Musings of an Inappropriate Woman

“Is there a failure more immediately public than trying to look beautiful and falling short?”

I related to Autumn Whitefield-Madrano’s post on failure and beauty a couple of weeks back on all manner of levels.

There was her failure of her first driving test (Autumn at 16, me at 18), which both of us had assumed that as “smart, level-headed, ‘good’” girls, it couldn’t be that hard to pass. (Turns out were wrong.) There was the idea – which I’ll write about later this week – that success should spring from natural ability rather than from effort, or that success that derives from the former is more valuable than that which derives from the latter.

But today I want to talk to you about a third kind of “failure”; the main kind Autumn critiques in her post. The failure of trying to look beautiful… but not quite getting there. Autumn quotes Siobhan O’Connor of No More Dirty Looks:

“We had people privately e-mailing us and saying, I just can’t do it... I guess the mentality was, Well, if I look bad with no makeup, no big deal. But if you look bad with makeup—it’s like you’ve said to the world, This is the best I can do.”

I’m embarrassed to admit this, because it is in no way cool or strong or feministy, but a few days after my wedding to Mr Musings, I woke up and started crying. I cried and cried and cried and cried, for a whole hour. Maybe two.

I cried because I’d seen a bunch of photos our guests had uploaded to Facebook and, well, to say I didn’t like them was an understatement. It was hardly the first time I’d seen a photo of myself that I hated, but that these were photos of me as a bride made it sting all the worse. Because to paraphrase Siobhan O’Connor: “If you look bad as a bride – it’s like you’ve said to the world, This is the best I can do.”

I meant to write about this back when I was doing my “Feminist Wedding Planning” series, but I ran out of time. This idea that in putting on a white dress and getting our hair and make-up professionally done, we transform into something other than ourselves. The “bridal beauty myth” is the reason women spends thousands of dollars on dresses and photographers, starve themselves for a couple of months, and try out hairstyles and make-up they wouldn’t normally touch with a ten foot pole.

No one actually transforms themselves, and I knew that going in. But I still retained some trace of the belief that this was the best that I was ever going to look - certainly, the most effort I was ever going to put into looking “beautiful”.

Which was the crux of my horror, really. Because when I saw the offending photos I thought, “This isn’t the best that I can do!” And the idea that it might be, frankly, horrified me.

I felt like I hadn’t tried hard enough. I could have stopped eating chocolate the months leading up to the wedding in order to achieve that seductive but damaging to the psyche just-on-the-precipice-of-too-thin look! I could have reapplied my lipstick more often! I could have asked the hairdresser to give me a slightly bouncier blow dry!

But I didn’t do those things. Because while I considered altering my diet in the months leading up the wedding, the mirror, the scale and my clothes all told me I was “thin enough”. Because no one bothered to tell me to reapply my make-up on the night, and I was too busy eating and talking to people and having fun to think about it. Because even though it did cross my mind that my wedding day blow dry wasn’t quite nice as the one I’d had for my friend’s wedding a couple of weeks before, it looked nice enough, and I was in a hurry.

And because however much - and however wrongly - wedding planning is defined by an impossibly transcendent beauty ideal, it doesn’t actually impact the magic of the day. For me, that came through the singing, the dancing, the community and, you know, the actual getting married part.

To be honest, the insecure neurotic in me (which is not insubstantial), still wishes that I had tried a little harder. Not because I looked bad – I know I didn’t – but because it’s hard not to feel that way about a day in which photos are being taken of you from every angle.

As it happens, the official photos turned out great (even if, yes, I look thoroughly imperfect in them). This one is my favourite, for its hilariously triumphant expression*:

* Really, I was just saying hi to the friend in front of me.

Elsewhere: On failure and the contradiction of beauty (The Beheld)

Republished: Britney Spears and why it’s painful to be beautiful

I saw her on Thursday night.

A lot has been said in Australia about the quality of her performance, most of it centred around the fact that she doesn’t actually sing. To those people, I say, “who goes to a Britney Spears concert expecting her to sing?” We established 10 years ago that it wasn’t her forte. Back then I was pretty pissed off about it too (being a self-righteous teenager at the time - and one who sang at that), but these days she’s more a symbol than she is a singer. And her show is more a Circus-with-a-capital-C than a concert.

Even on that level, it had its failings, though. It was much like one of her albums, in that there were some incredible high points (multi-media, Perez Hilton, the first three songs and the last two or three), and a whole lot of filler in the middle. And she spent way too much time off stage. I paid [ridiculous amount of money] to see Britney Spears, not her dancers.

But five-song lulls mean time for thinking, and I spent most of it thinking about just how much the success of Britney Spears - and even her mental health - is measured and predicated on the way she looks. As I’ve written before: Britney with fat on her body is read as ”off the rails”; skinny, toned Britney means “she’s baaaaack” - as much so as the quality of her albums or songs.

She looked fantastic on Thursday night, absolutely beautiful. But looking at her made me feel sad, because it reminded me of how much work - and probably anguish - goes into keeping her looking like that.

Two and a half years ago, she shaved her head. Now her hair is long, blonde and half-way down her back, but you could see quite clearly where her real hair ended and the extensions began. Her body was perfectly proportioned and toned - but we’ve all seen enough photos to know that she doesn’t look like she did when she was 20 anymore without a lot of work. (And even then I recall reading that she did 1000 sit ups each day. And possibly had bulimia.)

Recently, I wrote a feature article about the lives of the ridiculously beautiful. One of the things that came out of it was that even for the prom queens of this world - the kind of women who get approached on the street by legitimate modelling agencies and put on their books - being “the beautiful girl” takes work.

