The Way I Look And How I Feel About Feminism

I was in a car, at a stoplight, in the evening, and the person driving, who I like a lot, wanted to know if I would answer a personal question and I said okay, and so I got asked what the deal was with my general failure to wear makeup. Which was kind of a funny thing to get asked. I don't know; we talked about it some. But it led me to contemplate the relationship between the way I actually dress and look and my feminist beliefs.

(By the way, this post started life as a comment on this recent post by Noko Marie, but got a little unwieldy for a comment.)

Because I think we can all agree that I look a lot like what you would imagine if you were to draw up in your mind kind of a stereotypical feminist image. I don't want to overstate the case, but I'm kind of hairy, and my hair is pretty short, and I don't wear makeup, and I wear pants mostly, and I'm slightly unkempt, and I could go on and mention the goddamn nose piercing, but I don't really think there's any point to it.

Nothing about the way I dress is mandated by my feminist beliefs. My feminist beliefs do not bar me from makeup or hair removal or the sporting of short skirts or high heels or panty hose or whatever your own secret personal version of archetypal femininity is. In fact, my feminist beliefs encourage the indulgence in and enjoyment of such things.

There's the complicated issue, discussed previously on this blog, of the intersection of personal indulgence and cultural coercion, but we'll leave that for another day.

So if somebody asks me why I don't wear makeup, in some ways the most honest answer is that it's a combination of laziness and slobbiness and intimidation and the disinclination to put anything on my face that I might find had shifted over several hours.

But at the same time, I feel disingenuous when I just say things like, "I'm too lazy to wear makeup," when I make it clear that my lack of makeup isn't a referendum on other people's makeup. Because I feel strongly that makeup shouldn't be a norm or a demand. Because I feel like it's important that I be able to look the way I mostly do without it being a political stance. Because my decision not to wear makeup isn't a statement, but my decision not to care about the fact that other people notice that I'm not wearing makeup is, I guess, one.

Dress Made Out Of Plastic Shopping Bags On Headless Mannequin

In the shop window, 'round the corner from my apartment.

The Nature Of Femininity: Two Photos

I've never been into "chick flicks." In fact, romantic comedies of any kind make me squirm, and historical dramas bore me unless they're really great. I'm really more of an action movie sort of girl -- though I have to say that action movies have been declining lately. For instance: I was a big fan of the Die Hard series (especially of the Jeremy Irons villian!) but the Mission Impossible movies I didn't even bother with.

I do read a lot of novels, which may or may not be a girly thing to do. I tend to think of myself as someone who does not have girly tastes in literature, but surveying the last two months of reading suggests a more complicated picture.

Roughly in order, since Jan 1, we have: A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, by Ken Kalfus, Blue Pills, by Frederik Peeters, Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn, How the Light Gets In, by M. J. Hyland (which I blogged about before), Him, Her, Him Again, The End of Him, by Patricia Marx, The Dissident, by Nell Freudenberger, Whatever, by Michel Houellebecq, When the World was Steady, by Claire Messud, Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris (which I blogged about before), and The Futurist, by James Othmer.

Five of these ten books are by female authors, and looking at the list and remembering the books, I'm actually struck by the extent to which those five authors engage themes we associate with femininity: family, female adolescence, love, social worlds, the absence of love.

Not that those are only feminine themes, and many of them are addressed in the men's books. But it's also true that there are some guy-oriented themes in the male authors books that aren't so much in the women's books: work, rage, the state of the world.

All this just to say I was amused by this display at the bookstore last weekend, which didn't reflect my own tastes at all:



All that history! All those clothes! All that, uh, Victorianism! Do women long for the past?

After I left the bookstore I went to shop for a bag -- not a handbag, exactly, but I'm looking for something to carry my laptop in that's cooler than a backpack. I went to a department store, and saw this:


So shiny! So cool! So, uh, robotic! Do women long for the future?

I'm thinking maybe the answer to both of these questions is "Yes."

Staring At Strangers

There was this kid on the subway today who was just really exceptionally stylish. I think. Or maybe not.

What made him exceptionally stylish was that he looked so strange for a kid. He was maybe twelve, and he was with his dad and his sister and he was wearing this lime green, bright pale lime green Lacoste polo shirt and kind of architect-ish glasses, and a grey sweater tied around his waist. And he was kind of a burly kid.

