Читать книгу Fat, Pretty, and Soon to be Old - Kimberly Dark - Страница 5

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

—Adrienne Rich

This is not just a memoir told in essays. It’s a call for radical cultural change.

My mother sold the dream of life mastery—a chance for sovereignty within the restrictive and persistent landscape of patriarchy. I’m talking about the 1960s now. That was a long time ago, or at least that’s what you tell yourself.

At first, that dream of mastery was for white women specifically—but then it included men, children, and people of color as well. It included the rich, middle class, and lower-middle class but never the very poor. It could include queer folks as long as they were gender-­conforming. It never included gender-non-binary folks.

My mother went to modeling classes when she was still in high school, in 1949. Her family was working class but white, so they were able to take advantage of the new FHA home loans and buy a house. They were set toward economic improvement, and their only daughter was pretty, so it made sense to give her the skills for upward mobility.

After her modeling school graduation was attended by many of her high school friends, she reaped the rewards of being seen as skilled at beauty, capable of charm. During the 1950s, she was a model herself. That was a time when the women who sold products were nameless smiling beauties, not celebrities. She went on to work for—and eventually owned—a John Robert Powers franchise. Powers’s eponymous charm schools began in 1923, and business boomed right up to the Internet age. I believe three social developments took place during the late 1980s and early 1990s in the United States to hasten the decline of modeling and charm schools. One was the increasing use of Internet sharing: not relying on just magazine articles, real people shared beauty secrets online. The second related phenomenon was the slight diversification of beauty ideals. It was possible to find affinity groups and positive representation of women of color, redheads with freckles, and very tall women, for instance. Specific lessons on hyper-­conformity began to feel retrograde. The third development to hasten the demise of charm schools was the widespread availability of consumer credit and the ability of doctors to advertise to the general public, which began during the Reagan era. All of these changes made beauty a do-it-yourself endeavor and the body a repair project worthy of medical interventions like cosmetic and bariatric surgery, not just dieting and careful packaging.

Here’s the main premise of the charm school era in which I grew up and that still influences the world we live in today: if a woman can figure out how to be beautiful and how to have charm, she is more likely to control her own destiny.

This is not incorrect. And it’s a sorry substitution for meaningful social change that would actually allow women respect and the ability to steward their own destinies. When I was born, no matter how pretty or charming or trim, no matter how capable of emotional labor or choosing the right bottle of wine for dinner or enunciating proper English, a woman still could not open a credit card account without her husband’s permission. Women could still legally be raped by their husbands. Even today, we are not always able to secure birth control as part of our health plans and certainly not always believed when reporting abuse.

Further, appearance still affects quality of life. A lot. We all know this, yet we subvert our knowing by telling stories about love (in intimate relationships), talent (in employment), and tenacity (in all meaningful pursuits). The fact is, people see their partners’ appearance or power (or both) as an extension of their own success. (And you know immediately for which of the two dominant genders each is most important.) Employers want their employees’ appearance to uphold and extend their brand credibility, and they won’t hire those who are easily disdained (e.g., fat people or old people, unless they are absurdly cute and entertaining). Without reasonable accommodations, no amount of tenacity will help a wheelchair user turn a flight of stairs into a ramp. Yet we still discuss personal tenacity and positive thinking as the key ingredients in overcoming public barriers.

While modeling schools showed women (and others) how to conform to beauty standards, we less often discussed what the particular homogenization of those standards meant to consumer America. People of color were taught to act and dress and appear whiter in order to gain access to everyday advantages. Fat people were taught to “reduce” or give the appearance of disappearance, to blend in. Disabled people were taught to develop personality, to emotionally manage others’ expectations regarding their abilities. Conformity to the gender binary was paramount. These are the values with which I grew up, and our family business was to teach people how to navigate social expectations successfully.

