Tizz Wall, Domme, Oakland, California

Interviewing Tizz Wall under her guise as a professional domme was a delight, but she actually has a panoply of guises that would have made for excellent beauty chat. A speaker (she’ll be speaking at the upcoming Catalyst Con on how to ally with sex workers), sex educator (she assisted sexuality author Jamye Waxman with her most recent book), writer (including her Mistress Manners column at Playpen Report), and erstwhile advocate for survivors of domestic violence, Wall’s working lives appear diverse but all surge toward the larger goal of making the world a better place for women of all walks of life. In fact, she’s currently completing her San Francisco Sex Information Sex Education certification. She currently does her domme work independently (though when this interview took place she worked out of a BDSM house). We talked about assimilating to—and literally blinding—the male gaze, the pressures of being a physical worker, and the similarity between BDSM houses and slumber parties. In her own words:

Photo by Lydia Hudgens

On Looking the Part

Some of the women show up for work looking cute, but most of the time everybody shows up in their sweatpants and don’t have makeup on, or they biked there so they’re all sweaty. No one’s showered. They’re in states of comfort, almost like, “Oh, did I manage to put on pants today?” In the morning we have kind of a ritual—there’s opening chores to get things going for the day, and then we’ll sit down at the kitchen table. There are a bunch of mirrors we pull up and put on the table, we’ll have our computers out, listening to music and talking and gabbing about whatever. That’s when we’ll all put on our makeup and do our hair. If we’re struggling and can’t get our hair right it’ll be like, “Can you please do the back?” It’s the female bonding over grooming at its max, I guess. Almost every day that you’re there, it’s part of the process. It’s like having the slumber party makeover every morning. It turns into one of those tip-sharing things that happens at slumber parties: “I got this new concealer, do you want to try it?” or “This color doesn’t work for me but I think it’d look great on you, do you want it?” We’ll do that, cook breakfast, make coffee. You all want to get ready in the morning because you want to have someone available in just a few minutes. If I need to, I can put on full makeup in probably 20 minutes tops, 10 if I’m really hustling. 

I’m very aware of my looks, specifically as a sex worker. Personally, I’ve wondered if I’m attractive enough—I can get very self-conscious. I feel confident in myself, and I did when I first started too, but back then I was like, I’m definitely not the tall, thin, blonde, model-esque type, and obviously you have to be that to be in this line of work, right? So I wasn’t sure I’d get hired. Then, it’s funny—being there, there’s kind of a transformation that happens. So it’s particularly interesting to see the getting-ready process in the morning, because everybody is gorgeous—and the particular house I work in has a wide variety of body types and ethnicities and different types of beauty, it’s really varied—but you see everybody show up in their normal-person outfits, and then you see them do all this and it’s a whole transformation that happens. 

I had no idea what this world was like when I got into it. I remember asking, “How much makeup should I put on?” My boss said, “Whatever is going to make you feel comfortable and make you feel like you’re going to personify this character”—which is an extension of yourself but also still a character. You’re kind of amplifying a certain part of your personality. Whatever will make you feel like that character, that’s how much makeup you need to put on.

On Bodily Labor

A lot of our client base is older straight men, and that means on some level we are catering to the male gaze. We keep that in mind a lot. The people who have tattoos will hide them; I have a septum piercing, and I tuck it in my nose. I have a coworker who has a mohawk, but she has long, pretty hair in the middle; if you’re not paying close attention when she wears it down, it passes for long hair. When I first started, I’d been dyeing my hair blonde. I changed it because when I was at work I couldn’t have big old roots.

You show off your body in a certain way. One of women has lost a ton of weight since she began working, and that has helped her get more work. I know I’ll get more work if I do certain things that are more traditionally feminine. It becomes a business decision. There are definitely sex workers who don’t cater to that. But our particular community, the particular house that I’m in, that’s something the person running it gears toward. That’s what our advertising is geared toward. So that regulates a lot of our choices for our physical presentation.

I’ve actually gained weight since starting this work; when I first started I was doing roller derby, skating 10 to 12 hours week, and I’m not anymore. So now when I’m not getting work, I’ll be like, Oh my god, is this because I’ve gained weight? And I know that’s not it—I mean, I fluctuated just one size, it’s not this massive difference. But this feeling of the possibility that my looks are tied to my income can really hurt my self-esteem. Being financially independent is really important to me. In this work, everybody has slow weeks, and then you’ll get a rush with lots of work; it’s a back-and-forth. But when that happens, I can start to think that I’m actually putting myself at risk by gaining weight. Rationally I know that’s not the case—even if I were a supermodel, there would be an ebb and flow no matter what I do. But when I gain weight it’s more than just, “Oh, I’m having a bad day and feel so ugly and bloated.” Body stuff takes on a different tone. It’s less destructive in my personal relationships and my personal interactions and personal self-esteem, but with this financial angle there’s this feeling of, If I don’t lose this weight, I’m not going to work again. 

On Being Seen—or Not

When I first started I had a lot of self-consciousness about leading a session by myself. I wasn’t yet 100% on my domme persona, so I would use a blindfold. When I was really new I had a three-hour session booked, and I just hadn’t gotten the timing down and I still didn’t really know what I was doing. One of the things we learn to do is negotiate what to say and how to elicit what the clients want to do, and match that up with what our interests are. What I want to do is, you give me your money and leave, because really what I want is to just read my book and still have the money, you know? So it’s not really what you want, but they say that, so you have to be good at asking the right questions and proposing things. So during this three-hour session I kept getting bored and not really knowing what to do and needing time to think, particularly because at that time I was so green—I had no clue what I was doing. I’m very expressive, so if I’m confused or thinking about what I’m going to do next, it’s all over my face. Blindfolding him was great, because then when I was sitting there thinking, What am I going to do next, he’s not really being responsive and I don’t know what to do, I didn’t have to pretend like I wasn’t having those thoughts. Now that I’ve been doing it a while and feel like I’ve hit my stride, that amount of time would be a great session and it would be fun.

Clients will often request that I have them only look at me when I give permission. I mean, that’s very submissive! In a playspace, not making eye contact can represent submission and reverence. It can become about asking for permission, or earning that privilege in some way. If a client is coming to see a domme rather than going to a strip club or going to see an escort, they’re going to a domme for a reason. They’re seeking out that dominance. Saying “Don’t look at me” is a subtle, effective way of establishing dominance, of making it clear that this is my room, this is my space, and you need to respect that.

That applies outside of work in some ways—not to that extreme, of course, but in terms of self-presentation. It makes the argument of how you present yourself in a certain way to control how people look at you in a fair or appropriate way where you have some degree of control over it. Women are so judged by their appearance that making certain choices about how I present myself becomes a way of controlling how people view me.

On Commanding Attention

Being a sex worker has made me recognize power I can have in everyday interactions. Before, I was much more self-conscious about things, even if I was dressed up or whatever. Everybody talks about how confidence is something you can do, but I don’t think I understood that until I started this work. I mean, I’m incredibly clumsy, so I’ve fallen in front of clients. But being a domme is a lot like theater in many ways, where the show just keeps going. You drop something, you trip over your words, you trip over your feet, your garter comes undone—whatever, you play it off. And when you’re a domme, you can play it off like, “That’s not even my fault. Why did you do that?” I’ve had the CD skip and I’ll be like, “Why did you make my CD skip? It wasn’t doing that before you got here.” “I didn’t touch it.” “It’s still your fault!” “I’m sorry.” One of the stories that gets told around the house is that this woman had a client who basically wanted humiliation; he wanted her to punish him. He was very tall, and she was a shorter woman. So the minute they got into the room she said, “How dare you be taller than me?! Get on your knees.”

