Beauty and Infidelity, Part III: The Other Woman

"The camera served Tereza as both a mechanical eye through which to observe Tomás's mistress, and a veil by which to conceal her face from her." —The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera (film, 1998)

Several years ago, I found myself overwhelmingly attracted to a colleague, and, despite the existence of his long-term girlfriend, we wound up kissing at a party. Affair is too grand a word for what ensued in the following weeks, nor is it wholly accurate, as he soon told his girlfriend about our liaison. She promptly broke up with him and then called me, wanting to talk. We agreed to meet at an ice cream parlor, of all places.

What struck me upon seeing her sitting at a corner table was her beauty: wide-set eyes, honey-colored curls, creamy complexion. I’d met her once before, so it wasn’t that I was only then seeing what she looked like, but rather that I was seeing her in relation to myself. In my mind there was an algorithm of attraction whose full components were a mystery to me; I just knew that two parts of it were her appeal, and my own. Sitting face-to-face with another part of the messy equation made me question the math I’d come up with: I’d talked myself into believing I’d overestimated her allure the first time we’d met, for if she were really as pretty, charming, and vivacious as I remembered, what was her boyfriend doing kissing me? At the time I was inexperienced enough to believe that the fellow had betrayed her because of some magnetic pull between us, instead of what I now see was the case: He was bored, and I was willing.

“I know it’s weird,” she said, trying to explain why she’d called. “My friends were like, Why do you want to meet up with her? But—” She looked up, her face flushing for the first time since she’d seen me walk through the door. “You understand why I wanted to, don’t you?”

I did. At least I believed—and believe—I did. She had an algorithm to question too. For as I watched her eyes occasionally brim with tears, her head bow and bob with a mixture of sadness and defiant optimism, I began to understand exactly how off my math had been. Despite a bearing I interpreted as confidence, she might have had an algorithm with the naivete of mine: Maybe he went for her because she’s just all that. I saw in front of me someone beautiful, earthy and ethereal in equal measures, capable and grounded, and the thought that she might be questioning her own appeal burned. I wanted her to see herself as I saw her, and it occurred to me that if she was doubting her allure, she might be doing so because I helped her doubt it.

As neutrally as I could, I answered her questions, which began as you’d expect but eventually moved into the territory of a first date. Where are you from, what did you study? Who are you? Easier than you might believe, our conversation began to flow. We both made jokes that probably weren’t very funny, but we were both easy laughs so it didn’t matter. We stayed long after we’d finished our cones, long enough to get sodas because we got so thirsty. At one point she said, “I’m actually having a better time with you than I did on my first date with him.” “Me too,” I replied. It was the truth. We lived in the same neighborhood, so we walked home together. When we parted, we hugged. 

Four days later, I saw her again, as I was walking down the street hand-in-hand with her ex-boyfriend. As we passed her, I could see that her steely expression belied a map of tears. He and I broke up a month later. I heard through friends that he tried to get back together with her, but she refused him, just as she refused me when I tried to contact her a few weeks after our ice-cream outing.

*     *     *

I have been the other woman. I could chalk up my indiscretions of this sort to youthful impudence or an “exploration” of sexual ethics or falling for the same old lines, but the truth is I was just plain selfish. Would it help if I tell you that it is a selfishness I have outgrown? Today fidelity is more appealing to me from every angle than its opposite, or even its shyster cousins—inappropriate emotional investment, Olympian flirting. But that is now, not then, when I’d mentally say I was sorry and mean it, just not enough to stop.

What strikes me now about this weakness is not the way I felt toward the men involved, but toward the women. The spritely live-in girlfriend of a man I longed for and did not resist when he told me he shared my longing; the sloe-eyed designer whose partner told me had lost interest in sex with him years ago (of course!); the husky-voiced business major whose date slipped me a note at a party saying he wished he were there with me instead: These women intrigued me, and not competitively so. It would be easy to chalk this up to my own tendency to cast a golden light of admiration onto women in general. It would also be easy to chalk this up to being the other woman, not the—woman-woman? The girlfriend, the partner. The beloved, supposedly. When I tried to explain my bizarre reverence to a friend, she rolled her eyes. Of course you get to feel that way, she said. You won.

I’m resistant to attribute this sensation to “winning,” though, even under the faulty logic of other-womanness as winning, for it's happened when I’ve been the betrayed one too. I once discovered a stash of messages sent to my then-partner by a woman whose name I didn’t recognize, but who clearly knew who I was. Most of the content was your typical affair nonsense, but this was a woman who was thoughtful about me in the same sincere, curious, and egregiously self-involved manner that I’d had in past liaisons.

She’s prettier than I imagined, one of her messages went. My first thought was to wonder what she’d imagined me to look like, and whether my boyfriend had given her clues: She’s medium build/she’s brunette/she’s gotten thick in the waist. But her note continued: It makes me insecure. The admission had the effect of both a stab and a caress. A stab because as much as I hated the existence of this woman, I hated that she too used other women as mirrors that reflected back her doubts. I’d have preferred that she be superhuman, for then I’d have a receptacle for my vitriol that might have allowed me to stay with my boyfriend, whom I loved. And a caress because reading that she shared my own reaction—insecurity, shaky doubt, a plea for affirmation—did allow me to use her as a mirror, did let me see that whatever the reasons for his betrayal, it wasn’t because I wasn’t enough. If she was made insecure by my looks, and I by hers, that canceled each other out, right?, so the reason for the betrayal logically had to be something else. (Because logic and love go hand-in-hand so often, I know, I know.)

In tales of infidelity, we overlook a central fact: Two people share another. She and I already had two things in common—the man himself, and being the kind of women who would pique his interest. In another time, another place, another life, our begrudging sisterhood could have been sisterwives. We would live together, create a home together, prepare food together. I might braid her hair. And secretly, each of us would worry that the other would forever be more alluring to him, therefore—in my grief-stricken, abjectly depressed reasoning of the time—more alluring to all men, everywhere. How could I not be fascinated by her? I looked her up. She was beautiful.

There’s a particular way that someone you become intimately involved with knows you: They know a side of you that remains hidden to not only the public eye, but most private eyes as well. My best friend may know me better than most of my lovers have, but she’s never felt me grasp for her touch in the middle of the night, or seen me through the shaky moments that come after an act of, quite literally, naked vulnerability. What that means is that there are dozens of women roaming around who know those same things about the men who have entered my heart. Ex-girlfriends, ex-wives, yes, and I’ve been fascinated with them as well. But it is the other woman—the woman who knows not the man at age 19 or 27 or 38 or whatever age he has long passed, but the person he is now, the person who may have had dinner with you mere hours after a kiss good-bye with her—that you are actually sharing a person’s affection and attention with, in real time.

That’s what makes betrayal sear so acutely, of course. It’s also what links the women together.

*     *     *

Beauty cannot exist without fascination. Unless something captivates us enough to hold our interest for more than a fleeting moment, it’s pretty or pleasant or maybe lovely rather than beautiful. It’s why people we love become more beautiful to us the longer we love them; it’s why we find “flaws” beautiful on others. When I love someone, I’m quick to become fascinated by what fascinates them. Soccer, Slovenia, antipsychiatry, Montaigne, urban gardening. The other woman. It’s fascination once removed, but it is fascination nonetheless. I want to keep looking; my attention is held. This is part of what defines beauty. Is it any surprise that when I look at the various women I’ve been triangulated with—some against my will, some against my better judgment—I find beauty at every turn?

When I’ve been cheated on, occasionally friends have taken the tactic of beauty assassination in an attempt to assuage my grief. Girl could use some Clearasil. You’re pearls before swine, she’s pig slop. Or just: What was he thinking? I mean, look at her. I’m quite certain the same has been said of me when I’ve played the other role. You see the problem, don’t you? That using beauty as a lever in infidelity displaces the exquisite pain of betrayal? That Clearasil was a beauty in her way, and that Pig Slop was too, and that this is entirely beside the point? That to lament my own loss of appeal served only to prolong the lamentation of my loss of trust?

