A Compleat To-Do List for the 34-to-56-Year-Old American Woman, as Determined by Ad Placement on Lifetime Television's Premiere of "Flowers in the Attic"

• Fix yellow, crooked, softening teeth (Invisalign, ACT mouthwash, Colgate Optic White)
• Cover gray hair (Nice & Easy, Clairol Age Defy)
• Find appropriate food for pet with food sensitivities (Fresh Pet, Blue Basics)
• Find a date (Christian Mingle)
• Lubricate (Osphema; see above)
• Cheer on patricide (Lizzie Borden movie with Christina Ricci)
• Find insurance, preferably from talking and/or oversized baby (State Farm, Nationwide)
• Make homemade bread but not really (Fleischmann's Simply Homemade Bread Mix)
• Take on vaginal fungus and win (Monistat)
• Root for the underdog ("Gimme Shelter" with Vanessa Hudgens as "a revelation"; see also Gabby Douglas Lifetime movie)
• Go to the Bahamas (Atlantis resort)
• Get a damn coat (Burlington)
• Eat fried chicken and/or creatively packaged tuna (KFC, Sunkist Tuna Creations)
• Be appropriately compensated for injury sustained in truck accident (Cellino & Barnes, 800-888-888, Call8.com)
• Call Cellino & Barnes on new phone (T-Mobile)
• Get rid of this damn migraine/remind self of anti-aging possibilities (Botox)
• "Do" taxes (H&R Block)
• Become pain-free (Xeljanz, Cortizone, Move Free, ThermaCare, Advil, Rolaids, Robitussin, both of the ’Quils, Selsun Blue, Chapstick, Airborne, Gold Bond)
• Menstruate (Always Infinity Flex Foam)
• Purchase sturdier shoes (Skechers Slip-Resistant Shoes)
• Consume anything at Dunkin’ Donuts except donuts (DD iced tea, coffee, breakfast sandwich)
• No, wait, have breakfast sandwich at home (Jimmy Dean)
• Switch to bank that cares about my ideas (Santander)
• Watch more Lifetime Television, preferably using Time Warner (too many to list)
• Learn; drink more water (Capella University, Pur water filtration)
• Take out the trash (Hefty Ultimate)
• Buy batteries for vibrator (Energizer; implied)
• Meryl! ("August: Osage County")

"Flowers in the Attic" Is the Best Book Ever* And Here Is Why

Yes, I’m serious. Flowers in the Attic—a.k.a. “The book that made teenage girls look sideways at their brothers and shudder,” as my similarly besotted pal Lindsay put it—wasn’t originally marketed as a young adult book when it was first printed in 1979, but it soon found its niche in the hearts of pubescent girls across the land. (And now it’s popularly acknowledged as a YA book; in fact, my library categorizes it as such.) It hit bestseller lists within two weeks of its publication, and the popularity of that book and the numerous other works by V.C. Andrews** that followed didn’t dwindle for years—in 1990, V.C. Andrews was still the second-most-popular author among teens.

I was one of those teenagers, and maybe you were too. I’d grown up on a steady supply of classics and earnest Newbery award-winning books for children and young adults, so it wasn’t like I was deprived of good literature. But come the sophisticated age of 12, I was ready for something juicier than Tom Sawyer kissing Becky Thatcher, and I moved straight into—spoiler alert, here and throughout—brotherfucking. And, you know, I knew it was trash, but damn if I didn’t stay up nights sixth through ninth grade blazing through the entire Flowers in the Attic Dollanganger series, followed by the Casteel series, followed by the Dawn series, followed by My Sweet Audrina, which I thought was lame*** and then I stopped. But when I heard that Lifetime was premiering a new**** Flowers in the Attic movie this Saturday, I went back for a reread, and thus, my declaration that Flowers in the Attic Is the Best Book Ever.

And here’s why.

1) The incest plot was hot. 

Which is not to say that girls actually want to sleep with their brothers / sisters / uncles / cousins / parents / etc. It’s not even to say that girls fantasize about it in great numbers. But consensual incest caters to the nascent desires of many a pre/teen girl—that is, girls who aren’t yet sexually active, but who are beginning to think in terms of sexuality and have erotic impulses. A 12-year-old who has yet to be kissed might well be simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by the thought of sex—and what would make it a mentally “safe spot” where she could feel aroused and not repulsed? A known, loving, nonthreatening partner. That is...a brother. Not her own brother, of course; I’m guessing most girls would be repulsed by the thought of actually kissing her own brother. But with Flowers in the Attic, the teen reader is aligned with protagonist Cathy by dint of being a girl. She gets to experience the thrill of sex without having to entirely shed any vestiges of “eww boys,” because she knows that “her” brother (that is, Chris, Cathy's brother) is a loving, nurturing person who is, above all, safe. So by “becoming” Cathy, the reader is able to experience sex—which, if memory serves, the average early adolescent sees as a combination of forbidden and arousing—in a way that’s both. 

Consensual incest is actually a recurring theme in Gothic novels (“the perfect linking of the most desirable object with the prohibited object”), and it showed up in the work of one of the most-read feminine***** erotica writers (Anaïs Nin, whose incest erotica was published just two years before Flowers in the Attic). It’s actually a surprise that there aren’t a whole lot more Gothic YA books with brother bangin’. Of course, the whole “brothers are safe” thing is complicated just a bit by the wee matter of consent. Chris and Cathy’s major sexual interlude begins with this:

… “You’re mine, Cathy! Mine! You’ll always be mine! No matter who comes into your future, you’ll always belong to me! I”ll make you mine...tonight...now!”

I didn’t believe it, not Chris!

And I did not fully understand what he had in mind, nor, if I am to give him credit, do I think he really meant what he said, but passion has a way of taking over.

We fell to the floor, both of us. I tried to fight him off. We wrestled, turning over and over, writing, silent a frantic struggle of his strength against mine.

It wasn’t much of a battle.

Two pages later, Chris is quick to offer the world’s most awful/awesome apology (“I didn’t mean to rape you, I swear to God”). But Cathy is just as quick to clarify that he didn’t rape her. “I could have stopped you if I’d really wanted to. All I had to do was bring my knee up hard… It was my fault too.” Yet the pretense that there was force involved may well have helped girls derive pleasure from it—“good girls” don’t actively want to have sex, after all. But if you’re simply overpowered, then you didn’t want it, it just happened. Applied to real life, this is terrible logic (in fact, it’s rapist logic); applied to the fantasy life of girls who have desires but not the know-how to give them form even in her imagination, it makes some sort of sense. Rape fantasies aren’t uncommon for women to have; about 4 in 10 women have them, with a median frequency of once a month. I couldn’t find any numbers about rape fantasies among girls/teens, but my hunch says that the idea of having to have sex whether you want to or not is probably far more appealing to someone who hasn’t yet learned how to express her sexual agency.

The first time I floated this girls-like-incest-fantasies bit out loud, one woman pointed out that for a good number of girls, rape and incest are realities, and that eroticizing them reinforces the idea that there’s something sexy about nonconsensual sex. (Keeping in mind that while consensual incest does happen, many survivors of coercive incest convince themselves their abuse is quasi-consensual, as a survival tactic.) I agree, at least in the sense that popular culture is a part of rape culture, which then colors the idea of what rape is (and—surprise!—usually not in a way that is helpful to its victims). But that’s not what’s going on in Flowers in the Attic. (Later “V.C. Andrews” novels, perhaps, but that’s a different post.) It’s in the realm of fantasy—it’s even constructed as such within the book. As literature professor Cynthia Griffin Wolff writes of earlier Gothic work, part of the hallmarks of Gothic literature is “a set of conventions within which ‘respectable’ feminine sexuality might find expression.” It’s understood by the reader as a way to get to read utter filth with a sort of “free pass” for wanting to do so in the first place. Case in point: When I read it as an adult, I found that I’d erased any rapey overtones from my memory of reading it as a kid. I saw it for what it was, and judging from the way my friends talked about it at the time, they did too. Nobody in their right mind would hand it to a young rape victim as a depiction of her experience—read as such, it’s horrific (“It was my fault too”?). But that’s not how it’s read by its readers, I don’t think. (Of course, when I read this book the first time, I hadn’t experienced a whit of sexual trauma; perhaps if I had, my memory of it would be different. I can only go off my own experience here.) 