It’s amazing what can happen once you stop having the expected male-female interaction, since women are so socialized to be nice and really cater to men—even if you’re a staunch feminist, even if you’re really mouthy, like myself, before this job. I still have some of that tendency to apologize profusely if something goes wrong. I’m gonna be like, “I’m so sorry, I messed it up, I’m so sorry.” But I think having this job made me really realize the power I can have over a situation. I mean, personal accountability is important, and you should apologize when you mess up. It’s a matter of not overdoing it, not feeling really bad about it. Something went wrong? It’s fine, we’re moving on. Having that sort of presentation has a lot of power.

Doing the “I’m pretty but I have no brains” thing is not my goal. I don’t present that way, even as a sex worker when I’m trying to appeal to that male attraction, even though the presentation is definitely vampy and really conventionally feminine. And we definitely have clients who come in and think we must be stupid. My goal is that my presentation will command your attention—but now that I’ve got your attention I’m going to use all the other things in my arsenal. My brain, my sense of humor, being okay with myself and with what happens in that situation, communication skills. That definitely crossed over into dating: I’m going to use a certain presentation, and it will command your attention, but the other things are what’s going to hold it together.

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Lexie Kite, Ph.D. Communications Student and Co-Editor of Beauty Redefined, Salt Lake City

The minute I found Beauty Redefined, I knew I’d found a site to take notice of. Giving active points about media literacy, cultural messages aimed toward women, body image, and beauty ideals, every post on Beauty Redefined went beyond merely stating, Hey, folks, there’s a problem here, instead presenting airtight breakdowns of scripts we might take for granted. More important, the site gives active points for readers on how to begin to reject the messages we’re surrounded with. The Beauty Redefined team also gives one-hour visual presentations to arm viewers with tools and countermessages about harmful media ideals, beauty, and health.

When I learned that the incisive, dedicated, laser-sharp minds behind Beauty Redefined were not only two communication Ph.D. candidates at the University of Utah but also identical twins—well, how could I not want to interview them? Today we have Lexie Kite, whose dissertation focuses on women and self-objectification. (Read the interview with Lindsay, the other half of Beauty Redefined, here.) We talked about internalizing the male gaze, twins as mirrors, and prime-time pornography. In her own words:

Photo by Matt Clayton Photography

On Self-Objectification 

When you grow up in a media-oriented world, like we all have, you grow up with the male gaze: the look of the camera, the look of the spectator viewing the object of the gaze on film. It’s the way the camera pans up and down these bodies, the way the dialogue revolves around that woman. It doesn’t happen with men—it happens with women, for the most part. That has become so normalized that the male gaze is now internalized by women. It’s not even something we question. So what’s happened is that now it’s desirable to not only become the object of the gaze—I mean, we’ve been talking forever about this idea of objectification—but also to be the subject too. To be the one who gazes and the one being gazed upon at the same time. I think it really comes down to the fact that when we see this many images of women’s bodies signifying sex and power, we are cut down to our bodies—and somehow we begin to believe that’s true. Self-objectification is just the natural next step—the most harmful natural next step. When we are consumers of women, we are consumers of ourselves.

One of the areas where I see self-objectification playing out—and one that I think is so frustrating—is Victoria’s Secret. Five billion dollars a year! It’s powerful. I got interested in the industry of Victoria’s Secret because I was a shopper there; the semi-annual sale was very appealing. But then I’d get those catalogues in my mailbox, and I started seeing images that were pretty jarring. Then I caught wind of the fashion show they have twice a year on CBS, so I looked into how many people are viewing this show, how popular and powerful Victoria’s Secret really is. I found one other scholar who has really talked about this, and the stuff she said about Victoria’s Secret in her own historical and critical analysis was that those images were women’s pornography. Images of women, marketed to women, packaged and sold. It comes right into your home. It’s kind of like the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, in that it’s the most popular, credible sports magazine, and then once a year we get this other thing that is packaged in this way and sits on your coffee table. So you think it’s safe, but it might not be as safe as we think. In terms of Victoria’s Secret, I see that playing out, this idea that it’s just lingerie, but you’re really getting something else.

The Victoria’s Secret mission statement has said that these images are about women feeling good about themselves. They are not for men to look at. But if you look at the images, it couldn’t be anything more than what the male gaze is. It’s as graphic as anything you would see in soft-core porn—it’s just women pulling at their underwear or being naked. They can be completely naked some of the time and they are wearing thongs that say “All-Night Show.” But Victoria’s Secret says this is not for men to look at, this is for you to feel good—and we believe that. Maybe we don’t even think of it as a contradiction, like this is for us to feel good about ourselves, but that says self-objectification to me. To me self-objectification is the idea of taking some beauty thing—let’s say breast implants—and saying, “This isn’t for men—this is for me to feel good about myself.” I see that as the literal embodiment of self-objectification, internalizing that male gaze so much that you can’t even break apart the fact that being gazed upon is your greatest desire. You’ve internalized that male gaze, so that’s how you feel good about yourself. It’s crazy stuff. 

On Pain 

I was very confident in my abilities in high school—I was class president every year, was nominated for homecoming queen, I was always running assemblies. I was confident in what I could do and what I wanted to say. But somehow I lived this contradiction: I could do a lot, but for some reason I thought I couldn’t be everything that I was supposed to be, and couldn’t look good doing it. That was internalizing the male gaze, right there: I learned that it was all about how I looked and not about what I could do. So I was confident in who I was as a person; it really did just come down to the looks thing. All those messages that I heard from the media were telling me that if I wasn’t hot enough, I wasn’t good enough. And if I wasn’t going to get to that place of feeling like I really was good enough, nobody can. It’s unattainable, and I don’t think I really knew that. You’re never going to be pretty enough. You’re never going to be skinny enough. Because the whole point is that these messages are telling you that you need to be someone you’re not. It creates a void. I didn’t even know that I had that void, not until I took a class on media criticism my freshman year of college. We were looking into pop culture and how powerful those industries are and what kind of messages they are putting out. I felt my heart beat more rapidly because I was hearing stuff that resonated with what I’d come to think about myself in really harmful ways. For the first time I started being able to critically think about the messages I’d heard. They didn’t necessarily pertain to my reality—but I wanted them to so badly.

I’m a body image activist and I’m so passionate about this stuff, but it’s because of the pain I’ve felt. I know that pain brings progress. I can’t do this work without having been privy to intimately knowing the reason it resonates with people. They feel this pain too. I internalized this gaze, and I didn’t know how to articulate that—maybe that’s just because it’s so normal and so lived. It’s how most of us live our lives. But our research has helped me profoundly. I had been walking through life picturing myself from an outsider’s perspective. I’d taken less time to enjoy what was around me, yet it looks like I’m enjoying what’s around me. That division is so harmful. 

