Femininity (18 page)

My own claim to beauty, I learned at college, was an unusually pale skin which bruised
easily and did not tan, presenting a striking contrast to my dark hair and darker
disposition and wardrobe. To my romantic satisfaction, I was known on campus as “the
white-skinned girl,” an extraordinary tribute at an Ivy League school of ten thousand
students and many blondes. My tendency to bruise, a perpetual crisis in childhood
whenever I came home from the playground, was elevated, largely by me, to an emblem
of fragile sensitivity of the sort that marks a sisterhood of heroines in sentimental
novels, and my whiter-than-white complexion was compared favorably by some clever
boyfriends to the Spanish royalty painted by Goya and to the stark, sophisticated
models in the black-and-white pages of
Vogue.
Needless to say, I gloried in my delicate coloration, expecting the compliments to
continue over the years as a matter of course. Sadly for my femininity quotient, my
porcelain complexion, my alabaster loveliness, darkened with time to an average color.

In
Pride and Prejudice
the jealous Miss Bingley had scoffed
at Elizabeth Bennet for her coarse, brown complexion while the loyal Darcy staunchly
defended his ladylove’s right to the summer tan she had inadvertently acquired on
walks in the country. Lively, athletic Elizabeth was a woman ahead of her times. It
wasn’t until the 1920s that the rich overcame their historic aversion to the sun’s
effects and took up the pastime of soaking up the summer rays at their seaside resorts
and watering spas. The sybaritic novelty of toasting to perfection on the Riviera
or lying on a beach blanket at the Lido was strictly for the summer months, and the
women’s magazines of that era still featured advertisements for skin whiteners and
freckle creams to improve the feminine complexion. By the 1960s, however, the superior
femininity of lily-white skin had become an outdated concept, replaced by the healthful
vision of the golden California girl and the tawny glow of the international jet set
who followed the sun, never fully unpacking their Gucci bags. An expensively acquired
Caribbean tan became an enviable winter status symbol when compared to a dull office
pallor. Quick to capitalize on middle-class aspirations, cosmetics companies began
to feature tawny makeup and rosy blushers for the winter season so a secretary or
file clerk could look as though she’d been somewhere interesting, at least in her
imagination.

But just when a ruddy complexion was no longer the mark of a low-class laborer or
the exclusive dominion of lean, hard masculine strength, dermatologists sounded the
warning (the alarms were especially loud in
Vogue
and other women’s magazines) that nothing ages Caucasian skin more rapidly and irreversibly
than prolonged exposure to the sun. If large numbers of women become convinced that
the leathery, wrinkled look of a sea captain, or skin cancer, may be in store for
them rather than a permanent extension of a sunny vacation, we may see a reemergence
of the alabaster lady who eschews the noonday sun, although PABA lotions and sun blocks
may deter a wholesale return to the romance of the parasol and bonnet.

Because of their higher levels of androgen, more men than women suffer from acne,
especially in its severest forms, but the sheer panic a woman goes through at the
eruption of a single pimple has led to a common assumption that breaking out is a
female problem. It is, but the problem is strictly social in origin, for a solitary
pimple standing in wretched bas-relief on a woman’s cheek is a total repudiation of
the ideally flawless feminine complexion. That a woman’s skin often erupts on a monthly
cycle, because of increased androgen and lower estrogen at those times, has contributed
to the belief that female hormones are somehow to blame. Estrogen actually has a calming
effect on the skin because it reduces oil-gland production, as many women on birth-control
pills have discovered. But tinkering with the body’s natural hormone levels can have
unpleasant permanent effects on the complexion, as women on the pill have also discovered
to their feminine chagrin. Giant freckles on the face and chest, known medically as
melasma or chloasma, have appeared in perhaps as many as 30 percent of all women who
have taken birth-control pills for long periods of time; as with blood clots, the
pigmentation was an unexpected side effect about which they were given no advance
medical warning.

