“It is our humanity, and all our potential within it,
that makes us beautiful.”
Aimee Mullins, athlete/actor/activist
When I turned 13, the rite of passage that ushered me into
womanhood was not a hot-off-the-press copy of Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking
book The Feminine Mystique, published
earlier that year. It was a shopping trip to J.C. Penneys for my first pair of
nylon stockings, and a girdle to fasten them in place - a pilgrimage overseen
by my mother. At the time, I felt elevated by the grown-up-ness of it all, and
had no idea what a metaphor that girdle was for the constrictive world into
which I was about to step.
My mother - in her youth a free spirit and an infamously
beautiful rascal, but by that time the mother of eight children - wore girdles;
my aunts and grandmother and older cousins wore girdles; every woman over the
age of 13, it seemed, owned an undergarment that had evolved from the inhumane
corsets of the Victorian age. So, even at 105 pounds, it was my time to join
the ranks. It was what every fashion-literate person in the post-Eisenhower era
knew to be a required layer, the reining in of the cheekiest (pun intended)
portion of the female anatomy. Dames’ derrieres were kept firmly under control,
with contraptions that were given names like “The Comeuppance” by the
passive-aggressive pimps of Madison Avenue.
A 1965 magazine ad (you can see it in the lobby at the
Fuller Store this month) features the Comeuppance itself - capitalized, you
see, because they even trademarked the name - along with a thinly veiled
narrative of hostility toward the female form: “… the front panel swoops down
on the enemy from above… wipes away your diet sins… coaxes you into line in all
the trouble zones… No wonder so many interesting things start happening when
you get your Comeuppance!” The tragedy, of course, is that the hostility
conveyed in that copy was a two-way street. Those writers, for whom the “sex
sells” culture had become mother’s milk, knew they were communicating in the
newly modern self-loathing parlance of their target customer - a vernacular
that had become self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious cycle reinforced with each
insidious message to women about their bodies being the enemy.
Women bought into these things - the girdles, that is - for
about two more years after I got my first Comeuppance, and then said ENOUGH.
But they never stopped listening to the message behind them, and simply moved
on to the next fashion torture regimen.
How did such an obscene piece of clothing gain such a
stranglehold, something that so constrained movement, breath and any hope of
looking in a mirror, once you’d wrestled yourself into it, of feeling good
about yourself? What depths of self-loathing to this day continue to deliver us
- women who are fully qualified thinkers - to such self-torture? Spanx and
six-inch heels rule the modern day fashion tableau, and all I can think is that
the more things change the more they stay the same.
Human beings are bombarded from birth with the message that
if we are beautiful we will be loved. The modern cultural memo - reinforced
from Internet to magazine to billboard to late night comedy - continues to be
that beauty, as defined by Madison Avenue, is still the key to the Love
Kingdom. Despite an entire generation’s efforts at debunking the idea, of
warehouses full of books exhorting rational minds to see our beauty as coming
from within, people still fall under the spell of physical, fashion-proscribed
attractiveness and bow to its power. It never ends. AND - the message continues
to foster slavish loyalty to ridiculous, often harmful, trends. Shoes that
cripple, beauty regimens that poison, fashion must-haves that bankrupt,
undergarments that choke like a boa constrictor, body shapes that lead girls -
young girls who just want to be loved - to death’s door.
Nora Ephron’s book, “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” is a
self-deprecating assessment of all the parts of ones body a woman can learn to
hate. The neck, the skin, the hair, the waist, the hips, the feet, etc.… It’s
hilarious - until you put it down and ask yourself whether she’s been reading
your mail. Who among us is not a constant participant in the repartee? Nora’s
dead now - having succumbed to cancer at a cruelly early age. If the gods
offered her - or any dead woman - her life back in exchange for all the years
of obsessing over “maintenance” and intervention - if she could come back and
live a long life with the bargain of never mentioning, much less chasing after
remedies for, the “imperfect” condition of any part of her body - do you think
she’d turn that offer down? “No, your worshipfulness, I think I’ll stick with
the dead-early plan… this wattle under my neck is just too much to ignore, this
fat ass just doesn’t work in Michael Kors’ latest skinny jeans…” Do you think
that would be the answer?
We’ve fine-tuned apologies for hips that evolved in service
of healthy delivery of babies; for white hairs that spring up to signal a life
fully experienced; for lines around our mouths that betray a legacy of smiling;
for breasts that disqualify us from the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. Will it
ever end? Will one generation ever finally be able to get everyone’s attention
long enough to settle the silly fixations on such twisted versions of beauty? I
see girls in middle school already fretting about their sweet, perfectly
healthy bodies and I want to weep. Will the symphony of Brains and Imagination
and Kindness and Passion for things that matter ever trump the tinny little anthem
of Pulchritude? The author Andrew O’Hagan, in a brilliant piece in a recent New
York Times Magazine, seduced me with this statement condemning his own gender:
“Only with stupid men does a woman’s intelligence count against her. But maybe
a hundred generations of stupid men have succeeded in convincing women that
they’re only as good as the condition of their skin…” But wait! First we need
to educate the men? I suppose we can do that - they really are a teachable lot.
But I believe we have to start by teaching ourselves. Who, after all, stands
front and center, conducting the self-hating orchestra? The old anthems have to
stop with us.
I did my time in a girdle. I’ve had foot surgery to repair
the damage done by fashionable footwear. I’ve marched lockstep to the expensive
myth that my clothes must be in style. I look at fashion magazines today and
shake my head at the lunacy before me.
Girdles are gone, but there are the ads for Spanx… and all those
must-have 6-inch heels.
Here’s what I know now: I wouldn’t trade this aging,
imperfect body for anyone’s - not even a youthful, once-“beautiful” version of
it - because it is the repository of a hard-won wisdom about what matters and
what doesn’t. And about who can make the choices.
This month at the shop, we celebrate the bodies we have… all
their parts - but especially that elegant part that holds up our heads: our
beautiful necks. Let’s festoon them with scarves and look-at-me jewelry. Then
let’s stick those necks out and share the wisdom we’ve all fought so hard for -
especially with the next 13-year-old standing at the threshold of womanhood.
Let’s tell her to skip the Spanx and give her permission to conduct a joyful
symphony of all that HONESTLY matters in life.
The President of Me.
Join us at the shop this week for First Friday - 6-8pm ....
or come see what's new during Fall Open Hours: 11-5 Wednesday through Saturday... or whenever you see the lights on and the door open! (I'm typically here in the studio on Mondays and Tuesdays.)
19603 Vashon Highway SW - In the Old Fuller Store (just across the street from the world famous Vashon Coffee Roasterie.)
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