On Being a Twin 

Most of us view ourselves from an outsider’s gaze. But I don’t even really know how to think about that, because—maybe it’s the same thing as viewing myself from an outsider’s gaze, but in ways I view myself as being like Lindsay. Lindsay and I are especially hyperaware of competition. We’re such similar people—you know, identical DNA, as similar as you get!—and people put us in competition against each other, in conscious and unconscious ways. In terms of our looks—in terms of everything else too—but it definitely made me aware of my own features and my own looks, because I feel like Lindsay is a reflection of me to the world. I know she feels the same. I feel like I want Lindsay to represent me well. Because Lindsay could easily be me to people; we get called by the wrong name still, even in our own program at school. So I want her to be a good reflection of me. And yeah, that part of me is really aware.

Whenever I’d picture my face, I never thought Lindsay and I looked the same. I know the intricacies of my own face and what makes me different from her. Plus, being twins, people point out that stuff like crazy. So Lindsay looks different to me, but I get how people know we’re twins, especially when I see pictures of us. With the body it’s different. When we look at ourselves in the mirror we’re kind of seeing this two-dimensional image of our bodies; we’ve never getting the full feel. It’s why when you see a video of yourself it can be intriguing—you want to know what you look like from all those angles. So I can see Lindsay’s body—I can see her from every angle and it’s normal. She’s right there in front of me, in every dimension. It’s sort of a mediation of my mirror image and myself, and I can’t get that body perspective any other way. And then of course we have identical DNA, and people tell us we look so much alike—so even though I think our faces look different, I can internalize her body as my own. Sometimes I’ve pictured my body how Lindsay’s is; my body image becomes what Lindsay looks like. When her body changes, it can actually change my own image of my body, because she looks how I picture myself. And having someone else sort of be your body image can be a struggle.

My perception of my body image doesn’t have to do with size necessarily. Despite compliments I might get from people, it’s really about what I’m saying to myself. Body image is an internal thing. Lindsay has been able to brush off the negative messages better than I have, despite our similar appearances. To hear Lindsay value herself and not engage in fat talk, and just really refuse to be preoccupied with these notions about our bodies—it’s really helped me, just seeing her be positive. We don’t talk a lot about our bodies to each other—there isn’t a lot of that “Oh my gosh I feel so gross,” talk, and we don’t even do a lot of building each other up, because we’re such a unit that it feels weird. Like, I would never say, “Linds, you look so good!” I mean, occasionally, but that’s just not my first thing. I’m not going to just go to her and talk about her appearance. I don’t even know how to explain that because I’ve never known it any other way. Twins are weird!

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Invited Post: The Ripple Effect

Mara Glatzel from Medicinal Marzipan has long been one of my favorite body image bloggers, in part for her worldview and in part for her graceful, inspirational prose. But what strikes me most about Medicinal Marzipan is its honesty: Glatzel shares her vulnerabilities as well as triumphs in the route to wellness (including a recent post that gave me one of my own biggest "aha!" moments in the past several years about my own eating concerns). 

I was pleased to learn that Mara has developed a tool for helping others find their own place on the vulnerability-triumph spectrum, with Body Loving Homework, which she describes as "one part Ebook, one part digital anthology, and one part self-study coaching program—designed to help you find clarity around what you deserve out of your life and your daily experiences." When I sampled a few of the 100 writing prompts in the book, my responses ranged from joy (apparently my answer to "My body remembers" is a hint racy) to discovery (I think of myself as pretty calm, so imagine my surprise when several of my answers to prompts involved the word panic). I asked her to guest post here about incorporating self-acceptance into our daily lives, and the place where self-image and body image intersect. 

If you’re anything like me, you know exactly what it feels like to go through the motions: saying yes, piling on the additional work, doing the emotional housekeeping, working out the logistics, and taking everyone else’s needs into account.

You’re probably really good at it too—a skill cultivated and honed over the course of your life.

I used to think that taking care of others was what I was best at, what I was put on the planet to do.

I used to think that just because I was good at it, I was relegated to going through the motions the rest of my life.

This conveniently fit in with other beliefs that I held about my life—feelings of being unworthy, unlovable, unforgivably damaged—because, through taking really good care, I was able to make myself useful in a way that didn’t require me to necessarily stick my neck out.

I was kind.

I made dinner.

I cleaned up communal physical space.

I put down whatever I was working on, attending instead to the emotional crisis at hand.

I do not intend to set up a paradox here, as in: when I hated myself, I took care of everyone else, and when I learned how to love myself for who I was, I only took care of myself.

For me, it wasn’t one or the other. It was in the appearance of a choice in the matter. It was knowing that I was worth loving not only for my caretaking abilities, but also for the rest of me as well.

When I learned how to love myself, truly love myself, and believe in the fact that I had more to offer the world than laundered socks and mended hearts—I was able to believe, also, that I was more than what I had been permitting myself.

When I was single or momentarily attached, I used to joke that I was a “starter wife”—the kind of girl who picks up broken, sad partners, and uses her love to shine them up like a little penny, gently reinforcing their strengths through the repetition and constancy of my adoration.

Until the day that they got so shiny, they wanted to hop into someone else’s pocket.

In these moments, I was left alone, heartbroken, but, when I was truly honest with myself—at least partially to blame. I had avoided infusing myself into these relationships, because I deeply feared that doing so would scare my partner away. I had internalized messages during my youth—messages of being too big, too loud, too passionate. I had been told by my experiences that people stayed around longer if you made your needs as brief and palatable as possible, and then went about your day becoming exactly who they need you to be.

I remember the exact day when I realized that I could, instead, choose to be myself.

I realized that if I was myself, and it didn’t work out, at least I knew ahead of time instead of wishing and praying that my real self wouldn’t pop up unexpectedly and drive someone away.

For me, self-acceptance has been the slow integration of who I was presenting as and who I was inside. It was the process of becoming who I already was. It was putting all of my faith in the idea that if I could permit myself to be myself that I could love that person—even when I was afraid to do so. 

However, as will naturally occur when you begin to change one aspect of your life—suddenly, the impact spread, and I was astounded by how pervasive my self-hatred had become.

I found unexpressed sentiment and choked on words in every facet of my life—work, relationship, family. I found that in fact I really hated where we had chosen to put that new bookshelf or that in my heart, I wished we had painted the bathroom blue instead of red. I was surprised, as these feelings weren’t even large, big scary to divulge feelings—I was saying yes and keeping quiet in all aspects of my life.

And, at first, I thought I was doing all of this out of some sort of damaged self-esteem around my body, but, over time, I realized, it wasn’t my body—it was my most basic sense of worth and deserving. It was who I was, deep inside, that was hurting and needed to be freed.

What I thought was about the size of my hips, was actually about the cultivation and maintenance of healthy boundaries within the context of my relationships.

What I thought was about whether or not someone thought I was attractive, was actually about speaking my needs out loud, in the presence of another.

What I thought was about my body—was about how I was living my life.

The human body is a convenient scapegoat. 

Contentious by nature, degraded by the media, and a highly personal battleground, our bodies carry more than their fair share of the pain, hurt, and rejection that we experience in the world. For example, it was much easier for me to hate my body than realize that I needed to dramatically upgrade my ability to create and maintain healthy boundaries.

In many ways, hating your body is easy. You’ll never be alone. You will always have others to join you in your self-hatred, commiserating over the size of their thighs or how this was the week that they are going on a diet or he didn’t reject me—he rejected my body. As in, things that you can fix or have control over.

When it is about your body, it is a problem that society tells you you can fix—head to the gym, hop on a diet, indulge in some plastic surgery. Even if you wouldn’t resort to some of those options, they are out there, filling up the social consciousness with feelings of safety and well-being. Whether or not you choose to access them—the option is there.

