WWPD goes socialist

I did what needed to be done, and headed to the Flatiron district (appropriate, given the situation) to see what Sephora had in the way of hair-flattening devices. Ricky's had a good selection, but the explosive device formerly known as my old hair iron was once a Ricky's purchase, so I couldn't get myself to repeat that transaction. I hadn't noticed this before, but right next to the Sephora on 19th and 5th is a store called Essentials--I'd thought the only one was on the West Side. As versus Sephora, Essentials has the feel of being the store for those in the know, those who will not be swayed by shiny things when out purchasing... shiny things. This is a subtle but important point: just because you want some beauty products does not mean you want to trade your entire paycheck for eyeshadow, which is Sephora's purpose. Essentials is an easier place to enter and exit in a reasonable amount of time.

One might think there's something contradictory about a store selling beauty products calling itself "Essentials," but as I mentioned, this was what needed to be done, so the name is justified. Both Jo and the woman at Essentials remarked that I didn't need much in the way of hair equipment since my hair is already straight; to both I replied, the thing only exploded once I'd finished using it that one last time.

The above less-than-riveting anecdote leads to the essential of this post: no matter how ardent a believer in the free market, everyone has certain stores or aspects of capitalism that cause her inner communist to emerge. Sephora doesn't much bother me, nor do Starbucks, McDonalds, or i-banking, whatever that may be. For me, it's the following (with no links to stores, since all links function as advertising):

1) Ralph Lauren: Come in, and I will sell you whiteness.

2) Kay Jewelers; more generally, TV commercials for jewelry: Come in, and I will sell you your wife's affection.

3) Ads in the NYT Magazine: Need an apartment with an extra 30 bedrooms? Or perhaps you just sold your company for $50 million, and are worried about how this will impact your family's values? Um, oh well.

4) Not having a dishwasher: I had one in my old place, for which I paid Chicago-ish rent for a Park Slope-ish location. My current apartment has... a sink, a sponge, and a drying rack, and has rent that's just a bit higher. Until I once again live somewhere with a dishwasher, I will have a constant underlying feeling of class resentment, a weird sort of class resentment that causes me to resent many people who are not in fact well-off.

5) The Annual Report from the girls' school I attended, grades K-8: In the photos, everyone seems to be enjoying themselves at some event or another in the Hamptons. Since I only receive these newsletters when I meet my parents in Manhattan and they give me the mail that still gets sent there, I always end up reading the Reports on slow, weekend-service subway rides back to Brooklyn.

Vive la Revolution!

Sephora and secularism

Here's some highly relevant French-Jewish news, in a tangential way: Sephora wants to keep its French stores open on Sundays, which according to Jezebel, a leading resource on the French legal system, violates French labor laws. And the face-value interpretation is of course, does anyone really need Dior tinted moisturizer on a Sunday, like need it? Shouldn't we care more about labor than some white lady's sense of entitlement to 24-7 access to the lip stain of her choice? Can't we all just lead slower, simpler lives? Why not just shop on Saturday and take a walk on Sunday, like Sartre describes in La nausée?

While it's not false that consumers want to buy silly things, and are sometimes petulant when the shop's closed, there's a whole lot more going on here.

Which brings up something I... not necessarily should know but will now have to look into: Why does the Marais, one of Paris's traditionally Jewish neighborhoods, stay open on Sundays? And no, not Judaica shops - all the same boutique-chain retailers as have closed branches everywhere else in the city/country. And I don't believe they're closed on Saturdays (or any other day) to compensate. Evidently because it's a tourist area, but the Jewish angle seems not irrelevant.

More broadly, France has a whole lot of non-Christians, about 600,000 Jews last I heard (or 599,999 since I moved far away from Le Boulanger des Invalides, sniff sniff) and far more Muslims. While secular sorts of Christian origin may maintain the cultural practice of a Sunday sabbath without even thinking about it, and may not see it as religious, keeping one going is a form of discrimination against non-Christians, who may well have their own secular or religious sabbaths, and who may well just generally not enjoy the weekly reminder of the Christian-ness of their allegedly oh-so-secular country. (I'm not speaking for this population, imagining what might offend - Albert Memmi had a whole riff on this topic.) If you're an observant Jew and you work an office job, when can you buy anything? Shops aren't open late, and Saturday's not an option.

Maybe the more fair - but tougher to enforce - thing would be to have a law insisting that workers get at least one day per week off, and if a Muslim or Jewish Sephora salesperson wants to be the, err, Shabbos Goy of high-end cosmetics, so be it. Or maybe it's really so terrible to have a day off that doesn't match up with that of the rest of society that if France's religious and cultural minorities are kind of screwed over, those are the breaks. But the whole 'how charming, a day of rest' approach always strikes me as, yes, missing something.

Lucy and the hats

I bought a pair of boots at Camper. For those who are fortunate enough not to be obsessed with shoes, what this means is that I bought a pair of boots that are not quite designer but not quite L.L. Bean, either. It means months if not years of no more impulse Sephora or H&M purchases, unless I consider a very different line of work, which seems unlikely. It means getting the less complicated coffee drinks (i.e. black coffee, preferably made at home) until the guilt subsides.

What it does not mean, I hope, is that I am part of the "New Girl Order," as described by possible relative Kay Hymowitz. I would like to think that I do not model my life after "Sex and the City," especially not after the watered-down version those of us without cable get to see on TBS. Granted, the X amount of dollars I just spent on boots would go to children if I had children, but luckily I don't, the second year of grad school is busy enough as it is.

According to Hymowitz, Sephora is a prime example of the post-Carrie universe. Although it's nothing new for women to buy makeup, it's fair to say the chain does for mascara what Starbucks did for coffee. It creates a whole activity around what used to just sort of happen on the way between home and work, work and home (ladies, Sephora after class?).

Again, I think the main check on excessive girly consumption is men. It's not because women dress to please men that single women go nuts at Zara. It's because boyfriends and husbands do not see the subtle differences between one pair of black shoes and another, and, on some level, they have a point.

