Lady Business: Till We Have (Smooth, Dewy, Feminized, Ideal) Faces
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the twenty-third issue, published April 5, 2018.
Facing Up
I was reminded this weekend of Till We Have Faces, a C.S. Lewis novel I both enjoyed and loathed growing up. For obvious reasons, if you know me/read this newsletter: The heroine is a queen and a great warrior in ancient Rome … whose tragedy is that she’s ugly. Ruling-with-a-veil-over-her-face hideous. Clearly there’s no worse fate for a lady.
(Well, except for the resulting “misfortune” of her virginity, as Lewis later put it. We’re not talking Diana of Themyscira here; Lewis, an academic writing in the 1950s, clearly saw “badass warrior queen” as a consolation prize for “proper wife and mother.” Which isn’t terribly shocking, considering his “Susan can’t get into Narnia!heaven because she wears lipstick” track record. Lewis was kind of the super-Christian Aaron Sorkin of his day when it came to writing women.)
Women’s faces -- what we’re born with, what we do to them, and how we’re made to feel about all of the above – are big business. Americans spent $17.7 billion on beauty products last year, according to the NPD Group, including skincare ($5.6 billion), makeup ($8.1 billion) and fragrance ($4 billion). (Not mentioned: Ugliness veils.)
None of which is surprising if you’ve grown up with a female-presenting face, or been paying attention to the Internet skincare wars. I admit to being a bit neutral on the latter; I can enjoy using three moisturizers and two eye creams and the occasional sheet mask without necessarily needing 15 guides to them, but, you know. Let she who writes no newsletter cast the first stone.
It’s also predictably tiresome to see women being shamed, yet again, for spending money on shopping, and on beauty. On that thing that’s supposed to be “only skin deep,” except for how everyone feels entitled to an opinion. (And for how it affects the jobs we get and the money we earn.) On the faces that we present to the world, and that we can only do so much to change and control.
All of these are heightened tensions for trans women who pay to “feminize” their faces, a procedure that can cost as much as $60,000. This recent New Yorker feature examines the balance between treating gender dysphoria--helping women look like women--and upholding an idealized and sometimes harmful standard of feminine beauty. The (cis, hetero male) surgeons known for this procedure have chosen the latter:
Ousterhout initially sought to bring his patients within the middle of the femininity range that he had established through his research into facial shapes. But as he became known as the leading authority in facial feminization—a field that was rapidly being populated by other surgeons—his surgical interventions became more extensive. He gradually came to believe that he should try to make his patients look not just like average women but like beautiful women. In part, this was to counterbalance common masculine traits that a trans patient cannot alter, such as the size of her hands. But Ousterhout’s decision also had the effect of upholding certain cultural assumptions about what is beautiful or feminine.
... Not everyone in the trans community sees facial feminization as offering unalloyed benefits. “Passing” can be a fraught notion for trans people, much as it has been for people of color. For some, facial feminization is seen as bolstering restrictive stereotypes while stigmatizing gender nonconformity. And, given that the surgery is too expensive for most trans women, it has been criticized as perpetuating what Plemons calls “an embodied form of woman that was idealized by many but available only to a few.” The sociologist Heather Laine Talley, in her 2014 book, “Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance,” has argued that “facial feminization relies on and reproduces essentialized notions about what distinguishes a male face from a female face.” From this perspective, facial feminization may offer the individual who undergoes it a reprieve from prejudice, but it may also reinforce the broader oppressive structures that leave trans people disproportionately vulnerable to discrimination and violence.
The entire piece is worth a read, not least for the extremely vivid (and occasionally wince-inducing) language recapping one surgery. However frivolous and gross-sounding snail-mucus sheet masks might be, at least they don’t include eyelid sutures!
Lady Bits
-A bit of a brief Lady Business this week, as I’ve been on another deadline, but I’ll leave you with this quite horrifying conversation between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Lawrence “Empire Strikes Back” Kasdan about Indiana Jones and his proposed 11-year-old lover. Thank God we somehow got Karen Allen instead.
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