I’d like to think that my preternatural, private devotionals to the women I’ve been triangulated with are reciprocal in some way. Not that I want them find me pretty per se; it’s more that I want a sort of confirmation that I’m not the only one attempting to divert the pain of betrayal away from the accomplice and toward the betrayer, whatever side of emotional treason any woman might be on. But just as “girl talk” is a route to female connection only when each party is open to it, I now have to admit how much of my visual admiration of other women is one-sided. How much it’s about wanting them to see me: I wanted to stay in that ice cream parlor with my new boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend because I had nothing to offer her other than myself, and if she stayed there with me despite my rotten actions, it meant she saw something worth sticking around for. Inherent in being the other woman is a deep cynicism of men: You believe they always want something other than conversation, and this belief is played out with clandestine brushes against your knee beneath the dinner table. Women, though—at least women in these triangulated roles—have no such motivation. 

Since beauty functions as a code of connection between women, I turned to it as a sort of pass key to intimacy in times when my faith in the true nature of intimacy was shaken. After being betrayed myself, finding the other woman beautiful was a way of finding (concocting?) a trust that had been taken from me. And after helping someone else betray another woman, finding her beautiful was a misguided way of trying to reconcile the selfishness that landed me there in the first place with the way I wanted to relate to these women. I knew that somewhere inside me was a person with more respect for other women than my actions indicated, but at the time I didn’t have the character to allow that better instinct to thrive. The halo of beauty that I created was a paltry symbol of that instinct. It wasn’t enough.

With age and maturity (and therapy), I’ve learned to avoid situations that might find me turning these mental somersaults. This piece isn't a mea culpa; such opportunities are long gone. Opportunities for refocusing my efforts at emotional intimacy with other women remain, though, and it’s in the name of those opportunities that I’m trying to figure out why I’ve repeatedly returned to a different sort of gaze in the midst of infidelity. Perhaps when I felt so tethered to the male gaze myself, creating a female gaze and projecting it onto women I’d hurt (or been hurt by) was the only way I knew to express a true apology (or forgiveness). But apologies are only good if both parties speak the same language. And I don’t want anyone to be fluent in the tongue I was speaking back then.

Not long ago I discovered that Google logs all your searches, and that you can summon a historic tally of everything you’ve searched for when logged in. It’s been more than a decade since I last saw the woman I shared ice cream with, but in the seven years since I got my Gmail account, I’ve searched her name often enough that it’s the sixth-most-Googled term in my personal history. I have fantasized repeatedly about running into her. Each time, I look her in the eyes and say, I am sorry. Each time, a litany of excuses tumbles out: I was young, I was insecure, I was selfish, I was stupid. And each time, even in my fantasy, she walks away.

This is the last of a three-part series about appearance and infidelity. Part I, on using beauty as a scapegoat in infidelity, is here; part II, examining social science research on looks and betrayal, is here.

On Being a Fat Child

I was a fat kid. I haven’t written about this before, telling myself it’s because this blog is about beauty, and I’m wary of conflating weight and beauty. That’s true, but the real reason I haven’t written about having been a fat kid is that—listen, I know writers are supposed to “show, not tell,” but how can I show you the scar the ever-present question of fatness has etched onto my heart? I can’t, and so I will just say: I haven’t written about being a fat kid until now because it was too painful. Being a fat kid hurt me then. Having been a fat kid hurts me now.

Things I remember about being fat: Not being able to wear jeans (there was no such thing as jeans for fat girls in 1983). Not wanting to participate in any games at the school fair except the cake walk; wanting those cakes so badly that I moved faster than I ever had in my life to repeatedly get the last seat, thus winning five cakes; understanding the implicit humiliation of being the fat kid who wanted five cakes but wanting those cakes more than I wanted my pride; doing my best to be gracious when my parents insisted we give away three of them. Faking sick on the day we were supposed to do height-weight testing, only to find out upon return that it had been postponed a day; jiggling my leg incessantly until I had to step on the scale in hopes of losing “enough” weight by midmorning. Immense disappointment at learning that the three scoops of ice cream I’d piled on my plate at the Bonanza buffet weren’t scoops of ice cream but of butter. Pretending to twist my ankle at age 7 in the 50-yard dash at track and field day to spare myself the embarrassment of being the fat kid who came in last; doing the same at age 8, and 11. Stealing bags of brown sugar from the pantry to eat in my bedroom, alone. Secreting away boxes of cereal, to do the same; denying to my mother that I’d done so, even when it was clear she knew I had.

There is a theme here: absence, and falsity. I couldn’t wear jeans; I didn’t want to play games that wouldn’t get me cake; I faked sick; I pretended to twist my ankle; I denied secret eating. Being a fat child wasn’t so much about the fact of being fat as it was about couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t. There is a counter-theme too: Love—of food, exquisite food, food, füd, phood, food, the panacea to whatever free-floating stresses there were in my life as an intellectually mature but emotionally not-so-mature 8-year-old girl. I didn’t have a difficult childhood by any means, but it was a childhood; it came with bumps and dents and scratches that I didn’t really know how to handle. Lucky for me, I didn’t have to learn, because I had food right there, every day, making it all okay. It worked—until it didn’t, but that’s not the story I’m trying to tell here. Food felt like it worked, and in a child’s mind, that’s enough.

*     *     *

Things I do not remember about being fat: Being teased. Being bullied. Having my weight remarked upon by strangers; being laughed at or taunted. I remember exactly three instances of shaming from other people about my weight: a neighbor suggesting I not enter her family’s trailer because I was fat and might somehow damage it; my grandmother telling me in the JCPenney’s dressing room that the problem wasn’t that the pants were too small but that I was too big; a third-grade classmate gasping when she saw my three-digit weight listed on my weight-height chart, when most kids weighed in at around 65 pounds. But when I try to fish deeper for the other memories—the memories that are surely there, for what fat child escapes a landslide of teasing from cruel classmates?—I come up empty. I remember being lightly teased for other things—my name, my glasses, my ponytail, my lack of athletic coordination—but my fatness, the singularly most visible thing about me, remained uncommented upon.

When I look at my own experience of being a fat kid, I don’t see a problem with society, or cruel children, or unlimited soda refills. I see a problem with—how do I put this without appearing to be swatting the wrist of my 8-year-old self?—I see a problem with me, and with the way I understood my size. There was very little fat-shaming in my life, but I still felt like being fat was wrong, bad, unfeminine, shameful—all those things fat activists say are erroneously attached to weight. They’re right to say that; those feelings should be separate from weight. Yet they weren’t separate, not for me. I filtered any feeling I had—about my fatness or anything else—through food, and my chronic overeating was what kept me fat. My feelings were my fatness; my fatness, feelings.

I wouldn’t have been better off had I been basically bullied into losing weight, or into feeling worse about being fat. But I would have been better off had I learned ways of coping with stress that didn’t center around food; I’d have been better off had I understood the joy of moving my body. I’d have been better off if clothes shopping weren’t an exercise in futility; I’d have been better off if any of the well-meaning sweatshirts and tees that were given to me as gifts had fit without revealing the immovable fact of my belly. I’d have been better off if I hadn’t had the hurdle of weight to constantly run up against. What I’m saying is: I’d have been better off if I weren’t fat.

I’d also had been better off if the world around me didn’t disperse shame upon overweight people—had my grandmother not told me I was “too big,” had my classmate remained nonchalant whatever the number on my height-weight card, had my neighbor not insinuated I could singlehandedly topple over a trailer designed for far greater stress than a fourth-grader’s frame. The world needs to change in its attitude toward fat people, and that is unquestionable. But it wasn’t only the world around me that inscribed my fatness upon my identity to the point where I still sometimes cannot recognize myself in photos because I’m looking for someone bigger than I actually am.

Yes, I wish the world around me had been different. I wish I’d been different too.