Point is: Girls don’t want to be raped, any more than they want to sleep with their brothers. But are there elements of it that appeal to the V.C. Andrews target demographic beyond the mere taboo? Yeah.



2) It lets you hate the mother but still love your own. 

You know those goody-two-shoes YA novels where the protagonist and her mother might fight but deep down there’s a Very Special Connection? V.C. Andrews offers an ear-shattering Screw that and gives the reader every excuse to seriously hate on Cathy's mother, Corinne. SHE KILLED CORY, I mean, come on. Now, my mom and I have always had a pretty good relationship (I mean, I’m choosy about my guest bloggers, and here she is! Twice!). But our mother-daughter relationship took a definite downswing during my prime V.C. Andrews years. A catalogue of my mother’s sins circa 1987-89: She made me wear a hat and scarf in when it was a measly -18 outside (hats are for dorks!), she made me take a study skills course (study skills omg mom!), she enrolled me in a girls’ self-defense seminar against my will (on a Saturday, which is a weekend!), she made me read Charlotte Freakin’ Bronte (life is not school!), she wouldn’t buy me a Guess sweatshirt just because I wanted one (everyone but meee had one!), and she wouldn’t let me see Dirty Dancing (actually, I still think I’m right on this one). 

Anyway. So while I never resorted to any “I hate you!” antics, there was definite tension, and it doesn’t require years of therapy to understand that part of it was my pubescent resistance to becoming anything like my mother—that is, a woman. Eager as I was to grow up, my fantasy of womanhood clashed hard against the reality of womanhood I saw in the form of the actual woman I knew best. In my head, being a woman meant, like, going to balls and wearing updos and going out with a different dashing suitor every night, but then here was this flesh-and-blood woman who was doing things like making taco salad. It wasn’t long before I woke up and started appreciating her and everything she did for our family, but at 12 I was just too self-absorbed.

Enter a mom who went from basically being a Christmas card to locking up her four children in an attic and slowly poisoning them while she...went to balls and wore updos and went out with dashing suitors. Corinne takes every bit of perfectly normal mother-daughter strife and balloons it into grotesquerie. She’s a nightmare in the truest sense—just as you might manifest everyday anxiety into the classic why-am-I-in-my-underwear dream, Corinne’s evil is an enormously exaggerated version of what a lot of girls might feel toward their mothers at that age, shown from the girl’s perspective. That includes love and adoration too—Cathy might need prompting at times, but she’s still willing to melt into Corinne’s arms for quite some time after Corinne locked her away.

As Adrienne Rich writes in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, mother-hatred is interpreted as “a womanly splitting of the self, in the desire to become individuated and free. The mother stands in for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr.” Gee: split self, desire to become individuated and free, victim, martyr, sounds like a whole lotta 12-year-olds I knew. Cathy’s physical resemblance to Corinne is more than a handy plot point (not to detract from the awesome doppelganger subplot in Petals in the Wind******, but I digress); it’s an extension of this idea that mother is daughter, and daughter mother, as much as she wishes not to be. And it also leads to…

3) It depicts aspects of beauty that we don’t often see. 

Plenty of books explicitly aimed at teens and preteens involve looks, but it tends to be some variation on the protagonist’s dissatisfaction. Maybe she doesn’t think she’s pretty (but some boy just might teach her otherwise!), maybe she’s jealous of her best friend’s looks, maybe she has a movie-moment makeover in which she sees herself as she wishes to be seen. The better of the YA set will deal with these in a more complex manner, but at best there’s ambivalence about whether or not the girl feels attractive.

Not so with Cathy: She’s a babe, and she knows it, and it isn’t because of any makeover. In fact, she has a disdain for artifice—when her brother tells her that if she develops an hourglass figure, she’ll “make a fortune,” she schools him on the dangers of corsetry. She takes sensual pleasure in herself: “[A]lways before I went to sleep, I spread my hair on my pillow so I could...nestle my cheek in the sweet-smelling silkiness of very pampered, well-cared-for, healthy, strong hair.” She waits until she’s alone and “then I stared, preened, and admired” herself in the mirror, for “Certainly I was much prettier than when I came here.” As for body image, when she talks of her dream of becoming a ballerina, she points out that “dancers have to eat and eat or else they’d be just skin and bones, so I’m going to eat a whole gallon of ice cream each day, and one day I’m going to eat nothing but cheese…”—a far cry from the prototypical YA-ballet-eating-disorder storyline. (I mean, eating a gallon of ice cream a day is an eating disorder, but whatever.)

Cathy takes pride in her looks, something that we cheer her on about, especially when she’s punished by the grandmother after she catches Cathy admiring herself naked in the mirror. (Naturally, the punishment befits the crime: She pours tar in Cathy’s long blond hair, forcing her to cut it off.) Pride isn’t the sin here—the sin, as the reader sees it, is all on the grandmother. In what other universe are girls cheered on for their vanity? Not just her pride or resilience with her body image or ability to recite “I’m beautiful just the way I am!” or whatever, but her downright vanity? It’s the cardinal sin of girldom, thinking you’re “all that.” But Cathy does it. The only “mean girl” around to side-eye her is the grandmother (“‘You think you look pretty? You think those new young curves are attractive?’” she hisses at Cathy), and obviously we’re going to be on Cathy’s side here. We freakin’ eat it up.

The leadup to Cathy and Chris getting all bow-chicka-bow-bow is less about anything that actually happens between them physically, and more about him seeing her (something her mother never does—Cathy totally freaks when Corinne brings her a bunch of “silly, sweet little-girl garments that screamed out she didn’t see,” none of which have room for her new curves). “[Y]ou look so beautiful. It’s like I never saw you before. How did you grow so lovely, when I was here all the time?” Chris says to Cathy upon catching her naked. The only other eyes on her as a woman are her own. Remember that whole “girls mature faster than boys” thing that turned out to be painfully true? Remember that sensation of wishing boys would just see you already? Yeah.

Andrews herself had experience with looks bringing a mixed bag of tricks: After suffering a severe fall as a teenager (which eventually landed her in a wheelchair), doctors didn’t believe that she was in pain, telling her she “looked too good” to be seriously hurt. Says Andrews of that age, “I was very pretty, and some fathers of my little girl friends made advances.” She never spoke publicly of anything abusive that might have happened, but it’s interesting to note that alongside the wording she chooses for Corinne when describing how she fell in love with her husband/half-uncle-half-brother: “I was fourteen years old—and that is an age when a girl just begins to feel her power over men. And I knew I was what most boys and men considered beautiful…” Girls are usually cautioned against playing with this particular kind of fire—as well they should be, given the potential fallout. But denying that there’s a lure to discovering one’s own appeal does girls a disservice, particularly when young women’s bodies are still the universal symbol for sex.

Okay, now that I’ve convinced you that Flowers in the Attic is the best movie ever, you should all watch Saturday’s premiere with me and live-tweet the whole damn thing. That’s my plan, at least, but I am not kidding when I say that if tweeting interferes with the sheer enjoyment of it I will turn off all devices except the television immediately. In any case, I’ll hop on the Lifetime hashtag and go with #badgrandma too. Join in!

_________________________________________

* Okay, seriously, it’s more like, Anna Karenina, Beloved, The Sun Also Rises, and then Flowers in the Attic. Or is it?!?!