Luminosity

It's possible (definite) that my parents sometimes read my blog, and one piece of evidence is that I got a Sephora gift card for Chanukah. And promptly spent it on pale-person under-eye "corrector" (chosen at the advice of Fourtinefork and a Sephora employee) and pale-person luminizer. Jews' fried-potato Christmas happens to fall at that point in the semester, when stamina is maybe not what it once was. Also: winter is bleak, thus the need for these holidays, for sparkle. Artificial illumination of all kinds - coffee on the inside, shininess on the outside - is essential.

As the various reviews of this Lorac product say, the pump gives you so, so much of the stuff each time, which you maybe don't want. And I can see that this is a product you need to apply carefully, or dare I say learn how to apply. For example, after Googling this, I put some on my nose. It turns out that's a really bad idea. Noses are shiny enough to begin with - this is probably a contouring trick intended to give those with a wide and/or snub nose a Roman/aquiline/classical-looking one, which, much like hair extensions, I'll file under last-thing-in-the-world-for-me-to-sign-up-for. If light wants to reflect off my nose less than it currently does, that's fine by me.

But I can see how luminizer has the potential to work miracles, and by 'work miracles' I mean change one's appearance in a way that's entirely imperceptible to others but feels tremendous to one's self. The best way to describe it would be that if you put some on as you would blush, it makes you look like you're in an air-brushed, vaguely space-age magazine spread. It's not, in other words, a natural look, but it's a cool kind of artifice. It's not painting yourself orange, for example.  Nor is it blush, which is also kind of great but the line between 'healthy' and 'clown' is a tough call, and what works in certain light won't in other. Not sure what the "pearl" color would do for someone not 'sure you're OK?' pale, but works for me.

Sephora the Cheapskate

According to turn-of-the-century Alsatian-Jewish critic Moses Debré, the most unflattering portrait of a 'Jewess' in all of 19th C French literature is of a woman whose father is Belgian-Catholic. The woman is, it seems, something of a cheapskate. It gets better. Her first name? Sephora. I don't know what this means, but it did just revive the guilt I felt at spending $18 (before tax) on concealer at that chain.

The day thus far UPDATED

-Car and train trouble, both likely weather-related, but somehow made it to class on time.

-Not just in time, but with time enough to inhale a chocolate croissant from the convenient bakery. The very Old New York (pre-tip-jar, pre-hipsters-make-your-food, pre-good-coffee) one, which appears to cater mostly to elderly gay men who've had this routine since forever. The Margot Patisserie of the Christopher Street area. I like the idea of it, although the pastries themselves are borderline utilitarian.

-It had been a while since I'd taught, and the class-presentation visuals these days are higher-tech than I'd remembered. I allotted 15 mins for each 8-10 minute presentation. Had to hold over one presentation till tomorrow. Hate doing that. On the plus side, my students now know the conditional.

-Bought - finally - a winter hat without pom-poms. I somehow always end up with pom-poms, always spend the winter walking around feeling ridiculous, always find bits of pom-pom on the floor, poodle-related or otherwise. The new acquisition: an intentionally nondescript piece of cloth from American Apparel, because that's what's between where I teach and where my office is, and is exactly how much I could be bothered.

-Contemplated future wanty: A red (cashmere? non-itchy?) scarf, like the ones French men wear. One of those illuminating undereye concealers that make you look awake. It's the point in the semester when I might be awake (thank you, Oren's) but definitely don't look it. Does it need to be the $40 YSL one? Should I compromise and go with a $20-ish one from one of the lesser Sephora brands? Or at that point is it drugstore time? Is it 9 hours sleep or is it Maybelline? Also sought: a professional haircut.

UPDATE

After quite the marathon of grading, I spent a while (20 minutes? an eternity?) browsing Sephora in search of under-eye illumination. The thing with skin-color makeup, which I'd noticed before, is that it only comes in a series of shades that range from somewhat tanned white person to very tanned white person.  Useless if you're dark-skinned, but also, without the political implications, for the very pale. I kind of think a product I don't want to use as concealer is one that would, on me, be a bronzer. I remain not remotely luminous, which, for a weekend in the woods, is just fine.

Weak-willed women too Sephora'd-out for physics

Why are there not more female physicists? Should we care? As a member of DAPA in good standing,* I'm totally qualified to address this. By "this" I mean, of course, Heather MacDonald's article (via). Nothing about dark matter or anything.

She's going somewhere right with the piece, but there's still something missing. On the one hand, the notion that diversity must mean not just equal opportunity, but that every work setting everywhere must be an exact reflection of the population ignores the fact that different groups gravitating to different fields is sometimes a neutral phenomenon. Even distributions resulting from discrimination (obvious examples: Jews in finance, blacks in certain sports, women and gay men in the fashion industry) can end up empowering otherwise marginalized groups, although it's easy to see where success in a stereotypical field can backfire. But just because turning every field into a perfect gender-and-racially-balanced microcosm of society has its drawbacks doesn't mean we should just shrug our shoulders and say 'that's how it is and always will be' when we see imbalance, or that we shouldn't be looking to knock down barriers, visible and less-visible, to participation where they exist.

On that front, MacDonald misses a couple things. One, culture matters, and cannot be reduced to some TV show that's been on for about five minutes. She writes that "the fertility clock and women’s greater involvement with their babies are not chauvinist plots; they are biological realities." Fertility clocks, yes, baby-craziness, no. With breast-feeding the obvious caveat, there's no biological reason a man and a woman can't spend equal amounts of time with their children.

Moreover, women "attending to preposterous wrinkle-cream ads in women’s magazines" are acting rationally in a society in which looking haggard hurts a woman's chances in both personal and professional settings. There's an aspect of appearance-consciousness that is about putting together outfits because it's enjoyable and what-not, and that is often miscategorized as superficiality, but there's a less uplifting side to self-expression-through-appearance, which is the sense - based on an accurate understanding of how the world works - that certain 'flaws' must be corrected. It's not necessarily a sign of female 'weakness' or even vanity that women of a certain age - or weight - worry in ways that their male equivalents do not. (Not to mention the question of hair and race, or how for profession women with 'messy' hair, being taken seriously means time spent styling, whereas men have the option of cutting it all off without offending any sexual norms.)