*     *     *

Being a fat kid wasn’t easy. But the reasons being a fat kid wasn’t easy had little to do with what body-positive bloggers such as myself usually cite. I wasn’t teased, I wasn’t bullied, few people ever tried to make me feel like I was lesser-than because my body was more-than. I don’t recall looking at “aspirational” images of thin women and feeling like I didn’t live up to them, though of course it’s impossible to determine how much of those messages seep into our brains. Sociological reasons alone cannot account for the shame I felt about my fatness. The problem went deeper than that. The problem—to a point—was me.

I keep wanting to baldly state some sort of vaguely political point, but then I find myself stymied as to exactly what I want to say. That maybe childhood obesity is something we should be “fighting”? (Yes, but then there are those billboards in Georgia.) That there’s a way to instill good eating and exercise habits in children without shaming them? (Yes, but who on earth is arguing the opposite?) That maybe when we say fighting childhood obesity is about health, it’s not some fat-shaming conspiracy but is truly about children’s emotional, physical, and mental health? (Yes, but that doesn’t mean that concerns about “health” aren’t also a veiled way of talking about children’s looks.) That maybe plenty of fat kids aren’t built that way, aren’t “big-boned,” aren’t victim to some sort of “fat gene” or environmental hazard but instead have bodies that are suffering from too much food and too little exercise? (Yes, but there are children whose set point is higher than what’s recommended, and I don’t want to advocate anything that would see a child beginning a lifelong battle that she’ll never be able to win. Those children—all children—deserve dignity that gets slighted when we stick too heavily to the traditional way of thinking about weight.)

I suppose the closest I could come to having a larger “issues” point here is this: The emphasis on childhood obesity is a convenient scapegoat for the deeply conflicted relationship pretty much our whole society has with food, comfort, bodies, and conformity. And we as a society have a responsibility to not only take a cold, hard look at that relationship for our own benefit, but, yes, “for the children.” We need to help children on a physical, mental, emotional, and sociological level be as healthy as possible. And sometimes being as healthy as possible includes losing weight. I’m not a public health expert, I’m not a psychologist. I don’t know how to help children reconcile the ostensibly dueling messages of You are good just the way you are and You might be better off if you took certain steps that will make you healthier—and, as it happens slimmer. I just know that we need to.

I don’t like feeling like I have to choose a side: That I’m either a body-positive blogger who looks at weight as entirely separate from health when I know from my own experience that it’s not always separate, or I’m one of those body-shaming fat-phobes who thinks it’s fine to put chubby kids on a billboard as a warning and example. I only have my own experiences to go on, and when it comes to something as intensely personal as our bodies, going on personal experience alone can be dangerous. My experiences as a fat child can’t be superimposed onto the life of every fat kid in America, and I might be even more hesitant to quietly suggest that plenty of kids would benefit from losing weight had I been the childhood equivalent of those adult powerhouses who eat healthfully and mindfully, exercise aplenty, and remain fat. But that wasn’t me. Had I eaten the way my parents tried to teach me to eat, and not been so terrified of moving my body, I would have been well within recommended height-weight guidelines. As an adult, that’s where I fall, though my relationship with food is still conflicted enough that I may never know how much I’d weigh if I were able to be an intuitive eater. (Indeed, that’s another reason I haven’t written much on this; it’s hard for me to know how much of my feelings about childhood obesity inhabit the same space as the part of me where disordered eating thrived for years. Can we ever know?)

Nobody should be made to feel bad because of how they look, or because of the size their body takes up in the world. Does that even need to be said here? I’m saying it anyway, for good measure. But not all fat-phobia comes from outer sources. Yes, I’m tired of the idea that weight loss is unequivocally a good thing; I loathe the bumper-sticker wisdom that inside every fat person there’s a thin person waiting to get out. Nobody wins when we assume fat people must be unhappy. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t fat people—including children—whose size does make them unhappy, and who don’t have a vocabulary for articulating that unhappiness without falling down the rabbit hole of self-loathing. Had I such language as a child, I might have found more satisfaction from what came out of my mouth than what went into it.

Girl Talk

For my money, the most unrealistic part of Sex and the City was always the friendship. “Friendship porn,” I once heard it described as. People fingered Carrie’s wardrobe as being truly ridiculous, but after years of working in an industry where I’ve seen an adult woman spend a day at the office wearing a dress made entirely out of ribbon, I accepted that part of the show without question. But having a group of friends I have brunch with every weekend? Where would I find that?

So I’m interested to see that part of the critique tsunami surrounding HBO’s Girls has examined the characters’ friendships. It’s brought us everything from a feminist social history of best-friendship to a zoological history of the same. In fact, there’s been a good deal of attention paid to female friendship lately, including with the number of people who linked to this essay, which made the internet rounds when it was first published at The Rumpus. I’m glad to see these conversations happening; it’s a welcome relief from tired tropes of backstabbing women bad-mouthing one another at every opportunity.

My relief is tinged with melancholy, though. I couldn’t bear to read the Rumpus essay more than once because it hit me so hard when I read it the first time. Not because it resonated, but because it didn’t. To be clear: I have many wonderful female friends, some of whom I expect to be close with for the rest of my life. And in sheer numbers, I probably have more female friends than male friends. But in terms of who I treat as confidants, it’s slanted toward men, due to a combination of serial monogamy, the fortune to have remained friendly with a handful of men I used to date, and an incidental number of male friends. Given that I’ve usually worked in female-dominant fields, perhaps this has just been my way of adding some yang to my yin.

But there’s another reason my relationships with men move more fluidly. It may sound silly coming from a feminist who writes primarily for female audiences, but I’m talking socially, not intellectually, so here goes: I feel awkward around women. Now, that’s speaking in some pretty general terms—certainly I don’t feel awkward around every woman, or comfortable around every man. It’s more that accurately or not, I have an odd sort of faith that men enjoy being around women because of our womanness, making my sex is a built-in fortification of what I offer socially to men. We as a culture have been pretty successful at spinning stories about Man + Woman=Makes Sense, and the consequence for me has been just the tiniest bit more assurance that a man has reason to want to be in my company, even when attraction doesn’t factor into it. Then it becomes a catch-22: I’m more likely to be relaxed—and therefore more pleasant, charming, and fun to be around—if I trust that whomever I’m talking with genuinely wants to be there. So generally speaking, I probably am better company to men than I am to women, which results in a different sort of friendship.

I’m not proud of this attitude. I don’t like what it implies I think about men, or about myself. But it’s also notable for what it says of my relationships with women. I heard this quote once: “Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn’t seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.” Treat it like glass I do: afraid to touch it, afraid to give it the sort of handling that burnishes it and makes it uniquely yours. I’ve always hated the trope that women distrust other women, or secretly hate their friends or women in general, and that’s not what I’m saying here. If anything, I’m saying the opposite: I get tongue-tied around remarkable women because I dearly want them to like me, and unlike with men, there’s no culturally assumed “reason” for them to like me. The lack of trust here is in myself, not in other women.

So I feel like I have to work a little harder to get women’s approval. But the specific ways I’ve cultivated to gain approval—laughing a little longer at someone’s jokes, asking lots of questions, letting a gaze linger—sound suspiciously like flirting. Specifically, flirting with men. So when I’m around a woman I want to get to know better, suddenly I’m left not only being a little unsure how to be my best self, but also aware that my default “like me!” antics are conventionally feminine ways of appealing to men—which means plenty of women see right through them because they themselves have deployed the same tricks. At least, at my most vulnerable, self-doubting, and insecure that’s what I fear: that women—particularly the sort of intelligent, critical, soulful women I admire—will see through my laughter and questions and smiles and decide that whatever I bring to the table, it isn’t for them. (Perhaps that’s why I feel drawn to woman-only spaces like ladymags, come to think of it—it forces me to break out of relying upon the ways I’ve learned to communicate with men.)