** And by “V.C. Andrews” I mean both Flowers in the Attic author Virginia Andrews and ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman, who continued to write books under her name after Virginia’s death. Tracie Egan Morrissey interviewed him for Jezebel here.

*** Duh, of course it was lame. The first two lines of the Wikipedia entry about it: “My Sweet Audrina is a 1982 novel by V. C. Andrews. It was the only standalone novel without incest published during Andrews' lifetime.” Bo-ring!

**** As opposed to the old FITA movie with Victoria Tennant and Kristy Swanson, which was unfaithful to the book in the lamest possible ways (see also ***, above).

***** The literature scholars among you will likely not be surprised to learn this, but I was: There’s actually an entire genre of Gothic literature dubbed “female Gothic,” the hallmarks of which include ambivalent feelings toward female sexuality, and women being literally or symbolically motherless while simultaneously being shaped by patriarchal culture. For more on female Gothic—and for V.C. Andrews in particular—check out V.C. Andrews: A Critical Companion, which A) exists, and B) is now officially replacing Flowers in the Attic as The Best Book Ever. And now I’m absolutely serious—no, really, I am—it’s totally awesome and if you enjoyed this post at all you should at least skim it. Fascinating stuff.

****** Cathy dresses up just as Corinne did for a Christmas party 15 years earlier, then stuns the guests at the very same annual party by making a grand entrance as "Corinne" and revealing that she had kept four children locked away in the attic while she spent her evenings drinking from champagne fountains and slowly poisoning her kids with arsenic doughnuts. Then the mansion burns down, and Corinne winds up in an insane asylum. THE BEST.

In Which I Take An Episode of "South Park" Far Too Seriously

Just a few thoughts about the latest episode of—of all things—South Park. I've always thought the show was cute, but one of the side effects of cohabitation is that I'm now suddenly exposed to a lot of South Park, and I've become a full-on convert of its inspired mix of goofiness and social criticism and blah blah TV critic circa 1999. Anyway, it's always a treat when I see a media outlet besides the usual suspects take on my pet topics, which Trey Parker and Matt Stone did last night.

For those who don't watch the show or didn't see last night's episode: When one of the main characters tells a girl who asks him out that she's fat, the suddenly feminist cheerleading captain, Wendy, sets out to prove a point about unrealistic beauty standards by Photoshopping the girl's picture. But Wendy's plan backfires, as the boy now believes the girl is actually "hot"—and when the girl's manipulated photo goes viral, she's the school catch. Soon the entire cheerleading squad hits the gym—in truth, a computer lab where a trainer yells at them to digitally whittle their bodies faster—leaving Wendy alone and frustrated that her point has been totally missed. Worse, everyone from the school counselor to the nightly news team assumes she's taken up the crusade because she's jealous (or "jelly," in the show's parlance). The show ends with—spoiler alert—Wendy giving up by digitally manipulating her own photo so she looks as "good" as her friends. (There's also a side plot involving Kanye West's slow discovery that Kim Kardashian is the inspiration for The Hobbit. It is South Park, after all.)

In my recollection, this is the only episode this season—and one of the few overall—that has focused on the girls of South Park Elementary, and this is the topic they chose. And it's with a decidedly male perspective; men ages 18-24 are South Park's top viewers, and the prime target audience. Perhaps this was meant to cater to the show's female audience, but I don't think so: I'm guessing this was a (relatively) straightforward Parker-Stone perspective shown, as ever, through the South Park lens. Which means that on some level, the whole unrealistic-beauty thing is of concern to the target South Park audience—witness the last scene of the episode, where Wendy, with a tear in her eye, hits "send" to circulate her edited babe pic to the entire school. It was a quiet, surprisingly sincere ending, one that echoed the ending of last week's trilogy, when the main characters decide to put down their video games and actually play with each other.

What struck me about the episode was how the ability to manipulate one's own image was seen as a psychological gold mine—none of the girls besides Wendy saw it as anything other than a way to attract attention, and maybe as a way to trick themselves into thinking they truly looked as picture-perfect as their, well, pictures. (Now, to be clear, we're talking about a student body that has previously embraced mass murder as a route to scoring XBoxes, as well as defecating out of their mouths, so I'm not trying to say that the show is remotely rooted in realism here, mkay?) The focus of the episode was not so much on the other students' dismissal of Wendy's critique but of their embrace of the ability to edit their own images. It's this that's being mocked, not Wendy—the potential narcissism that accompanies the sudden ability to look as good as your digital skills allow. 

While calling out digital photography as a cesspool of narcissism is hardly new (and let's not forget that narcissism existed before social media), it's rare in the forthrightly feministy circles I tend to run in to see someone blatantly call a preoccupation with one's own image flat-out vain or narcissistic. I'm likelier to frame it in terms of social pressures, a psychic tradeoff for women's growing power in the world à la The Beauty Myth, or self-esteem or whatever. And I'm quick to defend the occasional charge of, say, makeup use as vanity (especially when it comes from men), because it is something usually leveled squarely at women. But, yes, narcissism does play a role, at least potentially—and it's interesting that this is what two male creators talking with a male audience come up with in regards to women/girls manipulating their own photos: the masses discarding the (righteous) political points surrounding the issue. It's interesting because the accusations of self-interest are still done with a relatively sympathetic hand: The girls see the rewards becoming digitally "hot" can bring them, so why wouldn't they go along with the plan? I wonder if Parker and Stone's—AND THEREFORE ALL MEN'S, ha—emotional distance from the question of visual self-representation is what allows them to squarely finger the role of self-absorption in image control. And more than that, I wonder if the reason they're looking at this topic now is because men are becoming evermore enveloped in these questions. (I see the sign on the clubhouse now: Boys allowed!)

Now, I'm hesitant to say that a single episode of a single cartoon indicates any sort of sea change for men's attitudes about beauty standards. But the first scene of the show that followed South Park last night makes me wonder. Comedy duo Key & Peele (another show that's grown on me) are walking in some sort of warehouse that's being redone with paint and plaster and the like, and a blob of paint falls on Key's shirt, right on his pecs. He smears it to the other side of his shirt, then laughs, "It's like I have two paint titties"—and then Peele suddenly can't look Key in the eyes, so transfixed is he by Key's "titties." The gag goes on just long enough, when another blob of paint falls on Peele's shirt too. The duo look up and see a painter above them, leering, "Hey, ladies!" They're literally subject to the male gaze, and they don't like it.

So I don't know, I'm drawing no Big Thoughts here, but it doesn't seem a coincidence that along with the boom in the "grooming" industry for men comes little bundles of criticism on the matter. And the only study I've found so far on the matter actually shows that that men are more likely than women to use an edited photo as their profile pictures on social networking sites. I can't help but wonder: Are men who don't necessarily identify as feminist paying more attention to appearance standards? Will the fallout be a shift in those standards, or just cleverer, deeper encoding of them? Are men likelier than women to call out vanity or narcissism in people's reactions to the beauty imperative?

A Tentative Exploration of The Female Gaze

The first thing I noticed? The thighs.

Several years ago, I was taking a class where I hit it off with one of my classmates—our first conversation was one of those where you wind up gasp-laughing in a way you normally only do with people who are already your friends (or people who are as drunk as you are). He was new to the city, and while he’d made friends at his job, his wife hadn’t had such luck, and would I like to go out to dinner with them on Thursday?

I would, and I did, and I was rewarded with more of that good cheer; I liked her as much as I liked him. And when she got up at one point to visit the restroom, I found myself doing something I hadn’t done before: I did not look at her thighs. 

To be clear, it wasn’t like I made a point of looking at the thighs of every woman I met. I’m not saying I’m above ever having compared another woman’s figure to mine, but for the most part I think I approach other women as potential allies, not competition or a measuring stick of my own appeal. No, my thigh-checking was more akin to a tic, like compulsively clearing one’s throat, or saying “you know” all the time. I knew I did it, but it was such an automatic act that it wasn’t something I ever thought I could not do. Plus, it’s not like I’d go around staring at other women’s legs or anything. It was always a glimpse, a landing point for my eyes, and I’d look away quickly thereafter. I didn’t think anyone noticed. I mean, I barely noticed, really.

