diplomats.

Fact-charm: High, especially because I can't remember how we started talking about either Bialystok or Esperanto. Plus, it will likely come in handy, because if I'm already talking about Esperanto with someone, it's probably a dorky enough conversation for me to introduce factoids about Poland.