by Andi Zeisler
So what, though? Haven’t women always felt compelled to use the materials at their disposal in the service of beauty? With a graveyard of products that have failed to unfrizz my hair, and a drawer full of cosmetics that will never give me actual cheekbones, I definitely have and will no doubt continue to. Botox injections, when you think about it, are no weirder than poisons like arsenic, lead, and deadly nightshade that ladies of the past consumed, patted on, and dropped in their eyes to make their complexions more comely and their peepers more doe-like; shapewear is just a less barbaric descendant of the whalebone corset. Women may be showing up at emergency rooms with painful waxing and vajazzling injuries and infections (estimates from emergency rooms showed a 50 percent increase in such injuries in the years 2002 to 2008),6 but that’s just how things are now. Get with the times! It’s her choice!
Yes, women were suffering for beauty long before the rise of consumer culture as we know it. And once advertising, marketing, and mass media got in on the action, such suffering was deemed crucial to their self-worth, happiness, and ability to find lasting love. Women’s magazines of the 1950s urged women to douche with Lysol and Listerine to maintain “feminine daintiness,” lest they drive away their husbands. (From one Lysol ad: “Often a wife fails to realize that doubts due to one intimate neglect shut her out from happy married love.”)7 In the 1950s and ’60s, women were explicitly instructed to never reveal their bare faces to their husbands, which necessitated—according to The Cosmo Girl’s Guide to the New Etiquette—keeping a stash of foundation, lipstick, and eyeshadow under the marital bed so they could wake up early and “survey the damages.”8
The tonal shift in the advertising of clothing, beauty products, and surgical and topical procedures, wherein they’re reframed as choices rather than imperatives, is a fairly recent one. Until well into the 1970s, women’s-magazine ads and editorial were almost exclusively prescriptive, though the language did change through the years. In the 1920s, ad copy warned that the wrong consumer choices would doom a young woman’s future by making her unlovable, while in the 1940s women with sweethearts overseas at war were urged to stay as young-looking as possible for their returning heroes. In post–second wave times, prescriptions were leavened with suggestions (“Why not try blue eyeshadow?”). And soon, it wasn’t a matter of having to buy any one thing, but choosing among many. (“Take this quick quiz to find the right scent for you!”) But as choice has become a default assumption, the belief that women’s individual choices regarding what to do with their bodies and appearance occur on a level, postfeminist playing field has changed too. It’s a seductive narrative and, fittingly, it’s the site of some of mainstream feminism’s most tiresome arguments.
Take pubic hair, which over the past two decades has likely been discussed more than at any known time in history, in a dialogue that can regularly approach near-nuclear levels of vitriol and self-righteousness. Most of the debates stem from an incontrovertible fact: female pubic hair, once considered a desirable marker of adolescence (recall Judy Blume’s Margaret, who, when not addressing God, is standing anxiously in front of her mirror searching for evidence of growth), and, for boys, an even more desirable erotic frontier, is now a disappearing phenomenon. Its extinction has been driven variously by the easy availability of porn, the mainstreaming of lingerie marketing, and a 24/7 culture of celebrity surveillance. Though waxing defenders are quick to remind us that pubic hair removal has enjoyed popularity throughout history as far back as the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, the contemporary world has seen an unmistakable uptick in both the practice and the available services since the 1990s.
In heterosexual porn, hairlessness is the norm for female performers: not only does it showcase more stuff, but it serves a disconcertingly blatant market for women who look as underage as possible. A once-unremarkable feature of women’s bodies is now considered a fetish, and women with pubic hair are one of porn’s many niche properties, marketed with the same frisson of sensationalism as granny porn, pregnancy porn, and plushie porn (I don’t recommend Googling any of those, by the way). Porn isn’t solely to blame for recasting what Amy Poehler once rhapsodically called “the ladygarden” as a bushy burden; shrinking bathing-suit and underwear styles have also played a role. As one Brazilian-wax devotee said, “[I]f you have hair sticking out the sides of your underwear, that’s just kind of, like, unkempt.”9 And celebrities like Spice Girl–turned–fashion mogul Victoria Beckham (who, in 2003, asserted that Brazilian waxes “ought to be compulsory at 15, don’t you think?”) and Kim Kardashian (“Women shouldn’t have hair anywhere but on their heads”) have largely taken over from fashion magazines when it comes to the business of grooming dictates.
