Saturday, June 12, 2010

My Lady Icons: the Pursuit of Being Beautiful

When I was around five years old I remember my mother showing me a music video. Strange, that memory; this was before we had cable at the house,but, still, the image persists. And what a series of images they were. The music was itself alien, a strange synthetic pulse, but beautiful anyway. Dark. And then the woman singing the music. Well, I remember watching quietly, staring at her narrow-shouldered, flickering form on the screen. She was, I thought, quite possibly the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, was quite possibly the most beautiful woman in the world. There she was, talking about how strange and scary desire can be (although I didn't understand the intricacies of all that just yet) while wearing a carefully tailored men's suit, her hair buzzed short and dyed a confrontational shade of orange. She was not pretty in the way most women I had yet seen were presented as pretty, she was, in fact, blurring the line of being a woman at all, and yet her face was perfect, skin flawless, features symmetrical and makeup carefully applied. And it was a lot of makeup, slick and shimmering, the high angles of her face smoothed to an almost inhuman sheen. The video was for the Eurythmics "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)," the woman was, of course, Annie Lennox.

I followed Annie from that moment onward. I remember one night, not much older, seeing her video for "Walking on Broken Glass" and wrapping my head up in a scrap of red velour in hopes of mimicking the turban rocked by Ms. Lennox in her John Malkovich-yearning world. I think I mostly just succeeded in amusing my mother, and convincing her of what a weird kid I was. And really, it was weird. I don't know that most little girls idolize women who manage to be androgynous and over-the-top glamorous at once. And I didn't stop with Annie. Not many years later, VH1 started airing reruns of the Cher show, and I was absolutely IN LOVE. I mean, bizarrely, obsessively in love. I thought that Cher was the single most exotic and elegant creature to grace the face of the planet. The first C.D. I ever asked for as a gift was Cher's greatest hits. She was, to me, not far different from the unicorns and magical, twinkling sea creatures that covered the piles of Lisa Frank merchandise I invested my allowance in. I loved her and her Bob Mackie costumes, her long black hair. Most of all, I loved the character she presented herself as: someone sassy and funny, sometimes downright deadpan mean. Cher was not a wilting flower, she seemed, on the T.V. screen, as though she could be six feet tall and made of steel.


I continued, throughout my childhood, to maintain a fascination with glittery, near-absurd, glamorous figures. When RuPaul had her show on VH1, I watched it as often as I could. At first, my mother hesitated to let me follow the program; Ru was, after all, very adult fare, cracking dirty jokes with her guests. My siblings teased me endlessly about my unstoppable attempts to sneak viewings, but finally everyone was swayed to let me watch in peace by my deadly seriousness about the thing. RuPaul was, in my mind, a beautiful and fascinating woman. Of course, I understood that RuPaul was a man, too, but rather than being a repulsive or confusing fact, that was part of the intrigue for me. Ru seemed to be in on a big and wonderful secret, a secret that Cher and Annie and any number of other (in my mind) lesser ladies I followed were in on as well: that being a woman was really a funny sort of thing, that all the makeup and the clothes were sort of, well, silly, and as long as they had to do such a silly thing as be a “beautiful” woman, they were going to have fun with it.

I've continued to be fascinated by this sort of lady throughout my life, a sort that is over-the-top in her presentation and seemingly uninterested in tailoring her image to please anyone but herself. It's taken me years, though, to sit back and analyze exactly why I'm so intrigued by women like this, a very vague classification that I can only say remains defined, in my mind, by Annie and Cher and Ru. The conclusion I've come to is essentially this: I am drawn to these women because, in an industry, and a world, that promotes a very narrow definition of what is "feminine" and "attractive," these are people who seem to be fully aware of and yet uninterested in conforming to those ideas. It is, however, more complex than that. These are figures who are, in many ways, hyper-feminine. They recognize that women are expected to have perfect make-up and nice hair and be drawn to shiny, pretty things and they take all of those things to their extreme. They costume themselves, and as such are commenting on the fact that all clothes and hair and all of it are is a costume, a way to express oneself, not an indicator of worth or usefulness. I think these women, with their awareness of the silliness of the physical, have appealed to me for so long because I have never been much at home in my body. Not that I've really struggled with feeling unattractive (although of course I think everyone on the planet has those moments of doubt), but rather that, since I was a little girl, I found it odd to be connected with and judged on a body that I had very little control over.

I've always been a gal who is more in touch with her mind, more interested in thinking about things and imagining, than in her body. And the older I got the more foreign my body felt. It still makes me feel uncomfortable and somewhat confused when people compliment me on my appearance. Of course, it is always nice to get compliments, and most people mean well by it, but it seems odd that something my genetics and not my achievements decided should garner me any attention. When I went through puberty, I found myself feeling at an almost total disconnect from my own form. I had always pictured myself growing up into the sort of androgynous, slim and flat-chested, odd figure that would be able to wear loose low-cut shirts and men's clothing and be taken seriously. There I was, fourteen, longing to be Patti Smith, to confront the male gaze, to prove that I was smart and different and didn't have to appeal to men in the big-boobed, soft-hipped way that they wanted. And then my body changed. Then I became big-boobed, softer hipped. I had no idea what to do with myself. I was entirely lost. I had spent so much time in my scrawny pre-teen days building up anger at girls with traditionally desirable frames as somehow being at fault for their desirability that I had absolutely no idea what to do with my own, new "womanly" figure. Throughout high school I would hear things from boys like "Man, she's weird, but she's got a nice body. Bet she's great in bed." I became attractive not, as I had hoped, because of my personality, but rather in spite of it. I hated it. I hated myself.

