Feminist leaders decry the “Bo-tax”

Terry O'Neill and Gloria Steinem think a tax on cosmetic surgery is unfair to women. But so is the beauty standard

By Kate Harding

Topics:Feminism, Broadsheet, Gender, Health

The so-called “Bo-Tax” — a provision in the Senate Health Care bill that would impose a 5 percent tax on elective cosmetic surgery — “sounded like a refreshingly good idea to me,” writes Judith Warner at the New York Times’ Opinionator blog, “until I read that Terry O’Neill, the president of the National Organization for Women, is against it.” With all due respect to both O’Neill and Warner, I’ve read the feminist arguments against the tax, and I’m still really not moved to fight for my sisters’ right to go under the knife.

I can understand the logic, to a point. ABC News reports that “86 percent of cosmetic surgery patients are working women between the ages of 35 and 50, with an average income of $55,000 a year.” There’s no question that this is essentially a tax on women, some of whom feel that plastic surgery is necessary to keep them competitive in the job market — not just on rich, superficial stereotypes. Writes Warner, “The economy is terrible. Middle-aged women, many of whom reduced their working hours, limiting their earning power and ambition, when they had kids or, later, found themselves having to care for their parents, are in a particularly vulnerable spot these days, as they’re increasingly called upon to supplement or take over the lion’s share of family money-making. And any number of studies have shown that people with better (read: younger) looks have a better chance of getting a good job. Particularly women.” Thus, both O’Neill and Gloria Steinem told Warner that this would amount to an unfair tax on women who are only doing what they need to do to survive in a sexist, ageist workforce.

A few things about that. First, having cosmetic surgery does not necessarily make you look younger; often enough, it just makes you look like you’ve had cosmetic surgery. So, not only are studies showing younger-looking people have an advantage on the job market a red herring here — unless there are studies showing that eyelifts, facelifts, Botox, etc., improve women’s ability to get hired, we still have no idea which procedures, if any, could cynically be considered a smart investment and which would only be a further financial drain on an unemployed woman — but given society’s general disdain for cosmetic procedures, they might actually sabotage a woman’s chances. If she shows up to an interview with half her face frozen from Botox or a permanently surprised expression, for instance, a (sexist, ageist) interviewer might be dazzled by the glow of youth, or might just write her off as vain and ridiculous. There’s no way of knowing in advance which way it will go.

Second, let’s be clear: We’re not talking about women as a class here, we’re talking about white women. In 2007, “Hispanics had 9 percent of the procedures, followed by African-Americans (6 percent), Asians (5 percent) and other non-Caucasians (2 percent).” White people, then? Seventy-eight percent. Women who aren’t white don’t have the option of paying a doctor to minimize their chances of employment discrimination; racism will still exist no matter how young-looking and symmetrical they are, just as sexism and ageism still exist even if 55-year-old women manage to pass for 40. And while capitulation to bigoted standards (where possible) might be a useful short-term survival strategy for some — as a bottle-blond who rarely leaves the house without mascara, I am certainly not judging individuals who choose that route — there is a big difference between acknowledging that reality and promoting such capitulation as a feminist cause. Rallying behind women who feel forced into cosmetic surgery only reinforces the standards that drive them to that point; Botox and eyelifts may help some of our struggling sisters get jobs, but what of those who can’t afford such interventions, those who will still be discriminated against because of their skin color or disabilities or sexual orientation? Helping white women maybe improve their economic circumstances by becoming a bit more conventionally attractive is really not the kind of goal I want to see feminist leaders fighting for.

Besides which, once again, we have no idea if it actually will improve the economic circumstances even of a select group of privileged women. As Laurie Essig recently wrote in True/Slant, “cosmetic surgery is now primarily consumed not by the rich, but by the working and lower-middle classes, sometimes even by the poor. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS), about 1/3 of cosmetic surgery is consumed by people who make less than $30,000 a year. About 70% of it is consumed by people who make less than $60,000 a year.” So the tax would indeed add an even greater burden to struggling women who choose plastic surgery as an investment in their careers, but I’m still not convinced that means I should be bothered by it. Essig goes on to say, “What these women don’t understand — what few of us understand — is debt. You sign on the dotted line for your boob job at $8000 but you don’t realize you’ll end up paying almost twice that much if you can’t put any money down. Easy for Hollywood starlets to plunk their cash down for new boobs, but for the rest of us, taking on debt for a better body is risky business.” How long will it take a woman to work off all that debt at the new job she got with her new face? And will a tax on cosmetic procedures necessarily mean that the same people are saddled with more of a financial burden, or might it mean that fewer women decide it’s in their economic best interest to take on a pile of credit card debt in the hope of finding a job that will lead to greater long-term security? Because if it’s the latter, I’m really not sure this tax is a bad thing.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good thing, either, mind you. Essig offers a number of solutions I like better: “If the government wants to control cosmetic surgery, then the answer is to re-regulate the banking industry so these medical credit loans don’t exist. And the other answer is to tax the obscene amounts of wealth being made by the likes of GE, who is selling medical credit to people who cannot afford it. Or the cosmetic surgeons income as part of an overall progressive income tax on the top earners.” But I think it’s safe to say we shouldn’t hold our breath for any of those plans — which is related to yet another reason why I can’t see access to affordable plastic surgery as a feminist issue.

If you can be judged by the company you keep, then it’s worth noting that Terry O’Neill and Gloria Steinem have thrown their lot in with the likes of Allergan Inc. and Medicis Pharmaceutical Corp., whom the Wall Street Journal reports “are mounting lobbying and public-relations campaigns against the proposed levy.” Allergan owns Botox, among other things, and Medicis produces competing products like Restalayne. Representatives from The American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery and The American Society of Plastic Surgeons are also all over the news, trying to spin this as an assault on women’s rights rather than their own wallets. “You’re taxing a disorganized group that has no one of its own representing it,” one doctor told The New York Times. “There’s no American Society of Plastic Surgery Patients… You’re not going to have a million-man Botox march.” But fortunately for the poor, unheard masses, you really don’t need on-the-ground activism when you’ve already got Big Pharma in your corner. Women who hope to maintain access to plastic surgery will do just fine without any organized leadership or the support of prominent feminists, as long as the people who profit most from sexist beauty standards are leading the charge against this tax. Heaven knows they have more political power than middle-aged women do. In fact, it’s almost like that’s the core fucking problem here or something!

