Friday, February 28, 2003

Girl Culture Shock

[Peggy Lee, singing “I Enjoy Being a Girl"] This Peggy Lee tune thrummed ironically through my head last weekend when I went to award-winning photographer Lauren Greenfield’s exhibit of photos titled “Girl Culture,” showing at the Snite Museum at the University of Notre Dame through March 9. (You can visit much of the exhibit virtually, too, by going to http://www.girlculture.com). There is little evidence of “enjoying” girlhood in these striking images of posturing teenagers, stoic exotic dancers, frilled and corseted girls at their proms and quinceañeras, girls with aged eyes at anorexia clinics and weight-loss camps, and 6-year-olds channeling Britney Spears. Instead, what we see is what Greenfield calls the “pathological in the everyday.” The title of the exhibit, “Girl Culture,” reminds us that this is nurture at work, not nature, and that in fact there is a profound unnaturalness to much of female beauty. The resigned, defiant, and heartbreaking interviews with her subjects that accompany many of Greenfield’s photographs underscore the crazy-making illogic of female lookism.

Of course, we all know culture is a production, and by now we know the harm that popular culture can do to children of either gender. But these photographs remind us of the absurdity of emphasizing and manufacturing differences between men’s and women’s bodies. When my first daughter was an infant, wearing whatever gifts or hand-me-down outfits friends had generously passed along, I was struck by how silly she looked swathed in pink frills, which contrasted with her patent-leather smooth crop of hair, like a miniature Victor/Victoria. One friend would say, “Hey - she’s going as a girl today!"and, nodding, I began to see clearly how much female dressing is a kind of passing. The agony and effort drag queens put into their costumes is scarcely different from the body-altering routines favored by the girl culture machine – from makeup to plastic surgery, as Greenfield’s unflinching close-ups of both reveal. My favorite moment in the novel, Bridget Jones’ Diary, is her exasperated comparison between women and farmers, with the endless “harvesting and crop spraying” women must do in the form of plucking and exfoliating and dying and tinting and shaving, just to stave off the reversion to nature.

And while pop culture has made the unnatural standards of women’s bodies more vicious, more inescapable, there’s no use longing for the good old days. The same corsets that made women pass out all through the Victorian Age are now on the spring runways – thanks so much, Ralph Lauren. And any visitor to Chicago’s Field Museum’s permanent shoe exhibit can imagine the agonized, withered foot that was once created and then cloaked in the tiny silk horror of the Chinese lotus flower slipper, and then easily see the link to the spiked platform pumps of our day. Why is the full personhood of more than half our species so feared that they have had to be hobbled in this way?

It is easy to feel defeated by this relentless bullying of female bodies and psyches, and several friends who have seen Greenfield’s photos have shaken their heads at the thought of my raising two girls in this toxic culture. “How can you keep them safe? Aren’t you terrified?” Well, of course I am. But here’s what gives me hope: my own experience of being raised by a mother who went from wearing the requisite spiked and pointy pumps as an airline hostess in the early 60’s to lacing herself into heavy leather “earth shoes” just a few years later, passing on the easily appealing legacy of practical comfort above all. I am optimistic that children who are raised among caring adults can dream up alternatives to this poisonous prevailing order. Writer Joan Didion says with some ambivalence that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” and she’s probably right. But if these are stories I tell myself about my daughters, their friends, the girls in my Scout troop, and the girls our block – with all of their dreamy, ambitious, athletic, artsy, scientific-minded, and sparky talents – and the ability I think they have to invent positive possibilities for themselves, they are stories in the same way that culture is a story; it is dreamed up, not written in biology. And so it can be dreamed up anew.

Certainly, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the pleasure any of us – of any gender – might take in decorating ourselves, in showing through costuming or finery that our identities are wonderfully malleable rather than fixed in our chromosomes. Here’s another story I tell myself, though: It’s about a culture in which there is equal opportunity for every body to participate in playful performance and self-decoration, without pain or self-hatred – but also a culture that will foster confidence and pleasure in the fanciness of our own skins, just as they come. So, here’s the song I’m singing now, and I’ll warn you that it makes even the grade-schoolers at my house roll their eyes.

For Michiana Chronicles, this is April Lidinsky. Hit it, Mr. Rogers! [Music: “Everybody’s Fancy,” by Fred Rogers]

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on February 28, 2003
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