Agreed. Its all about individual taste. As it should be.
I dislike the NYT authorâs premise that being a woman can be reduced to a set of shared negative experiences that build over time to place us in a âsocial constructâ based on oppression. My experience as a woman includes some negative experiences but it also includes a heck of a lot of positive ones. However, none of that makes me feel like a woman. I may have these experiences because I am a woman but they are not at the center of that knowledge. I have known since I was a small child that I was a heterosexual woman - since WAY before puberty and WAY before any knowledge of pay scales, etc. The nature of that knowledge might be ineffable and Caitlyn trying to say the her brain is feminine might not perfectly capture it, but it seems obtuse to me to think that she was meaning âgo dissect my brain or scan it and youâll see that Iâm a woman based on observable characteristics.â
Good stuff regarding our own attitudes on women to keep us all on our toes.
Lots of deeper thinking and I just got a cup of tea. You are all making my brain work too hard this morning.
I have always looked at gender and sexuality both as along one long line. At one end are the extremely traditional feminine beings and at the other the manliest of traditional manly beings. Everyone fits along that line somewhere with more women skewing towards the feminine side and more men shewing towards the male side. There are those men that are certainly more feminine than I am and women with more masculine traits than I have. Anyway thatâs how I have always looked at it. A continuum. I mostly blame hormones and body chemistry for where we all sit but thatâs a bit naive or elementary anyway. However it helps me in allowing for the vast differences we see in one another.
Good point, saint fan. Take her example of getting your period on the subway. My initial snarky reaction was to suggest that she not assume every woman lived in an urban setting.
âI understand the comment about not wearing any cosmetics, but unless you are more gorgeous than anyone Iâve seen, ever, there are going to be days when you need it.â
Completely disagree. This statement is where my issue comes in. I think choices are great, as long as they are personal preference. But I donât need it. As I said I will take my face as is.
@DonnaL this weekend I was watching the news and one of the panelists, who is gay, said that within the LBGT community, some were still not comfortable with the âTâ. I guess I was surprised by that statement. Is there any truth to it?
@acollegestudent, there is an ongoing series called Mall Makeovers on millihelen where ordinary women show photos of themselves before and after a session with a makeup artist. Quite a few people leaving comments prefer the âbeforeâ/natural photos. Other comments Iâve seen were expressing surprise that there are so many women who donât wear makeup on an average day. Itâs interesting.
To me, many of the before and after photographs arenât better or worse, theyâre just different.
Too often, on CC, when people talk about wearing makeup, the insinuation is that itâs pancake makeup, applied with a trowel, and very obvious. Thereâs never any middle ground of what most women do, which is a light hand with a little bit of blush or eyeliner or lipgloss, which doesnât âtransformâ you into looking radically different from how you look with nothing on. Just like when there are clothing threads, in which people continue to mistake âdressing nicelyâ for âoh, so you must feel compelled to dress like Peg Bundy and teeter on stilettos just to run to the drycleaners.â I think if we all saw one another IRL, weâd all tone the rhetoric down. I doubt anyone on here wears makeup like a hooker.
And I hope none of us would go to a professional job interview or client meeting in the cat sweat shirt, because itâs âme.â We all make the occasional adjustments to othersâ expectations.
âAnd then, of course, there are the friends that consider any concern with domestic arrangements too bourgeoisie to spend time on. They canât believe intellectuals care about such things.â
Yes, but even those folks, if they have to paint the living room, still specify that they want it blue or green or yellow - they donât just walk into the store and grab ANY paint can, go home and discover itâs magenta, puce or brown and start painting anyway. Which is my point - most people value aesthetics to some extent in their surroundings, so why is it such a shock that that includes themselves?
I donât care if people choose not to wear makeup, but there are very few women who donât look healthier and more awake with a touch of color and something to bring out their eyes. The male salesperson at one cosmetics store showed me his own eyebrow pencil and how it brought out his eyes. He sold me!
I am a pretty natural person, and the comments I get are that my skin looks pretty or my eyes look pretty and not that my makeup looks pretty.