Despite the old canard that a woman never looks better than when she’s pregnant, dramatic
changes in estrogen and progesterone levels during pregnancy commonly cause a blotchy
pigmentation on the face and stomach, freckling, darkening of the nipples and areolae,
varicose veins, unwanted face and body hair, mild balding, inflamed gums, stretch
marks, itching, swelling and other assorted skin afflictions. Some of these side effects
disappear in time and some, like stretch marks, do not, despite cocoa butter, exercise,
massage or whatever. Pregnancy and childbirth are prime, incontrovertible expressions
of biological femaleness, and the effects on the skin are so nearly universal that
they cannot be considered abnormal, even though in medical terms they may be considered
adverse. In societal terms, however, they are a feminine misfortune, signs of a used
and slightly worn body, a negation of the youthful, unblemished ideal. I would like
to meet the woman who is proud of her stretch marks as, the sign of a job well done.

Pimples and stretch marks are trivial concerns compared to the pitted, pocked skin
that permanently disfigured survivors of epidemic smallpox, the periodic scourge of
Europe and the United States until Jennerian vaccination brought it under
control in the nineteenth century. To honor a lady by praising her milkmaid’s complexion
was no mere poetic fancy, for the milkmaid, as Edward Jenner discovered, had been
immunized by catching a mild form of the pox from her cows.

Smallpox, like syphilis (the great pox), was no respecter of class. Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, a controversial figure in eighteenth-century England for her presumptuous
forays into the masculine field of writing, had survived the disease in childhood.
She was broadly ridiculed by Horace Walpole and others for her excessive use of cosmetics,
her thick and artless facial plaster. Whether or not the ridicule was justified, heavy
makeup to cover her pocks was one of Lady Mary’s passions. Her letters from Turkey,
a rare account of life within the harem, are filled with admiration for the concubines’
adept ways with jars of cream and pots of color, and she brought home many samples.
Always the first to try something new, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu introduced the smallpox
inoculation to England. Her son was the first to receive the serum.

Thick enamel was one contemporary solution to the esthetic problem of a pockmarked
skin; another was the Parisian fashion called
les mouches
—patching the face with little black stars and crescents of velvet or paper to hide
the disfiguring pits. The contagion of patching spread among ladies and dandified
gentlemen even faster than the pox, but while two or three black spots charmingly
affixed to the cheek, chin or forehead were admired, an evening at the theater afforded
the amusement of counting patches on those who were more intent on camouflage than
fashion. No other period in history has been so heavily made up as the eighteenth
century, concludes Fenja Gunn in her history of cosmetics,
The Artificial Face.

Hair on the face, or any part of the facial topography beyond the eyebrows and lashes,
is definitely off-limits to the feminine woman. Bearded women have been exhibited
as sideshow freaks in the circus, where they are jokes for the rubes on summer evenings.
“You should be women, and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so.”
With this famous challenge, Banquo addressed the three witches in
Macbeth.
While a student at Oxford after the first World War and an active participant in
militant feminist campaigns, the English writer Vera Brittain nearly suffered a breakdown,
convinced she was growing a witchlike beard.

At the beginning of the new feminist movement, when many of us rebelled for the first
time in our lives against artificial beauty from girdles to lipstick, I saw the emergence
of several bearded women. Peach fuzz, really, not the sort of stuff that could develop
into a patriarch’s full beard, but nonetheless a groundcover of surprising, dense
growth. I was shocked and wished they would do something about it—continue to do whatever
it was they had been doing—depilatory creams, strip wax, electrolysis, plucking, bleaching,
the daily shave. The women with hair on their faces were asking for support, but a
lifetime of social conditioning ordained my esthetic aversion.

A beard is defined as a male secondary sex characteristic because it arrives at puberty,
separating the men from the boys and the males from the females in Mother Nature’s
perfect order, which is never so perfect and never so orderly. Men and women within
a family, race or ethnic group have a fairly equal number of hair follicles on cheek,
chin and upper lip, but a rush of androgens in adolescence makes the difference in
male growth. But not the entire difference, for hairiness is also an inherited characteristic.
Whites are usually more hairy than blacks; Mediterranean, Celtic and Arab populations
are usually more hairy than other whites; American Indians and Asians are the least
hairy of all. This genetic pattern holds true for body hair as well as hair on the
face, and for women as well as men, and has nothing to do with androgen levels.