I don't know how to say it. He looked so much like a kid -- he wasn't one of the kids you tend to see around my part of town who are smaller scale adults, by which I don't mean to say anything bad because I think of that as part of being a kid too. But this kid looked like he could totally get into trading Star Wars cards or laughing way too loud about something stupid. Nerdy, and not in the way that we have totally debased nerdiness by using it to refer to 22 year old Echo Park clubgoers who got really good grades in chemistry when they were in high school, but that deep-rooted nerdiness that we all go through at one stage or another in our lives when we totally don't even see the social conventions that bind us and if someone tries to tell us about them we laugh in their face. "What do you mean, other people shave their armpits?" Or whatever, choose your own goddamn example.

So I could totally see him being that kid, but maybe not. The whole ensemble was jarring, but it was also totally appealing in this way. It made me want a lime green polo. And it seemed deliberate -- the bottoms of his jeans were cut up in some kind of creative way. So it could have been the opposite, it could have been deliberate and strategized and put together in a way that took into account social conventions and transcended them. Or maybe that's what all the kids are wearing these days. I don't have a clue.

It's just interesting, looking at people. And mostly you file them away pretty rapidly, with some respect for the things that you don't actually know about them, but still. Then your radar gets slightly jammed; you can't really put together who those people are and what category they fall into. It's cool, especially if the effect itself is pleasing.

A Short Distance Bus Ride

So it's late and I'm beat and I've been waiting out there in the cold for a bit, but eventually the Number 4 shows up and I climb on. The bus driver says, "Have you always had short hair?" I say, "Yes," which is, I guess, a lie. I don't know exactly why I lied, but I guess it had something to do with hoping to short-circuit the whole conversation.

The bus driver says, "You look like this girl who used to ride my bus, but she had long hair." So I look at the bus driver and he looks kind of familiar and I feel a little weird about lying on the hair front, which is more something I do to strangers on the street than to the bus driver, generally, so I say, "Actually, I guess I had long hair a couple of years ago." And he says, "Yeah, that could be what I'm thinking of."

And then he says, "Now you're walking on the wild side."

It was kind of a depressing thing to have your bus driver say to you.

Then two girls got on with a dog. Then some guys got on and started harassing the girls and barely, over my headphones, I could hear one girl going up to the bus driver and saying, "She's my girlfriend." I feel like any situation that requires you to explain your relationship status to the bus driver is probably one to be avoided, but I don't know. I don't know how they got the driver to let them bring the dog on the bus, for that matter.

Girls, Fashion, and Feminism

A lot of parents these days seem, well, maybe a little worried about their daughters obsessions. I've been noticing this among my friends for some time, and then then today a blogger for the Chronicle of Higher Education's new "Brainstorm" feature has a short piece on doll-fascination and its discontents.

She starts with a pretty familiar kind of story. Good feminist that she is, she dresses her daughter in overalls and buys her toy trucks. Unfortunately, the daughter starts demanding Barbies almost as soon as she can talk. Mom frets.

I wasn't really into dolls when I was a kid but I was way way into clothes and fashion. Many of my earliest memories are of clothes, and the feelings they inspired. For most of my childhood one of my main goals in life was "Look like Cher." That is, look like Cher as she was in her awesome variety show: elegant gown at 7, hilarious leopard print cat suit at 7:15, hip hugger pants at 7:30. This still strikes me as a reasonable life goal.

As a kid, I didn't see anything non-feminist about this, and I still don't. Sure, the goals of fashion sometimes conflict with other goals. Of course. You might not be able to wear your favorite lace petticoat to the office; you may want to purchase some sneakers for playing sports; you may even decide that to concentrate on your work you have to wear some sensible shoes.

But lots of life goals conflict, and any life is full of compromises. Is there anything inherent in caring about adornment that makes it a dumb thing to care about? As I argued before, no. The world would be a better place of more people got a more of their life's pleasure from clothing, and less of their life's pleasure from expensive electronics, feeling superior to others, engaging in violent sports, bossing other people around, and basically acting like fucking va-jay-jays.

The "Brainstorm" blogger tries to draw this connection: "While boys are learning to run the world by manipulating the control module on PlayStation 3, girls are learning to be second best by endlessly brushing their dolls’ hair."

This doesn't strike me as all that convincing. Everyone says kids learn lots of stuff with just ordinary playing, and usually girls playing with dolls are talking, imagining, and even maybe reflecting on themselves. It's a quiet contemplative activity.

You might have a point if you were to say, it's a problem if girls spend too much time thinking only about boys. Maybe. But everyone says little girls playing with dolls aren't thinking about boys at all.

In fact, in a paradigmatic hand-wringing piece on this issue last year, Peggy Orenstein wrote in The Times about girls' recent obession with princesses. One interesting thing she noted is that princess play never involves a prince. Or a king. Or a queen, even. Really, being a princess is its own thing.