And then there’s this: Women die from the pursuit of youth and beauty through surgery. This week, an Argentine model. In 2007, Donda West. In 2004, Olivia Goldsmith. In 1996, Adrienne Brown. Two months ago in Miami, and who knows how many other times, a woman who had no public profile. Statistically, the risk of death may be minimal, but it can’t be ignored in a conversation about feminism and cosmetic surgery. Is the ability to potentially maim and kill ourselves to look younger and prettier really something we want to fight for?

Look, I have no beef with any woman, up to and including Gloria Steinem, choosing to have work done for her own reasons; as a feminist, I believe in bodily autonomy without exception. And I can absolutely understand choosing to maximize whatever privilege you have in an effort to secure your own future; it’s not pretty, so to speak, but I’m neither naive nor noble enough to demand that people quit doing that. And I don’t have high hopes that this tax will make a dent in the cost of more urgent healthcare concerns, so I really don’t care if it stays in or not. But it’s still galling to see feminist leaders spewing the exact same lines as far more powerful people and organizations who depend on sexist, ageist, racist beauty standards for their very livelihoods, essentially to defend the right of white women who can afford it (even if they really can’t) to make themselves appear more acceptable to sexist, ageist, racist employers. I like a good contrarian argument as much as the next overanalytical feminist, but no. Just no. Access to affordable cosmetic surgery is not a feminist issue. What drives women to risk not only their financial stability but their lives, because being seen as plain or old or ugly in this society can be just that devastating to their self-esteem and career prospects, is the feminist issue here.

: Kate Harding is the co-author of "Lessons From the Fatosphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce With Your Body" and has been a regular contributor to Salon's Broadsheet. More Kate Harding

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Lessons of a very sexy pirate costume

When I took the job at the bar, I looked down on it -- and the women who worked there. But I had so much to learn

By Jennifer Wright

Topics:Life stories, Feminism, Editor's Picks

The job description had me at “wear a pirate costume.” A sexy pirate costume, for the very sexy pirate-themed bar on Bleecker Street. The fact that the bar promised hundreds of dollars a night for selling people shots sounded quite all right, too.

I grappled for a few moments over what anyone would find sexy about an eye patch. It implied my eyeball had been gored in a fearsome bayonet fight with a British grenadier. I asked the manager whether I should look for a parrot. She was not charmed.

But by God, I was. I’d grow up on a steady diet of country club sandwiches and tennis lessons, and this was what I came to New York for: to do odd things, and see interesting people. People who went to pirate bars, for fun. I had been a model for art classes, but I had never been a pirate. I kept thinking of the Dorothy Parker poem “Song of Perfect Propriety” where she wrote:

I should like to strut and curse
Among my blackguard crew . . .
But I am writing little verse
As little ladies do

There would be time for a little verse years later, once I doffed my absolutely hilarious eye patch. Before I went in for my first day, I received a list of rules on ways to be a good shot girl. The first was:

Make up: Black mascara, lip-gloss, GLITTER around your eye.
Dress code: short black skirt and heals [sic].

So by “pirate” they meant “shiny eyed slattern with a rare gift for healing.” Like Mary Magdalene, maybe. Other tips just made me think that selling shots was going to be a weird, weird job.

Some people have fun eating from their own hands. Do not force feed anyone!

It had not occurred to me that I would deliberately force shots down people’s throats, though, years later, I find it hard to watch any romantic couple feeding one another without thinking, “Some people have fun eating from their own hands!”

But I imagined the women working at the bar would take such a list seriously. After all, women who make a living peddling shots weren’t going to be smart. They wouldn’t see the humor in any of this. I assumed my co-workers would be girls who spoke very, very slowly and thought that Puccini was a type of pasta. To their credit, I also imagined they’d have great hair, and I double-conditioned accordingly.

I was in love with my own incongruity — being a poetry-spouting college graduate in a pleather miniskirt. And I loved this notion of doing something at which I was entirely unsuited, and which seemed to go so much against my personality. I would never have said it at the time, but I very much believed I was above being a fun-loving pirate wench selling shots. I had read Meno and lived in cardigans and went to museums for fun.

I was a terrific little snob who thought she knew everything, and subsequently, I was about to learn a great deal.

As soon as I started, I realized I had no idea what I was doing. Fortunately, the other cocktail waitresses were quick to make suggestions. My first night on the job, a fellow shot girl offered practical advice. “You have to be a little cold,” she explained. “Make them feel like you’re doing them a favor by letting them buy shots.” But it’s difficult to maintain a Queen of Sheba demeanor while trying to rub globs of green glitter out of your eyes. Instead I became a level of friendly you typically only see at Disneyland, if Disneyland reeked of vomit and spilled appletinis. I doled out shots as people in cartoon costumes offer hugs. The manager would point out that I wasn’t being sexy enough, which was surprising, because I was wearing 6-inch heels and less clothing than I ever had.

It quickly became clear that I was not the first literate person to don a miniskirt. Sometime during that first week, I was hiding in the backroom reading Margaret Atwood. I was sitting on the counter next to baskets of party mix because my feet hurt, which they did for the entirety of my shot-selling career. One cocktail waitress swept in, asked what I thought of Atwood’s novel “Oryx and Crake,” did a tricky little analysis where she compared it to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” mentioned some other female dystopian writers I’d never heard of, and then went out balancing a tray of shots on one hand.

