$43: A lipstick I don’t need. Up to nine. I now have enough tubes to form a hockey team.
$47.50: Waxing. “Do you want me to do the patch on your chin?” the aesthetician asks. What am I supposed to say? No, please leave the goatee. I’m auditioning for Bearded Lady at the circus later. I nod, and she rips it away with one quick yank. The facial hair of middle age increases at a rate much greater than income. This must be what they mean by Freakonomics.
$107: Advanced Retinol Night Treatment. It’s a random collection of words that mean nothing to me, but I have read on a website that retinol dissolves fine lines. It’s bullshit, of course. I am King Canute railing fruitlessly at the tide. The sea answers back: Relax, in the coffin no one will see your wrinkles.
$113: Dermatologist’s consultation fee: Because I live in the hellish No Man’s Land where adult acne lives alongside wrinkles.
Between my eyes there are two deep grooves, as though a velociraptor has hooked me by its claws and dragged me screaming through the night sky. Yet I have refused the siren song of cosmetic surgery, at least so far. I don’t want to abandon the face I’m meant to have. I worry that I’d look in the mirror for the years left to me and wonder, What was I supposed to look like? What was the face left on the cutting-room floor?
Around me, friends’ faces change, their eyes become wider and their foreheads as smooth as peeled eggs, and sometimes they whisper, drunkenly, about what they’ve done and I try not to judge (even though I do, in my darkest heart). Mostly I wonder, How do you afford that? We are all cash-strapped; the money must have come from somewhere.
Until I realize that, for many of my friends, it’s an investment: “Nobody at my office knows I’m pushing fifty,” one says. “They’re all thirty years old. I can’t afford to let them know.” Several friends are unemployed and looking for work; it is competitive out there at the best of times. For middle-aged women, more so. What if that smooth forehead is the advantage they need? Not that anyone would hire on the basis of physical beauty, rather than a bursting resumé, right? How shallow would we have to be, as a people? How fucked would the world have to be?
I am afraid to tot up the cost of my vanity, because it is inevitably a cost to someone else: A trip I could have taken with mother, a thousand extra dollars in my children’s university fund, money I could have given to charity. One day I find an article from the Wall Street Journal outlining four women’s annual beauty expenditures, and suddenly I feel like a feral child raised by wolves. I am in the beauty wilderness compared with these women, three of whom spend US$20,000, some of it on things I didn’t even know existed: What are hair vitamins, and would I be happier if I used them?
Hair vitamins, hair extensions, hair removers; breast enhancers, breast reducers; butt lifters, butt flatteners. It is extraordinarily lucrative to sell women the myth of bodily improvement. Last year, Glamour magazine made a short film illustrating this imbalance. In it, a mythical twenty-six-year-old Alison and Jason are presented in split screen. They wake up, shower, begin their beauty routines — curl enhancer for her, beard balm for him — as the cost of their respective public faces is totted up beside them. In the end, it is revealed that it costs Alison $1,832.55 to be a reasonably presentable modern woman, and $691.52 for Jason to be a man.
Glamour gets it. Jezebel gets it, too. The feminist website recently itemized “how much it costs to own a vagina,” and came up with the figure $2,663.02. That includes birth control, tampons, UTI remedies, PMS relief, and preventative medical interventions like Pap smears. In Canada, where health care is publicly funded, that figure would be somewhat lower. Still, it’s more expensive to own a vagina than a penis. Not to mention that the penis earns you more money in the end. But that’s another chapter.
As Wolf notes in the updated foreword to The Beauty Myth, much has changed since the book was published: The pressure to remain youthful and thin is as bad as ever, or worse. On the other hand, young women of the fourth and fifth feminist wave are savvy and critical of advertising and social media in ways that only add to their power. They are often the producers of their own media: “On balance, I think we have come a long way. It is a great thing for young women and men today to grow up taking for granted that they are entitled to analyze and criticize the mass media ideals that are presented to them, and to define beauty, glamour and style for themselves.”
