"Sometimes for years at a time, sometimes for her whole life, every woman battles with her body and her beauty as if they let her down. Every woman knows the damage done, the secret insecurities she carries, her feelings of not being good enough if she is not attractive enough, of wishing to have another body besides her own or look like someone she is not. Every woman knows. Every girl learns."
When Dr Gabrielle Hosein wrote those words in her Guardian column of March 28, in the context of the damaging nature of sexist advertising, some men just didn't get it. What's the big deal about it? Why can't women just ignore these images and get on with their lives?
Some time last year, I stopped wearing make-up. It was an experiment–since I was about 19 I'd resisted being photographed or doing interviews without make-up on and I felt in a way imprisoned by this choice. I say choice but in fact I felt I had no choice: to show myself, my face stripped of all its masks, left me feeling vulnerable and ashamed.
Without make-up, you can see all my moles and skin tags, the circles under my eyes, the uneven skin tone. You can barely see my eyes, which frankly disappear when I smile; and the scars and spots that dot my face loom huge and obvious without the cover of foundation. At least, this is what my mind told me.
Last year I just stopped. No eyeliner or mascara to "fix" my narrow eyes and short, straight eyelashes; no foundation and powder to cover the spots and scars. I took photos of this naked face and posted them on Facebook; I went to parties; I even did a reading or two, completely free of make-up. But last Friday was the acid test: a TV talk show appearance. I survived my first make-up-free TV appearance. Not only that, I was actually fine and didn't feel worried that my naked face was being broadcast worldwide.
The thing is, though, that I love make-up. It can be dramatic and artistic, and I have always enjoyed playing with it, my face a canvas for experimentation. What I didn't like was the tyranny of it, the feeling that I had to wear it to be appropriately turned out for my public life. My experiment was a difficult one, but Friday I considered it successfully concluded.
On Saturday, my brother and I were at the mall and I took advantage of the free demos at a store to have my face made up. Afterwards, my brother and I talked about it, and about women's insecurities, the insecurities Gab discusses in the above quotation. Women, he said, are always worried that they are too tall or too short, too fat or too thin. If they have slim calves they have "thin foot" and if they have muscular calves, "their calves too hard."
Their hair is too straight or too curly, too thick or too thin. Their bottoms are too round or too flat, and their breasts too saggy or too small. It is an unrelenting dissatisfaction with ourselves that most heterosexual men don't comprehend because they don't experience it themselves.
They get big bellies, they lose their hair without really worrying about what people will say. Most of the men I know don't even use facial moisturiser–far less for UV-protection for daytime and collagen for night–because it doesn't matter if men get wrinkles. They certainly couldn't care less.
Biologically, female humans are more attractive to males when they are young and fertile–signified by long, shiny hair, smooth skin and a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7, for example–while men are more attractive to females based on their ability to provide for a family–signified in our society by having a good job, plenty money and a nice car, for example. When we meet a small child, we compliment girls on their appearance and boys on their strength, cleverness and size: "What a pretty girl!" vs "What a big boy!"
It is, therefore, to some extent understandable why many women grow up with neuroses about their looks while most men don't. When you throw in the billboards and the magazines and the TV ads, it becomes even clearer.What Gab was talking about wasn't a simple question of women's vanity, but a whole systemic problemisation of female beauty. Dismissing it with a steups and telling women to "get over it" won't do.