As ridiculous as it sounds, that was the first time I became aware that clever people are buried in every nook and cranny of life. It is astonishing that no one pointed this out to me sooner. The girls working at the bar — they were so bright. Another shot girl had a journal that she filled with poetry that was — that rarest of all rare things — crisp and clean and very, very good. This was never a bar where everyone knew your name, but the cocktail waitresses came to know one another’s reading lists, and pitch letters, and audition schedules extremely well.

Of course, we were all there for the money. Shots were sold starting at $3 — the bar received a dollar, the shot company another one and then one for the girl. But once you realized how comically overpriced $3 is for a shot, it’s just as easy to sell them for $4. A customer once suggested I try selling them for $5 and see what happened.

Taking price variations into account, and often considerable tips, and the fact that if you were good you could expect to sell around 100 shots in a six-hour evening, the money was — well, it was the kind of money that teachers in America really ought to make. Periodically, I compare how much I made on an hourly basis as a shot girl to what I make at a job that doesn’t require eye glitter and fishnets, and, barring the possibility that there is a job opening for “wildly corrupt dictator,” I think the result will depress me for the rest of my life.

I don’t mean to make the bar sound friendlier or more glamorous than it was. A great many customers were precisely the kind of people that you would expect to find at a pirate bar buying shots at 2 in the morning. Bottoms got grabbed. Bodies got groped. One customer rolled in nearly every night, wearing a pair of Ray Bans. One of the waitresses always served him while loudly humming “I wear my sunglasses at night.” I wondered aloud if he ever noticed that he was being mocked through Corey Hart’s soothing sounds, and the waitress laughed and said, “Oh, I just do it for me.”

And that’s when you realize that everyone — not just me and my superiority — knows they’re too good for this sort of job.

One night, an older woman came into the bar. I can’t imagine why; I suspect it wasn’t the beer pong. She was one of those very elegant ladies who put their hair up with bobby pins instead of elastic and wore a perfectly cut black dress. I assumed she was lost. She smiled, and gave me $100 and said, “You know, I used to work in a bar when I was younger. It won’t last forever.”

She was right, of course. It’s been years since I’ve been in that bar. But even now I cannot go into a bar or a restaurant without scanning the waitress’ shoes to see if they look comfortable. Every time anyone says something slightly dismissive to a cocktail waitress I am immediately, instinctively on her side, as if we were members of a blood-bonded clan.

I think about that older woman often, usually when I am pinning up my hair. I hope that, like her, I will not forget that strange period in my life, especially as I move past it. I think of the girls in the bar when I am — as I still am — too quick to dismiss people. When I am about to write someone off for their choice of eye shadow, I remember that they might be a fellow Atwood reader, and I wonder if she and I are in the same boat. Once in a while they are, and if that makes me feel slightly less special, it also makes the world seem much less lonely.

And in that way, the lady was quite wrong. Those times, and those alliances with a blackguard crew: Thank goodness, they do last forever.

: Jennifer Wright is the editor in chief of TheGloss.com. She has written for The New York Post, Maxim, Popular Mechanics, Time Out New York, Gourmet and The New York Observer. You can follow her on Twitter at JenAshleyWright. More Jennifer Wright

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In defense of ladyblogs

Yes, they've turned the Internet into an adult slumber party -- but that's a good thing

By Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

wisiel via Shutterstock

Topics:Feminism, Media Criticism

A longer version of this piece originally appeared on Autumn Whitefield-Madrano's Open Salon blog.

As a feminist who started my career at Ms. and wound my way through Glamour and Playboy before winding up at CosmoGIRL! — the exclamation point was part of the name — finding Jezebel shortly after its 2007 launch was delicious. I enjoyed it as a reader, and I enjoyed it even more as a worker in the industry they frequently critiqued, especially as I learned that some of their writers had been in my position: simultaneously excited and dismayed to be in the “pink ghetto,” eager to up the feminist content in glossy lady mags but frustrated by the conditions that Gloria Steinem labeled a “velvet steamroller.”

So it’s not surprising that I’m more kindly disposed to ladyblogs than n+1’s Molly Fischer appears to be. I was 30 when Jezebel launched, and still eager for what blogs of any sort provided; Fischer, at 20, had gone through adolescence with public critique a click away. I’ve also contributed to two of the four sites Fischer critiques (Jezebel and the Hairpin), undoubtedly coloring my attitude toward them. I cannot pretend impartiality.

I admit to being both excited by and uneasy about the n+1 piece. The whole article is worth a read, but in a nutshell, she looks at the evolution of ladyblogs, sites that give traditional women’s topics signature treatment. (Seventeen assures you that masturbating is totally normal; Rookie tells you how to do it.) The bigger the sites get, the more they adhere to what Fischer frames as a particular form of triteness endemic to ladyblogs, in which Zooey Deschanel is shunned but eco-friendly cat bonnets are squeal-worthy. Drained of the gravitas of other alternative women’s media, like explicitly feminist spaces, the potential for ladyblogs to become a true alternative to women’s glossies becomes watered down; the tool for revolution is rendered in scratch ‘n’ sniff. “The Internet, it turned out, was a place to make people like you: the world’s biggest slumber party, and the best place to trade tokens of slumber party intimacy—makeup tips, girl crushes, endless inside jokes,” Fischer writes. “The notion that women might share some fundamental experience and interests, a notion on which women’s websites would seem to depend—’sisterhood,’ let’s call it—has curdled into BFF-ship.”

What this argument overlooks is that a slumber party is sisterhood. Junior high slumber parties might have brought anything from makeovers to pained sobs over family dysfunction to raging tear-downs of pervy gym teachers. The adult slumber party touches on these, with our adult wisdom added to the mix. The voices of women online have brought me my birth control (“Ask Me About My Mirena!”), lessened my shame about my belly bulge, shined an uncomfortable light on the way social and personal notions of beauty can collide, and opened my mind to what I, as a biological woman, can learn about my own position in society from trans women. There’s fluff, of course (“Watch Kristen Bell Adorably Lose Her Shit Over a Sloth”), but just as silliness coexists alongside our more meaningful concerns, fluffy pieces can comfortably coexist alongside essays on healing from sexual assault. (In fact, for some of us, the fluff was a way to heal.) The slumber party goes all night, after all.

