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 For some, maybe - for people who don't understand what's best about themselves, or who adhere to an outdated blueprint of how to build oneself as a women.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?

Millenials (Cavaliers)

Many stuffy experts agree that our generation is some cross between useless, pointless, indolent, and silly. But sometimes I wonder, kids. Sometimes I think we are just way too cool for school. That there's more to the passion for style and the chic, ironic bitterness than even we give ourselves credit for. That we have the same virtues of exploration and ardor and even moral fortitude than any beat poet/hippy/grandpa, and that we have the added bonus of having re-established all these things on a crazy-ass global and ethical stage. That we recognize the past more than others, we see that the routes are totally established, we're down with that, we are cavaliers and troubadours, we can awesome up a chilly time our own selves on the thin veil of a premise that we're gonna beat up some roundheads or love from afar, sure. With our feathers and our sexiness.

Somewhere deep down we're pretty sure the world will surrender as soon as it sees how good we look. I think all in all we're a very cheerful bunch, which is a lot braver than any doomsdaysayer or dystopian imagined we could be. Probably even braver than the utopians figured on.

I keep reading about how we take our jobs for granted, how our work ethic is low. But a good article that says that will also talk about how trustful and socially engaged we are in the workplace, how accepting and dependent. It's a big bad time to be married to, sure, they knew that would be the case. What was expected, I don't know. But I think it's awfully nice of us not to be hateful or even really spiteful with all this malaise running through our veins. I think we turned out very gentle and humble, as generations go.

Of course we're not a majorly active one. Barring the sudden influx of Obama's Change We May Just Believe In, we haven't been trying to change anything on a massive scale - change is happening fast enough without us. Besides, we know all about bunches of kids who thought they were right and we're just a little too tasteful for retro with that degree of kitsch, despite our sense of nostalgia (however revisionist).

Not that we think it's pointless, but we've seen enough half-baked revolutions to last a long time. If it's the truth, we hope to know it when we see it. We're hypercritical, but not spiteful. Not angry. Just kinda smiling, maybe with a little glint in our eyes, maybe leaning forward to the sexy Marxist and whispering, "Baby, you can half-bake my revolution any day."

Kind of academic, we're kind of nerds I guess, but into each fin-de-siecle a little langorous nerdery must fall. Meanwhile, we'll keep up the stylishness, making the point that we take our image more seriously than whatever fake old war the creepy old princes have going on. They made the roads we're walking on, but by God we're the ones doing the walking and we will walk so crazy awesomely it hurts. We know, somehow, the better reason for being.

Our whole job in the world, as the internet (really!) is teaching us, is to make it more beautiful. Sexier. Smoother and sweeter and easier. Our job is to make it blush with how excellent and hot we are. We're writing letters to our bitches back home that say maybe, baby, you should loosen up already, even though that rigid frigid thing you got going is totally hot, because you're so sexy when your cheeks get rosy and warm. We're riding around with feathers in our hair. We have faith in the victory of style, at least that it'll carry us over for a ways into the troubles.
Not to say live for today, because that's soooo lame. But to react to today, with aplomb that will be appreciated not just by tomorrow and yesterday, but also by today. Just to be very very cool.