That is, I barely noticed until I noticed that I didn’t do it. It had been a while since I’d met someone new who so easily gave me a sense of mutual recognition—and a couple at that! the holy grail of people my then-boyfriend and I could maybe hang out with together!—and I didn’t want to blow it. When the woman rose from the table, my brain slowed down for just long enough for me to recognize that I was anticipating, as in I was really looking forward to, being able to look at her thighs. Which meant my brain slowed down long enough for me to stop it. It’s not that I was afraid she or her husband would see my eyes flicker down to her legs (though I do always wonder how perceptive others are about the object of our gaze); it was that I recognized that I really didn’t want to know what her thighs looked like. If I knew what her thighs looked like, I might begin to care—I mean, not really care, not care enough to measure her as a person by it or anything remotely that distasteful. But I’d care in my own, private, ugly little way. I’d know whether her thighs were as large as my own, or larger; I’d know whether they were firm and muscular or soft and fleshy. I’d be able to add it to the enormous resource bank of thigh-images that I’ve catalogued in a dark part of my psyche for as long as I’ve recognized that women were supposed to think thighs were A Problem. And I realized I just really, really didn’t want to add this awesome woman’s thighs to that collection, and that I didn’t want to add any woman’s thighs to my image bank ever again. (Hell, I didn’t want an image bank at all, but you’ve gotta start somewhere, right?)

So I didn’t look at her thighs. Not then, anyway; at some point, months later, I recalled that moment, and realized that at some point since then my mind’s eye had gone ahead and taken a snapshot anyway. But I’d taken in the larger point: My eyes automatically went to women’s thighs, any woman’s thighs, every woman’s thighs, upon first seeing them. And if I could recognize this, maybe I could stop it.

But you’ll notice the first words of this post: Several years ago. I’ve noticed it, but there it is. I don’t think I literally look at the thighs of every woman I pass on the street, but do I find myself still looking at women’s thighs on the street, in the coffeeshop, in the gym? Yeah, I do.

I’d be more embarrassed to put this out there were it not for my hunch—now verified by Science!—that this is so common as to enter the realm of “duh.” A recent eye-movement-tracking study shows that women spend more time looking at one another’s bodies than they do looking at their faces. (The same was true of how men look at women, but that’s another story.) To add to it, men and women alike visually process women’s bodies as being parts, but see men’s bodies as being whole. (Thanks to Sally for the link.)

Both of these facts seem to come into play with my thigh gazing, but when I looked at the studies, I was thrown for a moment: The scholars identified themselves as objectification researchers. Which makes sense; after all, when you see a human and focus first and foremost on particular parts of it, you’re, ya know, reducing them to an object, at least in part. But I’d never stopped to think of the ways I’d been participating in objectifying other women, even if my motivation (or what I assume was my motivation) was more tied to my own anxieties than tied to a predatory mind-set. For that’s what I primarily associate with the word objectification—predatory men, or at least men who bathe in the power imbalance that comes when half the world is seen as parts, not people. If I ever thought about women objectifying one another, I thought of it cartoonishly: Women tucking dollar bills into strippers’ g-strings, getting lap dances, raunchily commenting on babes walking by—Female Chauvinist Pigs-type stuff. And that’s part of it, yes.

But this sort of objectification—the kind of objectification I subtly take part in when I gaze out the coffeeshop window and, if I don’t consciously work my way out of it, see a parade of lady-thighs—seems more insidious. Not only because of what it says about how women’s own gaze might be defaulting to what we used to call “the male gaze,” but because of what it says of how we view ourselves. One of the reasons beauty can be so effective as a bonding mechanism between women is that we see ourselves in other women. It’s also my explanation of why so many straight women become aroused by watching women in porn, not just men or male-female couplings: We see the image of sex itself as being inherently tied to our bodies as objects of desire. Desire including our own. (Cue a Google Scholar rabbit hole for search term “self-objectification.”) 

At this point, it’s no mystery why my brain chose to zero in on thighs. Thin Thighs in 30 Days was first published when I was six; not long after that, I heard a television character use the phrase “positively bulbous” used to describe her own thighs, and I instantly knew that’s what my own stubby, childish thighs were—positively bulbous. (The one and only critical comment my mother ever made about my body was about my “Gaskill thighs”—in other words, it was a criticism of her own thighs too.) As Natalia Mehlman Petrzela writes in her fantastic, spot-on take on all that Lululemon jazz, women’s thighs are “one of the most fraught areas on women’s bodies.” And I’m beginning to understand my thigh thing intellectually, though who knows how much good that’ll do me in actually changing the behavior. So my questions are to you: Do you find yourself zeroing in on certain parts of women’s bodies? Do you notice it when you’re doing it? Are you bothered by this, or do you see it as something neutral or positive? And a plea, from me, who really wants to stop this automatic zoom-in on the thighs of the world: Any thoughts on how to put the kibosh on this?

"Growing Eden": Author Q&A

One of my favorite things about blogging (back when I was doing it regularly—which I'll go back to doing in March once my first draft is finished, I swear!) has been meeting some fantastic bloggers who ceaselessly bring new perspectives to this big loose conversation we're having on beauty, women, feminism, appearance, and the like. Specifically, getting to know one of the brightest body image bloggers out there, Kate Fridkis of Eat the Damn Cake, has been a delight—a delight made all the greater when I learned that she recently published her first book. 

Growing Eden, an interior chronicle of her pregnancy, diverges from body image but is wholly aligned with one of her larger themes: womanhood, and exactly what that means, personally and collectively. Being grateful for all the opportunities we have today that our grandmothers didn't; feeling constrained by the sheer number of opportunities out there. Wanting to be seen, yet feeling relief when her pregnant body—"the promise of motherhood"—temporarily excused her from being seen in a sexual light. Believing in commitment to community, yet not being excluded from little vipers of envy that can accompany being a part of a larger entity. The book is about femininity as much as it is about motherhood or pregnancy—and more important, it's a beautifully written treat. Fridkis has always been one of those writers whose thoughts inspire wanderings of my own, so I was pleased when she agreed to do a Q&A about Growing Eden with me here. For an excerpt, visit Eat the Damn Cake.

Given that you're a body image blogger, it's particularly interesting that you initially seemed to almost not trust your body to do what it did, like, "I can't really be pregnant..."—and then your body really did go and "betray" you with the morning sickness. In what ways do you feel like trust, pregnancy, and body image are interconnected?

My body definitely betrayed me in the beginning of my pregnancy, when I learned that “morning sickness” sometimes means “spending every day on the bathroom floor.” I think my brain thought I was dying. After that, my body shocked me by getting huge. I didn’t feel like myself, I felt like I was trapped inside a pregnant woman’s body. And then, just as that was becoming normal, I had to somehow push this terrifyingly large baby out. I didn’t want to do that. I really didn’t want to. But I had no choice. The whole thing was an exercise in being out of control. And the whole thing was an exercise in what my body is capable of, regardless of how I feel about it. My body turned out to be stronger than I’d ever known. It was a sneaky machine, just following its ancient program. And in the end, I was fine. Everything was fine. My body knew what it was doing, even when what it was doing was extreme or gross or enormous or horribly painful. My body made a perfect baby, even though I only ate Kraft mac and cheese and iron pills for a solid trimester. My body proved itself to me in spectacular ways. It proved how functional as opposed to decorative it really is. Which seems like it should be self-evident, but definitely hasn’t been for me. And all of this was totally normal. My body is just a normal body.