The central pubic-hair argument that’s raged in mainstream feminism for more than a decade is that pubic deforestation is either a capitulation to patriarchal, pornified beauty standards or is, by contrast, a bold declaration of the feminist freedom to choose. Either way, it has been made inherently, and depressingly, political. It’s worth noting here that men haven’t been immune to the message that the hair down there is passé. Gay porn has always had categories for body hair havers and the dudes who love them, but many hetero male porn performers began to regularly go bald at the same time as their female colleagues. This has certainly affected the grooming choices of laymen: The “back, sack, and crack” wax has become a popular choice among men of varying tastes and orientations. But there’s no apparent political significance attached to men’s decision to de-pube or not. For women, however, the quarrel continues online and off, with no sign of stopping. A writer for London’s Telegraph argued, in 2013, that for the young women she knows, the main feminist conundrum isn’t reproductive rights or the wage gap, but how they groom their nethers—a statement that is either great or completely terrifying, depending on how you look at it.
When British feminist Caitlin Moran argued strenuously for keeping one’s pubic hair in her best-selling 2012 memoir How to Be a Woman—devoting seven pages to her self-admitted didacticism on the subject—much of her audience felt annoyed by what they saw as the substitution of one sort of prescriptiveness for another. Moran had already offended almost as many readers as she’d charmed (via the book’s tossed-off references to “trannies” and some casually racist asides on Twitter), and that might have had something to do with the animosity toward her position in the Great Pubic Hair Debate. Still, her point—that an unholy convergence of capitalism, cultural pornification, and ongoing gender inequality has normalized pubelessness such that female adolescents are waxing it off almost as soon as it appears—got a little bit lost. Since then, Moran has spoken in interviews about women who now see her as some sort of pubic-hair Mother Confessor: “I’ve had a couple of women come up to me and guiltily, drunkenly confess that they still wax and they like it and that works best for them and it makes sex better for them and all this stuff, and they’re expecting me to just reach into my handbag and grab a pubic hair and shove it on them going, ‘No, no. You must be hairy forever.’ In my own most benign and lovely way, I don’t care what women do if it makes you happy.”10
Even having the luxury of time to spend debating the liberatory dimensions of pubic hair might suggest that more pressing feminist issues have been resolved; people engaging in these dialogues, after all, probably aren’t taking time out from working three minimum-wage jobs to hop online and weigh in. This debate is one that happens in a quite privileged sphere where individual actualization has prevailed over collective work. That’s not to suggest you can’t be engaged in both, but consider Moran’s reassurances: “If it makes you happy” and “If it’s your choice” are similar sentiments in that both focus on personal feelings and choices, aiming to decontextualize them from larger questions about why these choices are being debated at all. The fact that women feel the need to confess the details of their nethers to Moran in the first place speaks to how charged the debate is, but also points out that assigning feminist value to subjective groom
ing regimens is a pretty unstable base for ideology. And yet, along with high heels and makeup and underpants, pubic hair has become a feminist issue that depends on the invocation of choice as an unquestioned defense. It’s also had more ink devoted to it than more urgent issues—say, violence against women and the need for decent family-leave policies. We can care about all these issues, but it seems worth asking why ones that foreground appearance and desirability are amplified above the others.
“Am I a Bad Feminist?”
Looking around the blogosphere in the past few years, there seems to be a massive crisis of conscience among young, female, and generally white women who consider themselves feminist . . . except. One writer wonders, “Does Waxing Make Me a Bad Feminist?” (See what I mean?) Another asks “Can a Feminist Wear High Heels?” Another: “Can a Beauty Editor Be a Feminist?” And still another: “I’m Engaged and It Makes Me Feel Like a Bad Feminist.” Everywhere you turn, there’s a woman wringing her virtual hands over the prospect of not conforming to a mythical ideal, admitting to what she has self-diagnosed as feminist failure, and imagining the wrath of her strident foremothers raining down hellfire. (Or menstrual blood, maybe.)