And, of course, those lessons cost money. “Personal development” courses were marketed by modeling schools as an investment in one’s familial and professional success. While these courses were not the first or only expression of consumerist values in personal improvement, they were a strong precursor to the current-day thinking that encourages us to spend money to improve ourselves. Whereas previous (turn-of-the-nineteenth-century) ideas of self-improvement may have encouraged reading more classic literature, doing good deeds in one’s community, or learning to play a musical instrument, current thinking assumes that people—women more than men, people of color more than white people, fat people more than slender people—must engage in appropriate appearance management. The undertaking is so important that rather than learning the skills of fashion, design, and hairstyling, for instance, individuals spend huge sums for professional help to be sure they get it right. Indeed, spending money has become tantamount to expanding personal power, even when it paradoxically leads to impoverishment and long-lasting debt.

You may not have discussed the tools of conformity as openly as my family did (and we didn’t discuss it using this language), but you grew up with these norms too. These values didn’t just go away because we were learning about them on the Internet or discussing physical modifications with our doctors rather than taking classes in a downtown high-rise after work as in the heyday of John Robert Powers.

The basic idea of “self-improvement”—learning how to better play the game—was benevolent, except that it reinforced a hierarchy to keep racial privilege, social class privilege, and all the other privileges in place. Appearance matters. People behave differently toward you if you’re white, well-dressed, pretty, young, gender-conforming. This is another way of saying, as bell hooks so often does, that we live in an “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” We can all test the idea that appearance and cultural capital matter using reflections on our own lives. Consider how people spoke about each other’s appearance following your last large family gathering. What was she wearing? Did he really put on that much weight? How does she not know how old she looks with that hairstyle? Consider the process of job interviewing. With rare exceptions, these experiences uphold hegemonic appearance standards, and, if you are recalling an exception, you are aware that it is indeed an exception to the norm. The criteria by which we judge others—even if we have the compassion not to speak our judgment—betray the cultural values over which we believe we have control.

For instance, most people think they’re choosing how to look and expressing individuality without considering the built-in desire for maximum social privilege and how that keeps systems of oppression based on privilege intact. Most don’t consider the importance of expressing group solidarity—appearing like one’s friend group or political party or profession. With an array of options on the Internet, most don’t consider the paucity of choices in local shopping chains and how much of what we order online actually conforms with the inventory already available at the local Home Depot or Marshalls.

These factors drive decision-making. Even when the pursuit of privilege becomes invisible, it is easily revealed by trying to imagine an opposite. Author hooks has also commented on how white supremacy influences everyone—even white people—to aspire to whiteness. Think about the increasing number of salons that specialize in giving patrons blond hair and “natural” highlights, often accompanied by straightening or “blowout” services. Now think about how absurd it would seem to walk past the same salon focused on giving patrons of any race artificial dark afros. Yet somehow we remain uncomfortable talking about the descriptor hooks uses persistently: “imperialist, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” She reports that people often laugh when she says this, like it’s hyperbole, a joke for effect. She reminds us that she’s just being concise.

No, we’d rather take on the neoliberal beauty project and lament the fact that hierarchy still exists but that at least we’re doing our best not to be at the bottom. When I first started giving public presentations in the 1990s on the distribution of wealth and income based on race and gender, I worked with community-based coalitions. Though they were often quite progressive, they still felt that a focus on how people should dress for interviews would be more useful than showing people how the cultural and political deck has been stacked against them.

“Couldn’t we videotape people so they could see how their ­lower-class ways, words, and appearance are defeating them?” I was asked. “Shouldn’t we be focused on changing the individuals? People need immediate results.” And, “Hey, what if we have a drive for plus-size business wear for women. That’ll help.” The thing is, these tactics do help some people who are on the edge of appearance acceptability. But they will never help restructure economic opportunities, revise policies, or lead to true inner peace about how one looks. These tactics may pull up a “movable middle,” but they will always keep a social hierarchy, with a clear top and bottom, intact.

