Tuesday, January 11, 2011

A Lady's Toilette (Babel)

It is widely regarded that women* are too devoted to their toilette. This is particularly true in conjunction with the related theory many experts have advanced, which suggests that the feminine grooming regimen is frequently both unnecessarily cumbersome and rife with frivolity.


It's a matter of even more debate than your average no-frills abstainer might believe -- a subject of both internal and external conflict. Women are given a thousand reasons to love and hate their style.** A thousand million jillion reasons to feel soft and weak or pert and sassy for embracing a regimen of attraction, for spending money on ornament, for devoting time and pain and frustration to a curl in the hair and a clean sweet brow. For their obsession with the waistline. But as one of the shackled, I propose that it doesn't insult anyone to recognize style for what it is - one of the more precious and ephemeral arts granted to those of us trying to become or express something beyond us. 

Dear reader, I imagine I'm not alone when I wonder why I care so much about the fussier aspects of personal presentation. I wasn't raised that way; my mom talked about makeup and clothes as though they were at best an illusion demanded by an unconscionable world that fails, constantly, to see the spirit in the eyes or the laughter in the mouth. I was raised to comb my hair and keep my clothes neat, but not to devote myself to them. Certainly I'm aware that all these extras aren't necessary to function in the world, that they at times hold a person back in certain aspects of her life. So when I get caught up in lipstick or shoes or any of that hellish paraphenelia, or when that sudden nauseating wave of perfectionism sweeps over me in the morning and I can't leave the room because of the failure to be what I imagine, I feel guilty. Sad, even. Because sometimes I've had trouble addressing the real issue at hand, the real question that validates any practice:

What do we hope to achieve?

Money/wealth/attention? Fame/desire? Is it really an anthropological condition? To make a display of our shall-we-call-them-virtues, of our wealth so that the universe knows that we're to be taken care of? I don't think that's the case anymore. For some, maybe - for people who don't understand what's best about themselves, or who adhere to an outdated blueprint of how to build oneself as a women. But for the most part, for most thoughtful people and for most thoughtless people too, I think that religion is old, done for, if we examine it. That god isn't real.

But on the other hand, neither is it vestigial. Instead, the art/religion*** has evolved. 



It's easy to understand style as an art form from the outside. For instance, in like every single makeover movie ever, there's a moment of presentation, where the new version of the heroine is presented. Say, descending a spiral staircase and a spiraling soundtrack. We understand this as a frame. What we tend not to acknowledge is what is being communicated within that frame. That a woman's careful choice of clothing and hair and all that is meant to say something more serious than we've given it credit for. Women, like all people, struggle with the constant awareness of something invisible and better, something that definitely needs to be explained beyond the limits of vocabulary. In this effort, we've been afforded -- maybe not kindly, but at least happily -- the exciting toolbox that is the human presentation. 


This is why I do what I do in the morning, or before I go out. This is the base level of why we do anything right now - it's not about survival or breeding. It's about trying to craft yourself into a discrete and temporary note that passes with and in the click of our own heels, meant not just to exist but also to communicate. Each of us is a tiny Babel, designed and erected, propped up even, home to the unified language of appearance.

Laughing at women's hourly struggle with this expression is cruel and far more frivolous than any shade of nail polish. Because of every medium, anywhere, there's no finer instrument of dreams than the human form. Maybe we should feel lucky instead of dismissive that there are a hundred artists passing each of us every day; it's not wrong, as a member of the transient audience, to feel vulnerable to them. 



*The author understands that men undergo varying amounts of personal prep-work, too. However, the demons that topic wrestles with are often otherwise focused, and are certainly divergent enough to require their own later review.


**Today we're dealing with style rather than beauty.


***A blurry line that probably won't be reviewed on account of where are the experts who agree on that?

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