Ad Feminem

Smooth, Pink, Instant... Pudding

As we all know, in an era of keyword-driven advertising, ads and editorial content often end up sharing space in ironic, and sometimes humorous, absurd or counterproductive, juxtapositions. Of course, such juxtapositions aren’t limited to realm of Adsense autobots. While doing research on way the rhetoric of cosmetic surgery has been used in the past, I came across Chatelaine magazine’s guide to cosmetic surgery from 1968.

 

 

On the article’s second page (see above), notice the ad for Royal instant pudding which accompanies the copy.  A perfectly smooth bowl of pink perches on a bed of pocked berries, their shapes analogous to so many faces full of large pores. Instant transformation from mature fruit to seductive dessert; a visual replication of the promise of cosmetic surgery. Brilliant.

On Bodies by Susie Orbach

In Bodies, Susie Orbach theorizes the body as the home in which the self must live.  She asserts that there are authentic bodies and false bodies, the false bodies being the ones that we develop as early as infancy in order to please what we think are the wishes of other people when our own needs aren't being met (thus the infant that learns not to cry even when she’s upset).  Authentic bodies, she posits, are the ones in which our selves can live comfortably, the bodies over which we don’t fret.  Orbach’s theory, as I see it, poses some problems.  When I asked her about the relationship between the body and the self in the authentic body, her answer was that they were the same, that “corporeal embodiment” would entail no difference between the two.  If we reject the Cartesian mind-body duality altogether in favor of an integrated whole, this immediately seems to send us back down the road we have been traveling a long time, in which bodily markers will be “justifiably” read as signs of internal characteristics of the self.  Or does the notion of authentic body require that we see the body as unreadable, unwritable? 

This gets further complicated when we consider the question:  can a body culturally marked (by cosmetic surgery or other body modification techniques) and in which a self now feels comfortable or empowered be an authentic body?  When I posed this very question to Orbach when she presented the book's ideas at the London School of Economics, she pointed out that such cultural marking techniques were sold to women on the basis of their empowering results (which seemed to suggest that such a question accepted the premises of that discourse), but in the end she did not have an answer.  Granted, Orbach had to field the question off the cuff, but the lack of a satisfactory answer to it points to a glaring problem:  what’s the difference between an “authentic” body and an “essential” or “natural” body?  Is Orbach inadvertently taking us back down the path to essentialism by another name? 

Given the effort she makes in Bodies to show that there is no such thing as a “natural” body, using the example of wild children who developed internal regulatory mechanisms and other environmental adaptations from birth, it’s highly doubtful that reviving essentialism is Orbach’s intention.  In her conclusion, she encourages that our bodies not be seen as “sites of labor and commercially-driven production” or “aspirations that need to be achieved” (145).  But this again points out a conflict – she goes to such lengths to prove “that bodies are made rather than born” while enjoining us from participating too consciously in the making process. 

 

Plastic Light District?

Back before the club closed its doors forevermore, I sat on the bleacher-like steps of the Opium Garden in South Beach, Miami, and watched a breakdancer in a strategically torn t-shirt. Her athletic body gyrated; she pop-locked, downrocked and piked and then she sat down next to me, another girl in baggy pants, sneakers and a hat.  We watched the other action on the dance floor for a few minutes as the music kept thumping.  Nearly all of the women pouting to the beat shimmied in miniskirts, break-neck stilettos and band-aid tops, with breasts that should have been bouncing but instead remained firmly bolted in place.  The b-girl leaned over and shouted over the thumps:  “Welcome to Miami, where you’re not allowed to live unless you’ve got fake tits and dick-suckin’ lips.” Of course, that was a vulgar way to put it, the stereotype of body-conscious South Beach, but there it was.  

This year, the closed club a victim of noise complaints and rising rents, I ambled down Lincoln Mall Road in search of a gelato.  Before I got to the gelato, there it was again.

Of course, it’s possible or even probable that these mannequins graced Miami’s shop windows before this year and I just didn’t notice them; I’m not sure. Anyway, I don’t know what to think about these real fake ladies. Suddenly walking down Lincoln Mall Road bore a surreal similarity to traversing yesteryear's gauntlet of sex workers in the storefronts of Amsterdam's Red Light district. 

 

Those Miami mannequins displays say more about the normalization of cosmetic surgery in our culture than most anything I can write about it, I think. For women in places like South Beach and Los Angeles, the question of whether or not to go under the knife is moot; the question is no longer “Should I get surgery?”  That we should get surgery is taken for granted. Instead, the fundamental question has become “Where should I get which surgery?” 

The mannequins also beg some questions about the aspirational nature of window shopping.  It could be argued that the mannequins represent the body type of the average South Beach resident more than the traditional clothes-hanger-skinny mannequin, and thus give a more realistic idea of how the merchandise would fit potential customers.  It could also be argued that heroine-chic physiques of traditional mannequins modeled equally unnatural body types, or that they enforced a standard of homogeneity for the female form so the busty new gals provide some welcome variety, at least.  While that’s possible, I also wonder how much these mannequins now commodify the body as the items for sale versus the clothing as the items for sale.  When we’re window shopping, are we supposed to covet the merchandise or the bodies on display? 

There seems to be a sort of chicken and egg element to the issue as well.  Are mannequins like these a result of the body commodification and normalization of cosmetic surgery in our culture, or a cause of them?

 

The Indistinguishable Celebrity

In the course of the much derided interview with the French Marie Claire in which Demi Moore characterized rumors that she had ever had any cosmetic surgery as ‘completely false,’ Moore also bemoaned the familiar, age-old double standard by which ageing male actors ‘seem to get classier than us when they age.’  Mature actors in Hollywood, noted Moore, are seen as ‘distinguished.’ 

Men become distinguished as they age, that is to say that age makes them ‘prominent, conspicuous, remarkable, or eminent;’ people whom we ‘notice specially; pay particular attention to’ or ‘honour with special attention.’ To distinguish also means ‘to perceive distinctly or clearly (by sight, hearing, or other bodily sense); to ‘make out’ by looking, listening, etc.; to recognize.’  To be distinguished is to be recognized.  Not only does the process of becoming distinguished become synonymous with being celebrated, it becomes synonymous with being seen at all.   In a spread entitled “Celebrities Who Are Aging Well’ in the Winter-Spring 2009 issue of New Beauty magazine, the faces of several female celebrities are analyzed. The piece opens by noting that the women featured – including Olivia Newton-John and Demi Moore - have successfully ‘tackled common aging concerns, all while looking gracefully age-appropriate’ (40). 

In the analysis of Newton-John’s face, it is noted that ‘“There is a little bit of flattening out of the upper lip and some loss of definition,” which makes her look appropriate for her age’ (44).  Loss of definition.  In this language we have an enactment of the gendered double standard.  It is appropriate that the ageing female should lose definition in her features; that is to say, it is appropriate that her features become undistinguished.

The homogenizing effects of the anti-ageing procedures promoted by New Beauty and widely used by female celebrities are criticized for exactly this, that they efface faces, making those faces indistinguishable from one another.  In these attempts to defy ageing, celebrities may be subverting the very idea of celebrity. The undistinguished is one not recognized as different or distinct; further, the indistinguishable (i.e. the ‘imperceptible’) has not only the preceding quality, but goes unrecognized and unseen altogether. 

*All definitions taken from the Oxford English Dictionary.