Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (5 page)

Pretty girls get used to being treated like the enemy by other women. They are not the enemy. If you grow up weird-looking, it’s easy to think of them as such. I used to be terrified of those to whom girlhood seemed to come naturally, the gorgeous, graceful creatures who flocked around the back of the school bus, flirting and texting. It took me years to understand that pretty privilege comes with its own set of problems. That pretty girls, too, have to put up with harassment and violence, with the constant pressure to pare down your flesh and desires, and with the feeling of being judged and dismissed.

A pretty young woman is a paradox: at once a figure of desire and disgust. Hers is the power that all women are supposed to want, the only power we’re really allowed to have, the power to please and to play up to male sexual attention – and so it is vital that her power be put in its place. Anyone succeeding at the pretty girl game, however briefly, has to face the suspicion and hostility of other women as well as the worshipful contempt of men. She is assumed to be without consequence, to be intellectually void, to exist only for the pleasure of others; at best, she is a muse, a fascinating enigma. She is permitted hidden depths as long as they stay that way – hidden. 

Girls and grown women are exhorted to be beautiful at all costs, to compete with other women, for love, for attention, for the few consolation prizes handed out to those who try hardest. Pretty girls and ugly girls are taught to fear one another: after all, if power is a product of ‘erotic capital’, there can be no solidarity between those who are competing for those consolation prizes. You can’t win. If you choose to devote less of your time to grooming as a political statement, you’re a ‘hairy bra-burning feminist’ and nobody has any obligation to listen to anything you have to say, but if you embrace conventional beauty standards, or appear to enjoy them for their own sake, you are presumed to be a shallow and manipulative slut.

It’s interesting that ‘ugly’ is still the insult most commonly thrown at women to dismiss their power, to get them to shut up. Female politicians are called ugly and unfuckable by men who can’t quite bring themselves to say directly that they don’t deserve their power, that their primary purpose as women should be to please and arouse the opposite sex.
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I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been told, on the Internet or in person, to ‘shut up, ugly bitch,’ when men – or, occasionally, women – were uncomfortable with something I was saying, or with the fact that I was a young woman saying anyting at all. At first I panicked, started turning up to talks and debates in my best slinky black clothes, in leather, in lipstick – but no amount of lipstick is ever going to make patriarchy comfortable with the words coming out of your mouth, if you’ve an ounce of courage, or ambition, or anger.

‘Fat’ is even more obvious. You’re gross, you take up too much space, get out of my sight. Men who occupy positions of power, of course, are allowed to run to fat, to lose interest in their appearance, to turn up unshaved, bloated, haggard-looking after a night out networking: their places at the top table will still be reserved.

It’s a system of judgement, of exclusion, that permeates social class. Naomi Wolf was right, in
The Beauty Myth
, to refer to ‘Beauty Work’ – the time, money and effort women have to put into ‘maintaining’ their appearance and cramming their physical selves into the narrow stereotype of conventional beauty standards – as a new ‘third shift’ of labour, alongside women’s traditional ‘second shift’ of domestic and caring work. The irony, of course, is that when Wolf published
The Beauty Myth
at the age of twenty-nine, she was lambasted by men and women alike precisely because she was and remains conventionally beautiful.

At the same time, we’re told that we’re weak and stupid for caring. We’re told that participation in traditional beauty culture is in some way capitulating, is fragility on a fundamental level, whether in ourselves or in others. Women who are expected to turn up for work in lipstick and high heels – recently a trade-union motion was overturned that would have prevented employers from forcing women to wear heels
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– are often punished when they don’t, but rarely taken seriously when they do.

The game is rigged. You can’t win, because nobody wins. If you don’t diet, blow-out your hair, spend your spare cash on beauty treatments and fashionable clothes, you’re considered inferior, letting down professional standards – but if you do, you’re an idiot bimbo. Incidentally, here’s the answer to the weary question of whether leg-shaving and bikini-waxing prevents you from being a feminist. Of course it doesn’t. It doesn’t, and we need to stop writing articles about it. 

