"Can't we perceive beauty without comparison?"

asked Sage in the comments to Friday's post.

I think we do perceive beauty without comparison. We do not attempt to compare the beauty of a tropical seashore and the beauty of a mountain range. And we don’t attempt to compare the beauty of Marilyn Monroe and the beauty of Audrey Hepburn. Unfortunately, we are pretty rubbish at perceiving our own beauty without comparison to other women or cultural standards of beauty.

Excuse the gender bias chaps, but this remains primarily an issue for women at this time. Fortunately, you are vindicated; out of all the manifestations of sexism, the baggage we carry surrounding women's appearance has far more do with money than anything else. Not a sinister conspiracy to hold us down, but an unintentional consequence of good old capitalism: if one is in the business of selling things, one does what is necessary in order to sell them.

There are really three branches to this. One is in uniformity. Representing beauty in the same way over and over makes good commercial sense simply because it avoids unnecessary risk. So for example, if you are selling a movie with a heroine in it, it will be far safer if this heroine looks rather like the last heroine who sold the last successful movie. People watched that movie, that look worked. Doesn’t have to be the same lady, but it is significant financial risk to have a woman with a markedly different appearance – for example, a beautiful woman of colour instead of a beautiful white woman. Never in this day and age, of course...

Although few would argue that the only examples of beauty are as restrictive as Hollywood might present, commerical interest doesn't like to test this or indeed any of the flexibility in our aesthetic judgement. It is far easier, far safer to do the thing that worked before.

So you have uniformity, you have this comparison to a very rigid concept of a beautiful person which can be really quite demoralising to those of us who deviate from it, because of ethnicity, age, weight, impairment and so on, let alone the subtleties of skin, hair, muscle and bone-structure. Like I say, any fool ought to be able see beyond this stuff; otherwise very few of us ordinary folk would ever receive any positive comment on our appearance. But, I think something else comes into play when we are asked to look at our own beauty.

Let's say I make and sell Magic Wonder Potion. It is a moisturiser – add moisture to the skin and in the short term, it will appear slightly smoother for a short while (another trick is to immerse your face in ice cold water for half a minute). So anyway, I may legitimately claim it makes your skin look younger.

For younger-looking skin, try Magic Wonder Potion!

I sell a few bottles, but naturally I wish my business to develop to its maximum potential. There are a few things I can do to draw custom from my competition. I can change the directions so that my customers are applying twice a day as opposed to just the once, thus needing to restock more often – I can even develop a night-time formula and sell two bottles to every customer instead of one. But the most obvious, most effective way of increasing my sales is to increase my number of customers. I do this by adjusting my wording…

Suffering from unsightly wrinkles? For beautiful younger-looking skin, try Magic Wonder Potion!

Do you, dear reader, suffer from unsightly wrinkles? Put it another way, have you got any wrinkles? – I have already implied that all wrinkles are unsightly and result in an experience of suffering. Not sure? Okay, well let me show you a picture of a model who might possibly be your age, who is dressed nicely with immaculate make-up, a photograph taken in fantastic flattering light with every flaw subsequently airbrushed out.

Now, how does your mirror image, in the yellow light of your bathroom, compare to that? One or two unsightly wrinkles, aren’t there? Are you suffering? You don’t just need Magic Wonder Potion if you want to look beautiful – you need Magic Wonder Potion before you dare show your hideous face in public!

Advertising for anti-aging skin products has always struck me as particularly blatant bullshit because they have to make their customers feel a little bit ugly the way they are in order to sell a single tub. Unless of course, they’re selling it as a preventative measure to younger adults – and yes, they have done this – in which case they have to install fear of future ugliness.

However, the same mechanism takes place in very much of the marketing for beauty products, toiletries, cosmetic surgeries, diet regimes etc.. The worse you make someone feel about some aspect of their person, the more they are likely to buy your product. And whilst I wouldn't like to believe that it is ever thought about it in these terms, a woman with a rock-bottom self-image and a wad of cash in her purse is an ideal customer.

