tone it down

For the moment, let's turn our focus on the notion of a person being "attention-seeking."  This is the concept we draw on when we sigh "he just wants attention, ignore him", or sneer "shut up, you attention whore."  We might describe Lady Gaga this way, or Louis Spence, or a small child--anyone shrill or grating.  It's a catch-all term of abuse for anyone whose behaviour is outré in a way that people consider otherwise unjustifiable.  This is a term of discipline, meant to evoke shame.

This first started niggling at me when I was seventeen.  My high school's yearbook committee had planned a page devoted to photos of couples kissing (which was dumb), and administrators had excised a photo of a pair of my lesbian classmates from the final product while preserving the rest of the page (which was dumber).

The message was clear: the school didn't see our relationships as valuable or meaningful in the same way as our heterosexual classmates, but rather as obscene. The administrators advanced two arguments in their defense: first, that the young ladies involved would benefit from not having a permanent record of a relationship they might later characterize as a youthful indiscretion (a courtesy not advanced to a straight couple who had vowed on the page that they would be "still together ten years from now" but who had broken up between the taking of the photo and the yearbook printing); and second, that any further debate over the fairness of this decision would distract other students from their important studies.

Naturally, we organized a kiss-in.  That is to say, we called up the local newspaper and tv news and told them that all the high school students would be kissing each other in a variety of gender permutations out on the school lawn one afternoon.  The form of this protest was considered.  It held up as ludicrous the idea that being photographed kissing your girlfriend might be shameful, and demonstrated that failing to value us queers as students was going to be more distracting than just treating us like everybody else.  It referenced the golden era of American protest, and it had a hook to draw in the media (hot teen sex lawn).  We did get a good amount of coverage, and although we had to add our own lesbians to the yearbook that spring, they made damn sure to acknowledge the existence of queer students in the following years.  It was also, incidentally, the first time I ever kissed someone.  A successful protest all around, I would say.

So it was with some dismay that I read a letter in the paper (an early form of online commenting!) the next day, admonishing the editors for deigning to attend the protest, grousing about all the "giggling bisexuals" on the local news, and generally complaining that it was clear that all the protestors wanted was attention.  Well, yeah.

The more I considered it, the more of a mystery it became to me.  Attention seems like such a Maslovian need--would we sigh "ugh, what a food whore" when we see a starving man?  "She's only doing that because she's looking for a sense of security and belonging in a group."  Attention is how we understand ourselves to have a reciprocal social connection with others.  Not being attended to frequently by people in your life fucks with your sense of self.  Ask a homeless man, charged with the task of soliciting permission to survive from every passerby, how dehumanizing a lack of attention can be. 

Then I started looking at whom the epithet was directed--first, children and reality show subjects.  Second, trolls and bullies.  And thirdly, women in the public eye, queers of all stripes, and people of color who complained of institutionalized racism.  People it's not applied to include parents, reality-show creators, the owners of sports franchises, and straight men in general (hard to be attention-seeking when your gaze is constantly subjectified). 

So.  The framework that's being encoded in the pejorative use of "attention-seeking" is that some people have an excessive desire for our finite attention, like small children, and that ignoring them will serve both to punish them for their bad behaviour and to help them grow up into strong, capable straight white men who dress conservatively.  This is untenably paternalistic, and I reject it.

There is, however, one instance in which I support the diabolization of attention-seeking, and, spoiler warning, it's when corporations do it.  I am profoundly annoyed whenever I see a corporate blog post end with an exhortation to "join the conversation!" or "tell us what you think!"  It's a lazy and useless attempt at online community-building, one which attempts to shunt all the work of fostering a discussion space onto commenters.  Moreover, it's one part of a creeping systemization of creatives working for free (not, as I wrote initially, "pro bono") to make profits for corporate stockholders--regard the ads you see regularly nowadays which ask you to produce content for more advertising campaigns, presenting this as a fabulous creative opportunity rather than a pure scam.

It's really getting to the point where capital is in such a strong negotiating position that it can demand years of free service from a worker before paying him, that he may prove a faithful and uncomplaining employee.  We can fight this, but we need one thing.  Workers of the world: get attention.

For my Moogle

The Fantasy Scenario In Which I Can Imagine Myself Wearing This Lipstick

Just as the alarm sounds to tell you that the doors are closing, a woman bounds onto the 8 AM train.  She's in low heels, sheer black nylons, and a dark skirted suit, very conservative and businesslike.  Hair's up in a well-pinned french roll with a slight quiff, sleek and put-together.  She sits down but remains erect, smoothing her skirt front and back.

