Dear friends,
Here are some simple thoughts about a complicated subject. I think I might start wearing makeup.
Not really. I have just been thinking about makeup and the politics of gender and oppression quite a bit lately, and I have a few comments. I don't stand with the either the males who insist on women wearing makeup or the equally odd ones who insist they don't: to insist on women doing anything seems like a rather ridiculous and harmful thing to do. I remember once my little sister asked for makeup for a birthday in her tweenage years, and I bought her some facepaint. Now I can't decide if that was funny and clever or stupid and cruel. I certainly would have appreciated it if someone bought me facepaint though, facepaint is awesome.
I think I was talking about something else before.
There are a two reasons why if I were a woman I would feel like I should not wear makeup. Neither of them end the conversation though, and obviously not being a woman I don't know what I would actually think.
Firstly, I think the expectation on women to wear makeup is part of a mechanism of oppression on women. Being expected to conform to certain (arbitrary) standards of beauty, including and not limited to wearing some amount of makeup, takes up a lot of time and quite a bit of money, both of which represent a transfer of power away from women (a loss which is not really offset by any gain to anyone, except I suppose makeup manufacturers). As a feminist I think women ought to have more power, and as a Nietzschean of the cuddly variety I think people in general ought to have more power, so in my set of values makeup is not looking good.
However to go from this point to the assertion that one should not wear makeup is to make a grave mistake. It is frankly idiotic to say to somebody who is being oppressed "Why don't you just stop being oppressed?", and that is what such an assertion would constitute. The makeup element is just a part of a system of oppression that works so well precisely because the penalties for not playing along are so severe. These penalties take two main forms that I can think of, loosely the internal and the external. By external, I mean the ways that other people treat the person, and all the material and emotional implications that has, and by internal I mean the way that one treats oneself, feels about oneself. I think the internal element is probably an internalisation of real or perceived social judgements, as opposed to the mere loss of an instrinsic self-regard increase which arises from anthropologically well established preparation rituals. The "battle armour" concept may hold some truth, and it may be true that in fact women feel and perhaps are more powerful in makeup, but we ought to have a society where women can be and feel powerful without taking that measure.
The second reason is that wearing makeup may perpetuate the oppressive beauty norm. Irrespective of what one actually says, wearing makeup may increase the feeling in other people that they ought to wear makeup, particularly of those who look up to one. For me, more scary than being a victim of oppression is the concern that I might be a component of a wider system of oppression.
This too is not a conclusive point. Nobody is morally obliged to make a martyr of themselves in a case like this. I think my position here can only really be that there are morally good things about not wearing makeup as a woman, and probably no morally good things about wearing makeup. However, people are of course very much entitled to be concerned for their own emotional and physical welfare, and this may entail them wearing makeup. As such, if individuals want to wear makeup, they should not feel morally obliged not to. At least that is what I think, and another thing I think is that there is a very good chance I have not thought about this enough or that I am just wrong. I think these are conversations that our society needs to have though.
I have one final thought, and that is about the racial element of the politics of beauty standards. For white women it can be hard enough trying to conform to what we generally understand as the sort of mainstream typical beauty norms (I realise I may have essentially said the same thing three times). But we should think about the effects these norms have on non-white women. When I lived in Kenya one of the most popular "beauty" products was a skin whitening cream. Treatments like this, as well as the time-consuming hair styling that many black women undergo, seem also to be caused by the same systemic mechanisms. If we agree that the existence and appeasement of these norms are disempowering, I think it follows that they are more disempowering for some than for others, and the people for whom it is most disempowering are non-white people, both here in the UK and globally. That might be a good reason to try and weaken, destroy or change beyond recognition those beauty norms, and a part of that might mean opposing wearing makeup. However from my point of relative privelege in these respects, I don't know how helpful it is for me to say things like this.