By talking about issues particular to women and treating them as though they matter, we create sisterhood. Ladyblogs do that in tones earnest, flip and everywhere in between; the “Women Laughing Alone With Salad” Hairpin post Fischer mentions is downright effervescent, and it went viral because it brilliantly encapsulated the way women are painted into a corner where if we’re happy to be eating, it must be because we’re being guilt-free. The post caught on because we all got it, and because we were all fed up with it too. Women laughing alone with salad was, in its own way, sisterhood, and to dismiss it as mere quirk is to dismiss the day-to-day stuff that makes up the particulars of a woman’s life.

Fischer ends her piece with a rallying cry for sites that stem from “the notion that women might share some fundamental experience and interests,” but I’m not convinced that the sites in question aren’t doing exactly that. They’re doing them in a more lightweight fashion than Fischer might desire, but the things that constitute gravitas (formality, for example) are frequently structures that purposefully omit the validity of the personal, that look to an “objective” viewpoint (as if there is any such thing) as the end-all, be-all. That is, they’re structures that dismiss the ways plenty of women have written for centuries. Here it comes, that clichéd rallying cry we feminists say over and over: The personal is political.

So it’s unclear what Fischer wants the reader to do — what, when I worked in women’s glossy magazines, we called “the takeaway.” Are we to eschew the Hairpin in favor of today’s equivalent of the Bimonthly Period, the newsletter of the women’s resource center Fischer’s mother founded during her college years? Sites like Feministing, Pandagon and Feministe play a crucial role in feminism, and therefore in women’s lives, even for women who have never heard of these sites, as they keep the activist fires burning. They can also occasionally feel alienating. I greatly enjoyed my guest blogging stint at Feministe last summer, but I also walked away from it understanding, for the first time, why some people whose politics roughly parallel mine refuse to call themselves feminists. For every commenter who thoughtfully critiqued my message, there would be one who’d say I was a tool of the patriarchy, and another who’d accuse me of abusing my class privilege. It’s a vibrant, razor-sharp community and I was honored to be a part of it, but my point is, if explicitly feminist blogs are the only acceptable online outlet for feminists to inhabit, we’d get exhausted mighty quickly.

Fischer hits plenty of nails on the head (you know, my opinions being the bed of nails), especially her questioning of the age-appropriateness of ladyblogs’ tone. I enjoy Rookie, helmed by 15-year-old Tavi Gevinson; in fact, I enjoy Rookie so much at age 35 that I began to wonder how many teenagers actually read it. I’ll happily cheer unabashed femininity, but like Fischer I’m wary of mass numbers of adult women inhabiting teen spaces. In fact, many of my feelings on this topic can be neatly summed up by an excellent Julie Klausner piece that — oops! — ran in Jezebel.

Still, despite finding aspects of adult-girl culture downright creepy (Hello Kitty?), I see other aspects as liberating. Where women’s magazines place readers on a trajectory of traditional womanhood — teenager to single woman to mommy to retiree — ladyblogs generally treat their readers as though they’re child-free adult women. Ladyblogs don’t mommy-track their readers, and that’s part of why “lady” makes so much sense in describing them. Classically speaking, ladies were put into a somewhat separate class. Ladies of recent centuries had social status; earlier, they had feudal privileges. The ladyblogs don’t use lady in that sense, but it carries a separatist air: We needn’t be quite as serious as we might when using the broader term “women,” but we don’t want to be girls. Fischer asserts that “On the ladyblogs, adult womanhood is a source of discomfort, and so when we write posts or comments, we tend to call ourselves ladies.” I’d argue the opposite: On the ladyblogs, adult womanhood is a given, and within our shared womanhood we carve out a comfortable space we can all inhabit. Within ladyblogs, we all become ladies.

The lingo may be why the presumably adult women on the ladyblogs (Rookie excluded, as it is aimed at teenagers) might seem to be clinging to girlhood. Fischer questions both the hallmarks of ladyblog style and the way its commenters pick up on it. In my own writing I rilly rilly try to avoid the clichés of the ladysphere (amirite, ladies?), because I don’t want to rely on those methods to convey my point. But as Emily Gould points out, it’s not like “commenter sycophancy” is particular to the ladyblogs. Still, it’s particularly easy to slip into ladysphere lingo, for the very reasons these clichés evolved in the first place: When skillfully employed, lady mags’ “endemic verbal tics” connote personality. Instead of the self-seriousness of magazines, lady lingo gives a tilt to the voice, one that implies we’re all in it together (which, again, is why it’s contagious). The tics serve as a friendly politesse, a way of conveying that you’re typing with a smile.

In fact, that seems to be Fischer’s larger point, and one I’m ambivalent on: Ladybloggers and their commenters are typing with a smile. “They bake pies with low-hanging fruit: they are helpful, agreeable, relatable, and above all likable,” Fischer writes. “Surely one can’t, and shouldn’t, strive to like and be liked all the time. But how else can one be?” (I couldn’t help but wonder how much time Fischer spent actually wading around in comments sections. The culture of “like” looms large, but ladyblog commenters can get vicious, and they’re certainly not afraid to disagree.)

The point is an excellent one, but two key points give me pause. First: What’s so wrong about wanting to be liked? I want to be liked; I want my writing to be liked. When I started the Beheld I repeatedly said that all I wanted was to be a part of the conversation. Some writers become a part of the conversation by being controversial, but that’s not my style. I’m a good girl from birth, and it’s built into me to want to be liked. But being liked isn’t my goal in writing; likability is a tool I use to pave my way toward the larger goal of being a part of the conversation, and occasionally hosting it too. There’s plenty to critique about women having a compulsive need to be liked, and it’s something I’ve wrestled with a good deal on a personal level. But I’m not going to apologize for couching arguments in a softer way than I would if my goal were to win.