Of course you can remove the hair on your legs, straighten the hair on your head, wear high heels and pink glitter and play with make-up. I do some or most of those things whenever I go out in girl-drag.
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Feminism isn’t about telling women what not to wear. Nor is it about saying that every wardrobe choice you make is unproblematic, let alone likely to lead to sexual revolution. The fall of patriarchy is unlikely to begin or end with one woman’s decision to wear fishnets or grow out her armpit hair, so relax. Make informed choices, play with gender, wear what you want. Feminism is far more than a big-girls’ squabble over the dressing-up box, and there are more important things to do.

Gender determines the shape of our fantasies. Good little boys are supposed to dream about changing the world, but good little girls are supposed to dream about changing ourselves. From the first time we open a book of fairy tales, we learn that beauty is destiny, and when we grow up, we’re told that this destiny is ours to command. If we can consume wisely enough to be beautiful and fashionable, we can transform everything about ourselves.

When beauty becomes mandatory, it ceases to be about fun, about play. Dressing up, playing with gender roles, doing your braids badly in the mirror, and eating half your mother’s lipstick in an attempt to get it on your face – do you remember when that used to be fun? And do you remember when the fun stopped? Like any game, the woman game stops being fun when you start playing to win, especially if you’ve got no choice: win or be ridiculed, win or become invisible, dismissed, disturbed. When I was in the hospital, the markers of psychological health among young women were long hair, pretty dresses, shopping and make-up. The middle-aged, ponderously paunched male psychiatrists who ran the ward were absolutely in agreement on that point – to become healthy we had to ‘embrace our feminity’. The latest right-on theories about eating disorders posit the diseases as a method that young women use to escape the stresses of modern femininity.
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Anorexia nervosa, the logic goes, suspends the traumatic process of becoming a woman, because when you stop eating, when you cut down from 600 to 400 to 200 calories per day, your periods stop, your tits and hips and wobbly bits disappear, and you return to an artificial prepubescent state, complete with mood swings, weird musical obsessions, and the overpowering impulse to shoplift scrunchies from the cornershop. The reason young women and increasing numbers of young men behave like this, the logic goes, is because they’re scared and angry about the gender roles that they are being forced into. The notion that they might have damn good reasons for being scared and angry has not yet occurred to the psychiatric profession.

BREAKING THE GAME

In the school ward for the re-education of wilful non-eaters, sex talk was not permitted. Swearing was not permitted. In mandatory art-therapy sessions, me and two other girls drew huge, hairy cocks and cunts and crude sex scenes on the sheets of paper provided for us to express our feelings, and were called to explain why we were being so stubborn and not progressing as planned. In the line to get weighed in the morning we’d whisper
minge
and
fanny
to each other to see how loud we could get before the nurses shut us up. We had to behave. We had to be good girls, if we ever wanted to leave.

In that place, if you wanted to go out the front door and not in a box, you had to play by their rules. You had to smile and eat your meals. You had to be a good girl. That meant no more trousers, no more going out with short hair and no make-up, finding a boyfriend as soon as possible, and learning to style your hair and do your eyeliner. It meant buying different dresses for different occasions, fitting yourself out to have men look at you with lust, learning manners, learning to dip your head and say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ and ‘No cake for me, I’ve been naughty enough this week.’

That was proper femininity, straight femininity, femininity as control, as a great unqueering. It was the makeover to end all makeovers, and we helped each other, dressing each other up in clothes and make-up like cracked-out Barbie dolls, even me – especially me, because I’d come in wearing short hair and trousers and talking about kissing girls, so I had the most to learn about what a woman really was. We all played the game with one another, especially when one of us was allowed to leave the ward, dressing and painting and polishing her nails and doing her hair, sending her off into the world a healthy, normal woman, not the damaged, fragile person who had walked or been wheeled in months before with her heart unskinned.