At some point, though, I learned one thing I can bring to the table with women: girl talk. And yes, I mean highly stereotypical girl talk. I mean: I like your earrings, That’s a great color, Your hair looks fantastic. I used to consciously stay away from beautystuffs as small talk because I wanted to feign nonchalance about such matters; somewhere along the line, though, I recognized how well I myself responded to such conversation starters. My countenance, particularly around women, is pleasant but a little serious, meaning that something frivolous can come out of my mouth and I’m fairly certain it doesn’t make me seem frivolous. It simply lightens me, desirably so.

It’s been several years since I’ve started being more fluent in beautytalk, and between working at image-conscious magazines and running a blog that is specifically designed to examine women’s attitudes and feelings about beauty and being looked at, it’s second nature now. Compliments and questions related to style or appearance easily tumble out of me; if I’m meeting a woman cold, like if I’m at a party where I don’t know anyone, chances are that’s the first thing out of my mouth. I’m always sincere about it—compliments fall flat if they’re a lie—and at this point I wouldn’t even say that this line of conversation is intentional. But I know where it comes from, and I know what I’m hoping to elicit when I do it.

Here is my trouble: I fear that I am forgetting how to connect with women in any other way. I found myself at a dinner party a while ago with a woman whose manner intrigues me; she’s one of those people whose words seem to matter more than other people’s, so wisely does she choose them. I was seated next to her, and my first words to her were something about her shoes (which were gorgeous, so I’m not entirely to blame here). She smiled and said Thank you, as one does, and after we had each nodded acceptance of the compliment and ensuing gratitude, neither of us had anything further to say to one another. Rather, I didn’t know how to get to that further point—at least not without her doing some of the heavy lifting along with me.

I’d expected her to help me out, which isn’t an outrageous expectation on my part; that is, after all, how conversations work. But in expecting her to help me out by saying anything other than the logical, polite response—thank you—I was actually attempting to direct her attitude. Toward herself, toward me, toward womanhood itself. I was expecting her to play along—to tell me, say, some story of where she’d gotten the shoes so I could then riff off a detail of that story, and in the course of that we would have each revealed something personal that could serve as a launching point for the conversation I actually wanted to have with her. I was expecting her to speak some code of womanhood right along with me—a code that as a feminist I know better than to think is actually how women communicate. I lobbed exactly one volley in her direction and expected her to return it.

And when she didn’t, I found that I didn’t have a backup plan. The code I’d been speaking in wasn’t code at all; it had become my native tongue, at least when attempting to make small talk. For it wasn’t just that laconic seatmate and her response that’s troubling me. It’s also the times when it works too well and I find I don’t know how to better anchor the conversation; it’s the times when I see exactly how moored I feel by “girl talk” with women and I wonder how deep my own feminist blood can run if this has become the primary way I know to reach out to other women. My approach has assumed that women in my path are eager to talk about their appearance, and not only that, but that they are eager to talk about their appearance with me because we are both women. Small talk works because we presume all the small talkers share a common condition. While I believe that all women have a unique relationship to presence, style, and visibility, the route I’ve been taking to get to that relationship isn’t helping me establish better friendships with women. And that’s because of another characteristic of getting-to-know-you chatter: Small talk is, by its nature and nomenclature, unimportant. And the very thing I value about beauty talk is what it reveals about us—that is, the stuff that is important. And yes, sometimes beauty talk gets there quickly and directly; that’s exactly why I defend it and work hard in my writing to not have it be written off as cotton candy. Yet in relying so heavily upon beauty talk as a conversation starter, I’ve been failing in my central mission. I know that you can’t just jump into a conversation by asking the really meaty stuff, sure. But if I truly believe in “girl talk” as a portal to that meat, to treat it in practice as fluff is a disservice to my goal.

Perhaps that became clearest to me when I was the recipient, not the instigator, of this sort of exchange. Some time ago, I found myself having a drink with a friend of a friend. The person who introduced us was doing most of the talking, so we were both able to quietly get used to the rhythm of the other before our mutual friend departed and left us on our own. We continued the conversation to its logical point, and it was clear that we each had a good deal to say to one another, but that we were perhaps too much alike in our being better responders than presenters. The conversation was good but not fluent. During one of our fumbling, strained pauses, she looked down and said, “I like your shoes.” The only thing remarkable about these sneakers is how unremarkable they are: Cheap, several years old, a faded olive color, scuffed and beaten, I’d only worn them because the weather was in flux and they were the single “shoulder season” pair I could fine.

I knew enough secondhand about this woman and her somewhat turbulent life to know that I wanted to know more about her. I wanted to talk with her about art and expression, about motherhood and madness. I wanted to know if what she saw every day in her appointment book, her mirror, her life was what she’d envisioned for herself; I wanted to know about disappointment and relief, and where the two might meet. I didn’t ask those questions, of course; you can’t just go in and ask those sorts of things. Sometimes chatter of shoes and mascara is a portal to the questions we really want answers to; sometimes the words that don’t matter are the only way to the words that do. But sometimes those words—where did you get that and I had a pair like that once and what a great color—form a Mobius strip of the words we know don’t matter, with no apparent outlet to what we want to say but don’t know how to articulate. I am trying to step off that neverending loop. But I am not sure how.

I felt that ache, that frustration that comes when I dance around intimacy, a dance only made more frantic when I sense the other person is there with me in our pas de deux. I felt it—I saw it—but I am still unpracticed in saying whatever one would need to say to get to what comes next.

And so I looked at her and said what we both knew you’re supposed to say upon receiving a compliment, the words that, with luck and effort, could lead to chatter of other cross-weather shoes, which could lead to climate, which could lead to where we grew up, which could lead to how we each define the word home. That is, I said Thank you.

What I didn’t say—but what I hope she heard—was I like you too.

Checks/Balances

I first set foot in ladymag land in the fall of 1999, when a teen magazine hired the 23-year-old me as the lone editorial assistant. Since then, I’ve worked in women’s magazines in some capacity—running the gamut from fitness rags to fashion, teen to adult, highbrow to lowbrow, freelance to staff and back to freelance again—for the majority of my 13 years of being in the workforce, which is to say the majority of my adulthood. Which is to say that for the majority of my adult life, I have spent thirty-five to, oh, eighty hours a week working on women’s magazines, or physically surrounded by them, or thinking about them, or reading them. And as a copy editor, which has been my primary professional role for most of those 13 years, when I say “read” I mean I read, very closely, every single word on every single page. There have been repeated 12-hour stretches of my life where—and I am not exaggerating—I have done nothing but eat, drink, pee, and read women’s magazines.

Have I made my point clear? I think I have. I have spent a lot of my life reading women’s magazines. Not as much as some of my colleagues—those who have been on staff instead of having extended freelance stretches like I have, those who work harder and more intently than I have, those who have simply been in the workforce longer—but I think it’s fair to say I’m in the top 1% of the population as far as taking in women’s magazines goes.

I still work in them in some ways—pinch-hitting in the copy editing department, penning the occasional piece—and I’m generally happy to do so, because as much as I’m critical of the velvet steamroller of women’s magazines, I’m also supportive of them in many ways. My ambivalence on the world of women’s magazines could fill a blog of its own, but suffice to say: I support what they do, and I want them to do with aplomb, and I also know that until we have a societal sea change, there will always be a stopping point in how far they can go toward truly serving their readers in all aspects of their lives.

Anyway. I’ve broadened my copy editing client base in the past couple of years to include publications outside of women’s magazines. One of those clients was a personal finance magazine, which meant I went from proofing columns about the difference between lip balm, lip stain, and lipstick to proofing columns about fixed annuities, variable annuities, and perpetuities. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I enjoyed it—the copy could be as dry as the Mojave—but certainly it was educational, and I came away from it knowing much more about personal finance than I had when I started.

The first week or so that I worked on this material, it only made sense to apply what I was reading to my own finances. I transferred my short-term savings to an account with a higher interest rate; I double-checked my bank fees; I eventually even rebalanced my IRA portfolio. But the fact is, I’m unmarried, child-free, and lazy; my entire financial empire could fit in a shoebox. There’s only so much I could do to check up on my finances, you know?