But the larger issue here about likability is this: Maybe if more women writers were published in gender-neutral publications, writing stories that treat “women’s issues” as people issues, we wouldn’t be paranoid about being so fucking likable. This is a much deeper issue than I’m able to address here, and since most of my bylines have been in explicitly female-oriented spaces, I’m not particularly credible on this front. What I’ll say is that I’m not alone in being a female writer who writes about women’s issues who would be happy to publish in more gender-neutral spaces — and that I rarely pitch those spaces because there’s still a little voice inside me telling me that what I write about is just girl stuff. And people, this is what I do, every day: I write about girl stuff, and I treat it with the gravitas it has in my own life. But that voice is still there, and it’s a result of all sorts of things: internalized oppression, the realities of the “pink ghetto” of women’s issues, fear that if I did start writing more for gender-neutral outlets I’d have to face harsher criticisms than I usually do (the only time I’ve been forthrightly called stupid is from self-identified male commenters, and never on ladyblogs).

Despite my misgivings, I liked Fischer’s piece. I like the questions it asks, and I just like that it exists. Recent discussions about women writers and where our bylines ought to be need to continue, and they can’t continue in an authentic manner if we’re afraid of critiquing one another. Ladyblogs aren’t above reproach or critique, and given that some of them serve as watchdogs to traditional women’s media, if we become lax in watching the watchdogs we’re perpetuating the problem. I just don’t want the conversation to be a ping-pong of should we or shouldn’t we, of ladyblogs versus the rest of the Internet. I want the sentiment behind Fischer’s piece to be explored so that whatever these spaces look like in five years, they’re serving women’s needs even more.

Perhaps it’s the women’s magazine veteran in me, but I want a “takeaway” from Fischer’s piece, and I want it to be something like this: We’re in an interesting time as far as gender and access to the public, and we’re also at a time when “voice” is a prime asset for online visibility — “voice” being something women writers have traditionally been told they excel at. We’re also living in a time of fragmented, personally curated information streams, one in which a person could read a handful of sites — even ladyblogs, depending on the blog — and have a reasonable handle on what’s going on in the world. So we’re at the era, and if the proliferation of ladyblogs is any indication, we’ve got the talent. Now what are we going to do with it?

: Autumn Whitefield-Madrano examines beauty at The Beheld. Her essays have appeared in Glamour, Marie Claire, and Jezebel, and she is a contributing editor at The New Inquiry. More Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

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What is it about red lipstick?

From Elizabeth Taylor to Cleopatra, women who wear it make history. Was I ready to be one of them?

By Larissa Zimberoff

Topics:Body Wars, Life stories, Feminism, Editor's Picks

Mom used to tell me to “put a little lipstick on” before I left the house. “You need a little color,” she’d say. To this day, I notice when I look a bit pale. An outfit never seems complete without the shine of lipstick. I’ve mostly stuck to safe colors, never quite sure my face should call so much attention to itself. But as I moved from my hometown in California to the big city of New York — a new career and a new coast — I was ready for a lip color that matched my life change. This meant only one thing: red.

My search for the perfect shade of red took me to a SoHo store on Spring Street. The boutique was far from welcoming: a cavernous black-walled room with a black floor, black leather chairs, and spotlights that shined from high above. It was far more theatrical than I’ve ever thought of myself.

“Hi, welcome to MAC,” an assistant greeted me, as I began to glide carefully around the shiny, foreign objects.

Wandering around this highly specialized world of make-believe, I began to question my desire to cover up my lips in something significantly darker. My thin lips, I should add. Because really, no matter how hard I try, they’re still slashes of chopsticks instead of a big Angelina Jolie pout. Recently, at a birthday party, a few of us clambered into a bedroom to put on some lipstick before heading to a bar. There, on the dresser, sat a tube of MAC Red. In one aha moment, we all put it on. Three girls of all colors, shapes and sizes. Kissing out our lips, we looked in the mirror, looked at each other and walked out the door.

It was dizzying to think what such a simple product contained. The main components of lipstick are wax (from bees, cacti, palm and roses), fat (from sheep and mink), man-made fatlike products (compounds that provide a more consistent feel), mineral waxes (from coal and petroleum), as well as a number of other unlisted solvents, solids and synthetic products. Looking into the ingredients I use every single day made me less inclined to investigate further. Was I willing to give up my search? Or even to stop wearing lipstick?

As I moved around the store, I kept my gaze low to avoid eye contact with the black-outfitted strangers. But I couldn’t find what I needed. “I’m looking for a lipstick,” I said. “MAC Red?” Even forming the words felt odd. I wasn’t sure what had come over me. Why the sudden need to wear such an extreme color. Was it a way to reinvent myself? I wasn’t about to cut my long hair short or lose 20 pounds. Did I need some dramatic physical change to feel like there had been one inside? Was I trying to convince myself that I was moving forward?

When I read about why women wear lipstick I see words like: sexuality, rebellion, deception, arousal. I see a dangerous woman in a black and white movie. She’s running from the law, doing bad things, sleeping with criminal men. Of course, she’s dressed impeccably. Tailored shirt hugging her curves. Tucked, belted and cinched. Her hourglass bod is the perfect backdrop for a deep, dark, perfectly red red. Was I like those women? Did I have what it took to wear red — or would the red wear me?

Lipstick traveled a roundabout journey before inserting itself into my makeup routine. It was documented as far back as 3,000 B.C., when Mesopotamian women tinted their lips with a mixture made of red clay, rust, henna, seaweed and iodine, among other things. As time went by, women would continue to get creative with lip color. Cleopatra mixed crushed ants and carmine with beeswax. Lip color was once so important that well-heeled ancient Egyptians were tucked away in their tombs with jars of crimson lip color to ensure an elegant look in the afterlife.