And that even if you naturally possess all the qualities that make a woman considered beautiful by the majority of people, it’s still something you can turn up and down, even on and off, at will - through clothing, hairstyle, make up, high heels, etc. So much of what we think of as beautiful is really about performing femininity, regardless of your body shape or bone structure.

For the story, I spoke to Dr Meredith Jones, a researcher from UTS. She told me that contrary to the “ugly duckling” stereotype, conventionally attractive people were actually more likely to get cosmetic surgery than less attractive people. They knew the feeling that comes from being loved and appreciated from their looks, and were terrified of it going away. Or, you know, wanted to give that “love” a little boost.

And so we see Britney Spears. A woman who has - I think, at least - all the gifts of conventional beauty, who gets shit lumped on her whenever she dares to gain five kilos, get a pimple or not blow dry her hair. And who gets showered with financial and emotional rewards whenever she follows the script.

Barbie vs reality: via Healthy Is The New Skinny:

“This is Katie Halchishick, one of the founders of the blog Healthy Is The New Skinny. She was photographed for the November issue of O magazine covered in the dotted lines that would be made by a plastic surgeon prior to cosmetic surgery. She’s clutching a Barbie doll and the lines on her nude flesh — the first time O has featured a nude model — indicate what she would have to have cut away in order to have Barbie’s figure.”

I DO NOT HAVE AN EATING DISORDER P01.

I rather love this series. misspixnmix writes:

I DO NOT HAVE AN EATING DISORDER P01

I’ve been having some pretty intense internal arguments about whether or not to start posting this, but finally bit the bullet. Last year I was diagnosed with anorexia, which I’ve apparently had for most of my adult life. While I’m still very much in the process of recovery (still sort of in the process of even accepting that I may have a problem, actually), I’ve been using a variety of tools to try to wade through the sea of emotional craptasticness that this has unearthed. After I started taking anti-depressants, for months I couldn’t draw. I felt like my hands had been cut off. By starting to work on a story, I was able to focus enough to get my hands moving again (you can see a lot of brilliantly crappy artwork as I work my way out of the slump). I started to find this exercise therapeutic (in conjunction with, you know, actual therapy), as attempting to define my thoughts and actions for the page has forced me to examine them more closely. And on the other side of the coin, regular sequential art is supposedly a much better way to improve your drawing style than just sketching random naked ladies and animals (I swear I keep those two subjects separated most of the time).

I’ve got a decent backlog to work with, so am planning to post weekly. I apologise in advance for any offense as this is a sensitive topic, and my experience is in many ways not typical to other ED sufferers. I can only go with what I know. Being confronted with how many lies I’ve learned to tell to cover up my habits is pretty shocking, so now I’m trying to be honest.

Next Page: http://misspixnmix.tumblr.com/post/3371225911/i-do-not-have-an-eating-disorder-page-002-wow

(via Blogelstein)

Pop music had often cast women as sweet, bright creatures, but Winehouse’s lyrics revealed something messier. Here was … a woman who chose to live a little wild, follow her heart and sing of the simple stew of being female. Her songs were filled with broad talk, cussing, drink and drugs and dicks, songs that could hinge on one magnificent, unladylike question: “What kind of fuckery is this?

Laura Barton on Amy Winehouse

Like every other journalist on the planet, I’m writing a magazine piece this week about Amy Winehouse. But the above quote made me think of another famous British woman: Kate Moss.

When I interviewed Moss last year for Aussie ladymag Cleo, people were eager to know “what she was like”. Which, now that I reflect on the questions I was asked, pretty much meant “what she looked like in the flesh”.

“What was she wearing?”* “Was she insanely beautiful?” “Did you just want to kill yourself looking at her?”

Most of the time, I told them she was small. Boring, I know, but that was my first and most overwhelming impression: that she was shorter than I expected. Not the 5’7” she is officially promoted as. More like 5’6” or 5’5”.

My other thought - and I couldn’t find the words to explain this until I read Laura Barton’s article on Amy Winehouse - was that she looked like a woman who was too busy living to be overly invested in how she looked.

By which I guess I mean that I imagine that if you spent 20 minutes in a room with someone like, say, Jennifer Aniston, you be bowled over by her glow. The toned limbs from her daily yoga classes with a personal trainer, the glossy blowdry, the prenaturally dewy skin, the fact that the woman hasn’t had a slice of cake since the second season of Friends (okay, so maybe I exaggerate a little…).

Such comments aren’t an insult to Aniston anymore than Moss’s “messiness” is an insult to her. The woman is a beacon of health, and it shows.

But if Aniston is yoga and vegetables, Kate Moss is cocaine and clubbing. And again, it shows.

Our interview was part of a beauty promo day, but the only make-up she was wearing was thick black eyeliner. She looked like a good looking 37-year-old who has taken lots of drugs, drunk a lot of alcohol, and spent years sunbathing on the Mediterranean and partying at music festivals - which is of course, exactly who and what she is.

Moss has a face could light up any camera, but she’s also a woman who - as Barton’s article about Winehouse put it, has chosen to “live a little wild” and “follow her heart”. It’s not what everyone’s heart would choose, but I kind of liked the fact that - despite being a supermodel - she didn’t feel the need to play that role every day. That she’d rather live her live in a way that she obviously enjoys than have perfect skin. Which is probably why people like her so much.

* She was wearing black, if you’re curious. I don’t remember the outfit in any further detail.