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.

Spinsters, Bluestockings, and Other Aging Virgins

I think I might be a spinster. Is there a checklist or something I can look at to make sure? Let's see: over-educated, check. Glasses, check. Governess, oh no but teacher and librarian sort of equals that, terrible fashion sense, nope. Phew, this close to being a spinster.

But if I am a spinster and my life was a romance novel, then any day now Mr. Wonderful Pants should be coming along to sweep me off my feet. Which would be good because my love of beautiful shoes has completely ruined my feet. The bone below my big toe actually aches. However, I think that my shoes are the major fashion item preventing me from being a spinster.

In any case, I prefer romances featuring spinsters and bluestockings the most.  It has to do with Disney's Sleeping Beauty.

When I was between three and five I was obsessed with several things: Mr. Darcy, The Nutcracker, The Magic Flute and being a Sleeping Beauty princess.  My love of Mr. Darcy was born of having viewed the old Masterpiece Theater version of Pride and Prejudice.  I thought Mr. Darcy was a dreamboat. According to my mother, I used to pretend to kiss Mr. Darcy.  I also wanted to be a ballet dancing, opera singer. Unfortunately, I was unable to carry either a  tune or a rhythm. Such is life.  I was also the oldest child of a family of girls.

By the time I was five I was very aware of the fact that eldest sisters rarely, if ever, get a happy ending. In order to get a happy ending one must the youngest or the only child. I was neither.  I was convinced that somehow this dream of being a ballet dancing, opera singing princess in a story would some day come to pass. After all, if sudden transformations into great beauties have taught us anything then they have taught us that sudden transformations into great beauties are possible.

Imagine my bitter disappointment when none of this actually occurred. Ah well, what can you do. The other aspect of myself that characterized my childhood was deep sensitivity to anything that stank remotely of injustice or unfairness. That being said, it always seemed to me to be extremely unjust that ugly step-sisters and eldest children got the shit end of the deal in fairy tales. I mean, why should birth order rule you out of having a happy ending?

Which brings me back to spinsters, bluestockings and other aging virgins. Here then is coterie of ugly step-sisters and eldest daughters, albeit not in those terms, who are finally getting their happy endings. This coterie also includes any girls with glasses.

Favorites of this genre include, but are not limited to:

Mary Challoner in The Devil's Cub

Annelise Kempton in The Devil's Waltz

Beth Armitage in An Unwilling Bride

Penelope Featherington in Romancing Mr. Bridgerton

And most especially, Sophie Hatter in Howl's Moving Castle which is not a romance but amazing, amazing, amazing.

What I think I like most about these stories is that these heroines are not the object of initial desire, but somehow by being their own self, they become beloved.  While standards of beauty have changed, the one that has remained the same is that if a woman is to be successful in love then she must never be herself.  This is the central thesis of the infamous The Rules but it is not a new thesis.

Yet, these stories reject the notion that in order to be loved or sexually desired that a woman must hid her intelligence, push her beauty like a drug or crumble in the face of danger. In short, to exhibit masculine qualities rather than feminine virtues.  It's rather heartening, but is it true? This I do not know.

Two Weeks Notice

The romantic comedy genre is full of really, really bad movies featuring douchie male leads and women who can be politely described as harpies. Think Made of Honor in which Michelle Monaghan berates Patrick Dempsey for his sex-toy bridal shower (an accident on his part) like a prudish little schoolmarm instead of a sophisticated 30-something woman living in New York City. No woman I know . . . and let's be honest I know a lot of freaks and perverts, you know people who vote Democrat so my point of view is clearly skewed. . . would ever have a hissy over something that silly, especially something that was so clearly a mistake. They'd probably love it.  But then, I don't know very many harpies.

It isn't very often you get a rom com these days with lots of witty banter and the sort of classic sexual chemistry of opposites at odds that you find in older films. In fact, the romantic comedies of the 1930's and 1940's (It Happened One Night, The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby) tend to have strong female leads and charming heroes whereas in modern romantic comedies, as I stated above, the tendency is adhere to gender stereotypes like something out of a Parade magazine or Andy Capp comic strip;  misogynistic gender roles in which the man is a semi-retarded, ugly little doofus and the woman is mega-hot but total naggin, manipulative bitch. The fact that these sorts of comedies out number the witty-banter ones 10 to 1 is rather disturbing.

Two Weeks Notice, however, is an exception to this rather depressing rule. It features Hugh Grant playing my favorite of his roles, the lovable cad and Sandra Bullock as a type-A lawyer with a social conscience.  However, Hugh Grant always comes across as intelligent and never dumb and Sandra Bullock is sweet, if neurotic. There's a great deal of back and forth but it is never cruel or mean-spirited. Moreover, nobody's fiance gets dumped at the end (number one rule of modern romantic comedies is that anyone who is engaged/married at the beginning of the movie will not be so at the end unless they are the quirky side-characters), nobody tries to date three different people at once, nobody interrupts a wedding at the last minute to make a declaration of love, and nobody learns a very important lesson about the true meaning of Christmas or whatever.