She also misrepresents the time commitment it takes the typical woman to get going in the morning. Yes, women are more interested in clothes, and are under more cultural pressure to 'fix' this or that. But men who spend three hours a day at the gym (not uncommon, even among male scientists) are devoting far more time to personal upkeep than women who draw on eyeliner on their way out of the house. I'm not saying women shouldn't spend three hours a day on makeup/shopping/fussing, but that my sense is, few do. Until we measure hours spent lifting weights versus shopping, the dearth of female physicists cannot be blamed on the allure of Sephora.

And finally, The Question: "Which is it? Are women 'strong'? Or can they be crushed by fears of a permanent bad hair day and inspired by something as superficial as Hollywood fashion?"

All variants of 'what do women want?' are frustrating because the question implicitly leaves out the possibility that one woman might be more than one thing, or that different women want different things. There are geeky-genius women who've never heard of Paris Hilton despite growing up near her in New York or LA. There are female intellectual-types who love love love books and shoes. There are unstylish ladies whose shabbiness is not accompanied by great academic potential or achievement, or even extracurricular brilliance. (See also: in either sex, social ineptitude does not equal genius.)

* Are there meetings? Of course! I go to them every week, after the ones with the Jewish cabal.

Loyalty points

Sometime soon, a post on meritocracy, aristocracy, and the Stuyvesant cheating scandal. Till then:

A few days ago was a real festival of cheapness-studied-and-deliberately-ignored. Rain boots, lipstick, and neither the cheapest version around. While both were replacement purchases, and the former arguably necessity, I will focus not on financial justification but aesthetic explanation. The rain boots are muted olive green, and somewhat equestrian, and make me feel like a Swiss or Northern Italian socialite. Yup, even on NJ Transit. They fit perfectly, even the calves, which is not something to sneeze at when it comes to rubber boots, which of course have no give whatsoever. Paired with this other recent acquisition, I could be the very height of glam and practicality. (Must I keep repeating that it's possible to love shoes but not stilettos?)

With the lipstick, meanwhile, I wanted a sheer bubblegum pink, mod but not chalky, pale but not pastel, and no shimmer, to replace a too-light, too-shimmery, and almost-finished tube of Korres. (Requisite Alexa Chung example of what I was looking for.) This is surprisingly difficult to track down. Bubblegum is usually too opaque, too purple, or - worse - in the form of lip gloss. This one seems to be doing the trick. Perfect with a subtle liquid-eyeliner cat-eye - this will do.

Which brings me - alas - to a cheapness-studies note: if you sign up for a Sephora loyalty card (ducks head), they tell you how many points you have at checkout, thereby reminding you how many dollars you've thrown away on not being thoroughly low-maintenance. I tried to remind myself that in the course of living in the woods and not buying stuff, I'd honest-to-goodness gone through things like lipstick and eyeliner, which I'd never thought possible. That if lipstick is purchased less than once a year, it can totally cost more than $20 and come from some neato Canadian company that specializes in lipstick made from food-grade substances, and not from a dreary, brightly-lit aisle in the Penn Station Duane Reade.

But the points don't lie. "You have X points" means "You spent $X at Sephora since picking up that card, more than you donated to the Obama campaign, money that you could have at the very least put in your savings account, you frivolous, vapid fool.'" I think I'd prefer a stamp-card system, like in a coffee shop, so that once you've bought X items and gotten something free, you'd be back to square one.

Wish fulfillment

Recently, Katherine and I were discussing whether the complexity of dream plotline indicates anything about the dreamer's overall intelligence. I argued that it doesn't. Then this morning, I woke up right smack dab in the middle of a dream in which I was at Sephora, and I found the eyeliner that, in real life, I'd been unable to track down the previous week. Just as the alarm sounded, I was staring directly at the perfect silver pencil. My immediate thought was, damn! I don't really have the eyeliner, it was just a dream! My next thought: gosh, I'm an idiot.

So today during lunch, I went to Sephora and, after a thorough-ish search, found what I'd been looking for.

If you will it, it's no fairytale.

WWPD Guides: Beauty

Beauty - as in makeup, skin creams, and so on - is strangely compelling. But why? Is it just because relative to clothing, makeup is cheap, or is it more that one can more readily purchase a Chanel lipstick than a Chanel anything else? Is "beauty" - or "vanity" for that matter - for women thrilled with how they look, who want to spend as much time as possible gazing into a mirror, or for self-haters? Is Into the Gloss is actually a drug?

On some level, we all understand that how you look is for the most part a matter of your features, your age, and your overall well-being. If you don't look like this already, which I guarantee you don't, no revitalizing eye serum will make the difference. But wouldn't it be neat if, with the right selection of products, you could, at least on special occasions? It's now more possible than ever before to read about what various glamorous women goop onto themselves, and no matter how many times you repeat to yourself that correlation is not causation, you will wonder if maybe that Bioderma Créaline is all it's cracked up to be. You'll wonder this without even knowing what the product ostensibly does.

When it comes to beauty, there are two competing myths.  The first, the one promoted by the industry itself, is that products or procedures work miracles. The second is that beautification either does nothing (and is a plot to sell you stuff you don't need) or is in fact counterproductive. The liberation-from-beauty philosophy holds that if you stop blow-drying your hair, if you stop wearing concealer, this will make you not a frizzier, more blemished version of your usual, but will reveal once and for all your gorgeous natural hair texture and impeccable skin. When the truth is that sometimes, liberation might just mean accepting to look less conventionally attractive, and giving up whichever advantages that had provided.

So, onto the Official WWPD Guide, beauty edition. There are no hard-and-fast rules as to which forms of artifice are worth the bother, as this will depend on your own features, preferences, schedule, budget, and so on. But some general principles may help:

-There is a temptation to divide beautification rituals into self-hatred (bad) and self-expression (good). Yes to royal-blue eye shadow, say, but down with foundation. When what we should really do is separate out procedures that require general anesthesia, tens of thousands of dollars, risk of death, things of that nature, and have a separate conversation about those. When it comes to makeup, it's not always possible to say what's "fun" and what's "correction." For example, where does eyeliner fall? At what point does looking more awake become looking rock'n'roll? But as a rule, if the damage is $25 handed over to Sephora, this is relatively no big deal compared with $2,500 ($25,000?) handed over to someone who's cutting you open gratuitously. It's not that this removes ambiguity - where does Botox fall? chemical hair-straightening? - but it frames the discussion more productively.