Make yourself up. Make yourself new. Play the woman game, and play it better than your friends. You’re all surface, after all, and you’d better make the surface interesting, modern and new, because what’s underneath is just another woman with her petty problems and boring emotions. Makeover shows, from
America’s Next Top Model
to
The Swan
to
Snog, Marry, Avoid
and their endless iterations have been some of the most long-running and popular television franchises of the past two decades. This is no accident. 

For modern women in this anxious age, the makeover is a ritual of health and devotion and social conformity. It’s the central transfigurative myth of modern femininity, and it’s lucrative. Playing the woman game, the game of artifice and self-annihilation, is serious business. A recent survey by shopping channel QVC claimed that the average British woman spends £2,055 per year, or 11 per cent of the median full-time female salary, on maintaining and updating the way she looks. Men, by contrast, spend just 4 per cent of their salary on their appearance, most of which goes on shaving and the gym.
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Glossy women’s magazines are manuals of self-transformation: change your body for summer, change your wardrobe for winter, learn to look at the world through smoky eyes, sparkly eyes or natural eyes, which require just as much paint as the rest. Cosmetic-surgery companies plaster public transport with promises to deliver not just physical changes, but emotional ones like ‘confidence’. Fashion editorials advise us to spend money we don’t have on skirt suits and handbags as ‘investment pieces’; you’re not supposed to dress and style your body simply to please yourself but with one eye on your financial future. That skirt suit really is an ‘investment’ in a one-woman business whose product is you, only glossier. This is what power, health and success means to the modern, emancipated woman: terminal exhaustion and a wardrobe full of expensive disguises.

Femininity, docility and prettiness, by which we mean the lifelong effort to look as much like an even-featured, underweight Caucasian girl in her early twenties as possible, are the entry tickets to a wide variety of jobs in which a few will make it big and most won’t make it out.

It turns out that they lied to us. The magazines lied, the movies lied, our mothers lied. Being a beautiful girl does not make everything better. It does not, in fact, make anything very much better at all, it just gives you a different set of problems, as anyone who became briefly pretty after school was over, like I did, knows for sure. Little girls learn that being beautiful is the only sure route to love, liberty and happiness, and if they are born beautiful, it doesn’t matter if they’re born poor. The mythology of beauty isn’t very different from the fairy tale of the beautiful girl who grows up to marry the prince in centuries of children’s stories, except that today the prince is an optional extra, part of the package of fame and money and adoration rather than the only ticket to all those things we’re supposed to crave. Of the endless lists of the richest, most powerful and most admired women in the world, most of them still got there by being beautiful, by marrying a powerful man, or both. Hillary Rodham Clinton may have been Secretary of State, but she is still judged for her fuckability and ability to rock a pantsuit. The sole regular exception is the Queen of England, in whose case it doesn’t matter how much Botox you haven’t had if you own half of Antarctica and look scary on a stamp.

Beauty is about class, and it always has been. Centuries ago, the aspirational ‘beauties’ of the age were the trophy wives and daughters of wealthy men who could afford to keep ‘their’ women idle and dress them in impractical finery; today you are expected to look as if you’re rich enough not to have to work if you want to have a career. The extra time, money and energy women spend on their appearance increases every year, and is surprisingly resistant to the economic downturn:
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it’s almost as if someone had been telling us from before we had language that beauty was necessary for survival. What’s the first thing you say to a baby with a bow in her hair? Who’s a pretty girl?

Women and girls grow up learning that whatever we do with our three score and ten years on this planet, however brave and smart and accomplished we are, however many millions we earn or lives we save, none of it matters if we are not beautiful. In fact, we need to be beautiful if we want to be loved, powerful and successful; those few women who get to be in the public eye without the measurements of a teenage Siberian gymnast, from television academics to Secretaries of State, are mercilessly ridiculed and attacked for their appearance in newspapers and magazines, on television and online, judged on their attractiveness to men. We are reminded that we must be a hot babe – an ideal subject – or be ridiculed.