Not that that stopped me. I started repeatedly checking the balances of my checking and savings account. Daily. Not because I was going to do anything to them—no transfers, no withdrawals, no deposits—but because I just wanted to make sure that what I thought was there, was there. It wasn’t a conscious decision I made; it just naturally happened that midway through reading an article about saving, I’d have to stop reading immediately and look at the number on my savings account to make sure it hadn’t magically changed in the past, oh, 18 hours.

A brief aside about my temperament: I’ve been blessed with a relative lack of anxiety about money. Part of this is sheer privilege—a largely middle-class upbringing and the accompanying assumption that I’d go to college and land in a field that would allow me comfort, if not wealth. My father grooves on finance stuff—indeed, his lifelong career was in the financial end of health-care systems on Indian reservations—so while I’m lazy in handling my finances, I grew up with the idea that dealing with money matters could be a source of satisfaction (which, in me, mostly manifested itself in a love of filling coin rolls. Better ’n’ Quaaludes! So relaxing). When I’ve been under financial duress, I’ve usually had few problems adjusting my budget; while I’m not the best saver on the planet, neither am I the greatest spender. Basically, while I get the occasional jolt of nerves about money like anyone, overall it’s just not on my worry list.

Yet there I was, checking my balances daily, sometimes more than once a day, almost ritualistically. Seeing the number I expected to see soothed me, allowed me to take a deep breath and remind me that the world was in order, or at least my world was in order.

At a certain point I realized that my “sudden” need to check in on my bank balances was directly correlated to the content I was reading all day. Reading about how to improve my financial life did a little to actually make my financial life better, yes. But the number-one thing it did was instill in me an anxiety about my finances—an anxiety that was either latent or nonexistent before. Surrounding myself with personal finance material for eight hours a day for only a few months, off and on, had done something to me. Nobody else was making withdrawals or deposits to my accounts; nobody else was making transfers. I was the only one whose hands touched my money, but somehow that knowledge was no longer enough. My incessant checking of my bank accounts reflected a loss of trust in myself—a trust I didn’t even recognize I had until it was gone.

And once I’d realized where this sudden compulsion came from—and more importantly, once I’d stopped working for that magazine and quickly went back to checking my account balances monthly instead of daily—well, surely you already know what I wondered next: Maybe what you’ve spent the past 13 years reading has done something to you too.

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.

*     *     *   

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.

A Humble Plea

Love on the rocks.

I don’t share much about my romantic life here. This isn't necessarily by design; my gentleman friend doesn’t mind when I write about him, as he trusts I wouldn’t write anything about him that would make him uncomfortable or violate his—our—privacy. It’s more that the issued that would be relevant to write about here as far as our relationship—say, the keen desire to be desired, sometimes specifically for how I look, and how that plays out between two people who give a good deal of thought to authenticity and representation in relationships of all sorts—are things I’m still wrestling with. I frequently figure things out through writing about them, but that can be dangerous in a number of ways when the “thing” in question is another person, one you care about immensely. The end result—at this point, anyway—is that while the role of romance in beauty is hardly verboten from The Beheld, its presence is far less frequent than one might imagine.

So what I’m about to ask is, like, totally unfair. I’m working on a project (related to but separate from this blog) in which I need to hear from a lot of women about looks, appearance, and being seen—specifically, how those things play into dating and relationships. I’ll be making similar pleas in the future but for now I’m looking to talk with women about the role appearance, beauty, and the wish to be seen (or not seen) has played out in their romantic relationships and dating life. I’m not looking for any particular type of woman—in fact, I’m looking for a diverse range of people to talk with. The only requirement is that you consider yourself a woman.

If you’re interested in talking with me about how looks have played into your romantic life, please drop me an e-mail at the.beheld.blog at gmail dotcom; I’ll send you a few questions and we’ll go from there. Sound good? All responses will be confidential.

Leah Smith, Public Policy Ph.D Student, Lubbock, TX

The first time Leah Smith saw a little person, she turned to her mother and said, “So that’s what I’m going to look like when I’m an adult?” Her mother said, “Yeah,” to which Smith replied, “I think that’s okay.” Now vice president of public relations for Little People of America, a support group and information center for people of short stature, Smith works to let others know what she intuited in that moment. (Smith is speaking here on her own behalf, not in her public relations role with LPA.) She’s also working toward her Ph.D. in public policy, with a focus on disability policy, including discrimination and employment policy for people with disabilities. Her first love, however, was fashion design, in which she earned an associate degree. We talked about redefining fashion to include little people, the division between feeling beautiful and receiving romantic attention, and pretending to be Julia Roberts. In her own words:

On Pride
I know that people are looking at me all the time, and you have to find a way to process that somehow. When I was 7, I kind of pretended that I was Julia Roberts. I mean, obviously I don’t do this now, but as a kid I’d read or heard somewhere that every time she would go out, people would stop and stare because she was so pretty. And I was like, “That’s what I face every day, so it must be because I’m pretty.” In my little 7-year-old mind that’s how I processed it. That kind of shaped who I am, and I started dressing to fit the part. I’m not saying I’m any Julia Roberts; it’s just that I wanted to dress in cute or nice-looking clothes, so when people do stare I can be like, Oh, they’re looking because they like my outfit, or they think I’m cute, or whatever. People are going to stare either way, so you’ve got to bring some sort of confidence to it.

Dressing well has been huge in my life. The comments and the stares could have been really easy for me to internalize if I weren’t careful. I feel like my clothes are a way of putting up a shield against that, of saying to the world that the things people might believe about LPs aren't true. That's not who I believe I am—this is who I am. There’s a level of pride in being able to wear a cute outfit, wear my hair cute. It says that I’m proud of this body, and that it’s not something I want to hide or cover up. Because I am proud of my body—I’m not ashamed of it in any way, and I don’t want that to ever be something I portray with how I present myself.

My style is pretty feminine—dresses, cute sandals. There are very few days when I don’t dress up, and people joke that my hair is my biggest priority in my life, which obviously isn’t true, but I do pay a lot of attention to it. I’ve wondered if I would give my appearance as much thought if I were average-sized, or if it’s just a part of who I am. Sometimes I have to remind myself, “Leah, it’s okay if you don’t fix your hair every single day.” I consciously stopped styling my hair on Sundays—I still shower and whatever, but I just don’t fix my hair, to remind myself that I mean more to people than just what I look like. If you’re going to feel beautiful you’ve got to feel beautiful when you’re naked too. It can’t just be all about your clothes or what your hair looks like; it has to start from somewhere else.

On Speed Dating
It can be hard for LP women to navigate male attention. LPA has an annual convention, so you go from having never been hit on by a guy, and then you go to convention and all of a sudden all these guys are thinking you’re really attractive. How do you figure that out? What do you do with that attention once you have it? I almost feel like it’s a bit delayed for us, whereas most people kind of grow up learning those things. As soon as the girls are about 16, suddenly it’s like, “Whoa, these guys think I’m hot—what do I do?” As a part of the leadership at conference, you get to see the ins and outs of what’s going on, and one year there was a guy who was hitting on this girl, and she didn’t really do anything to stop it. He continued and continued, and then all of a sudden she was like, “Wait, I’m not comfortable at all,” and he was like, “Well, you never said no.” She said, “Well, yeah, because I liked it!” Everyone has to learn to deal with those situations, but it happens in a concentrated way at conference. You go from holding hands for the first time to kissing within a week. She had to learn: Okay, I can like this but still have limits here. For me, watching it was like, Oh, man! It was like seeing my own teenhood.