I donât blame Caitlyn for doing the makeup bit. I agree that Iâm more into it in my 60s than I was in my 30s. I guess I need more help! I also have no hesitation in doing errands and certainly exercising without makeup.
Disagree with everyone needs makeup or it makes one look healthier. Honestly, being Black especially dark skinned one hardly needs any makeup, and we tend to age very well.
PG: Iâll try one more time. I am in agreement with you that aesthetics matter, in one way or another, to most people, even if they make a conscious effort to reject them. That was pretty much my point.
In my opinion, heavy pancake make-up vs natural, beauty enhancing make-up vs a naked face are merely different aesthetic choices. It is impossible for one to be correct and others wrong, unless we believe in some sort of Platonic make-up ideal, which I donât. Maybe you do?
Same with Kardashian styles, Peg Bundy styles, PG style. There may be situations where it makes sense to dress to blend. Sometimes to blend, one would need to dress like Peg Bundy and sometimes like PG. I am going to do my best to understand and appreciate both looks, even though neither is my look. If everyone looks like me, or like you, or like Kim K, the world becomes very dull, in my opinion.
Why people choose their looks (and their decor) is much more interesting to me than the look itself.
Sheesh. It makes some people look better, ok? And thereâs a whole industry built on make-up for Black women, too.
Weâre really OT. So what if I had rosy cheeks when younger and didnât need blush? Or someone else has lush, long lashes and doesnât need mascara. Or others doesnât really care how they look, they want to be loved for their mind?
Why canât we just accept that Caitlyn wants to feel the way she wants to feel?
My husband says he doesnât like makeup, but the times he compliments me on how I look, Iâm wearing it!
Maybe I just live in a weird place, but often here otherwise very minimalistic and fresh faced older women here do a subtle eyebrow tattoo. My grandmother used to say about brows not to pluck them too much because just when you need them the most you donât have them.
âWhy canât we just accept that Caitlyn wants to feel the way she wants to feel?â
Because it seems that some people on this thread who happen not to be the makeup-wearing type felt disincluded, marginalized, told-that-they-were-less-of-a-woman because of this. And weâre trying to deconstruct where that came from - since no one on here has said that women must wear makeup and Caitlyn Jenner certainly hasnât claimed to speak for what all women should or must do.
CF, why not answer the question directly? How in your life have you been marginalized or told that you must wear makeup, such that you react so strongly to makeup-wearing in the abstract, whether itâs by any of us or by Caitlyn Jenner? I get you donât like it for yourself, which of course youâre entitled not to do.
âI donât care if people choose not to wear makeup, but there are very few women who donât look healthier and more awake with a touch of color and something to bring out their eyes. The male salesperson at one cosmetics store showed me his own eyebrow pencil and how it brought out his eyes. He sold me!
I am a pretty natural person, and the comments I get are that my skin looks pretty or my eyes look pretty and not that my makeup looks prettyâ
Exactly. I happened to go into a store recently that is where I buy makeup, and mentioned that i was going to Sâs graduation and was wearing various purple dresses / outfits for all the events (because I am completely and utterly hokey about stuff like that). I happen to have green eyes in an unusual shade of green. The lady pulled out some purple and showed me how just a very subtle touch of purple around my eyes could really make the green pop. She was right. Itâs not Peg Bundy or Tammy Faye Bakker. Itâs augmenting my own natural looks. Call me superficial. I donât care.
Nail polish and make-up are the fringes of what itâs like to be a woman. Being a woman also means getting your period at inconvenient or embarrassing times, sometimes staining your clothing. It means menstrual cramps, PMS, menopausal hot flashes, wet blouses or breast pads when lactating. It means worrying you might be pregnant or worrying that you canât get pregnant. It means doing regular breast exams for suspicious lumps. All these life experiences make us who we are. For me these female experiences were far more important than hair and make-up. Thatâs just the superficial stuff.
PG, I donât assume they feel marginalized. I don;t think it was even close to being presented that way, the personal psychological reaction. Not everyone is into makeup. Period. And my point is that, if they arenât, then just donât make assumptions about why Caitlyn chooses.
IRL, none of us should jump so quickly to suggest the only explanation is feeling marginalized or that old bear trap: not getting proper mothering.