You can change your body. You can make yourself prettier. You can buy new, sexy clothing.

You know how to do that, and on many levels—it feels safe.

What about when it’s not about your body? What about when it is about your basic ability to connect with other human beings, relax into intimacy, or be both yourself and yourself in the context of a couple?

That feels much less safe.

This is the messy zone, the dark closet that we shove all of our odds and ends in, in order to keep the rest of our house tidy and presentable. The answers here are not cut and dry. They do not apply to everyone. You cannot read about them in the self-help section of your favorite magazine.

They come from learning to listen to the voice inside your body, the small part of yourself that lets you know what you’d most like and what your wildest dreams are.

I had been keeping myself small—occupied by the an overflowing to-do list of laundry and groceries, wrapped up in the melodrama of my own creation, and concerned with the well-being of those around me first, and my own needs—last, always.

It wasn’t that learning to love myself dramatically altered who I was. I haven’t stopped taking care, but I am confident now that I am choosing to take care and that the people who I choose to take care of are worthy of my most profound love and consideration.

Learning to love myself has permitted me the ability to realize that I was worthy of anything that I put my mind or heart to. It was the quiet process of choosing, every day, that who I am is important. That my words matter. That my actions are an extension of my heart, and that they should be respected as such.

That I am worthy of my own love and the love of those around me, and not because I’ve cooked them dinner.


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Mara Glatzel is a self-love coach + author of Body Loving Homework: Writing Prompts for Cultivating Self-Love. She works with women who are ready to create the lives they want — and deserve. Her blog, Medicinal Marzipan, has inspired thousands of women to heal their relationships with their bodies, and treat themselves with relentless compassion. Catch up with her on Facebook or Twitter, or join her body-loving mailing list for secret swapping and insider news.

The Dating Game: Compliment Week*, Part III

Am I the only one who's just ever so slightly creeped out by this song?

I've been putting off writing about male-to-female compliments because, quite honestly, it’s touchy. I crave hearing compliments within my relationships, but I also know that when I’ve gotten them, I still feel dissatisfied. In fact, the compliments given to me by men I’m not dating tend to be the ones that stick. This is somewhat in line with research indicating that women are likelier to respond with a “thank you” to compliments from men than they are to those given by other women. The author of that study speculated that it was because compliments can indicate social status, and since generally speaking men are seen as having more status, women may treat compliments from them as coming from a social superior? Or something. Honestly, I think it’s more that when a guy friend compliments me, what I read into it is that he sees me first and foremost as his friend, but that sometimes I might do something with my appearance that reminds him, Oh yeah, you’re also a nominally attractive woman—and that he’s comfortable enough with our relationship to say something approximating that without it becoming weird. I take it at more face value than I would with a partner, or with a female friend, because I know from my own experience that giving compliments to other women has a different sort of function.

So when it comes to male-to-female compliments, I feel able to hear and accept them from male friends and acquaintances and not get all angsty about it. Not so for men I’m dating. Naturally, my interest was piqued when I came across this study examining the role of compliments in heterosexual relationships. (Unfortunately, the study didn't look at same-sex relationships; I'm very curious about how compliment patterns might differ between female friends and female partners.) The general body of research on this is minimal, but here’s what stood out:

• Compliments between romantic partners frequently differ from compliments given to friends. The role and intent of compliments are always contextual, and nothing provides a broader context than culture. Intimate relationships are a sort of “microculture” that’s reflected in the form and content of compliments. In Japan, a statement like “Those earrings are pure gold, aren’t they?” would be taken as a compliment (according to compliment scholar Robert Herbert), whereas in the United States it would be more likely to be seen as a question. The form (roundabout) and content (wealth and taste) tell us something about cultural values in Japan. Similarly, in a relationship’s microculture, “There’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather be than in your arms” becomes a compliment despite not resembling one structurally; these emotion-based compliments were the number-one type recalled by participants of both sexes. Whereas compliments among friends are often roundabout ways of expressing “I like you,” in romances there’s freedom to say exactly that, and to still have it experienced as a compliment by the receiver.

• Women are likelier than men to be aware of the presence—or absence—of compliments. But listen to the flipside: Both sexes equally value the role of compliments in relationships. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this. I’m guessing it has something to do with the traditional role of women as the gatekeepers of emotion, which would lead women to be more sensitive to all sorts of emotional indicators. Alternately, women’s heightened awareness of the role compliments serve with female friends and acquaintances might lead them to a similarly heightened awareness of compliments in their partnerships.

• The more compliments, the better. The study found a correlation between relationship satisfaction and the number of compliments given and received—and also a correlation between relationship satisfaction and feelings about the number of compliments received. It’s unclear which comes first: Are we happier with compliments because we’re happier with the relationship, or are we happier with our relationships and therefore more likely to give and receive—or at least, remember giving and receiving—compliments? Whatever the case, it seems like it wouldn’t hurt to tell someone you love that, oh I don’t know, the brightness of her cheek would shame the stars as daylight doth a lamp, or whatever floats your boat, really.

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So this research is interesting and all, but it doesn’t really get to the heart of why compliments in romances can feel so fraught with tension. These studies look at how the interplay of compliments works within relationships, but in truth, my conflicted reactions to looks-based compliments has little to do with the relationship and more to do with my own insecurities surrounding my appearance. It shouldn’t be that way: By dint of being together, presumably people in relationships find one another attractive. But in my experience—and that of many women I’ve talked with about this—there’s frequently a gnawing sense that maybe that assumed attraction isn’t...enough. Compliments become laden with tension: Does “You look pretty” carry less weight than “You are beautiful”? Does “You are beautiful” become diminished if it follows “Do I look okay”? Does a dropoff in compliments mean that our partners are less attracted to us, or that they’re comfortable enough to express admiration in other ways, or that they don’t want us to think they only find us beautiful when they explicitly say so? Or does an unflagging stream of compliments mean that they’re uttered by rote and don’t “count”?

In truth, only the rare compliment can ever “count,” because the very thing we seek in a compliment—validation—is a host of ambiguities and contradictions. Validation, by definition, relies upon one party affirming something about the other that has not yet been confirmed, and the thing being affirmed must already hold some water. That is, you can’t validate something that neither party really believes is true, or even that only one party believes is true; if you tell me I’m an excellent cook but I believe I’m just doing the bare minimum, I might be pleased by your compliment but I won’t feel validated by it, because there’s no preexisting belief to be affirmed. Similarly, when someone confirms something we already know to be true, validation isn’t in play—I don’t feel validated by being seen as a woman, but a transgendered woman may well feel validated by being called ma’am. With beauty, most of us hover between these poles: We might think under the right light that we might not look half-bad, but we’re not necessarily entirely sure of it. In order for an act to be one of validation as opposed to confirmation or presentation, we need both the possibility of the quality being true and the possibility of it being untrue. In other words, if you’re seeking romantic validation in a compliment, chances are you’re never going to get it.