-When it comes to deciding what you need/want to do, skin-care-wise, do not invent problems. There's this thing one reads about, "taking really good care of your skin," which evidently means purchasing thousands of dollars worth of serums. Isn't that some snazzy packaging? But try to resist. If the skin around your eyes is fine, you don't need eye cream. If your skin isn't dry, no moisturizer. Do you bathe regularly? Then skip the special "face wash" - you're presumably washing your face when you wash the rest of yourself, and if not, you're doing it wrong.

Meanwhile, if you have an actual dermatological condition, what you need is a dermatologist, not an equally expensive guessing game on a far-more-expensive trip to Frahnce.

-The big thing now in the beauty industry is "natural" products. As with organic food, it's a hippie interest gone mainstream. It's no longer about using one product as toothpaste, shampoo, and kitchen-cleaner, but the usual division of labor (one cream for the eyes, one for the neck...), minus whichever taboo ingredients, or with a leafy design. There will be an emphasis on "purity" - whether it refers to your health or the environment, subliminally it's all meant to stand in for the "purity" of your skin once whichever wrinkles or zits are removed. Leading to approaches like this: "[...] I got really scared of all the toxic things that are in beauty products. I mean, I smoke, I drink, I’m not a vegan, I eat like a French person, so pretty healthy, but with ice cream and candy."

While it's possible we are all being slowly killed by the butylacetoformadocyanides in our insufficiently organic eyeliner, the way to deal with that possibility isn't to collect a wide range of "natural" brands, but rather to simply use fewer products. Because let's be serious - do we have any idea if whatever replaces parabens is any better? Rather than scrutinizing the ingredients of what you do slather on, slather less stuff on. If you're wearing a toner and a serum and a primer and a day cream and invigorating oils and a tinted moisturizer and only after all that, you start applying your makeup, you may want to slow down. This will be better for your skin, your health, your wallet, and the environment, everything but the profits of the skin-cream industry. Your skin does not need to be "fed."

-That there is such a thing as marketing doesn't mean products never work as promised. I wanted to believe it, but no. Somewhere along the line, I tried this shampoo and conditioner, and realized my mistake. Oh, and if you're one of those pale women who gets a lot of 'you look tired', concealer and eyeliner, yes. Maybe blush, but don't overdo that. An absolutist stance against the Sephora Industrial Complex ends up being a bit self-defeating if you have some relatively contained routine without which you would look and feel worse.

-Mascara, however, is the single most overrated product. Yes, I have the drugstore Maybelline, and yes, out of some kind of ritual, I will wear it if I want to look my best. But if you have anything but pale blond lashes (and the product is of course marketed to women of all complexions), it's a bit like wearing foundation on unblemished skin - no one is going to see a difference. Putting waxy goo on your lashes does not make them any longer. The ads are showing you fake lashes. You will forget to remove the mascara and wake up the next day with under-eye circles. You will need special eye-makeup-remover to get the stuff off. If it rains (or worse, snows), you will immediately need to take cover. It's a gigantic pain in the neck for something that does approximately nothing unless, again, your eyelashes are near-translucent.

-There ought to be such a thing as enough when it comes to nail polish, but if you're someone who wants some, you want more. (Owning one bottle of clear, or a red from a decade ago, doesn't count.) That you already own beige doesn't mean you don't urgently need a sheer off-white. That you've got an orange-red doesn't mean you don't need a dark-red one ala "Vamp." That's just how it is. If you cared enough to buy the muted purple-pink, you will need a bubble-gum shade, as well as a pale-pink pastel, and why not a neon pink while you're at it. You can buy all the Opi and Essie you want, and still rationalize it by noting that you'd spend so much more if you got professional manicures. (It helps, with this rationalization, not to get professional manicures.) But you should still take it easy - $8 times infinity can add up.

The persecution of WWPD:

1) Clementine would not go to Sephora with me this afternoon, despite seeming quite interested in doing so, because she was worried I'd blog about it. Ha!

2) Jo thinks people will stop hanging out with me because I'm always blogging about it. "People will stop talking to you!", he said just now. Well!

3) Other people make the points I want to make so much better than I ever could.

A view from the provinces

-Bisou-walk podcast of the morning: Leonard Lopate on the NYU expansion plan. Not entirely the show's fault that there was no pro-plan guest, given that they evidently did contact NYU and not get anyone (too bad they didn't seek out the university's most contrarian grad student), but they did manage to get three guests opposed, presumably going through more than one channel. There are valid criticisms in the mix (what will the expansion be used for?), as well as heaps of nonsense. One of the guests - I think this was the professor - was criticizing NYU for using non-grad-student adjuncts. Fair enough. He then referred to said instructors as - I quote - "unqualified," asking why anyone would go to NYU to be taught by adjuncts. I beg your pardon? This was also the only point in the show that Lopate actually questioned the view of one of his guests, as opposed to offering tepid devil's-advocate statements. Lopate pointed out that some of these adjuncts are amazing teachers, leading this guest to reply, again, a quote, "Some of my best friends are adjuncts."

Missing from the conversation was a sense of what the Village these days is, which is, increasingly, a playground for the rich. And by "rich" I don't mean middle-/upper-middle-class NYU undergrads. I really doubt if that's who's sustaining that stretch of Bleecker Street that's all Marc Jacobs and French-import boutiques. I mean bankers, European socialites, and so forth. And what is the "character" of the neighborhood? Is it the low-rise buildings, composed of $3,000/month (or more these days?) studio apartments? Or is it the historical role of the area as a place where, for example, gay and/or quirky kids flee to from small towns? If it's the latter, it's hard to see how, these days, the Village without NYU would be of much use. If it's the former, then fine, it's so very tragic that college kids and their profs live in unsightly towers.

I mean, it wasn't completely missing. Lopate did bring up the NIMBY question (again, as quasi-counterargument), and mentioned that some of the plan's critics' critics accuse them of elitism. But the counterargument - that some of the area residents live in rent-subsidized apartments - gives just about no picture of what's really going on. Unfortunately, perhaps due in part to the university's own PR fumbling, the narrative that's sticking is that there are on the one hand these old-timey, of-the-people Village-as-village residents, and on the other, a corporate behemoth.

