I think sometimes that Men-who-Desire-Women don’t really understand the complicated relationship that women can have with make-up (and fashion generally.)
The use of cosmetics in western culture is pretty strongly relegated as a behavior exclusive to the female gender, as demonstrated by a recent page in Cosmo that said, commenting on the concept of nail polish marketed for men, “Johnny Depp may be able to pull it off because he’s smokin’ hot anyway, but here’s hoping most guys don’t fall for it.” (Not that the concept of “nail polish marketed to men” is not deserving of some serious critique, but because it isn’t “manly” isn’t the greatest approach.)
I am not generally in favor of the arguments that posit that “all things feminine” (like wearing lipstick, high heels or shaving one’s legs) are inherently oppressive—that is a debate that has been going on between 2nd and 3rd wave feminists since well before me and one I don’t feel need to get into here. I believe that there is a subtle, internalized misogyny at play when feminists themselves get going on a circle-jerk of “pink-bashing” and begin to measure “feminist enough” by the extremes to which a woman refuses to perform “femininity.” I would also like to take it as a given, that one cannot care about gender equality and not notice the ways in which female bodies are policed, and how present-day idealized femininity is often painful, time-consuming, and costly to reproduce. Not to mention physically unhealthy.
Those two points established, lets return to the issue of make-up. While someone who wishes to present as female-gendered has many options, make-up is coded as feminine and so is one of several fairly reliable means methods along with feminine clothing and long-hair, that an actor has to manipulate their body (without great expense and commitment) to present as female. Make-up is not just “female,” it’s coded as specifically “feminine,” as well as “heterosexual.” Despite the work of queer studies to illuminate the existence and experiences of “femme” lesbians and bi/pansexual women, heteronormative culture assumes that the main reason women have for wanting to make their appearance “more attractive” is to attract Men (and also the definition of “more attractive” is by definition, that which attracts men.) There are some limited arguments that women really dress up more for each other than to attract heterosexual mates, but I would argue that that is only because women are usually the caretakers of the gender-boundary and are charged with policing each other’s appropriate performance of femininity for the benefit of the patriarchy—the women do it in place for the men having to do so.
The “choice” argument can only really mitigate individual internal experience, because while an individual may imbue a certain meaning in their own actions, they have no (or at least very little) control over how others interpret their actions and appearance. Thus the “choice” behind wearing make-up and high heels is limited not only in the coerciveness of heteronormative culture, but also the inability of the actor to limit viewer’s reinterpretation of their choices of self-expression back into a performance of sexual attractiveness and how that influences others behaviors towards the actor. Make-up is not only constructed as “something extra” that women can do in order to make themselves more attractive. It is also, despite the fact that plenty of women no longer “can’t bear to leave the house without doing her face”, still a feature of the policing of women’s bodies that wearing make-up is a feature of simply “making oneself presentable.” The “acceptable range” of female-ness has widened fairly considerably in the past 60 years, women wearing pants and not make-up, short hair and button-down shirts can still present as female. However, when pressured, dressing “nicely” requires reinforcing gendered cues. I had a (female) boss, several years ago, tell me that I needed to wear make-up to work to my business-casual, data-entry job (that never interacted with customers) because I needed to look “more professional.”
The above generally assumes that the person applying make-up in fact, wants to be read as feminine. Under certain contexts (such as in movies), men can use make-up without having their masculinity questioned, and in others it’s a willing statement about ambiguous masculinity or queerness. But because make-up is not constructed as a compulsive obligation of masculinity, men who choose to play with gender and make-up (whether queer or otherwise) are not taking up standards of compulsive masculinity, they are breaking those standards and playing with taboos. (Yes, men can be punished for breaking such standards, but it functions totally differently.) Women who choose to wear make-up have no such luxury, they generally cannot play with make-up without reinforcing their female-gender. (Much like white middle-class or upper-class women who “choose” to work are playing with an option that most women of color traditionally have never had.) For persons assigned-female-at-birth, for those who feel ambivalent about being gendered female, for those whose preferred target of sexual attraction may not be men, and for some of us who generally don’t feel at war with our assigned gender but still feel constricted by the assumptions behind much of what is structured to be “feminine,” willingly putting on markers of femininity can be… complicated.
I personally, usually don’t experience much dysphoria in relation to my assigned-birth-gender. I am sort of okay with being categorized as woman, usually. I find a lot of gendered assumptions about women stifling—but I consider that a feature of living under patriarchy, not a fundamental misalignment between my assigned gender and my gender identity. My gender identity is generally “ambiguous female” with limited expressions of “femininity.” I don’t really wake-up in the morning with my immediate thoughts and feelings being “feminine,” but I don’t wake up feeling “masculine” either. Sometimes I fantasize about having different genitals, but it functions as a sexual curiosity, not a distaste for my existing ones. (Note: Many transgendered people never pursue genital-reassignment surgery as part of their transition, as genitals are not the defining characteristic of one’s gender identity.) Sometimes I feel dissatisfaction with the natural shape of my breasts, but that is a pretty standard feature of being female-identified, regardless of what body size one has. (However, I have also generally felt that my breasts also make it really difficult, should I desire, to be read as anything other than female by most observers.)