“Sometimes I do stuff which I’m frightened Germaine Greer will find out I like doing,” muses one conflicted soul, who then goes on to confess to loving high heels and kitschy 1950s-housewife apparel. It’s become a formulaic script: whatever the topic—push-up bras, cheesy romance novels, gonzo porn, etc.—there’s a woman out there pondering whether her interest in it somehow negates her basic belief in gender equality. There’s a performativity to it, as though public self-flagellation is equivalent to thorough analysis. Yet all of these pieces conclude with some familiar sentiments: It’s my choice. I do it for me. So it is feminist. But if that’s the case, writing 1,500 words on it for a public forum seems like an odd choice. Like the girls who wobble up to Moran to confess their pubic sins, such personal essays seem like a somewhat pointless bid for absolution. If you like high heels, wear them. If you want to get married in a white dress or watch women get choked with a bunch of penises, go on with your bad self. But don’t use a personal essay about it as a hair shirt.
This content genre is one of marketplace feminism’s biggest triumphs: women who act on the illusion of free choice offered by the market, and then offer themselves up for corporate media to capitalize on. Most of these essays are written for very little money, and almost all of them are published because they are guaranteed clickbait: they appear on Web sites that rely on numerous daily updates and increasing pageviews as a way to fill space that’s demanded by the constant need for new content. And young women are, by and large, the ones who answer this demand by mining their perceived failures. In doing so, they perpetuate the idea that feminism is a deeply heteronormative, white-and middle class–centric movement that’s become hopelessly stuck up its own ass. And, you know, sometimes it’s hard to argue against that. Someday, perhaps, we’ll start seeing essays by men with titles like “Does My Back-Sack-and-Crack Wax Betray My Marxism?” But so far, we don’t, and that seems like a good enough reason to cool it with the dramatics.
These essays help drive marketplace feminism not only because they omit other topics—keeping the focus firmly in the realm of the sexy and easily sellable—but also because they invariably conclude with an invocation of choice that forecloses on the possibility of deeper exploration. To be clear, this is not a condemnation of women for feeling confused and bombarded by mixed messages about what they need to do to be successful or desirable or happy. It’s not a condemnation of women who get Botox or style their pubic hair just so. There are countless reasons that all kinds of people enjoy dressing up, making up, pursuing styles, following trends: family and cultural traditions, rebellion from or adhesion to religion, and personal expression are only a handful among them. But what the bad-feminist genre reveals is that the personal, the individual, and the appearance-centric are the most likely both to be elevated as sites for empowerment and pointed to as things that betray a monolithic idea of feminism. Cultural critic Susan Bordo has pointed out that this kind of rationalization reflex acts as a “diversionary din” that shifts focus from its cause—consumer culture, persistent inequality—to its symptoms.11 We don’t exist in a vacuum, and neither do our choices. The cultural ideals created and delivered by profit-driven media and corporations have a massive impact on the supposedly free choices we make with our bodies, and rationalizing that away for the length of a personal essay is much easier than trying to change it.
Meet the New Beauty, Same as the Old Beauty
It’s a paradox that as more and more women are steered toward a cosmetically-enhanced sameness, a key feature of marketplace feminism is its earnest dialogue about broadening beauty standards. That brings us to Dove, a brand which in the past decade has made itself empowertising’s top banana with its Campaign for Real Beauty.
Beginning in 2004, women across North America and the UK began seeing something new in advertisements for Dove soap: namely, nothing. Replacing the humble, curved bar of white soap the brand was known for were stark photos of women of all ages, colors, and sizes, with checkboxes next to them. “Oversized? Outstanding?” asked the boxes placed next to a photo of a plump, smiling woman, arms raised in a black strapless dress. “Flawed? Flawless?” asked those alongside a fantastically freckled redhead. “Half empty? Half full?” was the query for a woman whose small chest was highlighted by a white tank top. Instead of a product, there was a Web site URL and an entreaty to “join the beauty debate.”