Not that that stops us—or rather, not that that stops me—from searching for validation in compliments anyway. I’ve dated men all over the compliments scale, from one who actually stopped and sighed while I was brushing my teeth to tell me how beautiful I was, to one who told me early on that he didn’t “do” compliments. Nowhere in there have I ever really found a comfortable place to exist with compliments. With the stingy men I treat each compliment like a rare jewel; with the overkill guys I become exasperated and begin to suspect their words are building a pedestal I don’t want to be on. And with the men who have a moderate, sincere, and appreciative attitude toward compliments, I usually just wind up feeling frozen. I'm not proud of this, and I don't think I've taken out my compliment complex on the men I've been involved with, but I admit it seems like there's no way for a partner to win here.

Yes, yes, it's me, not you, sure. Yet there’s an inherent paradox in compliments that can make them difficult to receive from those we love. The moment a compliment escapes the giver’s lips, a division is created: It’s a reminder that we are being looked at instead of being experienced as a part of a cohesive unit. A looks-based compliment is a reminder of the impossibility of merging with another person—and whether or not merging is actually your goal in a relationship, the whole "the two will become one flesh" bit is pretty much the basis of marriage in the western world.

More importantly, a looks-based compliment can be a reminder of the existence of our own feminine performance—our beauty work, our sleight-of-hand that supports the overall impression of beauty. If the end goal of feminine performance is looking beautiful, sexy, pretty, cute, and then we’re complimented for meeting that goal, it can be hard to shake the feeling that perhaps it’s the performance being complimented, not us. The first response I usually have après-compliment is not to feel pretty but rather to feel as though I need to keep on looking pretty. That is, my knee-jerk reaction is not to experience a compliment as an affirmation of who I am but of what I do. Continuing the performance is the only way to not reveal ourselves to be frauds, even if the fraudulence is benign and socially engineered; we’re not actually beautiful, we just look it right now. By calling attention to the end goal of the performance—a proper signaling of our femininity—compliments pull us out of the assumed nonchalance that makes feminine performance. Even if the goal has been successfully reached, part of the goal of feminine performance is to keep up the illusion that there’s no performance taking place.

No wonder, then, that so many women report ways of defending against compliments: One woman reports scrunching up her face whenever her boyfriend tells her she looks beautiful; another bats her eyelashes “absurdly” when complimented on her eyes; another says she feels “caught” for not being able to follow the compliment script when, in truth, she feels unsure of how to react when a partner says she looks lovely. The gap between the safety of love and the precarity of being seen as an image is a space of uncertainty—and in relationships that already host a good deal of uncertainty, that gap can easily become toxic.

I take heart, though, in one of the findings of the partnership compliment study: The number-one topic of compliments between partners was neither appearance nor skill nor personality, but emotions. Not You look amazing but You make me feel amazing. When I first read that this sort of statement was considered a compliment within the bounds of the study, I hedged—that’s a statement of love, not a compliment, right? But that’s exactly what compliments are: an expression of admiration, appreciation, or plain old liking—and perhaps, with the people we choose to really let in, an expression of love. And it’s not like I—or the women I’ve talked with who wrestle with looks-based compliments from their partners—value our appearance above those expressions of emotion. But framing these statements—which, in good relationships, have flowed easily regardless of the number of You’re so prettys that spill forth—as compliments helps put that urge to hear You’re so pretty in proper perspective.

In fact, it’s exactly that—understanding the true significance of any compliment—that might shoo away that urge for good. According to a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, when people with low self-esteem went beyond merely hearing compliments from partners and instead described the meaning and significance of them, they started to feel better about the compliments, their relationships, and indeed themselves. In fact, once people with low self-esteem did this sort of reframing, they started to behave as people with high self-esteem do.

Now, I’m not sure where I’d fall on the self-esteem scale, but when it comes to my looks, it’s not like I’m always standing on solid ground. I’m hoping that the next time I long to hear a looks-based compliment from a partner, I’ll be able to remember what I’m really looking for: the meaning and significance of things like You’re so pretty, not the words themselves. That is, I’m looking to hear I am attracted to you. I want to be near you. I choose you; you are special to me. And with the right person, the reminders of these facts—for with the right person, they will be facts—should be just that, reminders. You’re so pretty, with luck and patience, can be put aside, where it belongs.

*"Week" is to be taken loosely, mkay? And with that, Compliment Week has finally come to a close. Part I, about the ways women use compliments in relationships with other women, is here; part II, a cursory look at compliment scholarship, is here.  

My Own Private Beauty Myth

A number of things I once believed to be true about my appearance: I have strong features, I am big-boned, my skin is both very pink and very pale, I am pear-shaped with a small waist, I have oily skin, and I am hirsute.

Here’s the truth, or at least as much of the “truth” as I’m able to come up with today, after 35 years in this skin: My features are neither strong nor delicate, I am medium-framed, I have a yellow tint to my skin and tan easily, I am neither pear-shaped nor hourglassy nor apple-shaped and certainly a small waist isn’t in the equation, I have normal skin, and I’ve got about as much body hair as you’d expect on an Irish-English-Native American woman, which is to say that it’s dark but there’s not tons of it.

“Lots of women have no idea what they look like,” said makeup artist Chrissie Eden DiBianco when I interviewed her last year. And looking at this list, it’s clear I’m one of them. Some of these beliefs were rooted in plain old insecurity: When you’re 13 and the thought of anyone knowing you’re actually growing hair in your armpits is mortifying, having any body hair whatsoever may well mean—to your eyes only—that you resemble Chewbacca. Some were miseducation: I got the occasional zit in junior high, like pretty much everyone, so why wouldn’t I use products designed for oily skin since my skin was clearly a grease bomb?

But what strikes me the most about these personal beauty myths is their compensatory effect. Growing up in South Dakota in the 1980s, the “corn-fed” look was prized: blonde hair, blue eyes, upturned nose, the whole Swedish-Norwegian package. I had none of these, so I drew inspiration from books, where tertiary characters were often described as having dark hair (check), dark eyes (check!), and “strong features.” Now, my features are hardly carved from fine porcelain, but they’re...average. Sorta high cheekbones but not terribly pronounced, utterly nondescript nose and chin, mouth on the small side. There is nothing about my face that would make someone describe it as “strong-featured.” But teenagers are not known for embracing ambiguity: I wasn’t blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and ski-jump-nosed; ergo, I was Maria Callas.

Me, in eighth grade.

This compensation appears in nearly every erroneous belief I’ve had about my body: Growing up heavy-set and then suddenly becoming normal-weight as a teenager meant I had to reshuffle my entire self-image. Naturally I thought I was fat, in that classic teen-girl way, but I could also look in the mirror and see that I wasn’t actually overweight, so somehow I came up with being “big-boned” to make sense of it all, despite coming from a long line of solidly average-framed people. I blush easily, so thinking I had a pink skin tone helped me assimilate that (totally embarrassing!) fact; it wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized my skin actually has a distinctly yellow tint. And as for being pear-shaped—well, I’ve covered the whole body-type nonsense before, and it wasn’t until my early 30s that I realized I was both all and none of the main body types, and that the standard style advice for dressing those figures would never apply to me.