Look, I get it. So much of what’s influencing our lives seems out of our control. We just want to know what we can do to make things better. That’s why the neoliberal nonsense about self-improvement enhancing upward mobility (primarily via educational degrees and appearance modification) seems so attractive. Of course, personal improvement goals like degrees, weight loss, and wardrobe improvement overwhelmingly serve to feed the consumerist growth monster of debt and bolster the notion that we are not worthy unless we look and achieve in certain ways. That is, these aims actually rob of us of time, money, and personal sovereignty. The idea that people can assume debt in order to create a better future is the leading personal paradox of our time.

Nowadays, dieting and dressing well are not enough. Doctors (wrongly) say that the body can be safely and surgically slenderized, noses trimmed, breasts enhanced—and all on an affordable payment plan. And if you still feel badly about how you look for any reason, add body positivity to your to-do list because failing to love your body is yet another personal problem to be solved. Self-esteem is sexy; confidence helps you become employable; loving yourself improves health.

In her book, American Plastic, Laurie Essig calls the widespread availability of plastic surgery and consumer credit “the perfect storm.” She also points out that we are acculturated as consumers to believe that these entail our personal desires rather than cultural conformity. As she explains in the chapter “Learning to Be Plastic,” “To keep beauty profitable, our bodies must be colonized as if they were foreign lands. In this way, beauty can create new markets and extract more wealth.”

My body has been used to frighten people into doing something about their own, so as not to become like me. I’ve often been targeted by advertising campaigns and doctors for surgical interventions, which I’ve not pursued, so you won’t read about those experiences in this book. I hope it is clear that we are all influenced by living in a culture that sees these efforts as reasonable self-improvements despite the health and financial risks. The intersections of various forms of appearance privilege, along with the intertwined pursuits of credibility based on social class or educational attainment, are also explored here. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu extended Marx’s idea of capital into the realm of the cultural, and that’s the thinking I apply here. Marx distinguished capital from money. Money to buy goods or services is just money. Capital is money that is used to buy things in order to sell them again. Capital creates wealth, which is intertwined with social relationship. Appearance privilege and the hierarchy it creates can be understood in similar terms.

Bourdieu refers to the “symbolic” collection of skills, mannerisms, credentials, accent, posture, et cetera that comprise the tool kit of privilege, of which we are often unconscious. Those tools are rarely used in a quid pro quo arrangement—to purchase a specific commodity. Like Marx’s idea of capital, they are used to barter toward greater gain across time and within relationships. We create additional social capital based on where we work, with whom we associate, and how we seem to significant audiences. That is, our agreement on what constitutes beauty matters. Our perpetuation of the means to create and achieve hegemonic beauty matters a great deal.

In many ways, the modeling school era of my youth and of my mother’s generation were more honest in their pursuit of that privilege. They knew that privilege was the aim—to be seen as someone with a model’s beauty would yield complex personal and professional rewards. The coursework did not just include how to shape the body through hunger, color, shading, and clothing; it included how to enunciate clearly, use refined diction, choose wine at dinner, and steward a scintillating conversation during the meal.

As if our participation in upholding these standards for the sake of corporate profit weren’t nefarious enough, we tend to accept that some people just have a certain “way about them,” a feel for being slender, youthful, and attractive, while others don’t. Our belief in beauty, charm, and charisma adds to its capital. Some women just don’t feel good enough about themselves. That’s a shame, we might say, but it’s up to them to remedy the situation. We don’t even see that it is within our collective ability to amend that circumstance for all women. Now that body positivity is the new marketing edict, if a woman doesn’t present flawless love and acceptance of herself, she’s also to blame for the shame and awkwardness that others witness.

Of course, feeling positive about one’s appearance is not just a personal problem, though painful self-image can assail anyone. Bourdieu explained how this reinforces the idea that some people are worthy of receiving social rewards while others are not. Capitalism and all forms of class society shore up and reproduce themselves by dividing people. The obvious divisions have to do with social class, but the history of racism in the United States is another fine example. Our forebears simply invented another appearance-based distinction on which to base distribution of resources. We are still living with the vibrant consequences of deciding that when we look at some people, we are witnessing less humanity, even though the period of their servitude has formally ended. (Note that when I say “we” I am not speaking on behalf of whiteness. I am speaking on behalf of United States culture. Even those who are oppressed internalize a diminished humanity, until we are able to believe and behave otherwise.)