-Commentary does not know the difference between Greater Park Slope and Greater Williamsburg.

The New York Times notes, “The boycott would be largely symbolic, because the co-op carries only a half-dozen or so products imported from Israel, including paprika, olive pesto and vegan marshmallows.” It’s possible if you have not recently been to Brooklyn, that sentence may strike you as absurd.

Unclear what about these ingredients would strike non-Brooklynites as "absurd" - we do have items beyond Wonder Bread out in the provinces - but anyone who thinks the hippie-inflected, practical-shoe-wearing crowd on Union Street is "trendy" is, I suspect, unfamiliar with either the area or the concept.

-I had one of those indefinite amounts of time to kill in the city that demand a visit to Sephora. There, I tried to figure out what "highlighter" makeup is. I'm still unclear. It sounds as if it would be a magic product that makes you look amazing even on days when you're feeling sort of eh, but ended up with a sparkly left hand and a sense that $20-and-up packages of goo with names like "Orgasm" are probably as snake-oil-ish as they seem.

The Beauty Myth, Part I

You know those books you'll be meaning to read for ages, but it will never be quite urgent enough to put them on the library list, and then there's a giant used book sale, it's a dollar or less, and then just kind of sitting there in front of you at home, on a train ride... Which is how I ended up finally getting to Naomi Wolf's 1991 The Beauty Myth.

I'm somewhere in the middle of it now, so I have a good sense of the argument, only inklings of what the solution might be that she may provide. But basically the idea is, whereas women used to be held back economically, professionally, with every advance made in those areas, a step or several backwards have been taken in terms of escalating beauty requirements placed on everyday women. Whereas there was once a subset of women expected to be officially, professionally beautiful (actresses and such), thanks to modern media (which, these days... remember that this was in 1991! the stuff about how pornography has changed expectations, presumably one may assume the internet, the smartphone, has had some kind of an impact), this can now plausibly be asked of all women.

Who or what is the agent making this so? The patriarchy? In anticipation, no doubt, of arguments along the lines of, 'but I'm a man and I prefer the natural look,' or, 'women are much harder on one another than men are on women, they're doing this to themselves,' she attributes this not merely to men thinking they're entitled to porn-star clones, but also to women's own ambivalence regarding their relatively new power in society. That, and above all else, to corporate interests - if women are no longer buying ten different kinds of laundry detergent, why not try selling them a different moisturizer for every facial feature?

Much of the book - and I suppose, in retrospect, I half-expected this, but not to this extent - is made up of arguments I thought I'd come up with myself over the years, indeed, ones I suspect a great many women think they've thought of themselves. Whether the credit goes to Wolf as trickled-down into the culture, or whether women have been thinking these things for a good long while regardless, I couldn't say.

-Wolf on skin creams is wonderful. She - not that I thought I was the first, perhaps we must all discover this for ourselves - makes the distinction between color cosmetics (lipstick, foundation, eyeshadow, etc.), which do actually paint the face as promised, and the pseudoscientific world of lotions that don't do a thing. And there really is a division between the two, one marked largely by price, but also by where stuff is placed in a store. In a Sephora, say, there will be an upbeat paint-yourself section, where you can drop $20 on some high-end eyeliner, and then a quasi-medical beauty section, where you can spend $98 on a half-ounce of "advanced antiaging eye treatment," no link because I'm not suggesting anyone go do just that.

While we may debate the social value of makeup - does it improve our looks, or merely convey that we've put in some effort? - it is clear enough that if you line your eyes with eyeliner, you have lined your eyes. Whereas if you rub thousands of dollars worth of cream into the skin of your face, you are at best doing nothing, at worst exposing yourself unnecessarily to all manner of toxins. You're going to age along with everyone else born the same time you were.

Wolf makes some great points: that these products promise to "nourish" the skin, aimed at women often starving themselves; that these products cost so much as to effectively keep women's take-home income down; that the products (and here I felt ashamed, having succumbed to the "luminizer" promise, albeit just owning, and never figuring out how to use, the stuff, which is something between color cosmetics and skin product, I suppose) claim to illuminate the skin, as if one is at a fashion shoot at all times.

All of this, of course, made me think of my own perverse fascination with "Into The Gloss," a site that celebrates the woman who doesn't much go in for makeup, but takes really good care of her skin. This is supposed to be, what, higher-class? More French? It's just so much more serious business than my own routine of concealer, liquid eyeliner, lipstick, and SPF. (And nail polish. Lots of that.) Such a strange, exotic version of femininity, the land of the do-nothing not-even-moisturizers. Not something I was ever initiated in, and a good thing too.

-Wolf (well, 1991 Wolf - not sure what she thinks these days) would probably be on board with the content of my concept of weight-think. While Wolf has been accused of exaggerating the prevalence of eating-disorders-strictly-defined, she's no doubt correct about the way in which women imagine they ought to weigh "a stone" (or 10-15 pounds) less than they'd weigh if they didn't give their weight any thought, and that the process of trying to stay just a bit thinner is, well, maddening. It leads women to think about food all the time, leads in some cases to women weighing more than they would if they'd left well enough alone, leading others to a permanent state of hunger and crankiness.

All of this has if anything gotten worse since 1991 - these days, a woman who chooses to abandon weight-think stands accused of having succumb to the corporate interests devoted to keeping her on a diet of industrial food-product. It's become socially unacceptable not to think about food constantly. Where does your food come from? What are you putting into your body? What about the obesity crisis, which is apparently relevant even if you're 130 pounds, but would take a smaller dress size at 115. While men can sign up for this new let's-think-about-food without this having all that much to do with weight, it remains to be seen whether women can do the same. I will once again draw your attention to the strongest criticism to date of the food movement, found, of all places, in a NYT reader comment.

-Wolf and I do not have the exact same take on male beauty - she praises women for caring about the person, not what he looks like, and more troublingly, suggests that women come to find certain men beautiful once they get to know them, their looks presumably not entering into it. Whereas I tend to think there's a (largely subjective, if influenced by the culture, and more influenced by the culture for straight men than for straight women) bare minimum someone of either sex needs to meet to be romantically appealing, and past that point, it isn't necessarily the better-looking, the better partner. But the spirit of her argument is one I agree with: that it's a problem not simply that men have unrealistic ideas about what women might look like, but also that women are expected to repress the physical attraction they have to men.