And this means that we look at and judge ourselves very differently to the way we look at other people. For example, to find actual disgust in Patti Smith's hairy armpit would be quite irrational (not saying you have to find it attractive - that's a matter of taste). I don’t believe there are many people out there who feel that way – it is such a tiny pocket of history during which anyone has even considered removing that hair. However, there are very many women who have been programmed to feel total disgust about their own body hair, as well as their natural fragrance, the texture of their skin etc., without ever looking with so much as distaste at other women.

The messages themself are usually far more subtle than my Magic Wonder Potion campaign, but any woman who watches television, read magazines and go shopping is receiving these derogatory messages all the time. I did a brief recce for some of the concepts cosmetic companies implore me to be concerned about. One has to remember that none of these are medicated products; they do not propose to treat actual skin conditions like dandruff, acne, eczema etc., so all this has to be in the perception of the consumer. We are being asked to identify our own

Heat-traumatised hair / fragile flyaway hair / limp, greasy locks / extremely coarse, extra thick, frizzy, chemically-damaged hair [at that point, I think I'd shave it off]
Unsightly facial hair / unsightly body hair / unsightly nails / unsightly veins / unsightly feet and toenails
Orange peel skin / worn out skin / congested, oily skin / spongy skin
Enlarged pores [pretty gruesome for anyone examining your face under magnifying glass]
Prudish [sic.] lips and unattractive, dry flakes
Tell-tale dark circles / wrinkle furrows / colour imperfections / pesky imperfections [which can be disposed of for just £13.50 for a 6ml tube!]

And I can't help it; I find myself considering each of those concepts and whether they might apply to me. Deodourant is advertised in a different way. They won't spell out that you must use the stuff or stink, but they want you to know that you have something to be very much afraid of. So they offer that added security / extra reassurance / all day protection / 48-hour protection / maximum protection.

On top of these two factors, we also have a third branch, this strange but very powerful idea that it should matter terribly to women, the reasons why we spend so much time, energy and money on our appearance, when it's impact on our health and happiness is relatively very small. But that's another issue for another day and you'll be pleased to know I have now run out of steam.

Poetry Corner: Packing (a haiku)

We must try to put
Our lives in cardboard boxes.
Yet nothing quite fits.

Five Things I Like About My Carcass

Bit better today. Zuzu at Feministe opened a thread in which readers were asked to state at least five things about ourelves and our bodies which we loved. Sage and various others obliged. At first I thought this was a dubious exercise, especially as many of the answers tended to focus on physical or aesthetic attributes. I am suspicious of the idea that we need to find our bodies beautiful in order not to hate ourselves as people. All physical things are necessarily transient and to me, to say “I have nice legs” generally implies a positive comparison either against other women or against the current cultural measure of what nice legs are like – cultural measures that as feminists, we should be trying to ignore.

I then went to The Gimp Parade and decided I was thinking about this the wrong way. Blue offers a characteristically sensible discussion of this, links to the excellent As The Tumour Turns and offers her own answers. Which in turn has inspired Mark Siegel, who hit the nail on the head;

Those of us with physical disabilities have a tendency to internalize some pretty negative messages from society regarding our appearance. We learn to regard our bodies as freakish, deformed, or simply embarrassing. The concepts of disability and beauty rarely intersect in our popular imagination.

Indeed. It is a similar mechanism with non-disabled women of course, who are often programmed with ideas of perfection to which they cannot possibly measure up to - not because they have any impairment, but just because they are human beings as opposed to architypes. But we all have things about our bodies which are attractive or otherwise enjoyable. We are none of us so elevated that we don't live in the physical world or lack appreciation for physical things.

As you can tell, brain fog and a tendency to think too hard aren't doing me many favours this week.