But one aspect of the pear-shaped business illuminates something key here. As a faithful reader of all the “dress your body” magazine features published between 1986-2007, I knew that pear-shaped women were always told to emphasize their small waists. And because I believed myself to be pear-shaped (an idea borne more from embarrassment over the size of my thighs than objective evidence), I must have a small waist, right? Never mind that my jeans rarely gapped in the back, or that dresses didn’t hang loose around the middle, or that my waist measurement wasn’t particularly small. I was pear-shaped, dammit, and you can take my small waist from me when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

It would be easy for me to laugh at what I once believed to be true about my body, but this small-waist thing doesn’t fit into the narrative of teen-girl embarrassment. This wasn’t a case of putting myself down or not really understanding what my best and not-so-best traits were; this was me inventing a positive trait even where the evidence was flimsy. Even in the places where the myths I’d spun about my looks didn’t match up with the beauty imperative, I found these little nuggets that let me feel okay. If my generous thighs and hips made me a pear, I was going to seize the small waist that went along with it. If my weight was always going to be a sore spot for me, why not deem myself “big-boned”? If I was going to be pink-skinned, I’d spin it into some sort of English rose look and do my makeup to emphasize my pale pallor.

The point here isn’t so much that I was wrong about those things; it wasn’t until adulthood that I was able to see myself a little more objectively, and I’m hardly unique in that. (Of course, there’s something instructive in how off-base I was: How much better-dressed would I have been if I’d veered away from the pear-shaped advice and worn what actually suited me? How much more radiant would my skin have looked at 14 if I weren’t stripping away its oil?) The point is that even where the conclusions were wrong, there was some sort of survival skill at work—something that allowed me to take my imagined beliefs and fit them into the order of things. Something that, underneath all the self-deprecation and imagined detractions, thought maybe I didn’t look so bad after all.

The narrative we spin for girls is that they’re doomed to look in the mirror and not like what they see—that the dogpile of unrealistic images of women’s bodies and idealized femininity hits them so early on that by the time they reach puberty, the best we can do is damage control. We spin it that way for a reason—it’s true too often, and if it was ever true of you, that searing feeling of not measuring up has serious staying power.

There’s an alternate narrative too, of girls with resilient self-esteem, the sort of confident young woman we look at and think, She’s gonna be okay. But those two narratives are intertwined: My confidence was shaky in regards to my looks, but there I was, coming up with ways to tell myself that I wasn’t totally outside the realm of conventional prettiness, even if I had to make it up. I didn’t know my physical strengths and flaws until adulthood, but I intuited that if I roamed the world believing only my flaws (or what I perceived to be flaws), I’d be miserable, and I liked myself enough to not want to be miserable. So I picked up the odd shreds of evidence from the very things that pained me—my telltale blush, my ample thighs, my lack of Scandinavian grace—and constructed an effigy of myself. It was strung together with scotch tape and homemade safety pins, yes, but it was there: this emergent girl who had internalized all the media ideals, but who, at her core, was able to fight for herself.

Ideally, of course, that fight wouldn’t have been about inventing ways to fit the beauty standard; it would have been about challenging it by daring to think that I looked just fine even in the myriad ways I didn’t fit the template. I’m not holding up my teen self as some paragon of self-esteem, not by a long shot, and I’m under no illusion that my misconceptions were any sort of resistance to the beauty standard itself. But it was a resistance to feeling as though I needed to change in order to fit them, a corrective perspective from a girl who had internalized all those messages about how her body “should” look but who, at her core, also thought maybe she looked just fine. Acknowledging I looked fine as-is, if only to myself, may have been too radical for me at the time (woe befall the girl who thinks she’s “all that”); this was my in-between. It was a start.

The Two-Cocktail Makeover

The best makeover tool since the three-way mirror. Science says!

Over the years, I’ve had several of what my friend Jessica calls the Two-Cocktail Makeover, perhaps enough to put a good portion of the Mary Kay sales force out of work for a while. But one time in particular stands out: Jessica and I were out at a show, and during intermission I found myself on the bathroom line in front of an extraordinarily drunk bachelorette party. With beer-glazed eyes and slurred speech, the bride-to-be turned to me and said, “You’re pretty!” I smiled and thanked her, and she said it again: “No, really, you’re pretty! And I’m pretty too! I am so, so pretty! My friends are pretty, and you’re pretty, and I’m pretty. Am I pretty? I think I’m pretty.”

This might have been irritating were it not for three things: A) She seemed to take a genuine childlike delight at the discovery of her prettiness, as though she’d just learned we’d all been given free pony rides upon demand for the rest of our lives, B) I’d been downing a steady diet of Hendricks and tonic since sundown, and C) she was, after all, telling me I was "so pretty!" “Yes, you’re pretty, we’re all pretty,” I assured her as I slipped through the door of the bathroom.

As I stood there washing my hands, I started mirror-gazing. Our bachelorette was right: I was pretty! And oh my gosh, she was so pretty too! And Jessica was pretty, and we were pretty together, and we were there being pretty and watching pretty people do pretty things, and I can’t believe how pretty we all were! 

I stood there for a drunken moment wearing the halo of the bachelorette’s eagerly borrowed vanity, water running over my hands, an enormous grin on my face, feeling so pretty!—and then I remembered there was an enormous line of drunk pre-matrimonial revelers waiting for me, and I uttered “Oh shit!” out loud and left the bathroom without drying my hands. I reported the incident to Jessica, who, without blinking, just nodded and said, “The Two-Cocktail Makeover.”

The Two-Cocktail Makeover, as it is probably not terribly difficult to figure out, involves drinking two cocktails, looking in the mirror, and thinking you look fabulous. It’s hardly a thorough treatment plan; it’s best thought of as an occasional supplement to a dutifully existing core of self-care. (As for what defines “occasional,” I’ll leave that to your discretion. Birthdays, holidays, Tuesdays, noon.) It’s a wheatgrass shot for your self-image, not a daily vitamin. But manalive, sometimes wheatgrass shakes the health right into you, doesn’t it? (Am I revealing my hippie roots?)

And now the Two-Cocktail Makeover is science, kids. A research team based in France found that self-rated attractiveness of study participants increased along with alcohol consumption; people rated themselves as being more attractive, bright, original, and funny after downing a few. Rather, people rated themselves more favorably after believing they’d downed a few: Participants who were told they were drinking booze but who were actually given a nonalcoholic beverage gave inflated self-assessments on par with those who actually were tipsy. (PDF here.)

What’s intriguing about this is that it reveals something I was trying to get at when I wrote about entering a modeling contest as a superbly goofy-looking 13-year-old: For all the concerned talk about girls, women, beauty, and self-esteem, there’s a core within us that might just really like the way we look. Alcohol doesn’t make everything better. It merely lowers our inhibitions, blurs our judgment, loosens us up—it's why mean drunks are mean and why fun drunks are fun. And what that says to me is that what we often think of as poor self-image is actually an inhibition from allowing us to reach our natural state—a state in which we think we look pretty damn good after all. 

The trick of the Two-Cocktail Makeover is that it’s a portal to that state, however temporary it may be. It ever-briefly erases the damage we’ve absorbed over the years; it ameliorates, for a moment, the dissatisfactions we’ve heaped onto our self-image because that’s the most convenient place to stash them. While I’ve certainly had moments of looking into the mirror after a tipple and seeing all my flaws exaggerated, for the most part the Two-Cocktail Makeover works: My eyes glow, my pores shrink, my verve is unshakable, and my ability to speak French improves 300%. For a non-problem-drinker like me, alcohol does for my feelings about my looks what it does for all our pedestrian cares: It alleviates them in the moment, dimming the rest of the world for a time in contrast with the mild euphoria of letting it all go. The Two-Cocktail Makeover does what any good makeover should do—it gives us just the self-image tweak we need to go into the world and do the stuff that we actually care about, the stuff that we want to look good for in the first place. The Two-Cocktail Makeover isn’t about being pretty; it’s about being bold.