Brian, the assistant, walked me over to the lipsticks and we looked for the right shade of red. We started looking at the names on the bottom of the tubes: Russian Red, Cockney, Lady Bug and Ruby Roo. But no MAC Red. He gave me Russian Red and nudged me over to the mirror. The first thing I noticed was that I couldn’t see myself. The mirror was too far away for my eyes.

I often notice old ladies on the street. I see their shoes, comfortable and thick-soled. They’re waiting for the bus or walking down the street, clutching at pocketbooks that hide ancient tubes of lipstick along with the last bits of their prime. They never leave the house without a stroke of bright pink across their lips. Lips that can tell stories but that no longer contain the hue of youth. A few weeks ago I saw the play “Relatively Speaking” on Broadway. Marlo Thomas plays a woman who finds out her husband has just died in a skiing accident. Don’t worry, it’s funny. She was phenomenal in the show, but what I noticed more than her acting? Her shiny, medically assisted, pillow-shaped lips. Lips so large they looked like rafts floating in a pool. Marlo Thomas is 74 years old. Maybe it’s similar, this vanity we have to look better, to be someone different. It’s not like I can see my lipstick, or Marlo Thomas can see her rafts. Is altering my appearance for me, or is it for the eye of the other?

As I pushed and pulled on the heavy base of the leather chair, struggling to get closer, Brian found the MAC Red I was looking for. “Here it is,” he said. After I gently dotted the pigment onto my lips, I looked in the mirror. This cavern has bad lighting. I looked for another mirror. The wise assistant finally gave me a hand-held mirror. Looking at myself, as if for the first time, I saw my thin lips, my pale face, dark brown hair and I wondered, is this red really for me?

“It’s too pink on you,” Brian said.

“Yeah, you’re right.” Why was I so quickly agreeing with this stranger? “Anything else I should try?”

Wiping off my MAC Red with a handful of tissues I could still see traces of the color. Easy to remove it was not. I tried wiping at it with my hand, like a kid who’d just finished a glass of punch. Brian watched me with amused pity as I started to apply the Russian Red with the same hesitancy. “Can I help?” he asked, and quickly took over. No more gentle dotting. He went in with full pressure, gliding the color deep and dark over my lips. Handing me back the mirror I looked at myself. Then I looked up at him. Did I look better? Whose opinion did I trust? The mirror or Brian?

Red-lipsticked women are women who make history: Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, Lucile Ball, Paloma Picasso and Isabella Rosselini to name just a few. Stage actresses began the trend, wearing red lipstick so they could be seen from the back of the theater. In black-and-white movies they wore red lipstick because, in the absence of color, it was the quickest way to convey a deep, dark lip. Lips that meant business.

“No, that’s not it either,” Brian said. “Try the MAC Red on again, but this time Really Put It On.” He put his hand on hip, eyebrow raised. A hint of a gauntlet thrown.

“OK,” I said, following up with another tissue attack, leaving my mouth pink and raw. Pressing the lipstick firmly on, I tried to apply it with the confidence of Red. Unafraid, like the bull running in San Fermin. I could do this. Starting with my bottom lip, the easier target, I moved from one corner to the next with relative ease. Moving to my top lip, I faltered. Afraid to get red outside my lip line I moved like a blind person seeing their lips for the first time. In the mirror I saw the skin around my lips, lightly freckled, a sprinkling of light hair. I noticed how my upper lip was made mostly of angles. Isosceles triangles maybe, but nary a curve. I hoped the red would impart some contour to the sharp angles.

I put the lipstick down and looked up at Brian.

“Better. Much better,” he said.

In the late ’80s, the artist Marilyn Minter created a series of glossy paintings featuring sexualized women. The one I have in my head is of a bold red-lipped woman. She’s holding a pearl necklace in her slightly opened mouth. We don’t see her eyes, just the voluminous pearls tumbling from that red mouth. Minter has said about her work, “Women should make images for their own pleasure.” I think Marilyn would be happy to see me wearing this red. I certainly derive a bit of pleasure from it. Mine alone.

It was 5 p.m. when I left the store. My lips were the color of a Geisha’s. I had a tube of MAC Red tucked into my purse, and as I walked through SoHo I felt different – like I had presence. My lips were no longer invisible dashes. The red outlined a new shape: The two peaks at the top, the curve at the bottom. I was standing up just a little straighter as I walked back home, eyes gazing directly in front of me, saying, “Yeah, go ahead, look at me.”

: More Larissa Zimberoff

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Dear female students: Stop writing about men

Guys in my class don't feel the need to dissect broken relationships. Why do the women? For that matter, why did I?

By Lorraine Berry

(Credit: Adam Radosavljevic via Shutterstock)

Topics:Life stories, Women writers, Feminism, Coupling

My college students write a 20-page piece of creative nonfiction at the end of every semester, many of them memoirs. Over the years, I have heard about suicide attempts, rapes, arrests and the deaths of friends. I can never predict what they’ll write about, but here is one constant: The females in the class tend to write about a romantic relationship, and the males do not.

I’m not saying my male students are not sensitive. Some have detailed abuse at the hands of relatives; years spent in the foster system; hunting trips with their fathers; the thrill of learning to race motorcycles; but only once or twice in the nine years I’ve been teaching these courses has a guy expressed his need to understand why a relationship has fallen apart.

But the women do. They write reams about The One, or the One Who Got Away. Sometimes, the student outlines in heartbreaking detail the lengths she went to maintain a relationship — transferring schools so they could be closer, putting up with poor treatment, and so on — all to no avail. At some point, the relationship ends, and she’s left mourning the person she imagined to be her great love. Another common theme — and this one never fails to shock me — is the young woman who discovers her boyfriend is cheating by reading his texts on his cellphone. So he’s cheating, but she’s invading his privacy. I have to still my hand from writing “WTF?” in the margins.

