~a column by Colleen O’Brien
How many men worry about their hair in the wind? Or check their faces in a compact mirror after lunch with their cohorts? Have you ever come across your husband contemplating a face lift by pulling the skin on his face back taut?
“Men tend to judge themselves in terms of what they can do, whereas women tend to equate self-worth with good looks.”
With few exceptions this statement from the book Beauty Bound by Rita Freedman is as true now as when it was published in the late 1970s. And it was true before and during the height of the major feminist movement burgeoning then, which was not about female beauty but about female rights, accomplishments and realized potential.
If we are still stuck in what was true when Helen of Troy, a BC beauty, was what any woman in the know wanted to look like, we have not come a long way, baby.
The cult of beauty has more worshippers now than ever before. Women in their late 20s are getting their first facelift and tummy tuck, exercising not so much for health as for looks and starving themselves to look svelte even if they haven’t the kind of bodies built to be skinny.
No matter our looks, whether ugly, pretty or in between, we spend a lot of time on beauty rituals – curling our hair or straightening it, painting our toenails and applying false fingernails, wearing foundation, blusher, mascara, eyeliner and the all important lipstick. By the time we’re 40, we have more beauty aids and enhancers than Cleopatra.
Freedman says in Beauty Bound, “…women’s lives are bound….” What an apt play on words as she points out the idealized beauty and at the same time its secret belief in inferiority of beautiful women. Meaning that we have to be beautiful to be seen, but because we are beautiful, we have no brains.
Humans by nature are attracted to beauty, especially in human form, and because that is so, many of us females continue our quest for beauty forever. We waste a lot of time; could have won a PhD, become CEO, started a non-profit for children. But the mores and zeitgeist of century after century dictated that once a woman, twice a worrywart regarding our looks. And we don’t admit to ourselves that we’re chasing a chimera, fearing that future of wrinkles and sag.
Years ago, when I asked my husband what he’d do when I was old and wrinkled, he said, “Prob’ly leave you.” He was a great kidder, and I knew he was kidding; but the kernel of truth in it rose up enough to make me curse eyelash curlers and decide I didn’t have to play the game fully. If he didn’t have to be pretty to be worthy, neither did I. So I pared it down to mascara and lipstick; now I’m down to lipstick.
But the reality is, the older I get the less I care; and since he is dead and gone, I don’t have to compete with his wrinkled but perfectly accepted beauty – which it would have been had he lived long enough. And the other reality is that I hope my daughter puts lipstick on me when I’m in my casket, like my sisters and I did for our mom as she awaited the “viewing” at her own funeral. We shooed the mortician out of the room, brought out our cosmetic bags and went to work – mascara, blush, lipstick, fluffing of the hair, dangly earrings, a wild scarf and she looked like she’s just laid down for a bit of a nap before being picked up by her girlfriends for lunch. She was a doll in her demise, proving that it ain’t over till it’s over.
I wish the same for all us women who worked hard at feminism and a woman’s worth in the world . . . however much we longed to be femme fatales along with becoming Chair of the Board.