Feeling beautiful and getting male attention were two very separate events for me. Male attention was a once-a-year expedition for me, whereas looking my best was an everyday thing. At convention I’d get dressed up and be thinking about meeting a dude, but that was more of a mind-set shift; I was already dressing in clothes I thought were cute. I started paying attention to my clothes and fixing my hair around seventh grade, so about the same time as most girls, but dating didn’t factor into it like it might have for someone else. Dressing up was just who I was, and it had nothing to do with guys. Maybe if I hadn’t done that and had started being active dating-wise later, the two would have become linked—I don’t know.

There’s this epiphany for some women when they come into LPA, like: “Oh! There’s LP guys who like this body.” There are some women you talk to who have repeatedly been given the message that they are or should be asexual. You hear, “I can’t imagine a guy ever wanting to be with me,” or “I’ve been told my whole life that I’m not what guys want—I don’t have long legs, and an average-size guy would never want to date me.” But then on the flip side of that there are times that LPs have been hypersexualized and some women who take that to its extreme: There are groups of people who have a fetish with little people, specifically LP women. You see some LP women who have internalized this idea and believe that they should take this idea as their role. Sexuality can be very tough for someone who has seen these two extremes. On the one hand, we should be asexual, and on the other hand we are a fetish object. There’s a fine middle line somewhere in there.

On Being Little and Badass
Clothes are such a hard thing for LPs, because so often you have to buy a pair of jeans for $100, and then you have to go get them altered for $150, so that really limits your ability to buy a number of outfits. You’re spending twice as much on one item rather than getting two or three items. I actually do all my own alterations. With achondroplasia, the type of dwarfism I have, our torso is basically the same as an average-size person’s, so I’ll buy clothes that fit my butt and breasts and just alter the arms and legs. For most LPs, I’d say it’s about half and half—some do their own sewing, and the rest get it altered.

I went to fashion design school in Dallas. I really wanted to create a line that allowed LP women to express their inner beauty. At the time a lot of my friends in LPA were dealing with the same thing I was: We were young adults in the world, and asking ourselves what it meant to not be at home anymore, protected by our parents? How do we be adults and be little at the same time? So I started trying to design clothes that expressed the feelings I wanted to express at the time. If I felt badass, I would try to create a badass outfit. Even if nothing about the outfit shouted badass, if I could associate that feeling with the outfit, that’s what mattered—that’s kind of where I was going with my designs.

Going to fashion design school was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I was studying fashion design and trying to redefine fashion at the same time, and it really made some people uncomfortable within the school. I experienced a lot of discrimination there that I’d never experienced before. At the time I thought it was because I was little, but looking back I don’t know if it had anything to do with me being little so much as it was I was questioning the paradigm.

For example, we had to create our own line for our final project and do a whole business plan. I wrote that my goal was having a fashion line that would help LPs feel beautiful in their own bodies. My teacher marked that out and wrote on my project that LPs were not beautiful, that they’re not tall, that they don’t have long legs and this is an impossible thing for you to be trying to pursue or to try to make them feel. I was furious. This was after other things had happened—for example, I’d asked for a stool because some of the tables we worked on were really high. They were like, “Well, I guess we have to offer it, but we can’t promise it will be here every day. It’s not our fault if someone steals it.” I was like, “It’s my stool, I’m here all the time, everyone knows I use it, and I can’t imagine why someone would steal a stool.” And every single day it was gone. The other students were the ones who suggested I have a stool to begin with, and I couldn’t imagine any of them would be that vicious. It was that kind of thing that kept going and going, and that comment on my final project broke the camel’s back, I guess. That’s when I started going into policy and the legal side of it. This is a much bigger problem than what we’re wearing, or even what we can legislate. This is a societal problem, that women who are short-statured aren’t seen as beautiful. That’s what we’re up against. When you’re 22 and you’re out to change the world, nobody tells you the world is not an easy place to change. I mean, I’m still out to change the world. Maybe I’m just a bit more realistic with the ways that’s going to get done.

For Janis Joplin, On Her Sixty-Ninth Birthday

The first time I heard Janis Joplin, it was by chance. I was at the home of an acquaintance, a bona fide Popular Girl who argued feminist positions along with me in our junior-year literature class, making her my favorite of the in-crowd. I’d been assigned a class project with her, and she had a small group of us over to her home to work on the task. We sat cross-legged on the floor, sipping sodas and plotting our work, when a quiet wail in the background caught my ear. I tuned out the conversation and tuned in to the wail: I couldn’t make out the words, but the sound itself was urgent, pained, and undeniably female. I interrupted the conversation to ask who we were listening to, and the popular girl smiled. “Janis Joplin,” she said. “Isn’t she great?”

I’d heard of Janis Joplin before, but somehow she had slipped through my musical upbringing in favor of The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, and Bob Dylan. My parents owned Pearl—as I’d learn later that night when I’d ask my parents about Janis with the same sort of feigned-casual tone I might use to inquire about an it’s-no-big-deal-really crush—but she wasn’t a part of the household repertoire. After commandeering Pearl and realizing there had to be even more Janis out there, I went to the public library and found every bit of material on her that I could. I borrowed CDs to make illegal tapes of them; I read biographies; I watched Monterey Pop. I went barefoot for much of my senior year of high school because it seemed like something Janis would have done; I strolled the halls with my long hair, tie-dye T-shirts, long necklaces, and ripped jeans, and imagined myself to be channeling some part of her. Forget that as a classic good girl, any rebellious streak I had was forever turned inward, not outward; forget that I was 17 and had no idea what phrases like a woman left lonely, piece of my heart, and get it while you can could possibly mean (or rather, forget that I’m an adult critiquing my adolescent understanding of her work; at 17 I knew the meaning of those words as well as anyone).

I wouldn’t say I wanted to be Janis, or even that I considered her a role model. I’d quickly learn how she lived, I’d quickly learn how she’d died, and I didn’t want to shape my life in that way. But I admired her. I’d call it a “girl crush” if I didn’t usually apply that term to women who reminded me of a better version of myself, which Janis wasn’t. Janis Joplin was nothing like me. That’s part of why—I’ll use this phrase, and not lightly—I loved her.

It wasn’t until I had read multiple biographies of her that I began to recognize something that felt like a nonsensical gnat at first, but a gnat that appeared in every major work about her: Janis Joplin wasn’t pretty. I mean, yeah yeah, eye of the beholder and inner beauty and all that, but Janis Joplin was not considered to be pretty. She was an outcast growing up, teased for her looks—her acne-plagued skin, her tendency to gain weight—and she never carried the mantle of the pretty girl. Even when she became an icon of the late ‘60s, it wasn’t because she was a beauty. None of that mattered to me, though, because I had no idea she wasn’t supposed to be pretty.

There are plenty of reasons why I didn’t think about Janis Joplin’s beauty. The obvious would be that she was so extraordinarily talented that her voice took a backseat to her looks, or perhaps that her talent made her beautiful to me. Hell, maybe it was because Janis came to me through a Popular Girl, so I conferred the qualities of that girl onto Janis herself. And perhaps all of those are true, but that’s not what was really going on.

It was more this: Famous women are pretty, and Janis Joplin is famous, ergo Janis Joplin is pretty. That was it, that was the logic, and I didn’t question my faulty syllogism. Janis Joplin had to be beautiful, because known women are beautiful. I didn’t need to actually look at her to know it must be true. To be clear, it wasn’t that I had some special ability to see a female performer as beautiful because of her talent alone, or that I thought her looks were unimportant. It was quite the opposite: I thought looks were incredibly important. I was so stuck on connecting beauty with talent and “making it” that I superimposed a physical beauty onto anyone with talent. Rather, I superimposed the concept of a woman’s looks, to the point where the actual physical “truth” of it (if there is ever a “truth” about beauty) became beside the point. I’d like to think that Janis’s looks didn’t cross my mind because my attitude on the matter was so progressive, but in truth it was because my attitude was regressive, or at least adolescent. I prized beauty, so I tethered skill, talent, tenacity, boldness, attitude, charisma—the things I actually loved about Janis—to it.

