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Dana Stevens, Disney, Duffer Brothers, expressive individualism, film, gender, Gloria Wekker, Milan Kundera, music, Shahidha Bari, slavery, television
The English word aesthetician can describe two kinds of professionals. In the less common sense, it can describe a philosopher who makes a living theorizing about art and beauty. In the more common sense, it can describe someone who makes a living helping women with makeup and hair and nails.
These two senses have something to do with each other. But we don’t usually talk about it.
The idea of beauty is central to the work of both kinds of aestheticians. The word “beauty” in popular culture usually has to do with feminine beauty: beauty salons, beauty magazines, the beauty industry. But when Western philosophers talk about beauty, they are usually thinking about the beauty of nature and of art (in a conventional sense); what they have in mind usually isn’t feminine beauty. I suspect that feminine beauty was considered beneath philosophers’ consideration for two reasons. In the past, there was a casual sexist disdain for all things feminine (in a way that is blatantly expressed in works as recent as Stace’s 1960 Mysticism and Philosophy, and more subtly in later works). As Shahidha Bari notes, that disdain has played a significant role in Western philosophy’s traditional disregard for clothing. More recently, feminists often consider beauty standards something oppressive that keeps women down – nowadays not merely in academic circles but in popular culture, like Jax’s song “Victoria’s Secret”. Feminist or anti-feminist, few have wanted to take feminine beauty seriously.
Yet feminine beauty matters – and perhaps especially in a society like ours. Some other societies also allow men to beautify themselves, to preen and apply cosmetics and ornament. But North American societies cast a suspicion on any such activity, viewing it, effectively, as feminine. Not every society is like that. But in ours, to beautify oneself is largely the prerogative of women. That plays a major role in my own gender fluidity: I want not just to be beautiful but to make myself beautiful, and in my world, that’s a feminine thing.
For many people who are raised female, beautification this is a burden: an additional expectation placed on top of life’s other difficulties. But for someone who’s been denied it all his/her life it can feel liberating.
Frozen is justifiably one of Disney’s most popular movies ever, owing above all to the magnificent video sequence for the song “Let It Go” – in which Elsa, the heroine, casts off the rules that have kept her magical powers locked up, and comes into her own. The sequence is a hymn to expressive individualism; many, quite accurately, have described “Let It Go” as a coming-out song. (The movie’s trite and saccharine ending is intentionally at odds with the individualist message of the song – but few really care about that ending. “Let It Go” undermines the ending much more than the ending undermines “Let It Go”.) And crucially, the final part of the magic transforms Elsa’s hitherto utilitarian outfit into the stunningly feminine ice-princess dress that she is known for. I was fascinated by the sequence when it came out a decade ago; my wife observed that fascination with a grin and said “you just want to bang Elsa.” At the time I thought “yeah, I can see how you get there, but… there’s something else.” Only a few years later did I realize what it was: I didn’t want to bang Elsa, I wanted to be Elsa.
Elsa’s beautification understandably made some feminists uncomfortable. Dana Stevens in Slate appreciated the message of empowerment in “Let It Go”, but felt “a familiar sense of deflation every time that pulse-racing song (delivered so gloriously by Menzel) culminates in a vision of female self-actualization as narrow and horizon-diminishing as a makeover.” Yet for me, few things have expanded my horizons in the past few years as much as a fabulous feminine makeover. The film portrays it as horizon-expanding – very much so. Elsa’s clothes going up the mountain are tight but drab, whereas the new outfit is expansive and shiny, letting herself free of the old wardrobe.
Stevens is reminded uncomfortably of makeover scenes in Grease and The Breakfast Club: “These moments always bugged me as a kid, because they seemed to be last-minute reversals of the foregoing movie’s message, which was that the character in question (Newton-John’s virginal Sandy, Sheedy’s glumly eccentric Allison) was fine just the way she was.” I haven’t seen those scenes, but what I appreciate about the “Let It Go” scene is that it’s not about “being fine the way she is”, but rather – in the words of a philosopher whom the song’s second verse calls to mind – about becoming who she is. That you can be more truly you than you were before, when you were constrained by society’s chains. A point added to by Stevens’s admission that “Elsa’s conversion into a glammed-out ice diva does differ in important ways from those earlier onscreen makeovers—for one thing, her transformation isn’t meant to impress any specific suitor, and in fact Elsa (unlike her younger sister, Anna) ends the movie without a romantic prospect on the horizon.”
