During the great big "fun feminists" internecine conflict of last week, there was much discussing of "feminist credentials" and whether such behaviors as waxing, wearing heels, and delighting in make-up vitiated one’s commitment to the ideals of the broader cause. It got to be quite an intense discussion that took in at least a dozen blogs, if not more.
I thought I wasn’t going to post more on this subject, and then I read this long, fascinating piece at Mind the Gap Cardiff: How do I look? Thoughts on femininity and white middle-class feminism. I read it hesitantly, worrying it would turn into another Jill-bashing frenzy. But instead, I found it challenging, and it’s got me thinking about a point that I know BitchLab (not work safe for all) has been making as well: many of us tend to see everything through the lens of gender, and tend to ignore the class implications of what it is that we’re writing about.
From Mind the Gap:
When we have fights about waxing for example, are we assuming that all women can afford waxing, that waxing is expected of all women in the same way, and that waxing has the same significance for all women? The way in which women experience, or take part in feminine beauty practices, is enormously tied up with class, race, and also sexuality.
The construction of white middle-class femininity and its practices define my experience of oppression, not least because my own family has, over the last two generations, been in the process of achieving middle-class status. My father comes from a working-class family. His mother was a milliner and later a caterer, his father was a merchant seaman, and he was the first in the family to go to university. My mother’s parents were also both from working-class backgrounds and were obsessed with becoming middle-class. My maternal great grandmother drove herself crazy trying to convince everyone that she was white and middle-class (she was neither, but that’s a story for another day), and so the feminine beauty practices encouraged in my maternal grandmother and mother had a lot to do with the pursuit of a middle-class white identity and with erasing marks of race and working-classness.
For example, waxing has clear ethnic implications. One of my favorite former students, "Armine" (not her real name) reads this blog, and she came to see me yesterday. We talked about waxing, and about my post two days ago on men’s hairy chests. Like many of my students, Armine is of Armenian ancestry. As she herself remarked (her words not mine), "My people are known for being particularly hairy!" Armine talked about the tremendous cultural anxiety she had been raised with about hair. From the time she hit puberty, she’d been removing hair from her forearms, her lip, and elsewhere on her body — and she had been encouraged to do this by her mother and older female relatives. She’d also seriously considered rhinoplasty to reduce the size of what she called her "stereotypical Armenian nose". Her older sister has already had that surgical procedure done.
Armine is quite clear that there is a specific goal to all of this: "We want to look white, not ethnic." Armine feels that the ideals of feminine beauty she grew up with were primarily white women with "cute little noses" and little or no hair on their bodies. Here in Pasadena in 2006, she’s engaged in the same practices that the Welsh great-grandmother was in the Mind the Gap post above: pursuing a middle-class white identity and erasing marks of race and ethnicity. Armine points out that within her culture, it’s possible to balance an intense pride in Armenian heritage with an equally intense contempt for how women from her backgound naturally look. To paraphrase something she said, "At the same time we were being told to make our noses smaller and our bodies hairless, we were told we could only date Armenian men and we had to never forget the genocide."
While I think that Jill — and other pro-waxing, pro-heels feminists — were rudely and unnecessarily savaged last week, I get the point that Armine, Mind the Gap, and BitchLab are making in different ways. Brazilian bikini waxes aren’t just something that women do — they are something that women who can afford them do. And while we generally have no idea how much hair a woman might have in her pubic region, forearm and lip hair (a big concern of Armine’s) is visible. Its removal is at least moderately expensive and moderately painful, and certain ethnic groups (whose DNA carries the genetic material decreeing that body hair shall be abundant) thus have to work harder, pay more, and endure more discomfort in order to meet an ideal that is still set largely by the white middle class.
This still doesn’t mean that I think anyone, white or not, affluent or not, ought to be racked with guilt over the decision to remove hair from the pubis, climb into stilettos, or apply really good make-up. But not all shoes look the same, and not all make-up looks the same. A $400 pair of heels often look like a $400 pair of heels; the make-up at an upscale department store is generally better than the Maybelline one buys at the corner drug store. And a really first-rate waxing job isn’t cheap. This doesn’t mean that only rich women buy nice make-up or get waxed or wear great shoes. It does mean that for women on a budget, the decision to spend on these things means less money for something else. And it also sends a signal to other women about what is appropriate, acceptable, and expected.
Ultimately, all of this raises the difficult question of communal obligation. To what extent are feminists responsible for the signals they send to others? To what extent are those signals even under our control? Jill Filipovic attracts intra-feminist hostility more than most, frankly, because she is a young, pretty, law student living in New York. She takes trips to Europe. She goes to parties and has great hair. Some of these things are within her control, some aren’t, but she gets singled out time and again because she’s both an immensely articulate young feminist and an easy target for envy. (Flame away, but let’s be candid here.) Jill has done the vital work of acknowledging her privilege, even while she has pointed out that she is — like so many of her generation — under a mountain of debt.
Folks seemed to take special issue with Jill because it’s clear that she comes closer than virtually any other feminist blogger to a particular middle-class, white ideal for feminine attractiveness. Unlike her co-bloggers, she does post pictures of herself (in a Flickr account). She leads a more "visually public life" than many other feminists, blogging under her full name and with many details of her private life laid open. So when a pretty, young, white female law student talks about getting a bikini wax, it’s going to produce a strong reaction from some quarters. It’s hard for some people to separate what Jill does from who Jill is.
Though Jill and I are very different, I recognize that perceptions of class and attractiveness function in my own life and work as well. When I’ve posted about my own body anxiety, for example, I usually get some annoyed comments talking about how "I have nothing to complain about." When I talk at length about the fact that I work out anywhere from 15-24 hours per week (including private Pilates and boxing lessons) that sends a stark, even grating message about privilege. My increasingly lean and toned flesh is a testament to my physical work ethic, sure — but it’s also a testament to discretionary time and discretionary income, both of which are associated with tremendous amounts of privilege. That doesn’t mean I am going to stop running, lifting, Pilate-ing, boxing, or cycling any time soon. But it does mean that I am going be cognizant of that privilege just as I know Jill is cognizant of hers.
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On a tangential note, talking about class reminds me of another aspect of growing up WASP in OKOP culture. One key rule that OKOP follow: talking about class is prima facie evidence you don’t have it. I remember when I was in junior high school, and I repeated something at the dinner table I had heard earlier in the day. I can’t remember what I was describing, but I said something was "classy." An older female relative whom I love very much said to me gentle, "Hugo, please don’t say ‘classy’. It’s vulgar." (For OKOP WASPS, few things are worse than being "vulgar.") The point became clear to me quickly: the people who talked about things being "classy" or about "having a lot of class" were the "anxiously aspiring" who were all-too-eager to try and signify that they belonged in a certain social stratum. Those who had already "arrived", as it were, practiced a careful, elegant pretense of ignoring the whole idea of class. Thus the use of the term "classy" was, as far as OKOP were concerned, proof of its absence!