I don’t remember what I thought the first time I saw a picture of Janis. I do, however, remember looking at pictures of other women from the era and wanting to be like them because they were pretty. Grace Slick’s tilted head and dark eyes on the cover of Surrealistic Pillow, Mary Travers looking pertly fabulous under her boa on Album 1700, even, as a child, the pretty smile of Marlo Thomas on the back of Free to Be You and Me: I loved all of these albums from childhood on, and probably would have even if Grace, Mary, and Marlo were less pretty than they were. But their looks were a part of the fantasy portal they created. Grace and Mary were beautiful women surrounded by men (who I saw as being of lesser talent, whether or not that’s true), and Marlo—well, she was That Girl, right? Was it any wonder a girl who longed to be both pretty and accomplished would look up to these women?

It was probably my experiences with Grace, Mary, and Marlo—and Peggy Lee, and Linda Ronstadt, and Lesley Gore, Julie Andrews, Stevie Nicks, Diana Ross, or any of the other female musicians who populated my childhood—that made me assume, sight unseen, that Janis Joplin must be pretty. Once I started reading biographies of her and saw that writers would occasionally mention that she was hardly Venusian, I dismissed such notions as being beside the point, but I still didn’t question the veracity of their claims. It was only after my fervor had died down a little bit—the poster taken down from my wall, my college boombox finally being relieved of Cheap Thrills—that I studied photographs of her, looking for something other than Janis Joplin, the legend. She made some arresting images, to be sure—sprawled in feathers on a leather settee for Pearl, behatted in furs leaving the Chelsea Hotel. There’s little question that Janis was attractive, in the sense that she attracted you, and for reasons that had nothing to do with her voice. But pretty? No, she wasn’t that.

Still, we loved to look at her. In fact, perhaps we loved to look at her because she wasn’t traditionally beautiful. As rock critic Ellen Willis writes in her 1976 essay on Janis, “Joplin’s metamorphosis from the ugly duckling of Port Arthur to the peacock of Haight-Ashbury meant, among other things, that a woman who was not conventionally pretty, who had acne and an intermittent weight problem and hair that stuck out, could not only invent her own beauty (just as she invented her wonderful sleazofreak costumes) out of sheer energy, soul, sweetness, arrogance, and a sense of humor, but have that beauty appreciated. Not that Janis merely took advantage of changes in our notions of attractiveness; she herself changed them.”

Isn’t it nice to think so? I don’t think it’s true, though, not exactly, or at least I don’t think Janis changed our notions of attractiveness. But I do think that not only is she a prime example of how someone’s raw talent can make a person so appealing as to actually transform one’s looks, she’s also a poster child for the ways beauty serves as a false protector. Janis Joplin, never having been considered pretty, also never had the security of banal prettiness. And as harsh as it probably was to not have that security, it may also have wound up giving her a certain protection against misdirected blame. In “Ball and Chain,” when Janis moans, “I don’t understand how come you’re gone” she has a near-childlike lack of understanding—how come you’re gone? how come? The only thing greater than her gaping incomprehension at why her man would leave a good thing is her pain. But at age 17, I’d have known how come he’d gone: I wasn’t his dream girl after all, I wasn’t pretty enough, I spat when I talked, I’d been too clingy, and my god was I really just fat after all? (I’d have been wrong, of course. We never understand how come they’re gone.) Janis skipped forward through the analysis of the good girl, the pretty-enough girl, the girl who desperately wishes not to repeat her mistakes—the me-girl—landing smack-dab in the searing, fertile garden of pain. We all wind up there eventually. I can’t say she spared herself any grief through her circumnavigation around nice-girl self-blame; Janis didn’t spare herself much of anything. But she grieved the right things. She never had the crutch of prettiness, so she learned to walk without it.

There’s only so far I can romanticize Janis in this respect, of course. She jumped from lover to lover, only rarely feeling satisfied. She sought approval more than her lasting reputation as an iconoclast reveals; one listen to the mediocre Kozmic Blues shows just that. She went to her high school reunion fully expecting the reception she’d longed for 10 years earlier, only to walk away with a tire, an award for having traveled the farthest to attend. (“What am I going to do with a fucking tire?” she reputedly said upon receiving the award.) And, of course, she died in a hotel room, alone, at age 27, of a self-administered heroin overdose. I can’t claim jack shit for Janis’s self-image or appraisal of her own appeal. I can only claim what she taught me.

I’m older now, more mature, and I’d like to think I’m no longer as eager to equate talent and physical beauty. In fact, I’ve come back to that place I was at age 17: Janis Joplin’s looks don’t matter to me, in the sense that they’re unimportant in the larger scope of who she is. I’m glad for that. Janis’s legacy isn’t that of beauty; it’s that of brutal vulnerability, searing talent, and the virtue of being totally unable to be anyone other than oneself. I write here of the importance her looks had for me because this is the place I have to honor her, and here I write of beauty. But when I listen to her—it doesn’t matter what album, it doesn’t matter what song—if I am thinking of beauty at all, I’m thinking of the kind of beauty that transcends. Whimsy, will, and revelation created Janis’s legacy, and they create her beauty too. And today, on what would have been her sixty-ninth birthday, I want to offer her memory a piece of my heart.

First Dance

Early in the summer of 1987, my next-door neighbors had a garage sale, and among the goods was a square-dance-style turquoise dress with silver rickrack. Those of you who have ever doubted me when I insist I don’t have a natural eye for style will surely become believers when I tell you that I thought it was the most beautiful dress I had ever seen, and that it looked something like the dress on the left—

—except it was double-breasted, and with more silver, more rickrack, buttons, pockets, and a clasp belt, and was worn not by a sylphlike blonde from a vintage pattern illustration but by a pudgy 12-year-old in Aberdeen, South Dakota, whose most adult fashion choice until that point had been to remove the star sticker from her Sally Jessy Raphael glasses. It was a wonderful dress for a hootenanny, and thoroughly inappropriate for any other occasion whatsoever.

My attitude toward my wardrobe was more advanced than my style, and I knew that I might be able to cadge the $10 from my parents to buy it—but that doing so would weaken my hand when it came to buying the Guess sweatshirt I’d been pining for, so I stayed silent. But as with the Alamo, I remembered. I remembered.

Later that summer, I enrolled in a weeklong camp. Going to camp was one of my biggest dreams ever since reading about it in any one of the YA novels that were set on the east coast, where, in YA we-need-a-setting-that-allows-for-personal-growth-and-minimal-adult-oversight-without-parents-appearing-neglectful world, everyone goes to camp. Nobody in South Dakota went to camp (unless it was 4-H camp), but there was a lot of attention being given to the perilous position of “gifted kids” at that time, so they rounded up all the Stanford-Binet changelings in the state whose parents could afford a couple hundred bucks for tuition and threw us onto a college campus for a week. “Camp,” in fact, might be a misnomer, implying that at some point we’d go fly-fishing and make God’s-eyes with yarn and popsicle sticks. Let’s instead call this a conference of seventh-graders who enjoyed logic puzzles, shall we?

I received the agenda for the conference, and somewhere among seminars on Future Problem Solving and South Dakota Literature, I saw the magic words: FRIDAY NIGHT: DANCE. I’d never been to a dance before—this was the summer before I started junior high, so definitively boy-girl entertainment hadn’t yet entered my social calendar. But of course I knew all about them. Pretty in Pink! Sixteen Candles! Footloose! Carrie! More important, I knew what a dance meant. A dance was redemption for the dorky girl; a dance was where she would step foot into the gymnasium and all eyes would be on her. At the dance, the popular boys would realize she’s the one they should be courting, not the rich girls who have as many Guess sweatshirts as they want; the rich girls, of course, would recognize the dorky girl as someone they should be inviting into their select clique (but will the dorky girl have them? the dramatic tension!). Forget that nobody was really dating yet, and forget that while I wasn’t the most popular girl in school, neither was I picked on; forget that there wasn’t yet anything in my life that needed me to redeem it by setting foot into the gymnasium and taking everyone’s breath away. I wanted the dance, I wanted the moment, I wanted the validation. The makeover was an essential part of the dance plot in teen movies—but just as important was the dress. And you’d better believe I knew exactly which dress it would be. Fate had even sealed the deal: The theme of the dance was “Western,” and what could possibly be more western and simultaneously becoming than a double-breasted turquoise square dance dress with silver rickrack? Exactly.