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Well, that’s what I would think about the formal conclusions of the Two-Cocktail Makeover study, if it had been conducted according to what I think of as basic research guidelines. But it wasn’t: Of 113 participants in the two arms of the study, exactly 7 were women. All seven of those were in the first segment of the study—the part conducted in a bar, where a total of 19 participants rated themselves and were then given a breathalyzer test. No women were in the much larger controlled study in which subjects gave a short presentation (after drinking booze, drinking a nonalcoholic beverage, or drinking a nonalcoholic beverage but being told they were drinking booze) and then rated themselves on how attractive, bright, original, and funny they’d been. 

It’s probably evident to anyone reading this blog that it’s ridiculous to conduct any non-sex-specific study without fully including women. But it’s particularly irksome in this piece of research, because until there’s a parallel or inclusive study we’re leaving out an enormous piece of the puzzle: How women’s inhibitions might play out differently than men’s. My own experience and theory makes me think that it would be much the same, and that perhaps women would be even likelier to rate themselves as being more attractive once given liquid permission to do so. Our culture loves to punish women who think they’re “all that”; to admit anything beyond baseline attractiveness is to invite critique or disdain. I’m dearly curious to know if the fear of punishment for claiming one’s beauty runs so deep that even a few pina coladas couldn’t lift it—or if, as with my bachelorette, that’s just what’s needed to be able to say, “Fuck it, I’m pretty, and isn’t that nice?”

I’m not trying to needle researchers about their omission. Part of me is relieved, actually: Not only does this study subvert the idea of women as narcissists by asking men to rate their own attractiveness, but it also has the potential to redirect the conversation about alcohol, judgment, and attractiveness away from women for a change. (Emphasis on “potential”; none of the reports on this study that I read mentioned the lack of women in the sample, so chances are this conversation won’t happen. But I am an optimist!) Heck, it’s nice to have researchers acknowledge that the phrase “beer goggles” isn’t just something obnoxious men mutter about women—that it’s something we all might apply to ourselves. I would like to know why women weren’t included, though. Because given the complex brew of attractiveness, sex, being seen, self-aggrandizing behavior, vanity, insecurity, and gendered expectations of passivity versus activity (and, more insidiously, how this plays out to the point of cliché in instances of sexual assault where alcohol is involved), it seems that there’s some sort of message encoded in choosing to mostly look at how men view their own attractiveness, even if I don’t know exactly what that message is. 

For now, what I know is this: The Two-Cocktail Makeover is a helluva lot kinder to women than “beer goggles.” (It’s kinder to men as well, but a quick Google Image search of “beer goggles” shows it’s not usually women who are eager to use that hateful term.) The former puts the emphasis on self-image; the latter, on the idea that women can fail at being beautiful even if the only thing that changes is the viewer's perception. And perhaps that’s one reason it’s not actually as alluring to researchers to explore women and the Two-Cocktail Makeover: It’s a reminder of women’s agency, of the potency of a woman being able to look in the mirror and take ownership, however temporary, of the light that “beer goggles” might lend through someone else’s eyes. It gives the euphoric glow back to the person who should actually control it; it gives us back what should have been ours all along. And I’ll drink to that.

Body Image Warrior Week: Mara Glatzel

As a part of Body Image Warrior Week, a collective of style, beauty, and body image bloggers is sharing content in order to promote various perspectives on body image. Mara Glatzel from Medicinal Marzipan has long been one of my favorite body image bloggers, in part for her worldview and in part for her graceful, inspirational prose. But what strikes me most about Medicinal Marzipan is its honesty: Glatzel shares her vulnerabilities as well as triumphs in the route to wellness, including mourning the loss of comfort of emotional eating and acknowledging that nobody is going to give you permission to eat--so you've got to give that permission to yourself. She understands that in working one's way to body love, sometimes a prolonged stop in the land of neutrality is required--and with that, I give you:

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Body neutrality: Be your own Switzerland!

It’s like--my body is over there, spilling over into the room around it, and my head is over here, chatting with you and looking pretty. We’re two totally different pieces. Can’t you see? But, I love my body, can’t you tell?

It took me a long time to realize that loving my body meant something quite different than leaving it alone and letting it run the show however it so pleases. That loving the skin that I was in had absolutely nothing to do with “throwing all the rules out the window,” or saying f*&$ you to society and their idealized beauty norms.

It means: You only get one body. One. It is your home, your rock, your ally--and treating it like a dumpster or ignoring it, hoping it will just go away already--is not helpful.

It means: respecting the skin that you’re in.

I get a lot of people writing me emails about loving their bodies, wanting to know please God body love seems so far away when I hate my body so much--to which I reply let’s start with body neutrality.

Yes, body love is the wonderous state where everything is wonderful and you skip around in a field of flowers, blissed out and having nothing but compassionate thoughts about your authentic self. But for many? We just aren’t there yet.

Body neutrality is a state of contentment. It is dead smack between I hate myself with every fiber of my being and I couldn’t possibly love my body any more. It is a white flag thrown into the ring. It is the gauntlet thrown down when you realize that what you’re doing? It just isn’t working for you.

For me, body neutrality means cultivating a short set of guidelines within which I know that I will feel relatively good--and sticking to them, no matter what. These rules include simple things (the kind we all know that we should do, but never get around to) like starting my day with 32 oz. of water pre-coffee, getting at least seven hours of sleep, buying underwear that fits, having sex with moderate regularity, and trying to fill up half my plate with vegetables of some variety.

It’s not really a write home worthy list, but it works. As someone who is recovering from a lifetime of compulsive and emotional eating--these guidelines keep me in a window of containment where I am able to make decisions that aren’t warped by mood swings or panic. They save me from the very dangerous place of: How did it get this bad? I am so terrified and feel so disgusting I don’t know what to do next.

These guidelines put my head back on my shoulders, reconnecting it with my body--after twenty years of stuffing my feelings down with food. It reminds me that my body is here to support me as I move about the world--and that is something that should be celebrated. It reminds me that we are on the same team, and that developing a baseline of self-care means that we both win.

And for someone who is just beginning to delve into the world of self-love--it is a perfect place to begin.

Mara Glatzel is a body image warrior and self-love coach. She spends the majority of her time causing a ruckus on Medicinal Marzipan, where she blogs (almost) daily about correcting your relationship with your body and food, creating relationships that are fulfilling, and manifesting your dream life. Catch up with her body loving updates on Twitter, Facebook, or send her an email. ___________________________________________________________________

Complete (for now! anyone can participate!) list of Body Image Warrior Week participants:

Already Pretty // Beautiful You // The Beheld // Decoding Dress // Dress with Courage // Eat the Damn Cake // Fit and Feminist // Medicinal Marzipan // Not Dead Yet Style // Rosie Molinary // Virginia Sole-Smith // Weightless

Say Cheese: On Smiling, Comfort, and Surrender

In the summer of 1986, a small item ran in the biweekly newspaper of Guymon, Oklahoma, that I am guessing went unremembered by all but one of the town’s 15,000 residents. The item in question was a column about how to look good in photographs, and I will paraphrase the part that stuck with me: If you want your face to look slimmer, tip your chin down when being photographed so that you are looking at the camera from a lowered gaze. And if you want to look seductive, smile faintly, without teeth.

