On Homogeneity and Beauty

I have a love/hate relationship with the television program “What Not to Wear.”

On the one hand, there’s something immensely satisfying in watching a woman being made over. And they are mostly women—despite the fact that there are an equal, if not a more substantial number of men in desperate need of a make-over. When a woman who was previously dowdy and hated her own looks suddenly comes out at the end looking confident, happy and put together, it feels like a kind of redemption. A shallow, superficial redemption but a redemption nonetheless. As a feminist, I am both aware of the illusion of beauty standards and the power that can be found in a tube of lipstick (I am currently sporting a shade called “Stiletto” by Kat Von D. It’s a delicious shade of orangey red that makes me feel like Marlene Dietrich despite the fact that I have not showered today and am 60 pounds over the weight I wish to be). The right dress can confer onto a person a dignity and a confidence not even prescription drugs can match. For men, I believe a similar kind of transformation occurs when they put on a good suit. Suddenly, they are James Bond. Clothing and costume are incredibly important aspects of our identity, even more than that: they are the matter by which we create our physical identity.  A change of job, occupation and ideology is often accompanied by a change in dress. This is true regardless of sex and gender as the revolving door of teenage subculture attests to daily.

So when the women come out at the end of “What Not to Wear” I always feel good for them, even if I don’t agree with the clothing, hair and style choices made, because they feel good about themselves. This is where my hate comes in.

When “What Not to Wear” makes-over a dowdy and dumpy woman, the results are always beneficial. These women had no style to begin with and, consequently, they had nothing to lose but their chains—so to speak. But the women who are trying, that’s always a bit sad because somehow they end up erasing something odd and ugly and wonderful about those women. My friend Louisa was the first person to point this out to me. She said that Stacy and Clinton erased people’s individual styles and all turned them into . . . well, into Stacy. It doesn’t help that Nick Arrojo gives everyone and their mother a Mom-bob. The women on “What Not to Wear” are inevitably homogenized, turned into merely pretty women.

Beauty is something that is not very well understood. The Greeks conceptualized it as balance, symmetry and harmony. If one looks up the word “beauty” in the OED the definition contains this meaning along with the idea that it is what is pleasing to the senses, especially the sense of sight. If this the case then I could assert, totally without any basis but that of my own eyes, that that in modern industrialized countries very few people are ugly and very few people are beautiful. To my mind, both beauty and ugliness are defined by the fact that they are extremes. We have a notion of what is or should be beautiful based on movie stars and models. However, I argue that if you really look at these people a lot, you begin to notice how similar they are. The noses, the mouths, the eyes all contain that Greek notion of balance and symmetry. Bodies too, for excess of fatness or thinness is immediately criticized. On the red carpet of any event, celebrities who dare to wear anything unusual are immediately castigated as the “Worst Dressed”—regard the famous Bjork swan dress incident for an extreme example. Beauty is standardized, not simply in that we promote a certain ideal of beauty but in that in order to be considered beautiful one cannot be in excess, neither in dress nor in feature. A certain level of homogeneity is required in order to be considered beautiful. It is a mediocrity that appears both unattainable and yet, within reach if one is willing to work hard enough.

And make-over shows prove that this is not just some beauty corporation conspiracy theory. I, too, can attest to the difference a haircut can make to the way my face looks. Of course, as I said above there are simply not very many extremes of ugliness or beauty anymore. Most women, IMHO, are just simply and naturally pretty and as such can become prettier with the application of mascara. This is both a state of mind and a modification of what is already there.