Women may be free to criticize and analyze, but they’re also still expected to pay more, as the prevalence of the so-called “pink tax” shows (this is the discrepancy in pricing for similar products marketed to men and women). In 2015, New York’s Department of Consumer Affairs conducted a survey of hundreds of items, from jeans to razors to compression socks, in a study called From Cradle to Cane: The Cost of Being a Female Consumer. The report concluded, “Women are paying thousands of dollars more over the course of their lives to purchase similar products as men.” The discrimination begins with children’s scooters, and it ends with adult diapers; an entire lifetime, in other words, to be hosed.
Thank God for the young women at Glamour and Jezebel, for the researchers who uncover pink tax discrepancies, and for all the young women who question our unthinking acceptance of a system that rips us off at every opportunity. They are the ones in the past few years who’ve written hilarious Amazon reviews on products such as Bic’s Crystal for Her, a set of pastel ballpoint pens with a slender barrel especially designed for a delicate lady’s hand. As one reviewer noted: “I’d really like to buy a pack of these pens; but I probably need my father’s or my husband’s permission first.”
They are also the activists — like the ones at Canadian Menstruators — who lobbied and fought to have the tax removed from sanitary products, which had been classified as “luxury” goods in Canada (how I survived my entire life without a Birkin tampon, I’ll never know). These are the young women at the vanguard of the no-product movement, who refuse to waste their money on useless gunk in pots. These are the women who woke up earlier than we did. With luck, they will be the generation that grows up happy in its own skin, wrinkly though it may be.
NEVER ENOUGH: WOMEN, POLITICS, AND THE UPHILL BATTLE
IT IS THE DAY AFTER International Women’s Day, and I’m moderating a panel on the barriers facing women in political life. In these situations — barriers, politics, lawyers — I find that it’s best to start with a joke.
“I hope you all had a chance to put your feet up and maybe have a glass of wine,” I tell the lawyers of the Women’s Law Association of Ontario, “because overthrowing the patriarchy is thirsty work.”
They laugh. I am relieved. Any time you can get a laugh out of a bunch of lawyers in the bracket between 5 p.m. and wine o’clock is a solid win. It’s also a good thing because I’m about to tell them something pretty shocking.
What I’m about to share is some polling data, released to coincide with International Women’s Day, that reveals 54 percent of respondents think there are “enough” women in politics in Canada, and 4 percent think there are too many. Too many! I tell the audience: “A study this week from Abacus Data revealed that nearly 60 percent of Canadians think there are the right number of women in politics, or that there are already too many.”
There is an intake of breath, and I see the women in the audience shaking their heads. Sitting next to me on the panel are Kristyn Wong-Tam, a Toronto city councillor; Farheen Khan, a community organizer who ran unsuccessfully in the last federal election; and Tamara Small, an associate professor of political science at the University of Guelph. They’re all listening intently. None of them seems very shocked. They’ve all seen the sausage of democracy being made from the inside, and it is not picturesque.
Still, the right number of women in politics? As I say to the audience, did the people in that poll realize that only 26 percent of MPs in this country are women? Only 18 percent are mayors? Only three provincial premiers — and two of those have been
in the news for the gendered abuse that’s been hurled at them? Saying there are enough women in Canadian politics is like saying there are enough Nobel Prize winners in the National Hockey League.
The women on this panel know all too well the barriers that stand between them and elected office: a nomination process that leans toward incumbents, who are usually male; a first-past-the-post political system, also known as “winner take all,” which discourages the selection of non-traditional candidates; a system that does not promote or financially support women, particularly those from racialized or LGBTQ communities.
On top of that, since the rise of social media there has been a particularly vicious, sexist public response to women in politics. More women are desperately needed in politics; research shows that women in elected office are better able to work across party lines and are particularly effective in policy-making. But given all the grief and hassle that women face in the political arena, you have to wonder, Why? Why do they put themselves through it?