When she pulls a compact mirror out of her purse (barely larger than a clutch, logoless and nondescript in an expensive-looking way) and starts gently powdering her face, it's a little offputting--doing makeup on the train?  Pretty much on the same level as clipping your toenails on the bus, as far as I'm concerned.  Keep personal care personal.  Anyway, she lightly powders her lips and replaces the puff.  I guess she's fairly made-up already, mostly around the eyes.  Unusually light on the blush and bronzer for Glasgow.  She pulls a short, slim tube out of her purse.  It's some kind of lip gloss in a navy-colored bottle, which she sets on the little table to unscrew.  Compact mirror in her left hand, she touches the applicator to her lips.  It's dark, darker than you expected.  The color of the bottle actually seems to be the color of the gloss itself. 

With a practiced hand she draws herself a little bee-stung mouth, then very carefully makes eye contact with absolutely no one on the train the whole journey in, just gazing out the window at the cows. 

Almost Rosey

I'm honestly a bit self-conscious about this next thing, but I regard this blog as somewhere between confessional and exorcism, and so it must come out.  My embarrassment stems from how this hits a bunch of anti-feminist stereotypes of women: it was a frivolous expense, on a foolish superstition, for looking pretty.

Okay, so, here goes: I've had my colors done.  It was a birthday present, anyway!  I just agreed to sit through it!

If you're not familiar with this, it's when you pay someone to look at you and tell you what colors would look good on you, often with regard to your "undertones" or "season" (I'm an Academic Autumn).  The practice is rife with stories of people going to several different practitioners and getting entirely different sets of colors, so you'll excuse me if I don't consider it binding.

I feel that I understand colors pretty well, having often drawn circles on white paper with colored pencils and having observed the apparent change in the centres.  I'm aware of your analogous and complementary schemes, so I see pretty much what is happening here.  The first four swatches are meant to be I guess interpretations (for makeup-buying) of my skin color, blush tones, eye colors, and hair. 

This was back when I was not dyeing my hair, on purpose.  The color-picking woman exhorted me to come back if I ever changed my hair, since of course this would shift around the wheel in a way that only an expert could be reasonably expected to compensate for.
(An aside here: After talking for about five minutes over dinner last night about the physical structure of hair and how that affects the way it can be colored, one of my father's co-workers confronted me in a weirdly hostile, contemptuous way about whether "you even remember the actual color of your hair," as though dyeing would make you unfamiliar with that, and further as though not changing your hair would be more moral than having knowledge about the molecular composition and organization of keratinous structures.) 

 Here's my prescribed, non-embodied colors, separated  by hue.  As you can see I am meant to wear almost exclusively green.  I do wear green without remorse, but colors I generally wear happily not represented on this chart include blue, black, gray, brick, navy, gridelin, yellow, and taupe. Yes, even yellow, which if you mention to someone they'll go "Oh, yellow is a hard color to wear."  No it isn't.  You just put it on your body like all the other colors.   It doesn't try to escape or explode or nothing.

A selection of colors from the chart.  Body colors are situated at the confluence of a circle and a line.

The color-woman said I have the eye-whites to wear proper white, but that I should look into getting my teeth whitened.  Instead I have used them for chewing food, removing tags from clothing, and looking that little bit crazy.

Gingembre

When I was eight or nine, my science teacher, whom I idolized, looked with fondness at my copper locks, saying "Habitual, never dye your hair."  This is a hell of a trip to put on a prepubescent girl.  She herself was rocking a salt-and-pepper ponytail that had never seen dye, so I can't say she wasn't practicing what she preached.  Nevertheless, when the onset of adult hormones darkened and dulled my hair a few years later, I started looking for something that would give me that feeling I had when my science teacher looked at me.

What grows out of my head today is a fairly deep greenish-brown with gold and copper highlights.  It's pretty fine in texture, with a smirk-worthy Veronica Lake wave.  Mostly I do nothing with it, not even putting it up unless I feel like it's going to stick to my face or get caught in a thresher or something.  Until quite recently, I was ruthless about burning it with peroxide and getting it all chopped off every month.  I believed it was my enemy. 

It's not difficult to have the wrong kind of hair; there are so many of them.  In my case, I had Nerd Hair.  This style is marked by a disinterest in whatever bullshit products people are currently using on their hair.  Nerd hair can be easily obtained by a scrupulous daily washing with an over-drying shampoo, inattention to dandruff, and a reluctance ever to cut the hair, leading to a gentle taper at the ends.  Mine was limp, yet frizzy, like an ironed cloud. 