I resist the urge to critique the relationships as they are explained to me; I’m not their counselor, I’m a creative writing teacher, and so I focus on ideas like resonance, tone, use of language, narrative structure and the Sisyphean task of my job: copy-editing. But many times, I have wanted to write letters to these young women in which I explain my complicated feelings about what they are going through. How, at 48 and settled into a long-term relationship with the man I love, I wish for them greater adventures in their lives than simply falling in love. I do have female students who have written about other things: time spent overseas; learning how to pick up your life after your best friend dies in a car accident; life with an alcoholic parent; the camaraderie they experienced playing a team sport. But too often, it is the same story: He doesn’t love me. He loved me and then stopped. Why didn’t he ever love me?

It’s enough to make my feminist bristles stand on end. Why is it all about men? I think, rolling my eyes. Can’t they write about something outside of their world of two?

And then I remember what I was like at that age. If the younger me were to write an essay for this class, it might well have wrestled with the dynamics of a relationship. I have been writing about the men in my life for a long, long time.

I started keeping journals when I was 10. My first entries were about fights with my little brothers, or my desires about what I wanted to be when I grew up, or trying to figure out why my best friend and I were not getting along.

I have other diaries, too. They embarrass me, especially the ones from my late teens and early 20s. Who was this young woman who was so caught up in thinking about young men and what they thought of her? Who measured each part of her body so that, when she measured those parts again, she would be able to show that she had made progress in her desire to be stronger and thinner? Where were this young woman’s dreams? Was all she ever thought about was how she looked to men, or how she looked at men? It was what a friend of mine calls “me myopia.” Me, alone. Me, not good enough. Me. Me.

And that’s what I see in these young women’s papers. This fear of being alone and the desire to be rescued from the “me” in all of this.

So, I write in the margins about the style in which they’ve written something, or that they’re telling not showing, but I also want to tell these students that there is more to life than guys. That I wasted too much of my time thinking about men, and it was only the creation of a life that was my own — not theirs — that made it possible for me to let go of the obsessive thinking.

I want to tell them that they are in the midst of years that they won’t get back. That college is more than hooking up and drinking and hooking up and thinking about how to make this or that young man like you. That the heart that was broken your freshman year of college will undoubtedly get broken again, and it will, as has often been said, heal stronger at the broken places.

But, at age 20, would I have listened to my own advice?

I am now at an age where I am old enough to be their mother. And, as with my own experiences as a mother, I wish there were a magic formula for making a broken heart feel better. One of the most painful things I have experienced as a mom is watching my own children hurt from a broken heart. And, when I’m dealing with that, I don’t chastise my children for falling in love: I hold their hands, tell them I know how much it hurts, that I’m sorry.

With the students in my class, I always hope that simply writing down what happened will allow them to see — in black and white — that perhaps “Mr. Right” wasn’t so right after all. That’s not for me to say to them, but I always hope that the evidence narrated in the essay will become a form of self-teaching. It was through the process of writing that truths about my own life were revealed to me.

In addition to my other embarrassing diaries, there is the diary from 1985, when I went to live in France at the age of 22. In it, I see traces of the me I shall become. Yes, I struggled with loneliness. The total immersion program I was in forbade me to speak English, even with my fellow English-speaking students, and so I had to learn to communicate in foreign words and phrases. Eventually sentences and paragraphs. And, as each day showed progress in my language skills, something was happening to me, too: I had to learn to be in a foreign language, too. And as small as I had felt when I first arrived, I began to feel a stirring. I have never-sent postcards from that time in which I write about wanting to find a connection to something bigger than myself but which I could not name.

I hold onto these postcards, self-indulgent though it may be, to remind myself that discomfort and fear and loneliness are often the first signs of growth. I understand my solitude in such a different way now. It is a tool I use to get writing done, even when what I want to do is go in search of my children or my lover and see what they are up to. Being a writer is not just thrashing about trying to figure out why he doesn’t love you — though it can be that — it is also finding a place where you can be alone and it’s OK. It’s more than OK. It’s right.

It is raining outside as I return to my grading. Another young woman has begun her story about how the guy she met at a party last year seemed like he was going to be Mr. Right, and it’s taken her months to be able to write about this. I grip my pen tighter, take a deep breath.

The cars are making that noise, that sluuussssssshing as tires cut through water. It is a melancholy sound, and eight years ago, it was my accompaniment as I wrote my own tale of a wrecked heart. I have to remember that as I, once again, offer my editing tips on how to turn a single tale of woe into the universal tale of female longing that years of teaching have taught me it is.

: Lorraine Berry is a contributing writer at Talking Writing and a columnist at Does This Make Sense? Her unpublished memoir, "Word Lovers," for which she is seeking literary representation, has been optioned for film. She lives and teaches in the Finger Lakes region of New York. More Lorraine Berry

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Egypt’s sexual counterrevolution

As society democratizes, social conservatives seek to reassert control over women

By Khaled Diab

Egyptian women face a counterrevolution (Credit: AP/Hossam Ali)

Topics:Egypt, Feminism

Half a world away from the Republican presidential primaries where candidates vie to outlaw birth control and promote abstinence, ban pornography and condemn the “sin” of homosexuality, Egypt’s first post-revolution parliamentary election was, thanks to the Islamists, dominated by similar issues.

As the first anniversary of the revolution approaches this week, Egypt is facing a spate of urgent political, social and economic issues, such as mass youth unemployment, a tanking economy and a cabal of die-hard generals who just refuse to call it quits. But you wouldn’t know it from listening to the discourse of Islamists, particularly the hard-line Salafist Nour party, which has focused attention on issues of “morality,” including talk of banning booze, prohibiting or restricting bikinis and censoring “sex scenes” in Egypt’s vibrant film industry.

Although women from all walks of life have been at the forefront of the popular uprising and are treated as relative equals by the revolutionary youth movement that has orchestrated the revolution, the burden of this moralizing, as is often the case, has fallen on the shoulders of women. This has led Egypt’s secular, liberal women and feminists to look to the immediate future with a mixture of apprehension and worry.

