When I was in 7th or 8th grade, I got into the habit of skimming my parents’ copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. It seemed like a expedient way toward the kind of wisdom that would earn me the admiration of my peers. (Btw, when did wisdom ever make a pre-teen popular? In my day, platform jellies from Delia’s = hot. Quoting Flaubert without really knowing who Flaubert is = not.) Anyway, I’m 99% sure that at one point I stumbled upon the quote, “The truth is halved upon utterance” and it still resonates with me lo these many years later. Recently, I tried to track down this nugget’s source, even going so far as to google the phrase, to no avail. Is this the Mandela Effect? Did I make up this quote? Am I a fucking genius unable to reckon with my own intellect, frantically tossing my sagacity like a hot potato because some deep-seated childhood trauma has made me unwilling to stomach my own greatness? Who would I hurt if I removed my light from under its bushel? Only God and my therapist know…. Anyway, if you can attribute this quote, holler at me!
I understand this phrase to mean that the minute you make a declaration about yourself (it’s always about The Self with this bitch!), your declaration, which you believed to be true, is exposed for its inconsistency. For example, the other day, I mentioned to my father-in-law that I saw myself as a “good listener.” As soon as the self-satisfied claim escaped my lips, I began to scour my brain for past examples where I’d revealed myself to be a bad listener in my father-in-law’s company, quite sure that he must be mounting a case for why I’m full of shit. Then suddenly, it was minutes later, and, distracted by all my self-scouring, I hadn’t heard any of the words he’d said to me since I’d plugged my listening skillz.
Anyhoo, I mention all this because recently I thought to myself: I’m a girls’ girl. I love women! I love having female friends! That I have male friends at all is completely incidental! Most of my male friends are just people I was forced to work with for years and years and, seeking beauty in the fallow landscape that surrounded me, I found the good in them! Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond my control, I’m currently around men a lot more than women. I mean, you could say that marrying my husband was within my control, but was it? I was beaten into submission by the blunt instrument of love! In a way, isn’t this kind of an arranged marriage? The arranging done by my heart? And I guess technically I chose to have two male children, but how much choice did I really have? Was I just supposed to abort fetus after fetus until I rolled a double-x chromosome? A woman’s fertility is a ticking time bomb, I didn’t have the luxury! Point being, due to the all-consuming nature of parenting small children, the capitalist precedence that, for work, drew me to a city where I had few close female friends, and my own learned helplessness in forging new relationships, I’m not hanging out with a ton of gal pals these days. Nevertheless, I’ve persisted… by replacing real female friendships with parasocial ones! I’ve become a devoted reader of Jessica DeFino’s gently militant newsletter, The Unpublishable, and Valerie Monroe’s gently non-militant newsletter, How Not To F*ck Up Your Face. They both brilliantly poke the beast of beauty culture and how we women can endeavor to disengage from the parts of it that don’t serve us. I listen to Kate Berlant and Jaqueline Novak’s podcast, Poog, and suddenly I’m the third musketeer (the one who doesn’t talk) in a hilarious, insightful conversation about the benefits and limitations of commodified wellness. But still, recently, something about these (one-sided) friendships has been nagging at me. Something’s been keeping me from feeling like an actual part of the conversations of which I’m not actually a part. This morning, I finally put my finger on the something: I don’t know what the fuck these women are talking about, and it hurts my feelings.