Very few people consciously want this to be so. People want to feel comfortable. The startling paradox here is that love and connection are the most comforting things humans know. Yet most people are daily reinforcing capitalist divisions that keep us alienated from the love we might otherwise feel for one another’s bodies and for the beauty of human diversity. This, at its most fundamental—the inability to love and value our own and other people’s bodies—is what keeps human culture disdainful, violent, and purchasing in order to alleviate our suffering. Consumerism—some might say capitalism itself—feeds itself when it feeds on our desire for connection and personal respect.

We have to cultivate the ability to look at other people’s bodies and love them with an expansive agape. We have to care for our own and other people’s bodies with compassion and tenderness. The mechanisms that reproduce inequality have become invisible. I believe that through storytelling we can reveal them again.

Body positivity will never be enough. As it’s presented in advertising and media, body positivity is not about doing away with beauty conformity. It is merely calling attention to the fact that beauty conformity is important enough that you should be allowed into the club. By saying that a slightly wider variety of bodies should be seen as acceptable—maybe not optimal, but acceptable—the importance of beauty conformity is solidified. There is nothing radical about this. As Amanda Mull offered in “Body Positivity Is a Scam,”

Like most ideas that become anodyne and useless enough for corporate marketing plans, “body positivity” didn’t begin that way—it started out radical and fringe, as a tenet of the fat acceptance movement of the 1960s. Back then, body positivity was just one element of an ideology that included public anti-discrimination protests and anti-capitalist advocacy against the diet industry, and it made a specific political point: To have a body that’s widely reviled and discriminated against and love it anyway, in the face of constant cultural messaging about your flaws, is subversive.

Now body positivity has shed its radical, practical goals in favor of an advocacy that’s entirely aesthetic and a problem that can be wholly solved by those looking to sell you something. The brands previously thought you should feel one way about yourself, and now they have decided that’s no longer appropriate for their goals. How you talk about yourself should change, even if nothing has changed that would materially affect how you feel.

The way these companies see it, our self-perception is unrelated to the external forces that determine the circumstances of our existence, which is why they think telling us to do better is enough to absolve them of responsibility.

So when do we get to not only see the bigger picture but hold it long enough to modify it? As the title of this book says, I’m soon to be old. I’m not kidding about that shit. As a woman who is fat, pretty, queer, and aging, among other things, I have a perspective that might help us reach critical mass as we discuss social change. Sure, wear the “body shaper” if you think it’s going to help you not be ridiculed on the bus. Put on some makeup if it’s going to help you be heard in the job interview. I’m not against the savvy application of social knowledge. But let the application of social knowledge be this: artful manipulation of privilege, not a daily quest for privilege that leaves existing power structures unchecked.

When it comes to those power structures, it matters how we talk and behave, what we wear, and which norms we challenge in small ways, day after day after day. We are creating culture even as it creates us. It matters that we check our own stories, discuss common words and phrases with our friends, and prepare for the moments that will happen again and again throughout our days, months, years, and lives. Before this day is through, someone will discuss dieting again in your presence. Unless you’re reading this in bed at 11:00 p.m., I can almost guarantee it.

We have to get ready, think clearly, behave differently, speak openly, and show who we are and what we want the world to be. No more just talking in private or just thinking about how we’re not comfortable when someone says, “Fat big-lip bitch” to the black female fast-food worker who’s slowly helping the person ahead of you in line. What’s happening in that comment? We have to own what we know, prepare to interrupt the culture as it is and become cultural creators.

Before someone can see you, you have to be you. I’m going to show you who I am in these pages with the hope of prompting urgency with this practice. I’m going to show you because I respect you. I believe in our ability to make the world a better place before we die. That’s what I care about. Not staying pretty. Not losing weight. I care about justice. See how you feel as you read; I hope your own creativity is sparked in the process too.