I took a lot of flak for dissing the 2011 Video Music Awards (VMAs) as “the triumph of packaged and formulaic acts over talented performances.” But no show since then has controverted my diss.
Some critics hailed Beyoncé for bringing a little redeeming value to this year’s show with her imperious, bootylicious, 15-minute set. Unfortunately, truer to form, lip-synching, butt-twerking performers like Britney Spears and Nicki Minaj summarily undermined it.
More to the point, everything I’ve read about the 2016 VMAs vindicated my reason for writing “Why Is Any Self-Respecting Adult Still Watching the VMAs,” September 18, 2015.
Well, except that there was this:
In case you missed it, Alicia Keys hit the white carpet at the 2016 MTV Music Awards on Sunday night [August 28] with not a stitch of makeup in sight.
It’s not a new thing for the singer, who this May wrote an essay for Lenny Letter explaining why she’s over trying to be perfect and instead working to accept herself for who she is and what she looks like naturally…
But for some strange reason (maybe not that strange — it is the Internet), Keys is facing criticism for her #nomakeup movement.
(Allure, August 31, 2016)
I respectfully submit that there was far more redeeming value in Alicia attending makeup free than in Beyoncé performing like a queen bee.
Indeed, I hail Alicia for taking this stand for women’s liberation. Especially given that so many female entertainers seem to think that aping male entertainers is an empowering way to express their liberation.
Frankly, some of them spend more time on stage fondling themselves and simulating sex than singing songs and busting moves. And don’t get me started on the asinine craze of women – of every stripe and in every setting – twerking like bitches with uncontrollable bladders (arf-arf)….
But ahh, Alicia, what natural beauty! If only more women would embrace theirs.
Mind you, I’m a social libertarian. Therefore, I couldn’t care any less how women choose to present themselves in public.
I just lament the “transformative” beauty tricks women rely on to make themselves feel good, impress other women, and/or attract shallow men. Sadly such tricks have become as pervasive as they are perverse.
I mean, during the 1980s, fake eyelashes famously made Tammy Faye Baker look like a weeping clown. She was a complete laughing stock. Yet, today, fake eyelashes have become as much a part of many women’s beauty mask as lipstick, and they invariably make Tammy Faye’s look demure by comparison.
In any event, I’m not just a fan of natural beauty. I’m a zealous advocate. Here, for example, is what I wrote three years ago in “PSA: Unmask Your Woman Before You Tell Her She’s Beautiful,” October 16, 2013.
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Every few months, one tabloid or another publishes images of celebrity women ‘caught’ in public without their makeup.
The implied notion is that a woman walking around without makeup provides as much fodder for ridicule and shame as one walking around with a trail of toilet paper hanging from her panties. And, regrettably, the mocking crowd (of mostly liberated women deriving guilty pleasure) who buy these tabloids never fail to affirm this notion.
Is this what the feminist tome, Our Bodies, Ourselves, has wrought…?
After all, who would’ve thought the liberation inherent in the sexual revolution and feminist movement would devolve into a self-abnegating farce, where women themselves consider it a “brave decision” to go out in public without makeup.
For only this farce explains why even a naturally beautiful woman like Carmen Electra would think nothing of making the pathetic and pitiable confession on national TV that she’d rather be caught naked in public than without makeup…
Perhaps the time has come for truly liberated women to lead a new revolution for women under the banner ‘Our Faces, Ourselves,’ calling on women not to burn their bras but to ditch their makeup.
Men could be good foot soldiers in this new revolution by encouraging every woman they know to wear a little less makeup each day – until the image they see in the mirror right after their morning shower imbues them with far more pride and self-esteem than the one they (used to) see after painting on their daily mask.
And those of you still in the dating game can do even more by asking your date to take off all of her makeup (along with her spanx and fake hair) before you make love for the first time.
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For what it’s worth, Alicia has never looked more beautiful.
Which is why, if I were her husband, I would not have dignified Alicia’s mask-wearing trolls with any reply. Nonetheless, here is how her husband, Swizz Beatz, is defending her choice to go makeup free:
This is deep … somebody’s sitting at home mad, because somebody didn’t wear makeup on their face… not your face, but they didn’t put makeup on their face, because they just didn’t feel like wearing makeup.
But you’re mad because that person didn’t put makeup to please you? What sh*t is this? #naturallove
(Billboard, September 1, 2016)
Alas, virtually all of Alicia’s critics are other women, naturally. I fear they’ve become so brainwashed by commercial, superficial and wholly unattainable images of beauty, hatred of their own natural beauty compels them to defend and propagate such images.
They actually personify not only what Stacy Malkan wrote about in her 2007 exposé, Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry, but also what Phyllis Chesler wrote about in her 2009 exposé, Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman.
NOTE: Women are wearing heels at self-harming heights to look statuesque. I have joined feminists, like actor Emma Thompson, in decrying this — as “Burning Bras, Still Wearing Heels. Feminism’s Unfinished Work,” January 14, 2014, attests.
Related commentaries:
2015 VMAs…
Unmask your woman…
Wearing heels…