Categotry Archives: beauty mythology

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Cahiers Parisiens: À faire vôtre conaissance, je suis ravie

Categories: beauty mythology, o mores, o rapites, paris notebook, the male ogle, travels with CL

Désolée, mes canards! Sorry, Ducks! Been an odd few days–an exhausting theory fight on a board I belong to, and general exhaustion! You see, it would seem that I did an apartment exchange with a French person who only drinks tea. That’s right! No means of creating coffee in the apartment except a jar of instant coffee. Which I was actually desperate enough to use.

So I’ve been drinking tea. Now, I know that the UKians in my audience will think this odd, but tea doesn’t wake me up, or at least not enough, not like coffee. And I think I’ve been going into serious caffeine withdrawal, which has completely messed up my sleep cycle. So today’s big accomplishments–on the day I needed to do a solid day’s work to get back on track–was walking down the Boulevard Voltaire to a kitchen appliances store where I got a tiny french press to make coffee with. And after I’d had a pot, and took a long nap, I finally am feeling human again.

So anyway. Do you like puns? do you like obscure French puns that only make sense in English! I do! I’ve named two blogs after that way, and the title of this post! Which I will explain below.

On Monday I went to the opening of Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Venetian Rivalries at the Louvre, thanks to a ticket my exchange mate scored for me. I’m not a huge fan of the Cinquecento, but there’s obviously some insanely good stuff done by these painters, so I was happy to go–plus sailing into the special exhibition hall in the Louvre was pretty posh.

The show has some really good paintings, and they are really beautiful–though I agree a bit with Michelangelo’s critique that the Venetian painters placed color over drawing skill. (It’s okay; you can make the same criticism of my favorite painting in the world, which has some awkward bits–look at the way the arm kind of hangs out there in the foreground.) And as I walked through the exhibit, two thoughts came immediately to mind:

A) These guys painted real women! Take a look at the centerpiece of the exhibit, one of Titian’s most famous paintings, Danaë:

It’s astonishing to contrast Danaë with media images today–her breasts, hips, thighs, arms–and look, she even has a bit of stomach. And she’s a gorgeous, idealized image of femininity; this is what women were supposed to look like.

In fact, she looks a lot like Lizzi Miller…the plus-size (size 14) model:

Although she’s hardly idealized, at least by some people:

So what do you think? Does Lizzi Miller look fantastic or is this lowering standards for stick thinness industrywide?

(For a little more intelligent discussion, see this Below the Belt post.)

However, my appreciation for this fact was kinda mitigate by my next observation…

B) This exhibit is a little…rapey

OK, a lot rapey.

I mean, the signature painting of the exhibit–the afore-referenced Danaë–depicts, well, the rape of a woman by Zeus. Oh, and did I mention that she had been kidnapped by her father and locked up to prevent her from having a kid? I know the Greeks weren’t really big on happy stories, but still.

In fact, and I guess sort of to it’s credit, the exhibit has a whole couple of rooms about the ways nudes are depicted in the arts of these masters. But even that was a bit problematic: wall to wall naked women, offering themselves up to men, or the male gaze, or alone by themselves (letting you gaze voyeuristically at them.) And in one room, there were five separate treatments of the Rape of Lucretia. Which is a lot of rape to have in one room, even if the paintings themselves are exquisitely decorated.

So that takes me back to French puns.

One of the things you say in French when you are introduced to someone is Ravissante à faire vôtre conaissance. Now, ravissante means ravished; and in French, this is basically only used in the way we use the English word ravishing, that is, beautiful.

But it comes from the same roots and same sense as ravished in English: to take, to carry off…to rape.

So that’s why I flipped it around in my post title, one translation of which might be: “to meet you, I am ravished.”

I don’t mean to say that in French you say that you’re raped when you meet people. That’s not what it means anymore. But it is an artifact of how rape, how the principles of rape–that a woman’s body belongs not to her, but the men who look at her, who can take her–pervades every corner of our culture. You can see it art; you can hear it in language; you can feel it in the way men look at you, or in the long lists that people send you telling you how you can avoid being assaulted–because assault is an implacable force of nature, not the acts of people with the moral capacity to make decisions.

But hey, don’t believe me. Just ask Tucker Max!

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Adventures in Transition, Special North Dallas Forty Edition: Face the Pain

Categories: all about me, beauty mythology, teh tranz, This Was My Life

Greetings, ducks, from Dallas, where today it didn’t crack 100 degrees Fahrenheit. That actually made the news. Today, we continue our unintentional Trans Week (good week for it, though) with yet more about body modifications:

In the 26 months since I decided to transition, I’ve made a number of physical alterations to my body, both to make me feel better about myself, and to make it easier for me to blend in the world as a woman. The vaginoplasty you already know about; I’ve made oblique mention to the fact that I had breast implants done at the same time. (The rumors are true about that: the augmentation hurt more than the GRS; it’s one thing to not be able to sit up for several weeks, and quite another to not be able to move your arms for four days.) And seventeen months ago, right when I went fulltime, I had plastic surgery to trim down my jaw and chin, which were quite heavy once upon a time.

None of these visible surgeries were to make me more conventionally beautiful, not even the breast implants–it was always about just trying to have something resembling the female body I feel I should have had, if things had only turned out differently. (Seriously, Scout’s honor, and you know, I was a Boy Scout once.)

But my longest investment in time and money has been electrolysis, to remove what’s left of my beard.

Getting rid of my facial hair was actually a project I began long before I began to seriously consider transition; I started laser treatments about a month after I separated from my wife. Even though I wasn’t really thinking of it as a step towards transition, I still had a lot of trepidation about it–after all, ti was the first thing I had ever tried to permanently feminize my appearance, and as such it became a mental Rubicon of sorts; if I crossed that barrier, would I inevitably start on a transition path? (Er–yes, but not because of the laser.)