This last point is crucial. Too often we assume that women beautify themselves just for the sake of landing a man. But this ignores how often women (cis and trans) beautify ourselves for our own sakes – or to impress other women. (Christian Louboutin’s designer heels have a signature visual feature that easily mark them as a status symbol among women – but it is probably one straight cis man in a thousand who knows what that feature is.)
If the expressive in expressive individualism is about anything, it is about self-expression. And surely there is no clearer form of self-expression than the way that one presents one’s own face and body to the world. As Bari notes, “the making of, caring for, passing on and wearing of clothes is steeped in our sense of selfhood, and registered in exquisitely intimate ways, by us and those around us.”
Consider a more recent makeover scene, the mall scene from Stranger Things: the character who has spent her life an anonymous captive, named only “Eleven”, is finally free and able to define herself, and part of that self-definition is buying clothes to develop a personal style. In Milan Kundera’s existentialist novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the female lead Tereza feels similarly: to be naked is to feel identical to everyone else, a cog in the machine, whereas by adorning herself she could express herself as who she was. (My wife, after having to undergo a mastectomy for cancer, decided to get a beautiful phoenix tattoo over the scar because, in her words, “I want something on my body that I chose.”)
Referring to a situation far worse than Tereza’s or mine could ever be, Gloria Wekker tells the story of a slave ship’s arrival in Paramaribo, when an eyewitness noted that enslaved women
had marked each others’ heads with different designs, suns, half moons, without the help of a razor, without even soap, only with a piece of glass…. The cultural vitality expressed in these images, amidst the horror, fixing each other’s hair… and making the unbearable bearable by way of creatively expressing themselves, is as impressive as it is shattering. Apparently, these shipmates, with their diverse places of origin, languages, and backgrounds, had already been able to find a common idiom with which to encourage themselves and each other. It is worth noting that part of the performance of their subjectivity was beautification… (cited in Tinsley, Ezili’s Mirrors, p. 56)
Much like the fictional Eleven – herself effectively a freed slave – these real women affirmed their humanity in one of the most dehumanizing situations possible through beauty. And none of this was done for men. The women on the ship beautify each other when no men are looking; the mall scene makes no reference to Eleven’s boyfriend.
Beautifying oneself is an art; just like other arts, there is no single right way to do it, but it still takes time to learn how to do it well. As an art form it is perhaps most comparable to cooking – another art often associated with women, and also too devalued in Western aesthetic theory. Like beautification, cooking too is a burden when one is expected to do it every day, but a joy when one can do it for one’s own self-expression. As with cooking, the art object disappears not long after it is produced, when bedtime comes and we strip off the clothes and the makeup. And as with cooking it’s silly to dismiss the art form on the grounds of that transience, the way Leon Kass does: the ending of the day’s look or the meal is not only like the famous ephemerality of a Tibetan sand mandala, but also like that of more everyday arts like music or drama. We recognize the aesthetic significance of those arts, and I think we should recognize the aesthetic significance of this one too.
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For many people who are raised female, beautification this is a burden: an additional expectation placed on top of life’s other difficulties. But for someone who’s been denied it all his/her life it can feel liberating.
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This describes the experience of my sister-in-law eerily well.
My mother-in-law was a math major in the mid 1970s (she says “because they wouldn’t let a woman be an engineering major back then.”) She was very much the sort who eschewed make-up, hair styling, and self-beautification generally. Picture the female lead from the 1985 film Real Genius, but with less frenetic energy and more social anxiety.
Since my mother-in-law never did that sort of stuff, her daughters didn’t learn about it at home. My wife still largely eschews it (except for costuming purposes), but my sister-in-law took to it in her 30s with gusto, and often laments that she had to teach herself how to do it as an adult, because of the joy she finds in it.
Yes, I think that is likely quite common. It might be less common than the reverse situation of feeling constrained by beauty standards, but I think both situations should be honoured.
By the way, I learned a ton of what I know about makeup by getting a tutorial at MAC (Sephora also offers these). It is great to have a professional do your makeup and explain to you what she’s doing and why; if your sister-in-law hasn’t tried one of these, I’d highly recommend it to her. (Just be ready to be selective about the makeup they sell at the end of the tutorial; buying all of it will be several hundreds of dollars you probably don’t need.)