Cliches become cliches for a reason. Women have rich conversations, even about subjects that a cruel and arrogant group of men in suits and hair gel would mock us for discussing, right before slapping our tushies. Last week I had a wonderful Zoom with one of my closest lady friends. It was restorative, enriching, and we definitely talked about Noom and the Flex Disc. Why is that any sillier than the fact that my husband really does bring up the fall of the Roman Empire at least once a week? Is the Roman Empire inherently more worthy and serious as a subject matter? From where I’m standing, all those Roman fuckers are dead, while Noom was recently valued at $3.7 billion, so….. Still, I can’t help feeling a knee-jerk sense of shame that I find comfort in the refuge of newsletters and podcasts focused on what are condescendingly referred to as “women’s issues", and in particular, physical attractiveness. Wasn’t this The Patriarchy’s master plan? Divert women’s attention to the mirror so that men can sneak off to start wars and make gang bang porn? I’m pretty sure Gabriela Mistral wrote an essay about that. But the fact is, a woman must cultivate physical beauty, by spending lots of money and wasting lots of time, to be treated well, professionally and personally. A woman can choose to accept or reject this paradigm, but it remains a paradigm nonetheless. How dare anyone call it frivolous to unpack OUR reality, as my soul sisters, my bosom buddies do on the aforementioned newsletters and podcasts? Did anyone call it frivolous? Because I’ll kill them.
The problem (FOR ME) is, these podcasts and newsletters speak in the language of products, which I honestly don’t know shit about. I don’t say this with any faux-modesty or virtuous ignorance. The world of skincare eludes me. When I was thirteen, my dermatologist told me to wash my face with Cetaphil and twenty seven years later, I still do. If I use anything other than Dove fragrance-free bar soap for sensitive skin on the rest of my body, my vagina will immediately burst into flames, and not in a good way! Baths? Unfathomable. And makeup? Let me telling you a little story about makeup…
Picture a sixth grader whose older sister did her makeup for her first school dance. Liquid foundation topped off with powder, a perhaps-too-mature smoky eye, a fall palate that was trending at the time, the works. Picture her cautiously, hopefully, innocently stepping into her middle school cafeteria, which had been converted into a dance floor for the evening. Hear the pulsing of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Love Rollercoaster” as she locks eyes with her crush. Feel her heart break as he inquires, “why is your face peeling off?” It was the foundation! My skin was too dry for the foundation!!! And I’ve never worn foundation since.
Skincare. Makeup. And now there’s a world of injectables and fillers and laser and/or microneedling procedures that take time to learn about. I don’t know what the fucking Tarte scandal is. I’m not on TikTok so don’t ask me to rank my favorite skinfluencers. Why would I want to watch a stranger put on their makeup? I find it humiliating if my husband or small children even glimpse me putting on my amateur face, which includes Walgreens-purchased eyeliner and mascara. (So it has always been and so shall it forever be.) The ideas surrounding wellness and beauty culture interest me. Why are we trying to turn our faces into food? How can we treat ourselves with compassion as we age? Is a linear path to self-improvement out of sync with our cyclical feminine rhythms? But I don’t care who Tracy Anderson is. And I’m not going to buy a jade facial roller. So sometimes, I feel held at a distance from my favorite female content creators, like I’m reading the newspaper because I’m generally interested in the moral ambiguity of war (IS it morally ambiguous???), but I don’t actually know what a Gaza is.
Of course, the very idea of being a girls’ girl is a rooted in a worldview so binary that anyone under 30 might find this whole newsletter borderline offensive. And it’s probably better for the world overall that I’m wrestling with an issue the future has already started to outgrow. But while one most certainly needs a room of one’s own, I think one needs a common room of one’s own too, to sit and gab with people of one’s own, who share interests of one’s own. And as I try to assemble mine, I want some bitches up in here. But I don’t want to talk about skincare.
It takes me over an hour and a half to "doll myself up". And I'm including build up and tear down... That would mean over 10 hours a week committed to such effort. I'd rather sleep and seem well rested instead of putting a bunch of products on my face that I then have to clean off with even more expensive stuff, so that my skin does not look like it needs to be covered up. Now, if you do it cuz you love it and you can afford quality items, great! If it brings you joy in a way that you feel yourself connecting with your body, good for you! And if you're making a living off it, that's also a win. But if not, that's a lot of precious time and money putting on a face most people may not even notice because they are busy looking at their own...
"Why is your face peeling off?" I FELT that in my deepest, most-shameful, 6th grade memories.