So here's mine, all physical stuff:

1. I like my hands. Mostly because they are extremely useful, they type and write very quickly, they can do all sorts of weird and wonderful things. And they also look pretty good; they are slender but padded enough not be bony. My fingers are long and I manage to keep my nails in good nick, usually varnished in a rare display of vanity.
2. I like the fact that, in my opinion, I can carry some extra weight without it showing as much as I might. This would be on account of my height and my bizarre shape, which means that even when I was properly obese, I still went in in the middle.
3. I like the fact that I can walk. It is certainly overrated in the wider world, but it is a massive advantage. Just now (excluding this week) as I’m gradually able to stand up for longer and walk a bit further, I am bursting with gratitude that I have this potential.
4. I like the fact that although I’m struggling to find things which I particularly like about my appearance, there is nothing about my appearance which I consider an ongoing source of misery. Which is nothing to do with the way I look, just the fact that I know it doesn’t matter that much.
5. I like my capacity for pleasure. I have an entirely amateurish theory that illness and particularly chronic pain may actually increase a person’s capacity for physical pleasure. If you feel okay most of the time, then you’re only a few notches below feeling good. Whereas when you’re sick and in pain, feeling good is a far more significant improvement. The most obvious example being orgasm; orgasm kills pain, but if you weren’t in any pain to begin with, that’s not going to be all that spectacular. Hmm, perhaps I am at risk of starting the new fetish of stubbing one’s toe directly before making love… Anyway, I do feel that I get far more pleasure from food and music and all those kinds of things much more than a lot of people.
   

I could only think of five, but I'm quite chuffed with my own immodesty given the week I've had.

Living is easy with eyes closed

Having a run of crappy days, which is great timing when I’m off in less than a fortnight. When not asleep, I am not worrying about the move; everything seems to be going all right. Unfortunately my imp is instead bothering me with all sorts of unrelated and frankly paranoid concerns. Which I guess is projection, but frankly I would rather be worried about paperwork, packing and general stuff than the bizarre fantasies about my having upset and offended everybody I have ever met, all sorts of bad things happening to people I love and similar nonsense. Some of the scenarios it has managed to convince me of in the last few days - such imagination - it ought to be writing books!

I know this happens because I am extremely tired, sleeping sleep that isn’t vaguely refreshing and generally very frustrated. I am particularly pissed off because I think this was my fault. On Saturday I got a little woozy. It was an accident, I rarely drink and when I do, I do so in very small quantities. But suddenly I realised I had crossed that line. After a somewhat horizontal performance of The Timewarp, I got a little nervous and proceeded to drink two pints of water. Which may, in itself, have been a mistake.

But no, I reject the possibility of a four day hangover. I haven't even had a headache. It is just that last week I was doing really well, so I am really very cross and wanting answers. I need to be better at the moment. And naturally, inevitably, I am now shit-scared that I’m having a turn for the worse. But that's not happened for ages now; I will be much better in a few days.

Shopping for wheels

We're going to need to arrange some mode of personal transport once we move. This would be my current favourite...

Reflect what you are, in case you don't know

I used to loathe mirrors. [...] felt differently, and overruled my objections to having several around the flat. If I didn’t like what I looked like, he said, I would simply have to wear a paper bag over my head.

The paper bag became quickly crumpled and torn and after a few weeks I caught a cold which made the whole thing completely impractical. So I just had to get used to them.

The wavy mirrors are my favourite. Nice and long, but impossible to examine one's overall appearance in on account of the fact they give you extra limbs, sometimes an extra head and they render your body twice as wide as you hope you really are. The novelty of this is yet to wear off.

Currently, however, these and the three others we have elsewhere are under threat. Not sure there'll be anywhere appropriate for them to hang in the new place. Thus they had to be documented in what is soon to become the most uninteresting collection of photographs since... actually some of these manhole covers are really quite pretty.

Things I will miss about Whitby #1

I like to watch people wandering about, particularly very early in the morning. Of course, the tourist industry stays up late and the fishing industry wakes up early so there’s very little of the night where there will be nobody about. However, it’s not only fisherman you see first thing, but all sort of people, walking, sitting on the fence overlooking the river, or just standing looking at it. Sometimes, if they look particularly intense, I become quite concerned and have to watch them until they go away.

When we have been in town on Christmas Day, there have been loads of people out, mostly by themselves, wandering around Whitby. Naturally, you make up stories. Are they by themselves today or have they escaped the chaos and tension at home? Are they perhaps having far more fun being by themselves, enjoying a nice peaceful stroll about on a glorious December morning?

The ability to wander about, to just taking off by myself with no particular object, is the one thing I mourn most about my physical limitations.

(Picture from freefoto.com)