More than 1.5 million women were inspired or curious enough to visit Dove’s site on the strength of the “Tick Box” campaign. But that was nothing compared to the exposure that came with phase two, when billboards featuring women in white bras and panties began appearing in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other major U.S. cities. The women were big—bigger than “normal” models, and, perhaps more surprising, they didn’t look miserable about it. They smiled, they laughed, they leaned against one another. In contrast to high-fashion billboard ads in which models looked contorted, pained, or simply frozen, these women looked alive. It shouldn’t have been such a shock to see happy-looking women of varying sizes and skin tones standing twenty feet tall above Times Square, but it was, and within days the media was buzzing about Dove’s newest coup on behalf of “real” beauty.
The Campaign for Real Beauty combined its body boosterism with lush, striking images by big-name female photographers Annie Leibovitz and Peggy Sirota, and with the institutional heft conferred by a 2004 study commissioned by Dove and developed in part by Harvard University’s Nancy Etcoff and the London School of Economics’ Susie Orbach. Both women had authored popular books about women and body/beauty image—Orbach was best known for her foundational 1978 manifesto Fat Is a Feminist Issue, and Etcoff’s 1999 Survival of the Prettiest broke down the biological basis for what’s considered beautiful. Conducted in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Italy, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Brazil, Argentina, and Japan, The Real Truth About Beauty study boasted of being “global,” though the exclusion of the entire continent of Africa and the Asian subcontinent seems like a big omission in a survey of women and beauty standards. Its questions sought to gauge how women in different countries and cultures value beauty—both in themselves and in others—and how their perceptions of their own bodies are affected by conventional beauty standards.
In disseminating the study’s findings, Dove focused less on the negative findings of the study—for instance, the fact that only about 2 percent of women interviewed used the word “beautiful” to describe themselves—and more on the section titled “Perceptions About Beauty.” Here, interviewees indicated how strongly they agreed with statements such as “A woman can be beautiful at any age” (89 percent strongly agreed); “I think that every woman has something about her that is beautiful” (85 percent); and “If I had a daughter, I would want her to feel beautiful even if she is
not physically attractive” (82 percent). The overall picture that informed the ads was one in which women were bonded in an urge to celebrate the beauty of capital-W Women while not quite able to testify to their own pulchritude. Thus was born the campaign’s stated mission—to “start a global conversation about the need for a wider definition of beauty”—and the Dove woman herself, bravely putting herself out there as a beacon for all womankind. One billboard model, Gina Crisanti, told the Associated Press that “I grew up not being happy with my body shape and size at all. . . . In my 20s, I realized all those [ideas] were simply self-destructive. Once I started to develop an alternative definition of beauty, all of it started to fall into place. It’s all about how you shine.”
Well, that and the firming cream. What? Oh, yeah, those beaming women on Dove’s groundbreaking billboards were shilling a line of lotions and creams meant to smooth out cellulite. As Jennifer L. Pozner wrote in a September 2005 consideration of the Real Beauty campaign, “[Dove’s] feel-good ‘women are okay at whatever size’ message is hopelessly hampered by the underlying attempt to get us to spend, spend, spend to ‘correct’ those pesky ‘problem areas’ advertisers have always told us to hate.”12 (Not to mention the previously nonexistent problem areas created by the brand itself: a later entry in the Real Beauty ad juggernaut proposed that women “turn armpits into underarms” with Dove’s Advanced Care line of whitening deodorants.)
But if Dove was a case of same story, slightly different-sized models, it still put much of its target audience—average, diverse, cosmetics-buying women—in a bind. It seemed important to support the brand’s effort to recognize that not all women are a white, paper-smooth size 2—and even more important not to give credence to people worried that seeing a size-12 woman in her underwear would fuel America’s obesity crisis (a worry put forth, in all seriousness, in articles like one titled “When Tush Comes to Dove”). It was equally tempting to support Dove in the face of male critics who protested the billboards on the grounds that having to look at underwear-clad women bigger than size 4 posed a grievous threat to their erections. Among these were film critic Richard Roeper, who penned an anti-Dove screed for the Chicago Tribune that read, in part, “When we’re talking women in their underwear on billboards outside my living room windows, give me the fantasy babes, please. If that makes me sound superficial, shallow, and sexist—well, yes, I’m a man.” In Chicago’s competing Sun-Times, as if trying to outdo Roeper, Lucio Guerrero cracked, “The only time I want to see a thigh that big is in a bucket with bread crumbs on it.”