I turn to the panellists, because I want to know what brought them into the arena. The answer, for both Wong-Tam and Khan, is the desire for change. Issues of social justice were close to their hearts (this jibes with research that shows that the desire to create change rather than personal ambition is the primary force motivating women to enter politics).
For Wong-Tam, the first out lesbian elected to city council in Canada’s largest city, one of the main issues was gender equity, and as soon as she was elected she began working to establish an office for gender equality (she’s also a driving force behind Women Win Toronto, which recruits diverse candidates to run at the municipal level). Khan, a long-time community activist who had seen anti-Muslim rhetoric at work in Canadian politics, wanted to be a fresh presence among the familiar faces in Ottawa — specifically, “a Muslim woman in a hijab.”
When Wong-Tam decided to run for office, her parents were opposed: They were worried that it would be a brutal experience, and bruising for her. Khan, too, had to overcome the reservations of her family. Entering politics is hard enough for white, straight, middle-class women: those existing at the intersections can find the barriers insurmountable. For Wong-Tam, campaigning to win a riding that had been held by Kyle Rae, also a gay politician, sexuality wasn’t a deal breaker for voters in downtown Toronto, but “there were other issues of discrimination and bigotry.”
For Khan, the campaign was even more heated. Anti-Muslim sentiment was a feature of the 2015 federal election campaign, with the Conservative Party, at one point, floating the idea of a “barbaric cultural practices” hotline. Barbaric practices, in this case, did not mean playing Nickelback loudly or serving warm beer. Everyone in Canada knew what it meant. It was an anti-Muslim whistle sounded at precisely the frequency some voters wanted to hear.
Khan was advised to establish herself as “Canadian enough” — emphasizing that she was born in Mississauga and that her sister had served in the military. Although she received warm greetings at most of the ten thousand doors she knocked on, there were still troubling incidents. A man at a public meeting asked if she’d impose sharia law if elected. One day, Khan stood near her headquarters adjusting a lawn sign. A police officer stopped and said, “Ma’am, what business do you have in this neighbourhood?”
When Khan says this, a small gasp runs through the room, and I see women in the audience shake their heads. I’m also shocked, but shouldn’t be: I know this is what happens to Brown and Black men and women; I know this theoretically, but not as part of my muscle memory, not as part of a humiliating ritual.
Only a couple of weeks before, the Pakistani-Canadian MP Iqra Khalid had introduced a motion in the House of Commons condemning Islamophobia and other religious discrimination; an anodyne, non-legislative bit of political bread-breaking, you’d think, on which all parties could agree. Instead, the motion became the subject of heated debate in the House, and venomous attacks outside. Protesters warned, against all evidence, that the motion would lead to something called “sharia creep,” as if we were living in a horror movie and religious extremism was oozing up the steps from every decent Canadian basement.
Khalid was subject to a horrid amount of abuse, in emails and online: She was called a “terrorist” and a “draper head.” She was told to go back home. She was threatened with harm: “Kill her and be done with it,” said one message. The police stepped up patrols around Khalid’s constituency office and her home.
Tamara Small, the professor of political science sitting to my left, isn’t surprised about any of this. One of her fields of study is the swampy place where women and politics and online culture meet: “The discourse around women in politics is that women are still outsiders. Politics is a man’s world, and all of these people are interloping. The Internet, more broadly, is not a particularly welcoming place for women.”
That is not a surprise to the women on the panel, or those in the audience. I tell them that one of my colleagues at the Globe and Mail has recently been reaching out to men who abuse female politicians on Twitter, asking them, in a deadpan fashion, why they felt the need to call the Premier of Ontario a “cunt.”
I’m relating this anecdote to the crowd, and suddenly I get to the word and freeze. Cunt. I can’t say cunt in front of the Women’s Law Association of Ontario! What if my grandmother in heaven hears? Instead, I say “the c-word,” like a debutante, like I’m Jacqueline Kennedy at a tea party.