Instead you have Hugh Grant doing his best to channel Cary Grant at his goofiest and a plot based on the coming together of opposites.  I think, though, that it is Sandra Bullock's character that really makes the movie.  She plays Lucy, an intense, politically liberal, do-gooder. She's honorable and kind and a little manic but never really a bitch. She wants the world to be a better place and she's determined to make it that way. When she gets stressed out she over-eats (one of the few heroines, movie or otherwise who does. Who the hell stops eating when they are stressed? Answer: No one, that's why Americans are fat, because they are stressed out and poor.  I hate heroines who don't eat. It is a lie!) until she makes herself sick. She's an overachiever but she doesn't nag or manipulate. She's just blunt.  I find this very refreshing. I like her. I know her. She's a character who is more like the women I actually meet than the majority of female characters in romantic comedies who are caricatures of certain aspects of female traits. Take for example the excerable He's Just Not That Into You.  Now I have three sisters, the majority of my friends have been and are women (I went to a small liberal arts college. The straight male population was minute), I have worked in female dominated fields most of my life and I have rarely come across a woman as desperate as the character Gigi or a little ho like Scarlett Johannsen's character or a nagging, frigid bitch like Jennifer Connelly's character.  Nor do I encounter very many women who define themselves totally around their relationships with no outside interests or concerns. These are not the women I meet. Sometimes the women I know occasionally act like one of these stereotypes but these behaviors are not their defining characteristics nor the a representation of how they are the majority of the time. The fact that women are depicted in such a consistently awful light in romantic comedies is just disheartening. Therefore, I love the fact that Sandra Bullock's character is nothing like any of these. She may be intense and dutiful and a workaholic but she's not a bitch, at least not in the bad sense of that word. She's flawed but likable and realistic nor does she spend the entire film punishing Hugh Grant for some absurd mistake. It is more a film about them coming to the realization that they love each other. One of my favorite scenes is one in which they go to a lunch, order the same salad and proceed to switch, whilst carrying on an entirely separate conversation, various pieces of food from their plates. George takes all of Lucy's beets and then dumps all his ice cubes into her water. She stills all his croutons. Its very charming and the sort of thing very close friends, family or married people do.

I would like to see romantic movies go back to the old-fashioned sexual tension of something like a Katherine Hepburn and a Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib, a Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, or even a Woody Allen and a Diane Keaton in Manhattan Murder Mystery. It is curious that as gender and sex roles have changed and become much more loose and malleable, as women have gained power socially and politically that the heroines of romantic comedy films have become less charismatic, less powerful and more and more bitchy and weak.  Seriously, what's up with that?

I leave you with a clip montage from Two Weeks Notice brought to you by some person on YouTube

Beautiful Heroines Make Me Want to Stab Things: A Rant

Despite the fact that I consider myself to be a very advanced reader--that is I read not only for pleasure and escape but also for knowledge and criticism, or whatever it is that distinguishes the two--I admit to a certain low brow reading habit in that I project myself into the hero.  When I can't do this I get angry. These days I often have a hard time reading about beautiful heroines.  I fully concede to the fact that this is because I do not consider myself a beautiful woman and thus it becomes difficult to relate or transpose myself into said heroine. Rather, I consider myself to be soundly average with the added drawback of being smart and not the least bit submissive--and if you don't think that's a drawback then you've never grown up in Utah. I swear to you all, sometimes it is like living in the worst parts of a Jane Austen novel. The point is that sometimes beautiful, endlessly desirable heroines with all their sexual knowledge or blazingly rampant naivete (see the heroines of Barbara Cartland and Laura London) make me very cross-eyed and stabby-stabby.

I realize, too, that I am a hypocrite in that I love, love the endlessly desirable, beautiful heroes. I know, that's a double standard if there ever was one, however, being a female I feel rather entitled to my hypocrisy for the simple reason that men have made physical and visual desire their sole provenance and have entirely left out the second sex.  Like when a hot woman and an average man are walking down the street or sitting at a restaurant together no one wonders why she is with him. They just assume that it is because he has money or personality or something. Whereas a beautiful man and an average woman would be goggled at with everyone wondering what he was doing with her?

The thing that really sticks in my craw is that it isn't even true.  The implication about beauty, I mean. You know, that it brings you happiness or joy. Ultimately it makes no difference. Oh sure, random people are more likely to treat you better and give you free scoops of ice cream at the gelato place but it doesn't seem to make any kind of difference in whether or not your husband will cheat on you, file for divorce or turn out to be gay. And of course then you get old and die and where is beauty then? Yet somehow everyone's still under the misguided impression that it is beauty that tames the rake. It isn't. I don't consider Diane Keaton any less attractive than Annette Benning yet Warren Beatty stayed with Annette not Diane. What's up with that? Probably something more to do with temperment and time of life than looks.

Not that looks don't matter because clearly they do but anyone who has checked out the personal ads on Craigslist will quickly learn two things: desire and beauty have nothing to do with one another and people are sick fucks. (seriously, message me and I will link you to something shocking, perverse and graphic that will make you snort milk out your nose).