Unfortunately, I have light hair and light skin, which is only one half (the light skin) part of the ideal candidate profile for laser treatments. While it definitely helped somewhat (I was fairly quickly able to stop wearing heavy foundation and switch to tinted moisturizer), laser was never going to be the final answer for me. So two years ago, after I had started hormones, I began getting electrolysis.

Ducks, you need to know this: I am a wimp about pain. Sure, I can take it when I need to, but in general I try to minimize it as much as possible. And since I also had the disposable income, I decided to go to Electrology 3000, in Dallas. I chose them not only because they are really good at hair removal, but because uniquely amongst electolyisists in North America, they use anesthetic during the sessions. That is, they inject your face with lidocaine.

This has a lot of advantages–since you have to let your hairs grow (so they can tell which ones are active) for several days, there’s an advantage to having your whole face cleared in a single day, something not really possible without anesthetic. (I’ve felt electrolysis without the lidocaine–not something you’d want to sit through for a couple of hours.)

The problem is, the lidocaine hurts: it gets injected at a shallow angle, multiple times, and it burns like acid under the skin. Sure, it’s just for a few minutes, but those few minutes are pretty hellish–I cried the first time.

I still think it’s worth it. Not because I couldn’t be a woman with some facial hair; I’ve known plenty of women like that. No, it’s worth it because of what it does for me–because shaving was the most masculine thing I did every day; because the things I had to do to cover up my beard were so frustrating and annoying, and such a reminder of who I wasn’t; and because stubble is one of the things that remind me most of who I was.

So I keep coming. After a while, the lidocaine gets hurts less. And so does my past.

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I Feel Pretty, I Feel…Coerced Into Being Co-Opted By the Patriarchalist Beauty Myth

Categories: beauty mythology, invasive kyriarchy, the patriarchy: you can't live with it....that is all

I wear makeup. Almost everyday. In fact, I’m writing this from a nail salon, where some nice ladies are tackling my feet with a belt sander.

Now, when I say makeup, I mean just any old cosmetic. Most days, it’s just some lipstick, and long-wear stuff at that, so I don’t have to touch it up during the day; when I have to do a client visit, or am going out on the town, I’ll add some blush and eye makeup. The whole deal takes about five minutes.

I wasn’t always so minimalist. When I first began to present as female outside of my apartment, I wore a lot of makeup. Some of it was by necessity: beard shadow is tough to hide, so heavy foundation was usually called for. Some of it, of course, was just wanting to wear makeup, because most of the time I didn’t allow myself to.

Since those days, I’ve done various things (like electrolysis) to make my life easier. Yet I still wear makeup, and as I am an introspective feminist, I wonder about what it says about me that I do.

Part of the reason is definitely to avoid any “OMGITSADOOODLOLZ”. The last time I went out of the house without wearing lipstick (about a year ago) I got “clocked” (picked out as trans) rather nastily. At six a.m. Before I’d had any coffee.

Such trouble, I don’t need.

Another reason is that I actually like to wear makeup, at least some of the time. I like the way it makes me look. I like the way that liking the way I look makes me feel, just as I like how I feel when I think I’m wearing a nice-looking outfit.

This is obviously a bit more problematic.

Because there’s no doubt that doing so feeds into negative stereotypes of how a woman is supposed to look, dress, and act. There’s little doubt in my mind that most of these are patriarchalist; that many are demeaning to women; that they constitute an ongoing backlash against women who dared be more than adjuncts to male sexuality.

I mean, hey, I’ve read Naomi Wolfe, I get all that.

But in my case it’s even more complicated. Because, you see, I never had a girlhood; I didn’t spend my childhood having lessons about what is proper or popular drummed into my head; and because of that, my relationship to fashion and cosmetics is a lot less complicated than most women my age.

I’m a bit like my friend Joanna. (Not that it matters, but she’s not trans.) She didn’t spend her high school or even early-adult years worrying that much about the latest clothes, the hippest trends. But around the time that I began to become interested in finding clothes I thought made me look good, instead of clothes that just made me look like a woman, she became interested in fashion. And she’s now one of the most fashionable people I know, though not trendy or consumed with a passion for the next unattainable fashion accessory.

For both of us, our clothes, our makeup, our appearance is a lot more about the pleasure we get from it than a pressure to fit in. I won’t deny that pressure exists–of course it does; but we both feel a lot more comfortable resisting it.

Or like I said before, we dress the way we do because of how it makes us feel, not because of how we feel we have to.

Ariel Levy said something in Female Chauvinist Pigs that I think gets at what I’m saying:

Monitoring her appearance and measuring the response to it have been her focal point. If her looks were a kind of hobby–if dressing and grooming and working out were things she did for pleasure–then the process would be its own reward. But she spoke of her pursuit as a kind of Sisyphean duty, one that many of her friends had charged themselves with as well.

I guess what I’m saying is that I definitely don’t feel the Sisyphean duty part of that equation.

But by the same token, I can’t help thinking about exactly how much I’m co-opted with the use of standards of beauty to repress women, that I can’t help but think that while I may feel good for wearing certain clothes, that’s only because the patriarchal culture around me tells me that I should, that these shoes/skirts/jeans make you feel good, and those (comfortable) shoes/(not-tight) skirts/(loose enough to breathe in) jeans won’t. It’s hard to sort out and the only thing that comforts me is that a lot of other women my age struggle to sort it out too.

But I’m still going to wear lipstick. Because more than one “LOLZURAGUYYYY” is too much. Hell, one was already too much.