There is a ton of work on dress in anthropology and on human attractiveness in psychology, not to mention interdisciplinary research. Shahidha Bari’s 2016 essay cited above, “Why does philosophy hold clothes in such low regard?”, cites the opinions of a few philosophers on appearance versus reality and holds up Karl Marx as a “notable exception” among philosophers for his concern with dress. But Marx’s concern with dress was arguably what we would call anthropology today.
Philosophers of logic or mathematics or physics or chemistry don’t study dress and human attractiveness because those subjects have little to do with their subfields. Just a couple of weeks ago Amod wrote a post on “The physics of emptiness” that didn’t mention dress and human attractiveness, probably because when you analyze things at that level all you have is physics (or emptiness if you prefer).
And because human attractiveness and beautification is so specific to how human brains perceive human bodies, I don’t know how much overlap there is between the aesthetics of human faces and bodies and the aesthetics of nonhuman phenomena. There is some overlap, but in some aspects they are different subjects.
One of the issues here is the valuation of different subjects of study, and cultural hierarchies of value. Bari gave examples of philosophers who disvalued anthropological and psychological subjects because those philosophers valued a conception of “naked” reality (whether conceived physically or spiritually) over appearances. Most of those philosophers also lived in a past time when their values corresponded to other rigid cultural hierarchies. But there are other thinkers (Bari named some), in various fields, who rejected such valuation. Another example of the latter that comes to mind is anthropologist Michael D. Jackson’s article, “Where thought belongs: an anthropological critique of the project of philosophy” (Anthropological Theory, 9(3), 2009, 235–251): “Taking the view that thought cannot escape the impress of a thinker’s immediate situation, this article invokes the phenomenological notions of lifeworld and lebensphilosophie to explore the social spaces where thought arises and transpires.” I’ve always liked the title of Jackson’s article as a manifesto against disciplinary narrowing of thinking: thought does not belong to any one discipline, not even philosophy.
Walk into any large public library, and you will find that philosophy is only a small part of thinking, and even what is being done in the name of “philosophy” is wider than you know. Those of us who have access to good libraries today (not to mention everything else available on the Internet) have access to a degree of autonomy and cultural democracy that makes old cultural hierarchies obsolete, and makes both “feminine beauty” and “the physics of emptiness”, and anything else, significant subjects of study, if we want them to be. This goes without saying for many people today, but people who are affiliated with the intellectual silos of universities may need to be reminded of this if they are too identified with whatever cultural hierarchies still remain in their university milieus.
Of course logicians or philosophers of mathematics don’t (typically) study human beautification; I never said they should. The point was specifically about philosophical aesthetics, which does often understand itself to be about beauty. (Heidegger disliked talking about art in terms of beauty and pleasure, and that’s why he disliked the term “aesthetics” in the first place.)
Human beautification is indeed specific to how human brains perceive human bodies – but any other field of aesthetics is also specific to how human brains perceive it. I think something’s lacking from any kind of art criticism that judges without reference to the (at least implied) perception of the viewer.
And yes, anthropologists have said plenty of interesting and worthwhile things about beautification – but this was a post about a gap in philosophical aesthetics, not in anthropology.
I suppose I was implying that a gap in philosophical aesthetics is not surprising (there are other fields that have large relevant knowledge bases, so people interested in the subject could be more likely to be found in other fields) and doesn’t indicate a gap in human knowledge of the subject in general; discussion of it can be found elsewhere. You didn’t imply a gap in human knowledge of the subject in general, of course, but as someone with a librarian-like generalist perspective, I wanted to say that. One aspect or cause of the gaps in philosophical aesthetics, in addition to whatever cultural biases of that subfield, is the smaller number of people working in that area. But step out of that part of the library catalogue, and you will have a lot more researchers and information to work with.
I just remembered that American philosopher Baker Brownell’s (1887–1965) book Art is Action: A Discussion of Nine Arts in a Modern World (Harper & Brothers, 1939) has a chapter on “Costume” (pp. 192–200). He wisely says much more about men’s clothes than about women’s (write what you know), but taking a look at it now, there are some passages that have a funny relevance to this post:
Oh, interesting. Thanks for that, I’d never heard of Brownell.