-sighs- I'm not even sure if this is a trend of the novelists themselves. I think my abhorrence of the beautiful heroine is entirely due to the back cover. They are written thusly:

Verena McAdams may have only been a common haberdasher and former nun but her fiery blonde hair and courtesan's body made other promises. Overwhelmed by bussiness debt, she was forced to do the one thing that no gently bred lady should ever contemplate: file for bankruptcy.

Simeon, Lord Ravenscock seemed the typical ton rakehell but he had a dark secret: he practiced law on the side.  When Verena McAdams walked into his solicitor's office with her virgin's eyes and knowing hips, he knew that pro bono or not, this case would pay him in something other than legal fees.

By the time I get through the first little summary where it tells me how hot Verena or Serena or Belinda is, I've discarded the book and moved on to the next one on the shelf. It's like in the movie She's All That where we are supposed to believe that nobody noticed how freaking adorable and edible Rahcel Leigh Cook is . . . okay well maybe I'll let that one go because it is supposed to be high school and everyone knows teenagers are basically retarded sociopaths, but still, you get my point.

I'm not really interested in beautiful heroines unless you can somehow make me forget that they are beautiful. That is, I don't want to read about people who have one shiny characteristic and nothing else. You know how it is where in some books they keep mentioning how damn witty someone is but is never manifest that particular claim in the dialogue or how smart and ditto. Authors! Show don't tell. Jesus, that's creative writing 101. A character should have depth and their one gigantic attribute, whether it be beauty or penis, should not be mentioned every other page. The most loveable things about people aren't their looks. Besides, familiarity breeds obliviousness. At a certain point, you stop seeing how hot someone is and just start seeing Ted.

On the Nature of Virginity in Heroines

The majority of heroines in historical and regency romance novels are without doubt, virginal. This overwhelming slew of virtuous women is bothersome to many modern readers who feel that a woman's worthiness should not be determined by chastity. They are right. Virtue is not synonymous with an intact hymen.  However, I do believe this consternation is missing the point about what virginity means in the tradition of Romance; meaning not just novels of the paperback persuasion but in the full sense of that term when applied to literature and narrative structure.

Let's begin with some general observations about the historical nature of virginity.  It has been argued elsewhere that virginity in women is a valued characteristic of a patriarchal society because it perserves the hierarchial order of inheritance from father to son. Therefore virginity in women is prized because it maintains tribal and economic purity. I don't dispute this.  However, a simultaneous truth to this argument is another; namely that motherhood is both dangerous and cumbersome. Pregnancy, both historically and presently, can lead to death. Childbirth killed many, many women. It was and is a risk. If one happens to survive the process, a woman then has a child, a child that needs to be feed and bathed, loved and hugged, cared for and protected.  A woman invariably becomes tied to her child.  Having children, as my father is wont to say, is like giving hostages to fate. What he means by this statement is that having children puts your life at the mercy of their destinies. Your destiny is suddenly tied up in their well-being on a level and in such a way that does not exist with any other person.  As rewarding as the endeavor can be, there is a certain loss of freedom in having children.  There is at the very least a certain loss in the ability to be entirely selfish and spontaneous.

 Sex, being the predeterming factor to motherhood, is therefore troublesome to women.  Add into that the fear of veneral disease (pox), the variety of social and religious pressures to refrain and sexual desire becomes a treacherous place for women (I would argue it is a treacherous place for men as well but that's a different blog.)

Romance is a love story but it is also, fundamentally, a narrative embedded in the idea of journey; of going from the safety of home to the adventure of the world.  The virginity of the heroine is therefore a metaphor for several things besides good character.  Northrop Frye in The Secular Scripture briefly discusses the concept of Virginity in his chapter on heroines.  Without having the book in front of me, I paraphrase that he says virginity is to a woman what honor is to a man: the identifying feature of her freedom and her status as an independent person and not a slave.  So like the goddess Artemis, a virginal heroine is neither mother nor wife and therefore has the liberty to go where she pleases when she pleases and act as she pleases. Retaining her virgnity is then an act that maintains her independence from the world of men. 

Advances of in medical science since the Enlightenment, particularly since the advent of the pill, have changed our views about the nature of female sexuality.  There have been, previous to this century, many more consequences for unprotected sex for women than for men (there still are.) 

Besides this, it concerns me that having sex or not having sex is the determining factor of whether a heroine is considered strong. As if somehow by choosing not to have sex (or conversely choosing to have sex) makes you a victim of your circumstances, of the ideologies of the patriarchy or the religious right, when it may in fact have very little do with either and be a choice made more by inclination, temperment and sexual desire.

The point is that virginity in heroines is not necessarily some outmoded model of behavior romance novelists are foisting on their reading public in order to proselytize a conservative party line for the benefit of a universal and fundamentalist morality.  That said, I think it would be more beneficial to ask the question of what this particular state of being does in the narrative structure of a particular story and for the character development of a particular heroine rather than simply repudiate her virginity as some sort of moral judgment of loose women everywhere.