Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (36 page)

history, social location, or even individual biography. A 1988 "Donahue" show offers my first illustration.

The show's focus was a series of television commercials for DuraSoft colored contact lenses. In these commercials as they were originally aired, a woman was shown in a dreamlike, romantic fantasy—for example, parachuting slowly and gracefully from the heavens. The male voiceover then described the woman in soft, lush terms: "If I believed in angels, I'd say that's what she was—an angel, dropped from the sky like an answer to a prayer, with eyes as brown as bark." [Significant pause] "No .

. . I
don't think so."
[At this point, the tape would be rewound to return us to:] "With eyes as violet as the colors of a child's imagination.'' The commercial concludes: "DuraSoft colored contact lenses. Get brown eyes a second look" (cf. Figure 44).

The question posed by Phil Donahue: Is this ad racist? Donahue clearly thought there was controversy to be stirred up here, for he stocked his audience full of women of color and white women to discuss the implications of the ad. But Donahue was apparently living in a different decade from most of his audience, who repeatedly declared that there was nothing "wrong" with the ad, and everything "wrong" with any inclinations to "make it a political question." Here are some comments taken from the transcript of the show:

"Why does it have to be a political question? I mean, people perm their hair. It's just because they like the way it looks. It's not some thing sociological. Maybe black women like the way they look with green contacts. It's to be more attractive. It's not something that makes them—I mean, why do punk rockers have purple hair? Be cause they feel it makes them feel better." [white woman]

"What's the fuss? When I put on my blue lenses, it makes me feel good. It makes me feel sexy, different, the other woman, so to speak,

which is like fun." [black woman] "I perm my hair, you're wearing makeup, what's the difference?" [white woman]

"I want to be versatile . . . having different looks, being able to change from one look to the other." [black female model]

"We all do the same thing, when we're feeling good we wear new makeup, hairstyles, we buy new clothes. So now it's contact lenses. What difference does it make?" [white woman]

"It goes both ways . . . Bo Derek puts her hair in cornstalks, or corn . . . or whatever that thing is called. White women try to get tan." [white woman]

Image has been removed. No rights.

"She's not trying to be white, she's trying to be different." [about a black woman with blue contact lenses] "It's fashion, women are never happy with themselves." "I put them in as toys, just for fun, change. Nothing too serious, and I really enjoy them." [black woman]
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Some points to note here: first, putting on makeup, styling hair, and so forth are conceived of only as free
play,
fun, a matter of creative expression. This they surely are. But they are also experienced by many women as necessary before they will show themselves to the world, even on a quick trip to the corner mailbox. The one comment that hints at women's (by now depressingly well documented) dissatisfaction with their appearance trivializes that dissatisfaction and puts it beyond the pale of cultural critique: "It's fashion." What she means is, "It's
only
fashion," whose whimsical and politically neutral vicissitudes supply endless amusement for women's eternally superficial values. ("Women are never happy with themselves.") If we are never happy with ourselves, it is implied, that is due to our female nature, not to be taken too seriously or made into a political question. Second, the content of fashion, the specific ideals that women are drawn to embody (ideals that vary historically, racially, and along class and other lines) are seen as arbitrary, without meaning; interpretation is neither required nor even appropriate. Rather, all motivation and value come from the interest and allure—the "sexiness"—of change and difference itself. Blue contact lenses for a black woman, it is admitted, make her "other'' ("the other woman"). But that "other" is not a racial or cultural "other"; she is sexy because of the piquancy, the novelty, the erotics of putting on a different self.
Any
different self would do, it is implied.

Closely connected to this is the construction of
all
cosmetic changes as the same: perms for the white women, corn rows on Bo Derek, tanning, makeup, changing hairstyles, blue contacts for black women—all are seen as having equal political valance (which is to say,
no
political valance) and the same cultural meaning (which is to say,
no
cultural meaning) in the heterogeneous yet undifferentiated context of the things "all" women do "to be more attractive." The one woman in the audience who offered a different construction of this behavior, who insisted that the styles we aspire to do not simply reflect the free play of fashion or female nature who went so far, indeed, as to claim that we "are brainwashed to

think blond hair and blue eyes is the most beautiful of all," was regarded with hostile silence. Then, a few moments later, someone challenged: "Is there anything
wrong

with blue eyes and blond hair?" The audience enthusiastically applauded this defender of democratic values.

This "conversation"—a paradigmatically postmodern conversation, as I will argue shortly—effaces the same general elements as the rhetoric of body transformation discussed earlier. First, it effaces the inequalities of social position and the historical origins which, for example, render Bo Derek's corn rows and black women's hair straightening utterly noncommensurate. On the one hand, we have Bo Derek's privilege, not only as so unimpeachably white as to permit an exotic touch of "otherness" with no danger of racial contamination, but her trendsetting position as a famous movie star. Contrasting to this, and mediating a black woman's "choice" to straighten her hair, is a cultural history of racist bodydiscriminations such as the nineteenthcentury combtest, which allowed admission to churches and clubs only to those blacks who could pass through their hair without snagging a finetooth comb hanging outside the door. (A variety of comparable tests—the pineslab test, the brown bag test—determined whether one's skin was adequately light to pass muster.)
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Second, and following from these historical practices, there is a disciplinary reality that is effaced in the construction of all self transformation as equally arbitrary, all variants of the same trivial game, without differing cultural valance. I use the term
disciplinary
here in the Foucauldian sense, as pointing to practices that do not merely transform but
normalize
the subject. That is, to repeat a point made earlier, not every body will do. A 1989 poll of
Essence
magazine readers revealed that 68

percent of those who responded wear their hair straightened chemically or by hot comb.
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"Just for fun"? For the kick of being "different"? When we look at the pursuit of beauty as a normalizing discipline, it becomes clear that not all body transformations are the same. The general tyranny of fashion perpetual, elusive, and instructing the female body in a pedagogy of personal inadequacy and lackis a powerful discipline for the normalization of
all
women in this culture. But even as we are all normalized to the requirements of appropriate feminine insecurity and preoccupation with appearance, more specific requirements