“When Egyptian media spends hours and hours discussing bikinis and alcohol with presidential candidates, it tells you where women are going,” says Marwa Rakha, an Egyptian writer, broadcaster and blogger. “After the revolution, we saw women exposed to humiliating virginity tests, fired at, beaten up, arrested, molested and stripped naked by army officers. Why would I be optimistic?”

But why is Egypt’s Islamic right so obsessed with sex and women, and seems to view both as the root of all evil?

Rakha sees a cynical populist ploy. “They want attention, lights and media presence. How else will they get there unless they talk about women and their evil bodies?” she said.

“These are issues that people can relate to on a personal level,” explains Karima Abedeen, a secular British-Egyptian living in Cairo. “They are also vague and not quantifiable and most of the people who use these issues as their platform haven’t a clue about how to solve any of the other, more urgent social and political issues.”

On a more ideological plane, Muslim conservatives have successfully painted sexual liberty and gender equality as a Western import designed to weaken Egypt’s Islamic identity and corrupt Egyptians. The argument is that only by embracing Islamic traditions and morals wholeheartedly can Egyptians resist Western hegemony and recaputure their past glory.

“Focusing on issues of morality sends a message to the community that parties like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis will protect our Islamic identity against the Western identity, which liberals try to promote,” observes Gihan Abou Zeid, an Egyptian activist and feminist who is working on a book about the women who took part in the revolution. “Many Egyptians believe that following Islamic orders would fix many of the current challenges that Egypt is facing.”

In this, Islamists and their supporters are confusing the symptoms with the disease. The reason Egyptian society is failing its people is not because it has veered too far from tradition, but because it has not embraced secular modernity enough, resulting in the relative marginalization not only of women but of young people too.

Similar to America’s Christian fundamentalists, Egypt’s Islamists and other social conservatives are alarmed by the corrosion of the traditional patriarchal order caused by the increasing emancipation of women. The loss of centuries of male privilege, especially in the public sphere, that this entails fuels the panicky public obsession with what should be private issues, such as virginity and promiscuity. In this worldview, strong, independent women are regarded with suspicion, as if they are carrying a volatile sex bomb that will explode upon contact with freedom and shred the fabric of society in its wake.

But despite the clear similarities between social conservatives in Egypt and America, the social context in which they operate is quite different. Egyptians on the whole may not necessarily be more religious than Americans, who seem far less inclined to abandon their faith than Europeans, but Egyptians interpret their faith far more traditionally.

Secularization has progressed much further in America than in Egypt, where it has been partially discredited through its association both with Western neo-imperialism and the corruption and failure of Egypt’s secular dictatorships. American Christian fundamentalism is a movement founded on freedom and imperial swagger, whereas Egyptian Islamism is a reaction to weakness and decline. The people who have been stripped of power in society for decades are focusing on those few areas on which they have been able to exercise control, i.e., “morality.”

Whereas religion is a fairly flexible and personal affair in America, in Egypt, religion, or tradition, is more often than not about conformity. And those who challenge this hegemonic view often suffer for their “indiscretion,” as witnessed by the massive overreaction by Egyptian society pretty much in its entirety to the decision by a bold art student, Aliaa Elmahdy, to post naked images of herself on her blog to protest the growing Islamization of society and to demand freedom of expression.

This traditionalist mind-set also partly explains the paradox that, although millions of Egyptian women have entered academia and the workforce, often outdoing and outperforming men, they have not become sexually freer but have had to compromise by stressing their “virtue” through adoption of the hijab. As men lose control of women in the public sphere, they try harder to control them in the family, suggests Abou Zeid.

Even Egypt’s secularists, although they view women more as their equals, share the Islamists’ objectification of the female form. “The secularists and the conservatives are two faces of the same coin when it comes to women,” concludes Rakha. “Most of the politicians in both currents objectify women; one side wants to cover us and lock us up, while the other wants to strip us naked and show us off.”

That said, there are significant differences between the right-of-center and heterogeneous Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) and the Salafis. For example, Abou Zeid points to the fact that the Brotherhood is not against women working, albeit within limits, but the Salafis want them to “return” to the home.

The Salafis, she also adds, want to force women to cover their faces, as demonstrated by their vigilante “morality police,” who have been roaming rural areas of Egypt, though, fortunately, Egyptian women have been fighting back.

“The Salafis are mad. They represent the very, very dark ages. The Muslim Brotherhood are not all bad,” says Abedeen. “I think the fact that the Salafis exist should push the Muslim Brotherhood toward a less conservative approach.”

In addition to the likelihood that the FJP will align itself to liberal, albeit economically conservative parties, the wind is not yet out of the sails of the secular revolutionaries who have so far spearheaded change in Egypt, as illustrated by the defiant “Revolution Continues” movement.

One consequence of the revolution is that it has empowered the previously marginalized, namely the young and women, and made them believe that they can be agents of their own destiny. “Attitudes toward women are better among the young generation, particularly the middle class, to which most of the politically active women belong,” notes Abou Zeid.

This is bound to widen the gap between the young generation and secularists, on the one hand, and older generations and traditionalists, on the other, leading to a more polarized social landscape. “I think that women’s attitudes toward themselves have changed,” observes Abedeen. “The new generation of women is much stronger than older generations and is much less willing to compromise.”

Abedeen also believes that once Egyptians see what the Islamists are like in power, they will soon fall out of love with them.

“I am trying to stay positive and tell myself that it is natural that people should gravitate toward a more conservative option, hoping that these people will not be corrupt,” she says. “I am hoping, down the road, that people will realize that is not the way forward for Egypt.”

It will be largely up to Egyptian women to carve out their rightful place in society.

“Looking at Egypt now, I see a lot of courageous defiant women, but I also see millions who realize how oppressed they are, yet do nothing about it,” says Rakha. “It is up to each woman on her own, in her house, at her desk, in her car, on her way to and from places. This is an individual fight whose collective gains and losses will reflect on the status of Egyptian women.”

: Khaled Diab is an Egyptian journalist based in Jerusalem. His website is Chronikler. More Khaled Diab

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