I don't have kids so I can't say for sure. But, bracketing for the moment the Barbie body-image issues, it seems to me wanting to be cool, pretty, and have a magic wand is not weird in the wanting department and isn't really related to not wanting to live as a feminist.

Some Brief Thoughts On Makeup

I have been going through a mildly pro-makeup phase, recently. Wearing lipstick, buying perfume, the occasional mascara experiment.

This is not, despite my stated goal of dressing neutrally, the first time this has happened. Every now and then I get this image in my head: some cream eyeshadow, a brick red lipstick, something that strikes me as tremendously appealing which I go out and purchase and play with.

Usually I give it up after a couple of weeks.

The main reason I usually wind up giving up is a feeling of self-consciousness about the whole experiment. I get overwhelmed by the sense that I am saying to the world: I look better this way. I smell better this way. I think this is a good thing to do. And I imagine a phalanx of people looking at me, shaking their heads, saying to themselves, "Is she out of her mind?"

If your clothes don't, at least on the surface, seem to be striving for anything, nobody can ever confront you with your failures.

It seems even harder, or more intimidating, to strive for femininity; I feel like I'm on the brink of exposure as a fraud.

(Written down it seems neurotic.)

You can avoid this fear, and sometimes I have, by making your clothes a deliberate provocation. You wear the brightest lipstick. You wear a hat. You wear elaborate jewelry. You tell the world that this is a light-hearted game, that you are in on the joke.

I am still not entirely sure what drives me into my pro-makeup moods in the first place. Another unknowable impulse.

Marc Jacobs' Mid-Life Crisis Is An Inspiration

As I seem to mention all the time these days, I am 40 years old. This seems to me just about the paradigm age for being "middle-aged."

In way, you could say I'm having a bit of a mid-life crisis, in the classic sense: I fret about my age; I feel bad that I've accomplished so little; I'm seized by stupid fantasies of life improvement. I know, I'll buy a Corvette! I'll adopt a greyhound! I'll get liposuction!

Last week Jezebel had a story about fashion designer/icon/guru Marc Jacobs and his midlife crisis. The basic elements: Marc Jacbobs has gotten into weird jewelry; Marc Jacobs has one tattoo of an M+M on his arm and another of the girl from "Poltergeist" on his back; Marc Jacobs has been to the gym and wants to pose for you, topless, ballarina-style, showing off his sexy physique. Marc Jacobs wants to say goofy things like "The new concept is to have no concept. Ha!"

Now, this is a midlife crisis. The Jezebel comments were sort of along the lines of "Ugh. What happened to him?" but I think it's way cool. The man is showing us how it's done. I, for one, am paying attention.

One of the things often said about midlife is that it's the time in life when one's thoughts start to turn toward death. This doesn't apply to me, though, because, as I mentioned before, I have always been a freak about death.

I think about the finitude of life all the time, and it never seems to me anything less than a shocking, unbelievable tragedy. I mean unbelievable in the literal sense: I almost cannot believe that this is part of the organization scheme we've got going on here. It's just too shocking.

As far as I'm ccncerned, death is the perfect dilemma for not enjoying life. When you're unhappy, it seems outrageous that, you know, life's a bitch and then you die. No second chance to work it out right the next time. When you're happy, it seems equally outrageous in a different way: what, you mean I'm just getting this all figured out and then it's going to end?? You can't be serious.

In my previous post I mentioned my apprehensiveness about reading The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, since it's a story about a man who can barely move. As I explained, there, though, I needn't have worried: the book is about a strange sort of life, not about death.

No, the book I should have been frightened to read is Philip Roth's Everyman. I just read it this week. Not only is it about death, and about dying, but it's about death and dying in a way that make them seem completely unbearable. Having come to think of Roth as one who makes the unbearable bearable, I felt the absurd emotion of betrayal on top of my ordinary unhappiness.

The "theme" of the book seems to be something like, "Everyone is going to get old and die, and it sucks so so bad. When you start getting older and closer to death it sucks even more. Way more than you expected."

Do I need this? The narrator of the book experiences a certain surprise at finding it so awful to be sick and alone at the end of his life, but is there anyone who isn't aware of the awfulness of geting older, and sicker, and finally dying?

As far as I'm can see, there is only one rational way to deal with the fact that one is going to die, and that is total denial. At least, it's the only way for me. If I think about it, I am paralyzed. If I don't, I am OK. My life is organized around finding ways to not think about it for extended periods of time.

