Ariel Levy will be on today’s Fresh Air. Catch it on NPR if you listen to it, or check back at the site tonight to listen online. Personally, I haven’t read Female Chauvinist Pigs and excerpts and columns written by Levy have failed to impress me, but Terry Gross always does thought-provoking interviews. It should be…interesting. If you’re into Levy you might want to hear, if you hate her, you might want to listen too. 
I don’t normally post about science fiction related things here, since it’s not really the focus of the blog (although that will probably change since it’s pretty much my life right now), but it is something I’m really into. So, NPR had a story yesterday about James Tiptree, Jr., called The Secret Sci-Fi Life of Alice B. Sheldon. They interviewed the author of a new biography of Tiptree that came out earlier this year. This isn’t news to me, and won’t be to some of you, but I still thought it was really cool to hear something about such an influential female SF writer on a mainstream program.
For those of you who don’t know who she was and don’t want to have to follow the link, I’ll sum up with the written introduction on the NPR page:
Science fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr. earned the reputation of being a male author who understood women.
Tiptree’s stories often addressed gender issues — on Earth and in worlds beyond.
One story in particular involves a woman opting to live with an alien nation, for the sole reason of avoiding the feeling of confinement she has in her male-dominated society.
There was a deep secret behind Tiptree’s sensitivity: In reality, he was a she. Alice B. Sheldon (1915 - 1987) used the male pen name to write in a time when male authors could expect more success in the realm of science fiction.
Julie Phillips wrote James Tiptree, Jr., a biography subtitled: “The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.” Phillips tells Andrea Seabrook why she was inspired to write the book, more about who Sheldon was and how the nom de plume changed Sheldon’s life.
Tiptree has really been an influence on my life and writing. Not because I’ve been influenced greatly by her style and subject matter, although I do think some of her writing is excellent, but more because her life and approach to it is so fascinating. I’ve always found the “feminine” gender role limiting. Until a few years ago, growing up, I felt I could solely identify with male role models, because I knew of few women who lived the sorts of lives men have always been allowed. It seemed that being female, feminine, limited you to a certain set of expectations, potentials, possibilities. Whereas being male or at least acting like it allowed anything to be possible. Men could do anything, be anyone. Women could be wives, mothers, and love interests. (Failing that, temptresses, witches, and Lady Macbeth. These have always been the feminine archetypes I preferred.)
I grew up in Utah, where gender roles and gendered expectations are alive and well and much more overt than in many other parts of the US, and this profoundly affected me. My mother was surprisingly feminist considering her background, and even though she was a stay at home mother of five (who now regrets her decision not to work), she always told me there was nothing wrong with being a girl and that I could do anything I wanted to do, anything a boy could. This was all well and good, but unfortunately, even if our parents are wonderful they are not the only influences on our life, and what I heard from my mother seemed to contradict the reality that assaulted me every day.
Now that we’ve established that, on to a different reason why it matters which has been touched upon but which was tangential to the other point I was trying to make.
Beauty standards are a class issue. I can’t say it better than Winter did a while back, so just go read that post if you want in-depth analysis. It’s also a race issue, and the two are distinct but also connected enough that if I address one I must address the other. I’ll simply try to explain briefly:
American standards of femininity are constructed in a way to be accessible to members of a certain class and ethnicity because they are markers of precisely that. Women are expected to look, at the least, middle-class and As White As Possible, because that’s what has been constructed as attractive and acceptable. It’s a deeply classist and racist system.
Not everyone has the time or money to spend making themselves look acceptably “feminine” all the time. Debates about whether or not some woman is a “bad” feminist for getting a bikini wax are pointless because they ignore the fact that many women can’t afford to pay someone to rip their hair out of them on a regular basis. Good quality cosmetics are expensive. Being acceptably hairless takes time and money, and if you’re poor, that might not be something you can afford to worry about all the time, and if you’re not white, it takes even more time because you might have more hair or darker hair or you might be more prone to ingrown hairs or skin problems from hair removal.
And the problem is that these standards of middle-class, white beauty are spreading. They are expected of every woman, not just the ones who are easily able to attain them. This is deeply harmful to poor women, and women of color; these are not necessarily one and the same but tend to go together. And so, in order to keep her job, a waitress has to waste time and money on cosmetics which might be toxic because it’s not considered a legally undue burden for waitresses to be expected to be “pretty” even though as long as they are clean and pleasant, it should have no impact on their ability to perform their job. This woman might lose her jobs if she doesn’t conform, a very real and negative consequence of how beauty standards are socially enforced. And so we have African-American women frying their hair flat in an effort to avoid social rebuke, Asian women having surgery to make their eyes rounder and more white-looking, and women of color all over the world being permanently poisoned and scarred from the use of chemicals intended to bleach their skin.
This is not okay. A woman forced to choose between spending her money on actual necessities and cosmetics in order to keep her job is not okay. A woman being forced to iron her hair in order to keep her job because “ethnic” hairstyles are considered “unprofessional”, because somehow her body is unacceptable the way it naturally is, is not okay. Being forced to choose between the pursuit of an ideal which is unrealistic and based on the income and often race of a totally different group of people, therefore often unobtainable, and the ability to make a living and live a decent life is not okay.
That’s why the hell it matters.
One continuing source of frustration for me is the fact that in every single “debate” (I use the term loosely) about shaving, makeup, and other (American, white) cultural beauty standards, everyone seems to miss the real point. When I post about it, of course I get the obligatory male response telling me how I need to alter myself to properly fit cultural norms in order to “look my best”. Hell, even other feminists have occasionally posted comments which amount to “well, if women sometimes want to wear heels/whatever to feel pretty…”
The point here is not about high heels. Not about bras. Not about makeup. Not about shaving. Not one of those individual things is at the heart of the matter of what I or other people critical of these beauty norms have really been struggling to say. You know what it’s about?
Bodily integrity. It’s about wanting my body to be seen and respected as a normal human body. It’s about wanting to be accepted as good enough on my own merits.