I think there’s a lot of pressure on women to have bodies that are exceptional. That are “better” than normal. That go beyond. Fitter, leaner, boobier, more dramatic, tighter, you know. I’ve definitely wanted to look “better” than normal. Better than myself. But it turned out, with my pregnancy and the birth of my baby, that normal was exactly what I needed to be. It was awesome that I was ordinary. And my ordinary body was awesome.

I think if I have another kid, I’ll go in trusting my body a lot more. I also hope I don’t have to barf as much, because that was really bad and I am still mad at my body for that part. Seriously, some women don’t even get sick. What the hell.

Ambition and reevaluating exactly what it means is one of the main themes of "Growing Eden", and it made me think of the ways that figurative hunger (for accolades, accomplishments, etc.) and literal hunger are often connected—i.e. many women displace larger forms of yearning onto their bodies. Do you feel like your interest in having a "successful" life as you frame it in the book and your interest in body image are related? If so, in what ways?

Sometimes I think that success and thinness are wrapped around each other so tightly that it’s hard, as a woman, to picture one without the other. So that this terrible thing happens: When you’re sure you’re failing or falling behind in your life you might think, “at the very least I should be thinner.” Or when you’re sure you’re getting ahead in your life you might think, “but I should still be thinner, to really make this work.”

For me, food hasn’t always been the enemy of success, but beauty has always been mixed up in my vision of it. When I was a cocky little girl, I assumed I was pretty because I assumed I was smart. Those things went together in my head. I knew beauty was important, especially for girls, so I just figured I had it, since I was confident that I had the important things. Having that assumption interrupted seriously messed with me, and when I felt worst about my appearance I also felt like I was failing as a whole person. It was hard to separate the rest of me from the way I looked. Later, coming out of that (long) phase, I wanted to succeed enormously in my career almost to make up for my appearance. I imagined that at least I would be able to impress people with my shiny, exciting life, even if they might not think I looked good. And of course, I wasn’t thinking any of this very consciously. It was just floating around in the background as I worked frantically through the weekends or looked in the mirror in the morning. Oy vey. How exhausting. That whole dance, back and forth, between beauty and career. What I was really afraid of the whole time was being irrelevant. Of being forgettable and meaningless. Of not being worth noticing for any reason. And it’s interesting, as I’ve learned to slowly, slowly forgive myself for not looking the way I’d like to look, I’ve also become more forgiving towards my career goals. I guess forgiveness is big like that.

Right now, I feel lucky to have the chance to be a writer. Which is not to say that I’m not ambitious. But ambition without appreciation is kind of like body dysmorphia—you never think you’re good enough. Convincing myself that I’m already good enough is probably one of the most critical missions of my life, and it’s interesting that it’s only really started to happen since I’ve been writing about body image in an effort to convince other girls and women that they are already good enough, too.

I loved the bit about how you felt like your pregnancy was a form of armor against sexual attention, and I'm wondering about whether that feeling of feeling somehow shielded against (here it comes) the male gaze has lingered since Eden's birth.

Yay! The male gaze! This feels delightfully classic. But seriously. Yes—it has lingered. Because now I’m a mom, and there’s a baby strapped to my body in a dorky Baby Bjorn carrier, and she’s bobbing around with her silly baby face under a giant fuzzy hat with bear cub ears and she’s drooling everywhere. In other words, my body is hidden under all of that. In other words, I am blatantly unavailable. 

And also no—because my body looks weirdly the same in clothes as it did before I was pregnant. So when I go out without the baby, suddenly I am transported back in time. And I look around and I think, “No one knows…” They don’t know that I am forever changed. That I am forever someone’s parent now. Instead I just look like some chick waiting for the C train in the same jeans and boots as every other woman.

But also yes—because I feel different, no matter what, about the way I am in my clothes, and about the way I am under people’s eyes. It’s hard to explain. I’m thinking about it and just sitting here trying to put it into words. OK, I’m bad at thinking, I’m just going to write: I am into my own body these days. Because I am so surprised by it. I can’t believe it swelled into such a dramatic new shape and then transformed again, exposing my hips and the curve of my ribcage so that I saw them in a way I hadn’t seen them before. I feel sexy for looking the way I always looked anyway. I feel sexy because I didn’t know what to expect and then I was too distracted to care and now my body fits into real pants again, and that’s exciting. I sort of expect men to look at me and appreciate the way I look, because I am appreciating it. And at the same time, I don’t give a shit what they think, for maybe the first time. So when I’m walking alone (which is still rare) I am just enjoying the freedom, and enjoying my body, and if anyone is gazing, let them gaze. I’m not even looking around. I just want to get on the C train and go.

That’s the best I can explain it.

You have a part in the book about how one of the first thoughts you had after finding out your child was a girl was, "What will she look like?"—a somewhat forbidden thought for we feminists who are supposed to be all about so many other things, larger forms of power and place in the world, etc. What was it like for you to recognize that that was one of your initial impulses, to wonder about her looks specifically as a daughter?

It sucked. I was mad at myself. And I was mad at the world, for being a place that makes beauty so important for girls that I would even have that thought. I was embarrassed, too. I didn’t want to tell anyone (so of course, I eventually wrote about it). It suggested that I had my priorities all wrong. It suggested that I am vain and lame and think appearances are the most important thing. No, no! I wanted to yell at the imaginary people who would lob that criticism at me, if I told them, It’s not like that! I think she should be able to be anything she wants! Feminism! Woman power! She is probably going to be a brilliant mathematician! But I just don’t want her to suffer because of this stupid thing that happens to girls. I don’t want her to waste her time. I don’t want her to get distracted by her surface and lose time that could be devoted to what really matters about her.

Most of all, I wanted to know what my daughter looked like because I had this desperate urge to make sure she didn’t look like me. It wasn’t exactly rational. It was a primal rush of emotion, and in that moment, I wished more than anything that she would be better than me in every way, beginning with her appearance. I didn’t want her to have my struggles. I wanted her struggles to be better, less embarrassing. Less petty-seeming. I wanted her to be less vulnerable.

It’s not true, though. Even if she ends up looking just like me, she will always be herself, and her goals and battles and vulnerabilities and confidences will be different from mine.

And now that I know her, in person—now that she’s real instead of theoretical, it feels different. I’m actually working on a little piece about how proud I sometimes feel of the way I look because of the way she looks like me.

_____________________________________

Growing Eden is available at Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and Kobo.

The Power of Glamour

The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion, by Virginia Postrel

At my very first interview for a magazine job, the executive editor of a now-defunct women’s magazine asked what periodicals I read, and I answered with what I thought would be the right smart-girl answer—The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and a magazine that was little-known at the time, Bitch. “I notice there are no women’s magazines on that list,” she said. (Bitch is indeed a magazine about and largely for women, but it’s hardly on the same shelf as Cosmo.) I stammered out something about choosing a “broader focus” for my reading material, the interviewers smiled politely, and, as you have guessed, I did not get the job.

I didn’t tell them the actual reason I didn’t read women’s magazines: They’re bad for you, right? I mean, that’s what I’d learned in women’s studies, and even if you’ve never taken a women’s studies class, you know the gist of the argument here: Women feel worse after just three minutes of looking at ladymags, the size of the average fashion model is size 0 or 2 but the average American woman wears a size 12, etc. (You might ask why I wanted to work at a women’s magazine if I believed all this, and it’s because I was naive enough and arrogant enough to believe that all the industry needed was one solid feminist comme moi and everything would change. Anyway.)

Over the years, my thinking on women’s magazines has become far more nuanced and ambivalent, but a core juxtaposition has remained: If women’s magazines make women feel so bad about themselves, why do we continue to buy them? And glamour is part of the answer. Not glamour as in the magazine title, nor glamour as many of us conceive of it—say, marcel waves, rubies, and sleek gowns on the red carpet—but rather glamour as articulated and explored in Virginia Postrel’s latest, eminently readable book, The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion. Rather than merely musing on glamour, Postrel sets out to define it, and in doing so weaves not only a history of glamour but the parameters that allow the concept to encompass everything from Jean Harlow to wind turbines, Angelina Jolie to train windows, James Bond to candy wrappers. Glamour here is neither an aesthetic nor a convention, but a nonverbal rhetoric that Postrel likens to humor, “a form of communication that elicits a distinctive emotional response.”