That's why I like Marc Jacobs' mid-life crisis. This guy is having a good time, and he is obviously not thinking about death. He is doing it at no one's expense, really: there's no violence, no belittling of other people, no crabbiness.

He's just having a good time. He's an inspiration to us all. Just as a fashion guru should be. Thanks Marc!

Now if you'll excuse me I gotta go work on my abs.

Malcolm Gladwell Can Go Jump In A Lake

It is morning here in Los Angeles. An elderly man just walked through the complex sticking fliers in everyone's door and muttering slightly to himself. My neighbor walked by with a dog. It's a noisy dog, and she was trying to shhh it. It seemed, surprisingly, to work.

Noko Marie's post got me started thinking about the eighties and nineties, and now I can't seem to stop. I'm thinking, a little dreamily, about my first pair of Doc Martens.

It was the winter of eighth or ninth grade. I can't remember which; it actually makes a big difference in terms of whether I was slightly ahead of the times or slightly behind. There can't have been too much of a difference either way. I know this,because they were still very difficult to find.

I can't remember how I decided I needed Doc Martens. It was just one of those things, one of the essential mysteries of life, why, one morning, something just looks right.

I wasn't a punk kid; I wasn't cool. But one morning I woke up and knew those were the right shoes to have.

I was talking about that moment, the Doc Martens moment, with a friend and she pointed out that Doc Martens were expensive. That didn't stop it; she had experienced it too. All around the country, thirteen and fourteen year olds were waking up and saying they needed Doc Martens.

There were two pieces: the money, and then finding the actual shoes. And let's remember it was the very early nineties. The internet didn't exist. Or it did, but only for rocket scientists who probably already had or didn't want a pair of Docs. No, I went to every shoe store around. I wasn't in L.A. when I engaged in this exercise; I was on the east coast and it was winter and I sucked my near ones and dear ones into this hunt.

There's something fun about it; every collector knows that. You go into a store and you look around and you don't find what you want and you ask the sales clerk if they know anyplace else that might have it and you go there and you repeat. You get closer and closer.

I found them at a little punk store in Hamilton, Ontario. It was my first time in a punk store and I was terrified. I had to draw the attention of the sales clerk who could tell in a flash that I was a) poor and b) not really cool enough to be there. But I did, and then I went back with my dad, and although I had thought I wanted the cherry pair I wound up buying the black ten hole kind.

So I wore them around and got blisters on my heels and bled all over the inside of the shoes and they got salt damaged and didn't really make anything different or better and I stopped wearing them at some point. Only to take them up again when I was in college and wear that same pair every day for like a year.

Look, I'm sure Malcolm Gladwell could come up with some elaborate diagnosis of what made those shoes look so right to me, and everyone else, at that moment. It still has this kind of mysterious quality to it; I start imagining myself as this more or less accurate radio set, picking up emanations from the ether.

Also I think there's a lesson here about the importance of high quality footwear.

Back here at morning in Los Angeles one of the shirtless musicians across the courtyard strolls out, wearing tight red pants. A wave of music with him.

Why Should You Feel Bad?

I was in fifth or sixth grade and I had this girl over to my house. She was blonde with a perm and her parents were Christian and ran a bookstore.

I didn't really have any friends in elementary school; kids generally accept invitations even if they don't like you. I think it's a curiosity thing. I don't know for sure.

So I asked her why I didn't have any friends -- what I was doing wrong. We're running around my backyard; it's been a pretty good time, actually. She says, "I don't know. You seem all right to me."

It's a while later, months, long enough for me to forget the initial question, when she comes up to me with a group of friends. The girl has done research. She tells me exactly why each and every member of our class doesn't like me.

What's surprising is that they all had reasons. I would list them, but they still make me cringe.

The worst part is I had no idea that those things would make people dislike me. None of the things she reeled off for me had crossed my mind as bad things to do.

Mostly, I guess, it's funny in retrospect. They walked away; I stood there cringing in the corner of the playground, my mind spinning. Imagine the end of the Usual Suspects: flashes of anecdotes coming back to me charged with new force and meaning.

I don't raise this just to invite pity for the young Cap'n, although pity is always welcome. I raise it because of the tension it illuminates in my own thinking about embarrassment.

My view, generally, is that you make choices about how to behave, what's acceptable and not as far as you're concerned, and then you refuse to be embarrassed by those choices. Or, at least, the ability to make your choices unfazed, which I pretty much lack, seems like a good thing to have. A kind of Cool Hand Luke quality: this is what I'm going to do for my own reasons and the rest of you can shove it.