Theoretically brilliant

Once again, The Bell Curve co-author Charles Murray flatters Jo, discussing "the level of intelligence that can permit people to excel in fields like theoretical physics and pure mathematics." This time, rather than complaining that too many idiots go to college, he explains why Jews--Ashkenazi ones, to be specific--are totally brilliant. As if we didn't know! Seems our I.Q.s peak at 110, not 100 like the Gentiles and the Sephardim (who we all know aren't real Jews anyway; any heritage that doesn't allow you to truly "get" Woody Allen, that doesn't mandate consumption of gefilte fish, doesn't count). All of this does little to explain the percentage of minutes in the day I ponder what next to purchase at Sephora. (Please let there not be a "JAP" gene).

In defense of garish

Makeup is an implement of the patriarchy if you're 13, a necessity for a woman give or take a decade older.

To the Prudie letter-writer: Your boyfriend "offered to pay for new clothes or some makeup and makeup application lessons." Think of all the Sephora-addicted women who'd be happy to trade Birkenstock clogs with you. Also: dude's sudden concern for your appearance isn't about how hot you are to him (your own guess) or his concern for your career trajectory (Prudie's guess), but rather how you will look at his work functions, or in a more general sense as the significant other of a dude in whichever job he's been promoted into. A key detail in your letter.

To the mom: permitting a 13-year-old girl to wear subtle, natural-look makeup, but nothing too garish, is not the sensible middle-ground, but is, instead, completely missing the point. The line can be tough to draw, but artifice tends to be either about looking pretty or about looking interesting/different. 13-year-olds, especially, should, if interested in artifice, go with the latter. Consider the difference between a 13-year-old with tasteful highlights and a 13-year-old with blue hair. A touch of mascara and lip gloss - for whatever reason, the consensus on what can be worn pre-high-school - is arguably less appropriate on a 13-year-old than bright purple eyeshadow paired with crimson lipstick.

Grown women tend to have fewer options in this regard - no need to ask the parents' permission, true, but this is cancelled out by desires such as not getting fired and using whichever anti-aging serums Andie MacDowell is peddling. But when we the adult women wear lilac nail polish, this is not out of self-hatred rooted in our not having been born with naturally lilac fingertips.

As for the patriarchy question... I'm not quite on board with the oft-repeated claim that women primp for other women/for themselves and not for men. A man might not be able to pinpoint that the reason a woman looks particularly good that day, but the reason could well be mascara. But for a great many women, shopping for and wearing makeup is fun. The same would be tough to claim for, say, dieting. Self-expression through artifice is an enjoyable part of many of our lives, and it's sad for them, in a way, that in our culture, men hardly have access to it. Men are basically stuck with what they've got, for better or worse. Is it a privilege to be allowed out barefaced, or to have the option of messing with what nature gave you? Is it oppression to feel socially pressured into putting mildly toxic chemicals onto your face, or to feel as though you must reject your gender identity in order to do so?

And please, don't tell her that makeup will "mar her natural beauty with unnatural products." The concept of "natural beauty" is far more damaging than whichever variant of face-glitter is sold at the local CVS.

Bringing glamor to the woods

Below, three recent or recent-ish things I bought but did not need:

-Galaxy-print leggings. At long last! And $20! Which might seem like a lot for what are effectively multicolored tights, but I promise, it's a great deal for this sort of thing, if it's what you're set on. Which, as you all know, I have been since forever. But not quite enough to send off for the pricey version from Australia.

-Neon-pink lipstick. A more recent and somewhat less challenging to track down wanty. (Didn't exist at Sephora, which was ultimately for the best, as MAC is ever so slightly cheaper than those brands.) I was mostly inspired by this Sartorialist photo - a bright-pink lip, a bit of blush, and (contrary to my usual approach) mascara (or nothing) rather than eyeliner. It just seemed like, yes, this is the look. The bare-face-bright-lip combo is one that usually seems better in theory (or looks better on someone else), but this seemed like a pared-down, everyday version that does not require the wearer to be a stunning Lithuanian, while at the same time, a bit more out-there and unexpected than a basic red. To be determined - haven't actually tried it on yet. If it makes me look either stunning or Lithuanian, you, WWPD readers, will be the first to hear about it.

-Iridescent-glitter nail polish. The best of these is apparently a discontinued Chanel, but such is life. It's fabulous and holographic in the right light, but like all glitter polishes, refuses to ever entirely come off. 

Equal-opportunity romance

Amber brings our attention - and Dan Savage brought our attention - to a post by Jos about why women who say they only date women or transgender men (for my stodgier readers, this means men who were born female) are a problem.

Jos makes two arguments. One is something barely comprehensible about how women with this preference are afraid of "trauma" (rape? the idea of rape? catcalls? the abstract patriarchy?) coming from The Phallus. Convoluted and obtuse.

The other, which is more straightforward, is that it's offensive (as in, basic manners, not simply a violation of PC) to imply that trans men are any less male than their biologically-male (cis, for my less stodgy readers) counterparts. Which it is. But does that mean everyone who dates trans men must also date cis men?

This is a sensitive topic not only because of the typically-assumed and true-in-nearly-but-not-all-cases relationship between sex-at-birth, current genitalia and gender, but also because not all trans people who wish to do so "pass" as the sex with which they now identify. So even in an ideal world of sensitive pronoun usage - which, it should be noted, we don't live in - some who are trans would continue to be referred to with the incorrect ones by acquaintances who didn't have the full scoop, and who, however apologetic the might be afterward, may have brought out whichever anxieties. (A policy of calling every narrow-shouldered, small-boned, short-haired, bare-faced individual "he" is going to end up offending a lot of women, who are no less women for not handing over X% of their paychecks to Sephora.)