Under the definition laid out in The Power of Glamour, in order to be glamorous—as opposed to charismatic, opulent, beautiful, luxurious, sexy, or romantic, all of which are frequently confused with glamour—any given person or thing needs to meet a certain set of criteria. Something glamorous must give form to an otherwise formless longing or desire; it must deploy a degree of mystery, illusion, and grace that vanishes once it shifts from the glamorous to the familiar. But the factor that resonates the most with me as far as the ladymag conundrum is a degree of identification. In order to find something glamorous, we need to see it as representing a world that we identify with—or rather, that we would identify with if only. 

Postrel cites Star Trek as an example of something glamorous, which might strike many as absurd, given its distinct lack of glamorous tropes. But it was this example that cemented for me the relationship between glamour and the viewer—and if you had memories of your 11-year-old loner brother sitting on the couch in his Star Trek ensign uniform, staying up late to finish his own handwritten Next Generation scripts, you’d understand too. A bit of an outcast at that age but with a longing for community and quiet appreciation of the skills he had to offer the world, my brother couldn’t wholly identify with life aboard the starship Enterprise, but he saw enough of its world in himself—and he saw enough of himself in the values of that world—that it became far more than mere entertainment to him, even if he couldn’t spell out why. Star Trek wasn’t remotely glamorous to me, but it was to him. 

When I think of my brother’s longing today, I’m struck by how much he yearned to truly identify with that world (even though, like all chimera of glamour, it was a world that couldn’t exist). In a certain light, his obsession with Star Trek becomes heartbreaking: a child wanting so badly to live in a world where he’d have a place that he literally wrote it himself when the prewritten fantasy ran out. But I also see it as an indicator of the ways he was thriving. He took up trombone because that’s what Commander Riker played. He learned how to save his child’s income in order to buy entrance to Trekker conventions once my parents became exasperated with the constant ticket requests. He was writing entire hourlong performance scripts—a passion that stuck around long enough for him to host a radio theater show today. You could say Star Trek held up an unattainable ideal that he’d never be able to join—or you could say it spurred him to better himself. Both can be fallouts of glamour.

As a feminist writer who wants women to feel as emotionally whole as possible, I’ve spent my fair share of time fretting over idealized media images of unattainable beauty. But in writing about beauty and in talking to dozens of women about the role looks play in their lives, my mind-set has slowly shifted over the years. I can no longer believe that women are such passive, robotic consumers as to continue to buy women’s magazines if they just make us feel like crap—nor do I naively believe that women bathe in these images because we feel fantastic while doing so. Looking at the question of idealized images through the lens of Postrel’s articulation of glamour, there’s a more satisfying conclusion here: We are drawn to images of idealized beauty not out of self-loathing but out of longing; we are compelled by images not only because we compare ourselves to them but because we identify with them. If we didn’t identify with those images to some degree—even a whisper of one—they would cease to have any resonance with us. Yet if we identified too much, we’d have less to strive for.

Let’s not be confused about what identification means here: Not that we see ourselves as easily stepping into the world of an image, but that we see potential for us to do so. We may perceive glamorous objects as an entrée into that world (hence the desire for that shade of lipstick, that style of ring, that color on the soles of our shoes), but it’s not the object we want so much as the life it promises. Some part of that life rings true to us, if only true with possibilities instead of realities. Some part of it reflects our own vision of ourselves—our better, ideal selves as seen through the looking-glass, sure, but it’s us in that looking-glass either way.

“By tendering the promise of escape and transformation, glamour feeds on both hope and hardship,” writes Postrel. The specific forms of hardship she’s referring to are more concrete than bodily discontent: Women of the 1930s being sentenced to domestic drudgery; gay men of the 1980s at risk of violence, self-harm, and AIDS. But the idea extends to the question of women, images, and self-image. Much criticism has been aimed toward glamour in this regard: By preying upon our vulnerabilities, glamour stirs a want that a handy variety of products and services are ready to fill. (Or attempt to fill; once we’ve inhabited the promise of any specific glamour, an item/person/place ceases to be glamorous per se.) Indeed, glamour is an effective tool in advertising because of its power to exacerbate desire. But a narrow focus on the darker side of that desire does two things. First, it allows us to forget that glamour stokes hope, which in turn can spur positive action: The cinematic glamour of the 1930s allowed housewives to envision a world where they weren’t their own servants; vogue balls of the 1980s allowed gay men a temporary space of transformation and acceptance. Similarly, while I’m not about to argue that a photograph of, say, a 14-year-old runway model is going to spur positive action in most of us, the world we enter when we gaze upon images of idealized beauty is...well, it’s ideal. It’s fantasy—and the more we remember that it’s fantasy, the better off we’ll be. In fact, a study from 2010 shows that viewers of images of idealized beauty report higher self-esteem when they’re prompted to see the images as fantasy, not as a reflection of reality. Still, we respond to fantasy because it reflects something we may genuinely long for in our lives—after all, there are dozens of ways a public image of a woman might register as “ideal,” yet we only respond to those that stir something inside us. Gwyneth Paltrow, Dita Von Teese, and Beyoncé offer entirely different aesthetics, and yet they’re all forms of a certain type of ideal. And depending on which (if any) of these ideals resonates with us—and which we find most glamorous—we may take different routes toward embodying the sort of life we aspire to. Can we take that aspiration too far? Yes, yes, of course, and there’s plenty of excellent work out there chronicling how. But aspiration can inspire movement, and movement can inspire change. 

Second, looking only at the negative consequences of aspiration allows us to erroneously believe that glamour and imagery create want, instead of merely exacerbating it. “[Critics] imagine that if glamour disappeared, so would dissatisfaction—that, for example, women would not long to be young and beautiful if there were no cosmetic ads or movie stars,” writes Postrel. “But glamour only works when it can tap preexisting discontent, giving otherwise inchoate longings an object of focus.” Vogue magazine didn’t manufacture women’s desire to be beautiful. But it gave form to that desire with skilled imagery that allowed the reader to create a story from what was presented on the pages. (A story in which she herself is the protagonist, of course.) 

I don’t mean to say that Vogue—or any other image outlet—should be cast as aspirational in a positive way for women, or that those who feel harmed by idealized imagery should just learn to suck it up like the people who derive joy from those same images. But I am saying that the question of these outlets should be examined through a critical—and feminist—lens, outside of the usual talk of self-esteem and body image and women’s health and all that. A treatise on glamour may appear apolitical, and it can be read that way without sacrificing our understanding, but we can also use it to ask larger questions that then become political. Glamour is not inherently feminine, yet its iconography often features women, harvesting the old cliché of how “men want to be with her, and women want to be her.” If so many images are of women, what does that say about what we as a culture aspire to, or what we as consumers and individuals find to be “preexisting discontent”? When we find ourselves transfixed by an image, a longing, what does that tell us about our own desires?

Indeed, part of the riddle here lies in Vogue itself, ever an icon of glamour. Despite its reputation as highbrow and snooty, Vogue has readers whose median household income is actually lower than that of its Condé Nast sisters Glamour, Self, and Lucky. It’s a comfortable number, to be sure, but it’s interesting that a magazine featuring $280 face cream appeals to the person of more modest means than does a magazine that features $28 pleather skirts. The lofty aspirational quality of Vogue may well be less appealing to those who are slightly closer to living in that world (and, of course, the magazine itself isn’t as exclusive as its reputation—not only does it feature plenty of trends accessible to the hoi polloi, but it can, after all, be purchased by anyone with a spare six dollars). This may be my fantasy, but I’ve come to picture the average Vogue reader as being much like the distant cousin who gave me my first-ever copy of it: a schoolteacher living on a farm in Ohio who simply liked to escape into the elite world of Vogue for one afternoon each month. I imagine the magazine spoke to the part of her that wasn’t a schoolteacher, that didn’t get up at 5 a.m. to tend to sheep, even as she treasured those aspects of her life. I hesitate to say it represented a vision of her life “if only,” for she appeared plenty content. But perhaps it represented a vision of a life she might have wanted had her life been, say, 20 degrees different than it actually was.