Despite my firm belief in the fact that most women are pretty, if not quite as put together as they should be, I have a real problem with beautiful heroines—which is obvious so I repeatedly complain about it over and over and over again, ad nauseam—for two reasons that I will discuss, though there are more reasons, I assure you. I have named these reasons as follows:

1. B is for Banality—this reason is an issue of narrative and prose structure.  I’m sick unto death of being introduced to heroines by physical descriptions. And these descriptions include the reaction of the hero’s wang to the heroine. I get it! She’s hot! And you know what? I don’t care! Okay, that was a lie. I do care but I would rather the details of her physical appearance arose organically from the story rather than through some lengthy description of her titian-colored hair or whatever, that is stuck somewhere in the first three chapters of the book. It reminds me of The Babysitter’s Club books wherein Chapter One was entirely dedicated to telling you who the characters were and what they looked liked—Maryann has braids and she’s the mousy, quiet one!  It is also something that defined most of my childhood games with my sisters. “Well, I’m a princess and I also have magical powers and a sword and red hair that is long and flows down to my waist, like Sorcha in Willow.” I wish I was making that last part up, but I’m not.

Moreover, I think physical descriptions of heroines are used in lieu of actual character development. I would suggest to all writers that before you even begin to think of what hair color you heroine has, whether she is beautiful or merely pretty or actually plain or even totally ugly, that you should figure out what the hell kind of personality she has because there are a slew of heroines who suffer from total lack of personality but have awesome hair. The second suggestion is to actually not say she is beautiful, because I never believe it. Sometimes when you tell me she’s beautiful it makes me downright antagonistic, I admit it.

Why? quite frankly, because it’s depressing. The heroine never just happens to be beautiful. Her beauty is directly related to and often responsible for the hero’s initial interest in her and since no other virtues ever manifest, one could correctly conclude that love is only for the beautiful. He sees her and then he loves her. Somebody pass me the Xanax because if that’s true, I’m gonna need that and a bottle of vodka.

2. The Lady Gaga Effect—I love Lady GaGa. I love her. I adore her. I worship at her feet. You should know that first before I get into this section. Lady GaGa is a weirdo. Have you seen her outfits? Fantastic, but bizarre. There’s something freakish about her. Even though she is blonde and pretty and thin, there’s a monstrosity there in the way that she dresses and presents herself that I find refreshing. Her music is neuroses disguised as pop songs. Her stage shows are about death and fear. When she’s interviewed she presents as a calm, composed, intelligent and creative young woman. Quite frankly, I’m not sure why she became such a superstar. Because beneath all that, she’s weird. And her weirdness is such that it really makes some people irate. Like people who hate her, really hate her. There were rumors going around that she was really a man—that’s just odd. That’s not the sort of thing that would happen to Madonna or Britney Spears. Why?

I read an article in the London Times by a woman named Caitlin Moran who summarized, much better than I ever could say, what I’ve always thought about Lady GaGa:

I have just come up with the theory that, if you have one of your heroes lying tipsily next to you, you should tell them all the pretentious pop-culture theories you have come up with about them. So I slurringly tell her that the difference between her and, say, Madonna, is that you don’t penetrate Gaga. Her songs and videos are – while sexual – about dysfunction and neuroses and alienation and self-discovery. They’re not, in any sense, a come-on. Despite having worn very little clothing for most of her career, Gaga is not a prick tease.

“Yeah! It’s not what straight men masturbate over when they’re at home watching pornography,” she confirms. “It’s not for them. It’s for… us.” And she gestures around the club (emphasis mine)

To confirm this statement I would say that with a few notable exceptions, most of the straight men I know hate Lady GaGa. Because, you see, she totally deflects the gaze. That underwear she’s wearing? It’s not for them, thus the rumors that she was really a transvestite.

Which leads me to my second theory about beauty: there is a kind of beauty that, to paraphrase Ms. Moran, cannot be penetrated. It cannot be gotten at, especially through sight. And not through years of intimacy with it, not through words, not through sex not through violence, not through death will it ever be known. It is a kind of beauty that constantly escapes capture. It hovers perpetually on the horizon of our vision and our conceptions and while it remains in sight, it is always out of hands’ reach. And it is monstrous. It incites desire but not lust. It is a beauty that borders ugliness, that toys with the repulsive, the grotesque, and the foul. It is a discomfiting dis-ease that does not incite or excite the sexual but makes us feel it nonetheless.

Can you imagine if a heroine was that kind of beautiful? The covers of the book might actually implode from the ramifications. Because if there is one thing that heroines are meant to be, it is penetrated.