On Wearing Not-Makeup

"Women shouldn't wear makeup because they look better without it" is right up there on the list of sentiments that keep my eyes rolling like a Kit-Cat clock with "Women shouldn't shave their pubes because I have a deep concern for feminism, and not at all because I long to press my face into a dense bush and reckon I have the authority to order women to comport themselves in a manner befitting my circa 1972 sexual fantasies."

Women have shit going on in their lives that doesn't revolve around you.  If you find yourself saying something along these lines, be aware that you sound like a tool, exactly as much as if you were saying that you should have the right not to be subjected to women's awful bare faces. 

There's a number of rationales people have for feeling like they can demand the paint come off.  Many express outrage or discomfort with the idea of a falsified face, tinged with varying degrees of jealousy or misogyny.  Some cite political or aesthetic objections to beauty standards that women feel compelled to approximate in their makeup.  Many of these, I've learned, habitually confuse people wearing natural-look makeup with people who don't wear makeup, and so believe that the most heavy-handed applications are representative.  A few simply have impossibly high standards for the skill involved in application, and so believe people shouldn't even try if they're not making up at a professional level. 

I also sense, in some of men's objections, a feeling of being unnerved that someone has gone to additional trouble to look pleasing, when they are strongly discouraged from reciprocating in kind.  Makeup seems to make these guys feel like more is expected from them, an implicit contract they didn't have the chance to agree to.

Others, idiots, appear to believe that attention to one's appearance precludes the ability to think about any other subject, and that such attention signals unbecoming pride in a body one is meant to keep from distracting others.  I feel pretty justified in calling this opinion moronic because I used to hold it before I gave the matter even a second's thought. 

Look, If makeup didn't make you look better, for whatever value of "better" is currently en vogue, it would die out.  Structural functionalism comin' atcha.  But I feel makeup has more to recommend it than mere improvement.  It can transform you, not just into your best you, but into any you you can communicate.  Applying makeup well requires a steady hand and good observation, both of yourself and of the qualities of what you want to create.  And I believe that clear self-reflection, tempered with self-love, is fundamental to maximizing what you get out of the brief few years you spend being an alive human.

Everyone should get to wear makeup.  It's what separates us from the animals (if that's your bag).  At the same time, though it irritates me to have to make this explicit, no one ought to be forced or coerced into wearing makeup (at any moment, in any particular fashion) to keep their employment or permission to act as part of society.  Okay, except maybe screen actors. 

If you'd still like to make a feminist-styled argument that pigments applied to the body deserve to be chucked in the dustbin of history (perhaps because you reify some concept of "natural"), let me give you a quick pointer.  You're going to find a great many feminists curiously unmoved by a precis whose assumptions concerning what would increase social justice hinge on making women look better.