But my fifth grade self didn't know that choices were being made, was acting not out of defiance but out of ignorance, and somehow that seems the essence of embarrassment

One example. It was the era of leggings and bike shorts, and I had worn a pair (lime green, Benneton), and you could apparently see a panty line.

I hadn't even heard of the concept.

It's a minefield out there.

Consistencies Or One Size Fits All?

N. Marie's recent post about fashion reminded me of that one-time staple of the fashion magazine.

Some male (sometimes female) fashion designer (or artist or architect) being interviewed would turn out to wear the same thing every day. Not the identical thing -- his closet would be full of custom-made white shirts bought from one tailor who works only on an island off the coast of somewhere that I had never been and would never go. Same deal with pants -- Levis, some kind of bespoke shit. You get the idea.

When I was fourteen or fifteen I read these articles very earnestly. They told me how adult life should be lived.

I would read them and then I would look at my closet, full of remnants from one phase or another. A slightly dirty sheer floral print skirt would be on the floor and, in despair, I would throw myself on my bed, consumed by longing for a better world in which I wore the same thing every day.

I'd imagine for myself one thing to wear every day. It would expand outward (what about bathing suits? sometimes I might want to wear a skirt) and then I'd be thinking of the things I already owned that I really liked a lot and it would all, once again, fall apart.

You get older, and generally more tolerant of yourself. I don't feel that bad anymore about my lack of fashion consistency.

You also do, sort of, get mysteriously more consistent. You like the way you look in certain things, you buy more things that look kind of that way, people start saying things like "Those shoes are very you."

"You" in that sentence is actually "me."

You lose, to some extent, your belief in dramatic wardrobe change as an agent for change in the rest of your life and you feel sad about that. I want to believe there's a better haircut out there for me.

It doesn't all go away, though. One of the things I liked about the one-outfit designers is that it felt like they were saying, "This is me. This is how I look in a coal mine and this is how I look at a nightclub. This is all there is."

Because I am sometimes struck (like everyone else in the known world) by the fact that not only do you talk about different things to different people, but you act differently too. This frightens me; it feels like deception.

I have become tolerant of my style inconsistencies. They are all unified by me; I am the unifying force in them. But my inconsistencies of persona still worry me in the same way my style inconsistencies once did. I do not want to give up my option of gossiping and giggling hysterically, although it does not really go with my tendency to speak seriously about the right way to live or my (abstract) belief in discretion.

But I would like to have one manner. Preferably one crafted by a tailor you can only find off the coast of an island that nobody else knows about. Classic, but with individual flair.

The Shoes! They Are Killing Me!

It's fashion week in New York. And since we've been talking about shopping, I've got a few opinions I want to get off my chest.

As the New York Times reported recently, fashion gets a bad rap. People complain: it's expensive, exclusive, wasteful, and most of all: superficial.

These complaints strike me as largely undeserved. I'm not being original when I say that fashion is the art of self-presentation. But it's true. The best thing about fashion is it makes every participant into an instant artist. The art materials are accessible, no special training is required, and if you don't like what you've created you can just take off your clothes and start over.

It's true that some clothes are expensive, and that the existence of "trends" means that clothes get thrown out. But thrift stores still have lots of what you might find interesting. And one thing that is true of humans is that we are easily bored. As Pascal said, "All man's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone." If we're going to be out raising hell and throwing stuff out all the time, fashion is more egalitarian and eco-friendly than technology crazes, the mania for giant houses, and all kinds of other things.

If you see fashion as an art, as I do, the first thing you get impatient with is when people get upset that so many fashions are actually ugly. Yes, that's correct: fashion is not always about being pretty or attractive. Like other arts, the best things are not the most beautiful.

Interesting fashion can be allusive and self-referential, with something to say about previous fashion trends. It can comment on politics and social life. It involves the wearer in creating a fantasy, in a way that does not require any literal engagement with the fantasy itself: the clothes create their own new mixed identity for the wearer.

Sometimes this means clothes are ugly. It's OK. Sometimes that's the point.

If you see the power of fashion in its ubiquitousness, as I do, another thing you get impatient with is the failure to compromise for practicality. I don't mean there shouldn't be wild unwearable runway dresses; there absolutely should, under point one. But some crazy clothes should be wearable, and some everyday clothes should have a dose of crazy.

I feel like we've been getting away from this a little. I find in the mall I can buy either a strapless dress or a pair of jeans; four-inch-stillettos or Clark flats; a lace-top or a twin-set. I want something in-between.

And by way, nothing against the "wedge shoe" personally, but could we please get back to some normal heels as soon as f***ing possible?