On the surface, this seems like an incredibly complex and touchy issue. Is it OK for women who identify as "queer" (as vs. "lesbian") to date cis women and trans men but not cis men (what about trans women?) as though it's somehow "queer" to date someone who's changed sex? Doesn't this depend on how the trans man in question identifies - i.e., as someone who's transcended the stifling limitations of gender labels and wishes to remain active in the "queer" community, or, conversely, as a boring ol' straight dude who happened to be born in a woman's body and just wants to be done with it once and for all? Is a woman with a preference for masculine-looking individuals with female genitalia, who uses pronouns impeccably but who perhaps ultimately, in her heart of hearts, doesn't see a huge difference between a very masculine-presenting woman and a trans man who hasn't undergone much in the way of reassignment, in part because some of the people she's dated have been both, perhaps in the course of their relationships... is such a woman a bigot for subconsciously denying the female-ness of very masculine women and the maleness of the male-identified androgynous, and if so, what can she do about it? And what on earth would yours truly, a straight, cis woman, have to contribute to such a complicated discussion?

In fact, while these issues are certainly complex, the issue at hand isn't all that complicated, nor does it require any particular knowledge of gender theory, correct terminology (which doesn't hurt to know regardless), etc.:


When it comes to choosing partners for romantic relationships - which is a euphemistic way of saying relationships with a sexual component, without specifying which acts, if any, are taking place or might soon - there's no such thing as bigotry. By this I mean, if you wish to date only men or only women, or only Thai men and Finnish women, or only those with a certain set of anatomy, and that's that, so it goes. 

And there's no other way it could go, because we-as-a-society deem it wrong to force someone to be romantically involved with someone against their will. If you feel that all someones who meet whichever criteria are not ever ever ever of romantic interest to you, there's no ethical way for someone or some entity to intervene and ask that you become an equal-opportunity dater. It's fundamentally not like hiring someone, or running a country club, because of just how wrong we believe it is for someone to be forced into a romantic situation with someone they don't see in that way. Society impacts individual romantic preferences, but individual romantic choices simply aren't the arena in which justice in terms of beauty standards and the like is to be achieved.

Happily, society influences but doesn't determine desire, allowing the vast majority of people not attractive/conventional-looking enough to ever in a million years get paid for their looks to experience, at least at some point in their lives, a choice between multiple interested parties. But it's certainly possible to have preferences that are self-defeating, as the plain-looking, low-earning men who'd only be happy with a swimsuit model can attest. But dude doesn't owe dates to the women of the world who aren't swimsuit models, and is in fact doing them a disservice if he dates them out of the principle of the thing.

Now, what can be offensive is how one voices one's preferences. This is especially the case if you have preferences that happen to line up with something likely to hit a nerve. It's one thing to only date six-foot-five blue-eyed blonds (a pattern your friends may pick up on, or not, if you live in the Netherlands), another entirely to announce that you 'only date Nordic types.' One to only date those 30 years your junior (assuming you're at least 48), another to announce your unwillingness to date anyone closer to or above your own age. Along the same lines, evidently, it's one thing to only date cis women and trans men, another to make that preference known.

But what if you want your friends to help steer you to the right people? What if you're constantly being set up with the wrong ones - wrong for you, that is - and don't want to waste anyone's time? To stick with the original example, given that the vast majority of men were not born female, if those who were are the only ones you date, but you identify merely as "bisexual," you're... I suppose functionally not so different from someone who lives in a place with very few Syrian Jews, but will only date a Syrian Jew, but thinks her friends will find her closed-minded and so defines her romantic interest as "guys." Technically true, and enough information in many situations, but not an efficient way of finding a partner.

Where offensiveness really enters into it is less in what the preferences may be (because as much as society influences desire, there somehow ends up almost being someone out there who likes everything) than in their presentation. If you present your subjective preference as a universal, as in, 'only X are attractive,' this is offensive even if your preference is something as seemingly inoffensive and fixed as, say, preferring men to women romantically. If you hold forth on what screeching nags women are, then you've turned an otherwise innocuous announcement - that you're a straight woman or gay man - into something objectionable. Along the same lines, if a woman announces that she dates only women and trans men, and does so in such a way as to imply that these two groups are part of one category, if she elaborates that trans men are OK in her book because she doesn't think dating them makes her any less a lesbian, then this, yes, would be a problem.

The medicalization of everything

In Paris, the divide between beauty products and medicines can be ambiguous. Yes, in NY, lipstick is sold at Duane Reade, and yes, Kiehls looks like an old pharmacy, but in general, no one's confusing Sephora for a health clinic. But in Paris, the establishment where one gets a pedicure is also a podiatrist's office. Beauty products not only make health claims - for sensitive, delicate skin, etc. - but are packaged and marketed in a way that suggests all these seemingly indistinguishable bottles of clear liquid are medical necessities. Brands like La Roche-Posay - which makes a mean nail polish - sell a seemingly endless array of products that go beyond the kind of creams that gosh darn get things done (sunscreens, antibiotic or anti-fungal ointments, cortisol creams, moisturizers, acne washes), liquid makeup (foundation, concealer), or even that classic cream-that-does-nothing, the anti-aging cream. There's this whole array of products to be applied before, after, or in lieu of makeup that, even understanding the words on the label, I cannot figure out. Soap is frowned upon, but there are 1,001 products sold in Paris, I'm sure of it, just to remove eye makeup. All that's missing is, pardon the "Seinfeld" reference, a Julliard-trained dermatologist to prescribe the stuff.

All of this, I should explain, exists separately, and is sold apart from, what we Americans refer to as "makeup." Monoprix will sell makeup in one area, regular shampoo, conditioner, and soap in the other, but then in this special area, called a "parapharmacie," exists the world of tonics, washes, gels, creams, lotions, and balms, through which women presumably sort to find the one product that truly expresses the particularities of their skin. (Gwyneth Paltrow, on the aptly-named GOOP, does a thorough round-up.) Where the US is holistic with college admissions, France seems to be with women's skincare products.

There are also free-standing parapharmacies, which are a great place to get overwhelmed. I popped into one today - the spectacular one on Monge that seems like a discount store but isn't all that cheap - and it was just aisle after aisle of products that are neither medicine nor makeup nor soap, yet obviously incredibly necessary for being the kind of woman who has a rockin' sex life at 80. I wouldn't know where to begin with these products, what complaints I'm supposed to have about my skin that wouldn't be fixable with makeup or soap, or serious enough to require actual medicine. All I could think was that it would be easy to drop hundreds of euros on products that look nice in a cabinet but do absolutely nothing.