It’s also worth noting that Vogue’s editor, Anna Wintour, was recently tapped to revamp some of the company’s other titles. Lucky went under a Wintour-led overhaul, and Glamour is in the midst of the same, with two key image-makers leaving the magazine in recent weeks. Wintour’s talents lie in finding the balance between malcontent and inspiration, identification and aspiration. That is, titles aside, her talents lie in finding none other than glamour.

"Fractals" by Joanna Walsh: Short Story and Giveaway

When people ask me what I like to read, the first word out of my mouth is usually "nonfiction." My reasoning is simple: I like to read about what I like to write about, namely physical appearance and its intersection in women's lives. And the open-minded part of me cringes to admit this, but: I've tended to believe that fiction isn't the place for this. Sure, the occasional piece might illuminate an aspect of women's stories, but on the whole, I'll stick with my nonfiction shelf—Wolf, Berger, Sontag, Etcoff, Steinem, and so on.

Had Fractals, Joanna Walsh's new collection of short stories from 3:AM Publishing, been published earlier than this October, my answer would have changed earlier as well. I'd mistakenly conflated nonfiction with truth, entirely forgetting that fiction allows us to tell a different sort of truth—particularly about internal experiences. Like how, as with Walsh's characters, we might keep ourselves groomed for an absent beloved we privately know will never arrive, or how we make silent bargains about our looks ("The man with the steak looks at my legs which gives me permission to look at the message he is typing into his mobile phone. I cannot see it as the glass reflects. I feel cheated."). I knew from my first encounter with Walsh's work—an illustrated look at five female authors, and how their self-presentation plays into their reputation—that she was as intrigued by beauty as I was. Fractals expands her thoughts on the matter, with a direct focus on how the rituals of womanhood affect not only how we're seen by the world, but how we see ourselves. Her characters are keenly—sometimes painfully—aware of how they present themselves visually, treating clothing as a talisman, as a reaction to life events, as a confirmation of who they think they want to be.

When I asked the U.K.-based Walsh how she tailors her own choice of clothing to her state of mind, she had this to say: "I haven't, so far, done any sort of public appearance (and I love doing readings) in a skirt or dress. I feel more authoritative in androgynous clothes, which I know is not a very worthy feeling as it's got to be to do with kowtowing to the way I intuit 'feminine' and 'masculine'-looking people are perceived. But there's also an element (another anxiety) of making writing look like 'proper' work—manual work even. I occasionally wear a boiler suit to read, and I always feel very comfortable. I think of the Surrealists in their suits: artists and writers who refused to look 'bohemian', who refused to make the distinction between what they did and less 'artistic' jobs. So when working at home I rarely stay in pyjamas. However I do own, and wear, a variety of pretty dresses..."

Enjoy "Fin de Collection," one of the stories from Fractals, below—and leave a comment on this entry to enter to win a copy of the collection from 3:AM. Winner will be chosen by random number generator; leave a comment by 11:59 p.m. EST November 12 to enter.

*     *     *

A friend told me to buy a red dress in Paris because I am leaving my husband.

The right teller can make any tale, the right dresser can make any dress look good. Listen to me carefully: I am not the right teller.

Even to be static in Saint Germain requires money. The white stone hotels charge so much a night just to stay still, just so as not to loose their moorings and roll down their slips into the Seine. So much is displayed in the windows in Saint Germain: so little bought and sold. No transactions are proposed that are not so weighty for buyer and seller as to be life-changing. But, for those who can afford them, they no longer seem to matter.

The women of the quarter are all over 40. They smell of new shoe leather. I walk the streets with them, licking the windows. Are we only funning that we could be what is on display? It is impossible to see what kind of women could inhabit those dresses but some do, some must. Nobody here is wearing them.

Amongst the women I am arrogant. I retain my figure without formal exercise. I retain my position as a wounded woman like something in stone, infinitely moving and just a little silly. In order to retain my position I must be wounded constantly. This is painful, but it is a position I have become used to.

We turn into Le Bon Marché department store, the women and I, Vogue heavy in our shoulder bags.

There is nothing like Le Bon Marché if you are rich and beautiful. But if you are not rich or beautiful, it doesn’t matter. The store has its own rules. It is divided into departments: fashion, food, home. It is possible to find yourself in the wrong department but nothing bad can happen here and, although you may be able to afford nothing, it costs nothing to look.

Le Bon Marché is always the same and always different, like those postcards where the Eiffel Tower is shown a hundred ways: in the sun, in fog, in sunsets, in snow. It may look different in Spring or Autumn, at Christmas or Easter, but the experience it delivers is always the same.

There are no postcards of the Eiffel Tower in the rain but it does rain in Paris, even in August. And when it rains, you can shelter in Le Bon Marché, running between the two ground-floor sections with one of its large orange paper bags suspended over your head (too short a dash to open an umbrella).

Inside is perpetual summer. Customers complaining of being too hot are forced to take off their coats beneath the stencils of artificial flowers that bloom across midwinter walls. The orange paper carrier bags are not made for real weather, either. Once wet their dye leaks onto hair, coats, and leaves orange stains on pale carpets, clothes, floorboards...

Fin de collection d’éte. In Le Bon Marché it is already Autumn. The new collections are in order. They do not privilege experience. With time they will deteriorate, unbalance, as each key piece sells out, leaving a skeleton leaf of basics, black and grey. One can commit too early of course. A key piece bought nearly in style will merely foreshadow the version available when the style is at its height.

In 35 degree heat, we bury our faces in wool and corduroy. We long for frost, we who have waited so long for summer. To change clothes is to take a plunge, to holiday. Who cares if we cannot afford to leave Paris. In the passerelle, the walkway between the store’s two buildings, a tape-loop breeze, the sound of water, photographs of a beach...

There is something about my face in the mirrors that catch it. Even at a distance it will never be right again, not even to a casual glance. Beauty: it’s the upkeep that costs, that’s what Balzac said, not the initial investment.

Je peux vous aider?

The salesgirl asks the fat woman with angel’s wings tattooed across her back. She mouths, Non, and walks, with her thin companion, into the passarelle, suspended.

The first effect of abroad is strangeness. It makes me strange to myself. I experience a transfer, a transparency. I do not look like these women. I want to project these women’s looks onto mine and with them all the history that has made these women look like themselves and not like me.

From time to time I change my mind and sell my clothes. I sell the striped ones and buy spotted ones. Then I sell the spotted ones and buy plaid. Does it get me any closer? At the checkout, the thin girl in her checked jacket looks more appropriate than me, though her clothes are cheaper. This makes me angry. How did her look slip by me? I was always too young. And now I am too old.

I cannot forgive them. I forgive only the beauties of past eras: the pasty flappers, the pointed New Look-ers. They are no longer beautiful. They cannot harm me now. These two are not even the beautiful people. It’s more that they’re so much less unbeautiful than everyone else. Please remember, we are in Le Bon Marché. Plunge into the metro if you want to encounter the underground of the norm.

Even your other women seemed tame until I saw them through your eyes, until I saw the attention you paid them. I no longer know the value of anything. And if you do not see me, I am nothing. From the outside I look together. I forget that I am really no worse than anyone else. But how can I go on with nobody, with no reflection? And how, and when, and where can I be inflamed by your glance? I can’t be friends with your friends. I can’t go to dinner with you, don’t even want to.

