During October 2013 the BBC’s 100 Women season will seek to shine a light on life for women in the twenty-first century – the risks, challenges and opportunities they face every day, in every country.
And we want our global audiences to tell us what they think.
(BBC, October 4, 2013)
Well, I’ve already chimed in with relatively serious commentaries on women using the fear of breast cancer as a pretext for getting boob jobs (October 8) and women making better politicians than men (October 10). Therefore, I shall do so just once more with a relatively light one on yesterday’s 100 Women report, which posed the question: “What does it feel like to be airbrushed?”
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 this pathetic and pitiable confession on national TV:
To be honest … I don’t know if it has to do with insecurities or just what I love, I haven’t quite figured that out yet but being on national Television with a little mascara and a little on the lip I feel so naked. I am almost more comfortable posing in Playboy naked than not wearing makeup.
(Daily Mail, October 14, 2013)
Frankly, twenty-first century etiquette about makeup seems right out of The Weird World of Victorian Etiquette, when:
Women had a duty to look beautiful at all times but they must also ensure that ‘…they make it look like there was no effort at all…’ It was also proper etiquette for the woman to always wear her hair up unless in the privacy of the bed chamber.
The instructive irony, of course, is that etiquette about makeup these days is such that not just Carmen but far too many women would rather expose their naked bodies instead of their naked faces in public. This indicates the perverse extent to which even women of undeniable natural beauty and professional success depend on makeup for their self-esteem.
Which is why, given this existential dependency, it is arguable that peddlers who get women hooked on beauty products are an even greater menace to society than peddlers who get them hooked on drugs.
Except that, at least with peddlers of drugs, there’s truth in advertising. By contrast, peddlers of beauty products exploit the willing suspension of disbelief among women who continually buy stuff that never makes them look as advertised (invariably by models airbrushed beyond perfection).
Yet I have no doubt that, in a moment of makeup sobriety, any self-respecting woman would readily scoff at paying thousands of dollars to maintain as fake a public face as humanly possible. But, as it is with any junky, such moments of sobriety are always too fleeting to lead to any change in behavior.
So 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.
For what it’s worth, I would be irretrievably turned off if the difference between the way a woman looks the first time we go to bed and the way she looks after washing her face the next morning were like night and day.
(“Airbrushed Models Banned in UK. Hallelujah!” The iPINIONS Journal, July 29, 2011)
In fact, 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.
But beware, because the novelty of having a man express a desire to make love to her instead of her made-up avatar might prove too … suspicious. Specifically, instead of being turned on by your disarming interest, she might just think you’re a pervert with a fetish for bonking ugly (i.e., makeup-free) women.
So be prepared to do all you can to reassure her that, far from enhancing her beauty, her makeup is only covering it up.
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Airbrushed models…