The garage sale had taken place weeks earlier, but I went over to my neighbor’s house to inquire as to the whereabouts of the dress. I was briefly crushed when she told me that the dress was actually her sister’s contribution to the garage sale, and that when it didn’t sell her sister took it back with her, to her home a four-hour drive away in Vermillion, South Dakota. But wait! Vermillion, South Dakota, was the exact site of the conference of seventh-grade logicians! With the inimitable pluck of a 12-year-old girl whose experience with sexual metamorphosis extended no further than a bevy of 1980s prom movies, I asked her if her sister would be so kind as to hand-deliver the dress to the camp so that I could then be suited up for my grand record-scratch of an entrance. And with the bemused affability of a thirtysomething woman being asked to urge her sister to drive across town into a horde of prepubescent Odysseians of the Mind just so a girl could make an entrance, she agreed.

I wasn’t exactly sure how the handoff was going to happen—this was before cell phones and e-mail, so I just had to hope that all communication was a-go and that somehow my neighbor’s sister in Vermillion, South Dakota, would be able to find me on the university campus. On the third day of camp, the camp director was doing “mail call” during breakfast (who sends mail during a weeklong camp?), and then he held up the dress—my dress—and said, “And who does this pretty little number belong to?” Someone—I now presume one of the other teachers—let out a loud wolf whistle, and the entire camp burst into laughter.

This isn’t where I became embarrassed. No, I loved it. It was mildly embarrassing in the same way you’re embarrassed when someone gives you a lavish compliment: I loved the attention but felt a tad gaudy (never mind that I was picking up a double-breasted turquoise square dancing dress with silver rickrack). The wolf whistle sealed it for me: This dress was smokin’, and I knew it, and now thanks to the loudspeaker delivery, everyone knew it, and as I walked to the small stage where the camp director was to claim the dress, I knew that come FRIDAY NIGHT: DANCE I would own the University of South Dakota campus.

Now, I’m not fast-forwarding past the rest of the camp in order to keep focus on the story. I’m fast-forwarding past it because I have no recollection of it whatsoever, other than a handful of memories involving the single friend I managed to make there (who now lives in Sioux Falls and is evangelical about the gluten-free lifestyle, or so Facebook tells me). I was there for a week, and I do not recall a single class, seminar, or activity we did the entire time, except for a timed writing exercise based on that year’s theme, “South Dakota Pride,” which I scribbled fervently even as I felt vaguely embarrassed that I was supposed to be proud of this state that had exactly zero glamour to it. (We were all from South Dakota, of course, but to remind us of this fact and to make us write about our pride on the matter seemed an act of aggression.) I think I had a good time? I don’t know, honestly.

But I remember the dance. The dress actually fit me reasonably well, and my neighbor’s sister had even thought to include a pair of matching silver sandals so I wasn’t stuck wearing my sneakers. They were too small for me (I wore a size 8 by sixth grade) but I wore them anyway. My now-gluten-free friend had brought eyeshadow, and I’d brought a curling iron and hairspray, so I went over to her dorm room after putting on my dress so we could get ready together. (My own roommate, who was possibly even dorkier than I was and professed to have no interest in boys or dances whatsoever, chose not to attend. This was fine by me because I’d already run out of excuses to not walk with her to the cafeteria and therefore have to eat meals with her, not wanting her dorkiness latch onto my own and create a Velcro-like dork hold. It’s not like Gluten-Free or I were cool, but at least we both knew about boys.) I knew we weren’t supposed to show up exactly on time, because that would be Uncool, so we waited until the dance was barely underway and then made our way to the gymnasium.

The adult counselors had decorated the gym with crepe paper, and they’d turned down the lights, but not too low, because we were 12. None of this mattered, however, because nobody was there. Nearly everybody—boys and girls alike—was in the hallways and rooms surrounding the gymnasium, doing the various planned, adult-supervised activities that each of those spaces held. I couldn’t tell you what any of those activities were (rebus throwdowns?) because I was too busy being horrified. This was a dance! This is where it—it!—was supposed to happen! It’s not like I’d met any boys over the course of the camp I took any particular interest in, but I was at a dance, and there were boys in the vicinity, and I was bewildered that they weren’t suddenly lining up to give all the girls punch from a punch bowl as a prelude to extending their hands as “Is This Love” by Whitesnake played in the background. No—they were doing, I don’t know, word games, and so were the girls, and I’d just had enough. I liked word games just fine. I’d spent my whole life doing word games, and rebuses, and logic puzzles, and making crosswords, and writing scripts—I liked doing those things so much that I’d gone to gifted camp. But this was the night that all those word games and rebuses and logic puzzles were to be transcended. This was the FRIDAY NIGHT: DANCE, and I was in my turquoise dress and borrowed silver sandals. I was ready. And nobody cared.

So I cried. I didn’t cry at the dance; I held it in with as much dignity as I could muster and made a beeline to the bathroom, where I entered a stall, sat on the toilet, and cried. I wasn’t crying because I didn’t feel pretty, not exactly; I was crying because I felt foolish for having thought that a turquoise dress and a curling iron would be enough to make me pretty, and for having such a specific result in mind, one I’d learned in a flash wasn’t going to happen. I cried because I knew I was smart—every girl in that gymnasium knew she was smart, that’s why we were there—but I didn’t know if I would ever be pretty. I cried because I saw that what I’d heard all along—girls mature faster than boys—was true, and that I was going to have to wait before any of them wanted any of us. I cried because someone had whistled when everyone saw my dress, and nobody was going to whistle at me in it. I cried because this was my chance and I didn’t even have the opportunity to blow it. I cried for not having been more kind to my roommate, and I cried for crying about not having been more kind to her because I knew I didn’t deserve my own pity. I cried because I’d believed with all my being that once I put on eyeshadow and a turquoise dress, I’d turn into a heroine of any of the slumber-party movies I’d watched; I cried because that was the night I began to understand that the success of those movies depended upon girls like me thinking maybe that would happen to them. I cried because at that moment, in a gymnasium decorated with crepe paper so that the gifted kids could feel not just smart but glamorous, I began to understand that not everything would come easy to me, and that some forms of failure could be intangible, inexpressible, and nonetheless undeniable. I cried because I wanted to be seen, and because nobody was ready or willing to see me.

Eventually two other campers came into the bathroom and heard my sobs. After I insisted I was f-i-i-i-i-i-ne, they called in one of the adult counselors. I don’t remember what she told me; I just remember that she was blonde and pretty, and that seemed comforting somehow. She walked outside with me while I decided whether I wanted to go back to the dance. I did, so she led me there, but once inside I lost all enthusiasm for it. My friend the gluten-free enthusiast found me and said she wanted to leave. Together, we did. The next day, we all went home.

I’d go to camp again the next year. Not gifted camp, but 4-H camp, where I had a certain amount of social cache because I was secretary of a rather important 4-H club (our “den mother” had been named Dairy Woman of the Year). By then I had contact lenses, reasonable proficiency with eyeliner, and a knack for detecting whether a boy liked me. I got my first kiss at that camp. It was where I got my first inkling that with a bit of skill, a few omissions, and an artfully placed laugh, the girl in the turquoise dress wouldn’t be the first thing everyone saw when they looked at me. It was where I learned that getting what you want—a boy telling you he likes you—could bring worries of its own. It was where I found that the magic happens not at the dance, but outside of it, as you hear people chanting to "Mony Mony" while you look into the eyes of someone who, at that moment, can see only you.

I returned to my room, aloft, and told my roommate in great detail exactly what had happened. And I understood when, in the middle of the night, I heard her muffled tears.