But why does the fat woman always travel with the thin woman? Why the one less beautiful with one more beautiful? Why do there have to two women, one always better than the other?

Je peux vous aider?

Non. There are no red dresses in Le Bon Marché. It isn’t the dress: it’s the woman in the dress. (Chanel. Or Yves Saint Laurent.) Parisiennes wear grey, summer and winter: they provide their own colour. I have learned to imitate them. Elegance is refusal. (Chanel. Or YSL. Or someone.) To leave empty-handed is a triumph.

In any case come December the first wisps of lace and chiffon will appear and with them bottomless skies reflected blue in mirror swimming pools.

To other people, perhaps, I still look fresh: to people who have not yet seen this dress, these shoes, but to myself, to you, I can never re-present the glamour of a first glance.

To appear for the first time is magnificent.

______________________________________

Joanna Walsh is a writer, illustrator, and artist. She draws and writes for The Guardian, The Times, Metro, The Idler, FiveDials, 3:AM, Berfrois.com, Necessaryfiction.com, and The White Review, amongst others. She has created large-scale artworks for the Tate Modern and The Wellcome Institute and has developed immersive theatre/games events in collaboration with Hide and Seek and Coney Agencies, as well as games she runs herself. You can read her blog at Badaude, and follow her on Twitter here.

Photo: Wayne Thomas

Hi Honey, I'm Home: Makeup and Cohabitation

I only needed one of these to move my makeup collection, mkay?

So, yes, I moved recently; only days ago. Specifically, I moved not just apartments but living situations—my gentleman friend and I decided to move into a new apartment together. I’ve lived alone for 12 years, so while this was a decidedly positive development, there’s also an element of adjustment going on. I’m not used to having someone else in the space I call my own, except for specific, defined periods of time—dinner, drinks. Even a lazy afternoon is just that, an afternoon, not an indefinite stretch in which ever-elastic time is shared with another. That’s exactly why most of us move in with someone, actually—you want to spend more time with them, or you want your downtime to include more of them, or something like that.

But when we talk about moving in with someone, the words we use imply not time but space. And—news flash, folks—sharing a space with someone means...you have to share. I don’t have a problem with this on a theoretical level, but on a practical level it means recognizing that you can’t just use your space however you see fit; if your intended use of space encroaches upon what a reasonable roommate might call “their” space, you’ve gotta make concessions. And here I am talking about the bathroom.

I recognized early on that I’d have to pare down my beauty products (this after I’d done what I believed to be a “thorough purge” a couple of years ago, ha!); our new bathroom has somewhat less storage space than my old (and crammed) one, and my beauty-product : non-beauty-product ratio is roughly 8:1. As I went through my bathroom, I started asking myself on products I was waffling on, “How would I justify this to my boyfriend?” Not that he’d ask me to justify any of my stuff—it was more of a weeding technique. If I can’t justify any particular beauty product to the person whose space I am about to share, I probably don’t need it at all, right? Despite my best efforts, though, I’m guessing that 90% of the bathroom is full of my crap. His grooming accessories: two bottles of cologne, an electric razor, and a stick of deodorant. (And a shampoo three times as expensive as mine, thankyouverymuch.) Mine? Well, are we counting only the daily-use stuff on the cabinet shelves, or are we counting the “extras” stored beneath the sink, or are we going whole hog and counting things like the velcro curlers and glitter eye pencil I can’t make myself get rid of? 

Still, that’s just the concern of space. Truly, the adjustment that living together takes is indeed about time, or perhaps division of time. I’m used to time being clearly delineated: Time in public means time out of my home, time in private means time in my home. Sure, there are plenty of spaces that straddle the two—going to friends’ homes, for example—but maybe that example just illuminates how skewed my idea of public vs. private has become. Private time for me in the past 12 years has meant not just time out of the public sphere but time away from anyone except myself. Living with someone means an adjustment to that line of thinking.

Enter makeup: For me, one of the primary functions of makeup has been to delineate the public from the private. Virtually every time I leave the house, I’m wearing makeup, and if I’m not, it’s because the space I’m entering is something I consider a mental extension of “home”: the grocery store, for example (it’s just around the corner!), or the gym. And for the most part, that means that I’d be putting on makeup before seeing my boyfriend. I mean, he’s seen me plenty of times without makeup, but the default is certainly mascaraed. Despite the fact that he’s enough of a “home” for me to want to create a literal home with him, being with him still gave me enough of a toehold in the public sphere that I’d want to put on makeup, even if I was just having him over for the evening.

So now that one particular form of public-private life—my intimate life, my partnered life—is more fully anchored in the private sphere, makeup could fall by the wayside, according to the personal logic I believed I’d been applying. And yet there I am, every day before he comes home from work, dabbing it on, prettifying, beautifying, cosmetizing. (It could be more extreme, I suppose: I’ve heard tell of the woman who wakes up before her partner so she can scurry to the bathroom to get made-up.) Me being me, I’m sure I’ve put far too much thought into this, but there it is: I’m not fully comfortable admitting that I make a point to put on makeup before he comes home for the day, and I can’t help but wonder what it means that I’m using makeup in this manner. Is it a form not of delineating public from private but of delineating me from us—a way of making sure I don’t lose myself in the glory of The Couple?

There’s actually some shreds of evidence for that line of thought: Unmarried, cohabitating couples are more likely than married couples to have spaces in the home that are designated “alone” spaces. (Well, they were in 1974, and while cohabitation has drastically changed in social meaning since then, I do hear this concern more from unmarried friends who live with partners as opposed to married couples.) But we live in New York, and while our apartment is comfortable, the idea of “alone spaces” is nearly laughable. We have a room whose main purpose is for me to work in—still, one can technically be out of sight in a New York dwelling, but one can never be out of earshot, even olfactoryshot at times. My makeup collection is a way of carving out a physical space of designated “alone” time, sure, but it may also be a way of drawing a boundary of sorts around a mental space that’s wholly mine. Not for his benefit, but for mine: For as I write this, my boyfriend is at work, and I am without a drop of makeup, without shoes, without contact lenses. No music is playing; no other creature is in this space. When he gets home this evening, I may still be working and writing, but things will look different. I’ll be made up, glasses off, hair brushed; the sounds of his existence will flow through this space. His sounds aren’t distracting per se, but they are not sounds of the solitude I’m used to when I work. I wonder if the makeup serves as an external notification to myself: You are no longer alone. It will take time to learn how to not be alone, after more than a decade of being able to be wholly alone at any moment I choose, simply by going home. And as it has done for me before, makeup may help me through a personal transition.

I wonder how this will change as time goes by and living with someone else becomes my mental default, not a new playdate. And yes, I’m aware that for all my talk of boundaries and solitude, makeup also helps us look better, and I’m talking about my boyfriend, not a roommate—I want to look my best around him. Especially now, I admit—now, before the natural rough edges of cohabitation begin to reveal themselves. I’m not yet annoyed by any of the things that may annoy me a year from now: shoes laying about wherever he feels like taking them off, that sort of thing. And in turn, to my knowledge none of my little things have crept into his brain: inability to get anything totally clean, 12 different kinds of flours in the cupboard (down from 15, so it’s an improvement). He’s under no illusions that I’m perfect in any way, including looks-wise; it’s not like he believes my eyelashes blacken themselves. Maybe that’s exactly why I’m drawn to wearing makeup at home now, in his presence anyway: It’s not an illusion at all, but an expression, an articulation of my desire to start off this whole living-together thing at my personal best. Sometimes my personal best will mean a laser-like attention to other things (most notably work), and in those times makeup may well fall by the wayside. Right now, though, my personal best isn’t so lopsided. She writes, she edits, she exercises, she researches, she reads, she cleans. And right now, she does it looking the way she wants.