What, then, does it all mean? Is it that I'm just so American in my thinking that a real dermatologist, as opposed to a tonic in a minimalist container, should deal with issues having to do with the skin that are significant enough to spend money on, and that if you're going to buy something non-medical, how about eyeliner? Am I too suspicious of not-quite-as-Western medicine? It's not that I'm inherently suspicious of beauty products - I will pay more for the better shampoo and conditioner, and I only know they're better from having tried a whole bunch at different price points. But here, there are things that are put into hair that I can't begin to fathom, products meant to be left in the hair, virtually all of which are intended for a European hair type that, unlike mine, could be wash-and-go without startling people, and does not even have frizz to contend with.

********************

Oh the Well blog. First we learned how the holiday season stresses out youngsters. The new-old stressor in their lives is slumber parties. A part of me almost agrees - it was at such a party that I saw, as a 10-year-old, "The Silence of the Lambs." Big mistake, and I'm still scared of moths. But is this really something pediatricians need to get involved with, advising children to take "a prophylactic nap" beforehand? Yes, sleepovers mean losing sleep, yes one friend's mother showed us all a sex book or movie, I forget, far too young, and yes, I got to see how it goes in a family where the parents do have enzymes for copious alcohol consumption. (We, however, may have even eaten some simple carbohydrates and trans-fats.)

Yes, also, Kids Can Be So Cruel. But if they weren't a little cruel, we'd all have the annoying tendencies that sleepovers and the like socialized us out of, making it harder for us to behave at cocktail parties, dates, job interviews, and so forth. I was a pretty odd kid; I owe the fact that I'm only a mildly odd adult to my parents having allowed me to go on sleepovers and such. What does it mean to call the sleepover "a step toward mock independence and at the same time an intense exposure to peer standards and pressures"? It's a step toward real independence, which involves navigating the world of people outside your immediate family.

WWPD Guides: complaining post-storm

Acceptable:

-Your home was damaged, but not altogether swept away by the storm.

-Your subway/train (or a viable alternative) continues to run, but your commute now takes twice as long and is twice as crowded.

-You have not had power/heat/hot water/Internet for a week or more, or for at least two days with no message re: when it's being restored. Assuming you have perspective, you're allowed to complain even if the electricity being off doesn't mean some machine that literally keeps you alive will stop working. Nor do you need to engage in Luddite romanticism about how great it is to sit by candlelight, or - horrors - how refrigeration is overrated. If anything, refrigeration isn't given its proper due. (Says the person who optimistically bought replacement ricotta, despite living somewhere where three raindrops means the power will go out.)

Unacceptable:

-Complaining about a loss of power in your home to anyone who'll pick up, from your cellphone, on an extra-crowded rush-hour NJ Transit train. Yes, dude behind me this morning, I'm talking about you. A shame that you've been without power, but guess what - by virtue of their presence on this train, they either are or until very recently were in your situation, or maybe worse.

-A momentary blackout lowered your inhibitions, causing you to OMG eat carbs.

-Your hair is a millimeter longer than you like it, and OMG your salon doesn't have power.

-You had to relocate to the Upper East Side, from SoHo, and uptown people are so square. I know, it's a pain to have to go to the Sephora on 86th Street rather than the one on lower Broadway, to the Barneys flagship rather than the Barneys Co-ops downtown. Uptown and downtown have been near-identical upscale malls (but with really good food, admittedly mostly downtown) since forever. Complain about relocation, but if you've relocated from SoHo or Tribeca, edgy you ain't.

-Your complaint, whatever it is, has been featured in the NYT Styles pages.

What's Right?

About a year ago, I asked, "why bother calling yourself 'on the left' when you disagree with much of what the left as it actually exists has to say, and agree with at least as much (or on the issues you find most important) with the right as with the left." This was in response to a Dissent Magazine event where I'd heard various proposals for reforming the left that were, in all practicality, calls for shifts to the right, given what the spectrum looks like these days.

Now I'll join some others in asking the same question of the right. Why call yourself a conservative if what you want to see from conservatism is that which is commonly understood as liberalism? Unlike Amidon and Yglesias, I could accept without too much questioning that Grand New Party is a conservative book. It's far too good of a rebuttal to that New Yorker article on the evils of the right for that to be the case. I suggest reading the article, then the book. That said, a conservatism that is anti-Bush and anti-status quo poses some of the same problems as a liberalism sympathetic to the pro-life movement and to the War on Terror. The purpose of the book is how to rescue the Republican Party and the conclusion is that the party should help the working class; had the book been about how to improve the lot of the working class, would the answer have been, by reviving the Republican party?

Side note: there's a similarity between the way conservatives--the authors and others--discuss the Sexual Revolution and the way liberals, particularly liberal academics, treat the question of women's rights in other cultures. It seems the argument goes something like this: the Pill benefited middle-class and wealthy women, but this same sexual freedom hurt the poor. In other words, it is elitist to call ready access to birth control an unqualified good. Some conservatives practice what they preach and some do not, but this doesn't matter because it's not us who require governmentally-imposed restraint, it's them. Sure, we have no problem with gay marriage, but they, well, to respect them one temper one's enthusiasm for gay rights. Being for gay rights thus comes to be defined as elitist, because elites are leading the fight.

This argument, if I'm getting it right, reminds me of the postcolonialist-left take on women's rights abroad, the argument against which neoconservatives argue with understandable enthusiasm: sure, in the West women demand freedom and define freedom as X, Y, and Z, but if we are to respect other cultures, we must respect their vision of freedom. If women in a given culture must stay indoors, we should explore their freedoms and influence within the indoor sphere, and must consider that men, too, are limited by not being allowed to take part in this sphere. We must consider that women forced to cover themselves head-to-toe are no less free than Western women coerced by the Great Sephora into covering their faces with brightly-colored goop. In other words, it's Orientalist and xenophobic to suggest women's rights, as understood across the political spectrum in America, have an obvious application abroad.

I'm baffled by why those who argue that at home, birth control and legal abortion are absolute goods, are not the same people who argue that feminism, as it's generally understood in these parts, applies to women not just across class, but across national boundaries. Either "sexual freedom" means the same thing everywhere, or it does not. Maybe I just need a more relativistic understanding of relativism, but I'm confused. What am I missing?