I feel a lot of ambivalence towards some traditionally “feminine”-coded behaviors, which I suspect to be a feature of the devaluation of things-associated-with-femininity and “girly-ness” in general, but none-the-less that informs my own preferred gender-identity. Because of this, most of my day to day performance of gender (the clothes and accessories I wear, how much time I spend on my appearance, how I wear my hair, my language, voice, laughter, bodily gestures, way of walking and negotiating space, my choice to continue not shaving my legs or armpits) focus not entirely consciously on avoiding overt appearances of (what is for me) “femininity” while generally accepting (and assuming) that people will read me as “female.”
My position on this has fluctuated over time and life experiences, when I was very little I actually insisted on wearing dresses. When I was about 7, I also wanted to be Peter Pan and butchered my hair (and nearly gave my mother a heart attack, but, you know!) (There are some really unfortunate fashion moments in my childhood pictures, such as one strange very tight pink satin dress with black polka-dots that I’m really not sure why my mother ever let me wear.) At one point I really wanted curly hair, I’m not sure why. My first high heels were satin pink stilettos—I loved them. To death, literally. But mostly as dress-up play-clothing for in my room, there was only a narrow window of opportunity where they even fit AND would match anything I had to wear. I think I liked the flamboyancy, and I played with my mom’s make-up a lot before I eventually got my own, but I often felt like it didn’t really “fit” right on me. I didn’t feel like I could wear/do flamboyant high-femme without looking ridiculous.
Make-up was, and is, for me a tool of play-acting, of putting on characters or roles or fantasies. In fact, I still do this. I still have a large container/drawer of make-up, mostly left over from experiments in when I was wearing it on a regular basis to conform with gendered-standards of “being presentable.” And sometimes I play with it like a 12 year old would, putting on bright red lipstick that doesn’t really match just to see how it looks, or painting on bright flamboyant eye shadow—all faces that I would never wear in public, where the casual observer relies too much on compulsive femininity and heteronormative standards to interpret my display as anything else. And I, like anyone else, strongly desire others interpreted observations of me to match my internal gender identity so for the most part—I don’t wear make-up. Sometimes I do, but it’s a game. It’s a face I wear when I feel up for it, and its generally far less about feeling or appearing feminine than playing with just looking “different.” (Right now, my hair is dyed an unnaturally bright red and that can dramatically change how make-up effects are interpreted.)
For many men-who-desire-women that I know, the desire to see a female partner “dressed up” in make-up, with or without femme-ish clothing like skirts or heels (or lingerie) seems fairly innocuous. “Make-up” is something females do, after all, remember? To the best that I can tell, usually these requests are sourced somewhere in sexual desire, not inherently a belief about gender roles so much, but there’s also sometimes an context of “appropriateness” for certain social spaces, that certain events should “naturally” include more “dressing up.” (And “dressing up” by women, by and large, requires more “femme”-y-ness the more formal you go. My mother forced me to wear a dress to her wedding. I hate those pictures.)
It only becomes worse, in my opinion, when the request comes in the form of, “please? can’t you just do it for me, just occasionally or something?”
What they may mean, perhaps, is “I like and desire you and I think you’re sexy—you should look sexy because I think you’re sexy!” and maybe also, “I would like to feel like you actively want to attract me to you.” Or sometimes, “I would like other people to see you as attractive as I always see you.”
But it can often sort of comes off as, one of several things:
“I want to see you performing femininity for me [i.e., you don’t perform femininity well enough otherwise]”
“Your normal way of doing things is not attractive to me.”
These first two may be the most obvious. Women’s bodies and the attractiveness of their appearance is often constructed, due to the “make over” culture, as a feature primarily of how much effort they put in. Therefore it is often assumed that a lack of conventional beauty comes about through laziness, rather than an intentionally chosen construction of gender. Also, women’s discomfort and dissatisfaction with their bodies is so prevalent that it's perceived as a norm, so any request to change appearance can automatically be assumed to be threatening (even when it’s not intended—even in fact, when it’s not interpreted that way, others may interpret it that way for you!)
Less obvious may be:
“I feel entitled to view your body in a way that is pleasing to me, not necessarily in ways that are pleasing to you or match your own self-identity.”
“I feel so entitled to view your body in a certain way, that I want to allow others to interpret your body in ways that may be counter to your own gender identity.”
This last one is particularly frustrating, because it combines everything together—assumptions that all women desire to be seen attractive in a certain way and that not doing so isn’t an intentional act, the complexities of gender identity that is more than just female/male, the inability of the actor to control how casual observers interpret certain contextualized appearance cues, the compulsive/coercive construction of “perfect” femininity, long-standing tradition of politicizing women’s appearance—in a way that makes it very hard to explain to someone (like a partner of a different gender) who doesn’t experience these things.
For me, make-up (and other performances of femininity) are masks, they are only miniscule facets of my identity. Sometimes, I am prepared to navigate public spaces with those masks on, and all the assumptive ideas that others will have and that will inform their interactions with me. Sometimes, my internal gender identity will match and be comfortable presenting in that way. Often times though, I’m not at all prepared to do that.
Asking me to dress “femme” doesn’t offend my “feminist principles” because of some fundamental belief about the wrongness of male desires to look at women’s bodies. But it does rob me of the ability to play with my own gender. It risks making every action I do which might seem to match that request, feel like an act of conforming to someone else’s desires instead of expressing my own fluctuating gendered body, and as such functions as a very subtle (and perhaps unintentional) theft of bodily autonomy.
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