I was both chubby and boy-crazy, giving this advice combination a compelling allure. As a result, nearly every single posed photograph of me between the ages of 9 and 34 shows some variation upon that look. Face slightly tipped down, eyes gazing up, smiling, no teeth.

Wholly Unnatural Photo Face: Exhibit A. 

This gaze works for me as an adult, to a degree, even if I question the "seductive" part of the equation. It certainly didn’t work for me at age 9; I looked as though I were attempting to seduce Pee-Wee Herman. But never mind that: I had a goal (slim, seductive) and a fool-proof way to achieve it (the advice column of my local biweekly newspaper), and it didn’t occur to me to question its efficacy. I practiced the look, goal in mind, and had a blind faith that it would make me appear slim and seductive. I stuck with it for 25 years.

Something else happened over those 25 years: I realized I preferred videos and candid photographs of myself over posed ones. Even if a candid shot caught me unkempt or making a weird face, I was able to laugh it off; I didn’t take it as any sort of statement about how I “actually” looked. But a bad posed photograph seemed an indictment. I resigned myself to not ever having a good posed photograph of myself, and in fact made my preference for candid photographs sort of a semi-feigned quirk about myself, semi-feigned quirks being the saving grace for many an analytical lady.

But early last year, in an online space far less kind than The Beheld, a stranger commented that I looked like I was “sucking on a lemon.” The more I looked at the photograph in question—a photograph I’d selected because I found it to be an artful arranging of my features—the more I realized the commenter was right, if unkind. I couldn’t very well avoid posed photographs all my life, and it was clear my 25-year-old trick wasn’t working for me anymore. I tried a handful of new tips, culled from fashion magazines instead of Dust Bowl newspapers, to become a little more photogenic. I tried gazing at the camera as though it were someone I loved; I tried blinking before the flash went off; I even tried saying prune, advice I picked up from none other than the Olsen twins. None of it worked.

No, but really, I like lemons.

A total stranger could tell my “photo face” wasn’t me, but it took a professional to tell me why. Around the time I started trying to shed my photo face, I interviewed photographer Sophie Elgort. I’d reached out to her for her thoughts on fashion—which were insightful—but it was her thoughts on being photogenic that resonated. “If somebody’s not comfortable—in person or in a photo—it’s pretty obvious,” she told me (while I, of course, was arranging my face so as not to let on that she was talking directly about me). “The difference between somebody who’s photogenic and somebody who’s not is that people who aren’t photogenic are sometimes nervous in front of a camera. They make weird twitches, or they’ll sort of crane their neck or purse their lips or do something that’s obviously not them, because they’re nervous. If you keep shooting, you can get them more into their natural element and you can get a good photo from people who say, ‘Oh, I’m not photogenic.’ You’re not unphotogenic; it’s that you’re usually posing, putting on this ridiculous face that’s not you. How can you expect to look like your best self in a photo if you’re putting on a ridiculous face?”

No wonder I liked candid photographs so much more than posed ones. I was so uncomfortable with how I appeared—face too full, lips too uneven—that I was doing everything I could to control my looks, for we try to control what we find uncomfortable. The result was not only tortured but inaccurate: Like the mirror face, the photo face is an exercise in manipulation, in falsehood. We cannot look like ourselves when we are attempting to manipulate the camera. And, as Sophie says, we cannot look our best when we don’t look like ourselves. In trying to manipulate myself into looking my best, I manipulated my way right out of it.

With every photograph taken of me, I was attempting to control something uncontrollable — my very face. And the thing is, I wasn’t fooling anyone, not even myself. Whenever I’d cringe at a photo, I was cringing not at how I looked, but at my failed manipulation. For the small, constant acts of management were revealing not only a physical truth (that I do have a full face, that my eyes aren’t as Bambi-like as I’d prefer) but a deeper truth that I wanted to keep hidden—that I wasn’t comfortable with how I looked. There was a reason I preferred videos and candid photographs of myself to posed shots—in those images, I’d surrendered control. I wasn’t attempting to slim my face or appear alluring; I wasn’t attempting to do anything other than be myself. And in being my candid, full-cheeked, pointy-toothed self, whatever charm I have was able to shine. As Sophie put it, “There’s no way you can show your charisma if you’re not acting like yourself.”

Of course, it’s hard to “be yourself” on command. And becoming comfortable with oneself is a lifelong process; I wanted to start looking normal in photos now. The solution came when I asked a highly photogenic friend how she did it. She said a few things I’d heard, tried, and discarded, and I started filing away her advice along with other well-meaning words from people to whom certain things come so naturally as to be inexpressible. Then she shrugged. “Or, you know, I heard this once—just give the camera your biggest, toothiest, cheesiest smile, even if you don’t mean it.” I flashed her the cheesy smile she was referring to, thinking she would get that I was poking fun at the idea. She just said, “Yes, like that.”

So I started to smile. Yellowed teeth, uneven lips, wide face be damned, I smile now, in nearly every photograph. I smile big and broad and with teeth. I try to laugh sometimes too, but if nothing genuinely funny comes to mind I skip the laugh and just smile. I don’t tip my head down; I don’t throw my head back; I don’t think about where my head is at all. I just fucking smile.

And as it turns out, there is a reason smiling is the #1 classic photo advice: It works. It works better than tipping your head down and keeping your lips closed; it works better than looking a hair above the photographer to keep the impression of a lofty gaze; it works better than whatever the Olsen twins might tell you.

Thanks to the lovely Paige S. and Beth Mann for the photos;
certainly my smile experiment is helped along by good company

But wait! you say. How is a fake smile any less of a manipulation than tilting your head and lowering your gaze and doing all that jazz you’ve been doing for 25 years that you just told us was some “manipulation of the self”? The answer: It isn’t. But the control of a smile versus other small manipulations takes a different tone. A smile is a signal of openness; it’s an invitation. We smile when we’re nervous or unsure (particularly women), but one reason we reach for a smile in those moments is that it soothes both the person smiling and the person being smiled at. In other words, a smile makes us comfortable. It can be a manipulated comfort, but posing for a photograph is a manipulated situation to begin with. The implied acquiescence of a smile is what can make it troublesome from a feminist perspective (“Hey baby, where’s your smile?”), and it’s also what makes some non-smiling portraits so arresting—it’s a display of resistance. But in the average, run-of-the-mill photo where I just want to look good—or rather, where I just want to look like myself—I’ll call upon the big, fake, cheesy photo smile.

I’m happy to let a photographed smile do its immediate work of making me appear more comfortable with myself. And perhaps seizing the control of a smile is just another roadblock to the goal of actually being comfortable; after all, I’m still not thrilled with my full cheeks and my small, uneven teeth. But here’s the key: The control I’m seizing no longer makes me uncomfortable. Instead of attempting to adjust my face—my face! the face I’ll have all my life!—I’m adjusting the sentiment it wears. I’m controlling my looks by adjusting the emotions I’m telegraphing, not by adjusting my actual features, which I was never able to truly control anyway. Call it something as simple as an attitude adjustment. I suppose, quite literally, that’s exactly what it is.

I try not to overidentify with photographs of myself; I try to see them as the snapshots they are, not as a representation of how I exist in this world. I probably don’t succeed. But if I’m going to fail in that regard, I may as well be overidentifying with someone smiling back at me, someone extending a temporary reprieve from self-consciousness. Someone offering, for a brief yet semi-permanent moment, comfort.