The only thing that prevents me from having nerd hair now (debatable!) is henna.  Mashing a paste of this leaf and some acid into my scalp every six months or so gives me the hair I always imagined I had before I looked in the mirror.  I wouldn't be growing it out to this rather absurd length without henna.

My hair now is nice and shiny and silken to the touch, but I'll be damned if I can run my fingers through it.  The henna gives it "body", which as far as I can tell means "a high frictional coefficient". 

I have no pretensions about appearing "natural" (though I do on occasion like to have no roots).  I suppose I have some bias toward a plant-based rather than chemical dye, or a small plucky company over a big evil conglomerate, but what mainly keeps me on the henna is that it is permanent, more than any "permanent" dye or treatment I've heard of.  The color I have on the third day is the color I have on the 300th day. 

So that's why henna, but I feel the more important question is: why red?  When hair color is a choice, it's as good a psychological test as any other costly signal.  If I can simplify the rather complicated sexual politics of women's hair color for a moment here, I'll give you an answer.  Of course the follicles that grow out of your head have no intention, but moving from their color to another (or sticking at a time when everyone else is dyeing) can carry these meanings.

To go blonde is to create yourself as a sexual object: the way you look to a partner will be most important to you when you fuck.  To go brunette is to conceal your sexuality from the public eye, to make yourself a "serious" woman instead of a sexual one.  But to go red is to make yourself a sexual subject, and foreground your own desire.  Like blush, like lipstick, like anger, you're wearing that rush of blood outside for all to see. 

Often I find myself wishing there were subject/red versions of other female signifiers--say, a ginger size of tits.  Oh, also I wish applying henna to long hair by my lonesome wasn't such a bastard--I managed to rip out a whole bunch of hair this time. 

 The red brows, lips and dolly cheeks of this post were inspired by Johanna Öst.

Solipsist

Perhaps one of the reasons I am so godawful as a lesbian--why I fell so fast and so hard for cock--is that I can't get the makeup down.  I heard the "lesbian look" described (of pre-outcoming Mary Cheney and Candace Gingrich; perhaps it would be more accurate to call this look "passing spinster"), in something I read in the early 2000s -- maybe a memoir of  Ron Reagan Jr. -- as little to nothing around the eyes or on the cheeks, with plain lipstick, viz.:

Pearls optional, unless you're in politics.  

I kind of have something against lipstick.  While my eyes continue to get flashier and madder, lipstick still codes as Trying Too Hard to the buried high school butch in me who still judges all my outfits.  Also, I have mildly asymmetrical lips, and applying a color to them inflames my OCD something terrible.  Wait, not OCD.  What's the one where you self-diagnose with psychiatric disorders?  Oh yes--hypochondria.  But never wearing something has certainly not stopped me from hoarding it, and so I have many lipsticks, nail polishes, pieces of jewelry, pairs of high-ass heels, belts, purses, bits of string, and the like.  These next pictures represent the portion of that collection I could be arsed to apply and quickly snap two photos of.

My lips with nothing on top.

Glosses:

Clear (maybe slightly red?) apple-flavored lip gloss.  Mmmm.

Some drugstore frosted gloss.  Unimpressive-looking, sticky, overpoweringly vanilla-scented.

These are some of my favorites, from Medusa's Makeup--magenta (Smooch) and red (Talk Talk), both with gold and copper sparks.  The purple somehow manages to match my lip color beautifully, and the red is just right for looking sexy but not overdone.  They smell pretty bad and the wands are difficult to work with. 

This one was a freebie from Everyday Minerals, some kind of tube of orange-hued chapstick.  This is another thing I object to about lipstick: my choice of hues, if I want to maintain some self-respect, is limited to the chunk of the spectrum between orange and purple, and that's dull to me.

Liners:

A frosty pink Barry M pencil I mainly use to highlight around the eyes.  Alarmingly metallic, but good under a translucent colored gloss. 

Another orange tone, this brick-colored drugstore pencil is soft and slightly emollient, making it a terrible choice as a liner. 

This looked to me like it would match my lips, but in fact it is dreadful.

Lipsticks:

This one is sort of a medium brown in the tube, called "Divine Wine."  Dark lipstick supposedly makes you look older.  I still think I would make a pretty good goth.

My best Elena Kagan.

 Another sort of matchy berry bronzey metallic thing. I am falling asleep.

Now, this is my favorite thing to do to my lips.  It's just a crimson stain, applied from the center of the mouth and faded outwards.  It makes me feel totally sex.

Also, incidentally, my skin is looking fantastic here, by the standards of my skin.