In
War and Peace
the little Princess Bolkonskaya, an acknowledged beauty and the toast of St. Petersburg,
was famous, as Tolstoy describes her, for the downy hair on her upper lip. White women
are endowed genetically with more facial hair than the modern Western esthetic would
care to admit. Hair on the chin and upper lip has a statistical frequency of 10 to
28 percent, depending on ethnic origin, compared to a zero incidence for Japanese
women. Although a hormonal imbalance may be the cause in a small number of cases (too
much androgen or over-sensitivity to androgen can turn a smooth-cheeked woman
distressfully hirsute), excessive hair is medically defined as “more hair than is
cosmetically acceptable to a woman living in a certain culture.” Facial hair in American
women is socially defined as unpleasantly masculine in appearance, and it is psychologically
feared as abnormal.

Quite understandably, the beard has not been significant in the mythology of the American
Indian or in African cultures. By contrast, Western and Middle Eastern tradition is
full of beards and their weighty importance. The mighty pharaohs, including Queen
Hatshepsut the obelisk builder, come down to us in monumental portraits wearing false,
formal beards, and it is difficult to visualize Moses or God the Father without their
patriarchal growth. Hairs from the chin of the prophet Mohammed are celebrated as
holy relics in Moslem shrines.

One of the more bemusing aspects of male-biased and white-biased anthropology has
been an obsession with beards and their evolutionary importance to male domination.
Identifying their interests, or the hair on their chins, with the whiskers on the
male baboon and the glorious mane on the lion, some impressionable men have asserted
that by presenting a stern and fearful visage, the bearded male makes a better hunter
and fighter. When George Schaller reported from the Serengeti in 1969 that the female
lion did 90 percent of the hunting, that took some of the starch out of the King of
Beasts and his magnificent mane. Nowadays one mostly reads about the glorious silverback
mane on the male gorilla, who is a leaf eater anyway. Speculation as to why females
are beardless has also crept into anthropological doctrine. One imaginative authority
has offered the thought that this “evolutionary adaptation” took place because it
was nicer for the baby to cuddle up to a hairless cheek.

Whatever the advantages or disadvantages to having a beard, in people of bearded stock
the ability to grow facial hair is a proud sign of normal development and virility
in men—even if they choose to shave every day—and a cause for deep social alarm and
insecurity in women, upon whom esthetic tradition imposes a childlike state of hairlessness
that is truly the unnatural condition. Masculine appearance may fluctuate from cleanshaven
to full moustache and beard, but women consistently winnow away the scant amount of
facial hair allotted by nature
to establish a feminine look even further removed from the emblematic hairiness of
men. A demure and placid feminine expression was achieved in the Middle Ages by totally
obliterating the eyebrows and plucking an inch of hair from the temples and nape of
the neck to create the oval face of pious chastity that is seen in the works of Memling,
Pisanello, Van der Weyden, Van Eyck and others.

There has rarely been an age in which the eyebrow tweezer has not been a necessary
feminine aid, either to clean up a scraggly line or to compose a thin arch of perpetual
serenity and pleasant surprise. Women have tampered with their eyebrows in practically
every permutation of ideal beauty, even today when the thick dark brows of Brooke
Shields are considered chic. One could argue that tweezing the brows is merely the
feminine equivalent of masculine face design
vis-à-vis
the moustache and beard, but a plucked brow that retains only a faint reference to
the muscle that lies underneath it functions to reduce the intensity of facial expression.
Unruly eyebrows that are thinned to a delicate arch and spaced wider apart than nature
intended can effectively turn a bold, forthright stare into a pampered, shy glance
that is coyly flirtatious. Tweezed brows can transform a knitted furrow of effort
and concentration into a mild, even gaze of inscrutable blankness; they can dilute
the severity of a negative thought into a tremulous flicker that might be mistaken
for timid approval. For these artful reasons, the tweezer remains a keystone of feminine
disguise and good grooming.