It wasn't until my later days of high school, long past the point of caring about anyone's good opinion of me, that I returned to thinking seriously about my earlier icons, about Annie and Cher and Ru and their big beautiful makeup and strange hair. I thought about them a lot, and I thought about myself (as any seventeen year old spends a majority of their time doing). That's when I realized why I liked them so much, when I became aware that maybe, for me, the easiest way to become comfortable in my own skin was to acknowledge how ridiculous everyone's expectations of me, based on my body and appearance, were. I tell my friends these days that I don't really consider that I get dressed in the morning so much as I get costumed. I love fashion, and I like to have specific inspirations for an outfit in mind, whether it be a famous figure or a film or a photograph. I particularly love clothing from the 1950's and 60's, things that emphasize that "womanly" figure I once felt so uncomfortable with. And I don't wear those outfits because I'm trying to seduce anyone with my assets, I wear them because they're fun and, often, funny. I wear them because I damn well want to. And that's what Cher and Annie and RuPaul helped me to accept, the same reason I stand solidly by Lady GaGa and her infinite number of costuems: it's hard being a gal, with all the incredible, conflicting things expected of us, so it might as well be interesting and it might as well be fun. You might as well dress however the hell you want. I prefer a bouffant, a full face of shimmer, and a good sense of humor.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

An Inaugural Blogging Post: Discussion Of A Thing That Annoys Me, Among Many

I graduated from college two weeks ago, which, with the current economy and the oil spilling into the ocean and the general breaking open of the earth's crust and releasing of hell-demons ringing in the oncoming apocalypse and feasting on the flesh of innocents, means that I have moved back in with my parents, back into the same room I was living in at seventeen. And boy, what a whirlwind that has been. Really stings the eyes with a sense of endless possibility. Of course, I'm not alone. I would say a solid seventy five percent of my graduating class (this is based on serious scientific statistical data) is currently unemployed, dining with their families and praying for a merciful death. Those that do have jobs are weirdos. Overachievers. Nerds. No one likes nerds; they smell weird, probably from handling all the money they earn at their unholy “jobs” selling babies to the aforementioned hell-demons. And we all know what those demons do with innocents. In any case, here I am, doing what any uselessly educated loser does: blogging. And watching “2001: A Space Odyssey” at three in the morning, a film that, from what I can tell, is a lighthearted comedy about monkeys in space.

Obviously, then, I have an abundance of time on my hands, time I've been using to catch up on some music blogs, digging through mp3s of boring remixes and leaked tracks from upcoming hip-hop albums. The other day I stumbled upon a She and Him cover of the Smiths' “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want.” She and Him as in the band fronted by Zooey Deschanel. Covering the Smiths. After my initial dizziness and nausea wore off, I thought about what, exactly, my reaction meant. It's a response I often have to encountering Zooey, one that's hard if not impossible to explain to most people. There is, to me, something fundamentally unsettling, something incessantly grating, about the actress. “But why?” I asked myself as I was wiping the sweat from my pale brow, “Why so visceral, so nasty, a reaction to a girl who is, by all accounts, cute and talented and not nearly so offensive as any number of other figures active in the world today?” And, well, all of those things are good arguments for Zooey. Though I may personally find her music to be as exciting as warm milk and Klonopin cocktail, she does have a good voice. She works with M. Ward. He's talented! She even writes her own songs. She's talented! And she's not a bad actress, not really. So why so much hate? Why can't I choke down my bile when it comes to her?

First, I should make it clear that my disgust isn't personal. I mean, Zooey Deschanel the person doesn't exist so much as Zooey Deschanel the idea. She's quirky! She has nice hair! She wears cute little dresses! My problem is that she has become the representative, in the minds of many, of what the ideal “alternative” girl is. And that's the core of it. The whole point of there being an “alternative” lifestyle is that it's different from the mainstream set of standards, so what does it say that there are so many people who seem to feel they deserve applause for having the sophistication and openness of mind to be attracted to this very beautiful, very conventionally beautiful, woman? And, again, allow me to stress my awareness that there are far worse people to praise, that Zooey at least has interests and talents and all that jazz, but I do question how much interest the people who love her have in her actual output. Further, Zooey seems representative of a larger trend in the idea of what even the ideal “different” girl should be. Elfin, giggly, deemed “interesting” but never seeming to express any particularly strong opinions about anything. And isn't that just a little bit scary? Is there no outlet where girls are allowed to be as sassy (or not) as they want to be? Where the hell is the arena for girls to be strong and funny if even in the outfield, when once we saw Courtney Love on MTV and Janeane Garofalo in movie theaters, the zaniest option we can come up with is a woman from a Hollywood family who is traditionally beautiful and relatively soft spoken, whose craziest moments come from the occasional vintage dress? And don't mistake me, soft-spoken, beautiful girls: I want every lady to be precisely what she is, nothing more or less.


What's unsettling about Zooey's popularity is that it seems prescriptive. It seems like a lot of girls these days, girls who are considered squarely in the “alternative” category, manufacture a persona that's quiet of voice and precious in presentation. Manufacture being the main word, here. Being quiet and precious is just fine if it's genuinely who you are, but Christ, can't we give girls a break from absurd standards even in counterculture? There seems no corner where a gal can be weird and truly outlandish without being simultaneously being deemed unattractive. And it's about enough. Let's see some dames being praised for being chill broads for a change. Let's try, just for a minute or two, not briefly mentioning a lady's talent and skipping quickly to the list of all the reasons she gives us a boner. Let's give Zooey a rest, and find some other interesting women to admire. And, dear god, let's avoid covering the works of Morrissey. You're giving me acid reflux.