Image has been removed. No rights.

emerge in different cultural and historical contexts, and for different groups. When Bo Derek put her hair in corn rows, she was engaging in normalizing feminine practice. But when Oprah Winfrey admitted on her show that all her life she has desperately longed to have "hair that swings from side to side" when she shakes her head (Figure 45), she revealed the power of racial as well as gender normalization, normalization not only to "femininity," but to the Caucasian standards of beauty that still dominate on television, in movies, in popular magazines. (When I was a child, I felt the same way about my thick, then curly, "Jewish" hair as Oprah did about hers.) Neither Oprah nor the
Essence
readers nor the many Jewish women (myself included) who ironed their hair in the 1960s have creatively or playfully invented themselves here.

DuraSoft knows this, even if Donahue's audience does not. Since the campaign first began, the company has replaced the orig

Image has been removed. No rights.

inal, upfront magazine advertisement with a more euphemistic variant, from which the word
brown
has been tastefully effaced. (In case it has become too subtle for the average reader, the model now is black—although it should be noted that DuraSoft's failure to appreciate brown eyes also renders the eyes of most of the world not worth "a second look" [Figure 46].) In the television commercial, a comparable "brownwash" was effected; here "eyes as brown as . . ." was retained, but the derogatory nouns—"brown as boots," ''brown as bark"—were eliminated. The announcer simply was left speechless: "eyes as brown as . . . brown as. . . ," and then, presumably having been unable to come up with an enticing simile, shifted to "violet." As in the expurgated magazine

Image has been removed. No rights.
ad, the television commercial ended: "Get
your
eyes a second look."

When I showed my students these ads, many of them were as dismissive as the "Donahue" audience, convinced that I was once again turning innocent images and practices into political issues. I persisted: if racial standards of beauty are not at work here, then why no brown contacts for blueeyed people? A month later, two of my students triumphantly produced a DuraSoft ad for brown contacts (Figure 47), appearing in
Essence
magazine, and with an advertising campaign directed solely at
already
browneyed consumers, offering the promise
not
of "getting blue eyes a second look" by becoming excitingly darker, but of "subtly enhancing''

dark eyes, by making them
lighter
brown. The creators of the DuraSoft campaign clearly know that not all differences are the same in our culture, and they continue, albeit in ever more mystified form, to exploit and perpetuate that fact.
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The "Donahue" DuraSoft show (indeed, any talk show) provides a perfect example of what we might call a postmodern conversation. All sense of history and all ability (or inclination) to sustain cultural criticism, to make the distinctions and discriminations that would permit such criticism, have disappeared. Rather, in this conversation, "anything goes"—and any positioned social critique (for example, the woman who, speaking clearly from consciousness of racial oppression, insisted that the attraction of blond hair and blue eyes has a cultural meaning significantly different from that of purple hair) is immediately destabilized. Instead of distinctions, endless
differences
reign—an undifferentiated pastiche of differences, a grab bag in which no items are assigned any more importance or centrality than any others.

Television is, of course, the great teacher here, our prime modeler of plastic pluralism: if one "Donahue" show features a feminist talking about battered wives, the next show will feature mistreated husbands. Women who love too much, the sex habits of priests, disturbed children of psychiatrists, daughters who have no manners, male strippers, relatives who haven't spoken in ten years all have their day alongside incest, rape, and U.S. foreign policy. All are given equal weight by the great leveler— the frame of the television screen.

This spectacle of difference defeats the ability to sustain coherent political critique. Everything is the same in its unvalanced difference. ("I perm my hair, you're wearing makeup, what's the difference?") Particulars reign, and generality—which collects, organizes, and prioritizes, suspending attention to particularity in the interests of connection, emphasis, and criticism—is suspect. So, whenever some critically charged generalization was suggested on Donahue's DuraSoft show, someone else would invariably offer a counterexample—I have blue eyes, and I'm a black woman; Bo Derek wears corn rows—to fragment the critique. What is remarkable is that people accept these examples as
refutations
of social

critique. They almost invariably back down, utterly confused as to how to maintain their critical generalization in the face of the destabilizing example. Sometimes they qualify, claiming they meant some people, not all. But of course they meant neither all nor some. They meant
most—that
is, they were trying to make a claim about social or cultural
patterns—and
that is a stance that is increasingly difficult to sustain in a postmodern context, where we are surrounded by endlessly displaced images and are given no orienting context in which to make discriminations.

Those who insist on an orienting context (and who therefore do not permit particulars to reign in all their absolute "difference") are seen as "totalizing," that is, as constructing a falsely coherent and morally coercive universe that marginalizes and effaces the experiences and values of others. ("Is there anything
wrong
with blue eyes and blond hair?") As someone who is frequently interviewed by local television and newspaper reporters, I have often found my feminist arguments framed in this way, as they were in an article on breastaugmentation surgery. After several pages of "expert" recommendations from plastic surgeons, my cautions about the politics of female body transformation (none of them critical of individuals contemplating plastic surgery, all of them of a cultural nature) were briefly quoted by the reporter, who then went on to end the piece with a comment on
my
critique—from the director of communications for the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery:

Those not considering plastic surgery shouldn't be too critical of those who do. It's the hardest thing for people to understand. What's important is if it's a problem to that person. We're all different, but we all want to look better. We're just different in what extent we'll go to. But none of us can say we don't want to look the best we can.
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