While I definitely appreciate Bartky’s exploration of femininity as alienation, and her crucial acknowledgment of our paradoxical pleasure in beauty rituals, I have some doubts about her celebration of the supposedly redemptive quality of unfettered femininity— it strikes me as too utopian, too sweeping and assumptive or even poetically philosophical, but not grounded in reality.
Bartky (and Brownmiller to a certain extent, in claiming that cosmetics are proof of “feminine insecurity, an abiding belief that the face underneath is insufficient unto itself” [123]), seems to romanticize the beauty we already have and the topical markers that come with age, equating wrinkles and stretch marks to a lived, experiential maturity, and extolling the virtues of “real” un-adorned faces, “Repressive narcissistic satisfactions stand in the way of the emergence of an authentic delight in the body too: The woman unable to leave home in the morning without ‘putting on her face’ will never discover the beauty, character, and expressiveness her own face already possesses” (42).
Sorry, I don’t buy that—I assume she’s referring to inner beauty or some kind of ineffable radiance that exists independently from socially imposed ideals of perfect facial ratios and immanent beauty standards, but honestly, that doesn’t mean anything in particular and it’s far too generalized. Are we to conflate an unmade-up face with an intrinsic wealth of character, knowledge, intelligence and expression? And who's to say that this theoretical woman has character?—she may be wan, wrinkled, and defiantly exhausted-looking without makeup, but that should not be elided with a political stance or a marker of superior interior qualities. The suggestion that I will never “discover” my true beauty because I need my daily eyeliner seems to exclude me from being a self-aware individual, and that I am somehow missing out on my true inner potential.
I think Brownmiller takes a more measured and less totalizing approach to the make-up-or-not-to-make up debate that situates the issue in the praxes of daily female life. Despite her avowed “anti-make-up bias” (122), she is fully aware of the both the pleasures and the imperatives embedded in putting on makeup, and she wisely does not deny woman than choice, “of course there is nothing wrong with wanting to look attractive (123), or “as it happens, some women look good in makeup—in society's terms I will even say that they look better in makeup (123).—more important to her work is identifying the difference between option and obligation, and being cognizant about the illusion of voluntary and naturalized beauty rituals.
On a personal note, there has been an unintended side effect of reading Barky and Brownmiller before bed: it has served as a reminder of additional acts of control correction and containment that I can (should?) be doing—how can I read about unmarred skin or National Geographic breasts and not want to improve myself? Both authors write about the sisyphean scope of female beauty practices—the constancy, the dedication and above all, the unattainable endpoint that engenders constant upkeep and scrutiny, “The female body is revealed as a task, an object in need of transformation…Every aspect of my bodily being requires either alteration or else heroic measures to conserve it “(Bartky, 40).
While reading about the tyranny of feminine ritual, the "daunting" perpetually incomplete task, the arduous combat of perceived lack, it has made me ironically, or more likely comically, even more hyperaware of my usual rituals; but far from diluting their pull, it makes me strive harder, so in addition to the internalized unquestioned nightly ritual of washing, exfoliating, toning,(occasionally masking or pore-stripping) and applying an anti-wrinkle or anti-acne serum (the paradox of 25), I’ve incorporated some supplemental practices. Unless I’m coming home at dawn or on a sleep-inducing drug the former are a given, but the content of the reading, and the fact that I'm awake and seem to have the time, has allowed me to address slightly more specific “problems”, i.e. putting scar gel on the small surgical keloid on my hip--I don’t like it, but it’s not as visible as the face so I often forget to apply the clear goo heralded as a miracle fixative. Similarly I’ve been remembering to apply Certain Dri, a product that claims to eradicate excessive sweat as effectively as botox injections (which I've also considered); ditto applying firming self-tanner (address two problem in one!) which I do occasionally but usually don’t have time to wait for it to dry. In fact, all of these applications require a lengthy drying time and must be used at night, so the reading has actually facilitated these ablutions—I’ll read a section, apply one, and stand like a newly shellacked piece of furniture waiting for them to dry while reading, and feeling extremely satisfied that I’m taking an (imagined?) agency in my own goals of self-perfection which obviously, as our reading and our own experience as women has proven, is a battle that is never won but typified by and framed by the the constant striving.
These augmented rituals and my beauty regimen in general is undeniably internalized to a Foucauldian extent, but I don’t see it as necessarily sinister—insidious, sure but complex. I appreciate that both authors (Brownmiller to greater extent) acknowledge the very real and potent pleasure of femininity—to ignore that would be doing a great and somewhat condescending injustice to women everywhere. We are not all insecure masochists helpless under the unrelenting pressure of gender roles and ingrained social construction. As Brownmiller notes, there is immense pleasure in the “trivial’ rituals—a spritz of perfume may ultimately serve to mask the natural human scent and efface our bodily selves, but just as importantly, it smells really really good and I love inhaling my favorite scent as I put it on. As the authors admit, if these acts weren’t at least occasionally pleasurable, we wouldn’t do them.
Of course there is the aspect of coercion and the sense of being obligated if not by an external motivation that by our own sense of what should be done i.e. I don’t want to shave: I hate it, as many have mentioned, it is time consuming annoying and fraught with problems—there is nothing pleasurable about the experience except perhaps the (maddeningly temporary) tactile pleasure of smoothness or the anticipated touch I might receive from a male (giving credence to everything the readings claim about women making themselves appealing to the opposite sex). So the pleasures of femininity are definitely counterbalanced by the more obligatory acts that feel arduous rather than effervescent and fun. Still, I love being a girl...
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