Then the absurdity of it strikes me: Trolls use the word cunt because they think we’ll shrink from it. They think it’s water on a witch.
“Cunt,” I say, quite clearly.
And no one melts, or screams, or even blinks an eye.
WOMEN WON THE right to hold elected federal office in this country in 1921, three years after most of them had won the right to vote. (Shamefully, women of Asian descent were excluded, and Indigenous women were not granted the right to vote until 1960, alongside Indigenous men.)
Right from the beginning, the fun began. “Don’t you wish you were a man?” an opposition MP yelled at Agnes Macphail, the first female member of parliament.
“Don’t you?” she hollered back. Agnes, a progressive farmers’ advocate from Grey County, Ontario, didn’t have much time for nonsense. She wouldn’t, as the lone female MP sitting in the House of Commons from 1921 until 1935, when the number of women in federal politics doubled to two.
Politics has always been a bare-knuckles game, even here in Canada, where the myth of politeness lies as thin as April ice on a pond.
“You damned pup,” the sodden father of the country, John A. Macdonald, yelled at Oliver Mowat during a sitting of the House, “I’ll slap your chops.”
Fisticuffs, what fun. That’s been the nature of male taunting: You’re an idiot, a weakling, a traitor. The nature of insults aimed at female politicians is entirely different. It is gendered in two specific ways: First, it suggests an unnatural incursion — the woman has broken into a realm where she doesn’t belong and isn’t welcome. I like to think of this as the “back to the kitchen, wench” school of political theory.
Second, it is sexual or physical in nature. Female politicians are “bitches,” “witches,” “cunts,” “whores.” They are ugly and old and unattractive, or they deserve to be raped for punishment. Because they’ve voted for a carbon tax or for an anti-racism bill or an unpopular budget, they are inviting threats to be assaulted or killed.
The nature of the messages might not have changed much — and we’ll skip gently over how depressing that is — but the language and delivery systems have. Consider that Ellen Fairclough, the country’s first female cabinet minister (in the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker) was chagrined but not entirely surprised at the bitter comments directed her way in the late 1950s: “I’d meet people on the street who’d say, ‘Why don’t you go home and look after your house?’” she said, in an anecdote recounted in Dancing Backwards:
A Social History of Canadian Women in Politics by Sharon Carstairs and Tim Higgins. “Well, I didn’t make any obscene gestures, but I felt like it.”
Sixty years later, Alberta MLA Sandra Jansen took the floor of the provincial legislature to read some messages she’d recently received: “Sandra should stay in the kitchen, where she belongs.” That was one of the milder ones. She was also, in the measured consideration of her critics, a “bimbo,” “a useless tit,” and a “traitorous bitch.” Jansen had made the mistake of crossing the floor of the provincial legislature to join the NDP government of Premier Rachel Notley, having abandoned a bid for the leadership of the provincial Progressive Conservative Party. She’d been forced out by rancorous attacks during the leadership race; the reaction to her floor-crossing proved her point.
Notley was no stranger to this kind of abuse. A progressive, NDP premier in Alberta was already as rare as a white tiger; add the fact that she was a woman and the tiger had a bull’s-eye painted on its side. After she introduced a controversial carbon-tax measure, a crowd of Conservative Albertans chanted “Lock her up!” (Proving once and for all that we Canadians are destined to suffer cheap American knock-offs till the end of time.) More troubling, an investigation by the Edmonton Journal revealed that Premier Notley had been subject to more death threats than both preceding (male) premiers combined.
For a country so geographically vast and sparsely populated, Canada has at least managed to spread the misogynistic manure far and wide. One morning I listened to a report on CBC Radio’s The Current in which an MLA from Manitoba and the finance minister from Newfoundland recounted their experiences. Nahanni Fontaine, an Objibwe member of the Manitoba NDP, talked about how she’d been called a “cunt” and a “whore” for speaking out about women’s reproductive rights. Cathy Bennett, the Newfoundland finance minister, had been body-shamed online and threatened with death and sexual assault.
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