This title in all-caps has been staring at me for the past four-to-five months in my drafts while I was sucking up the extraneous pulp from my mind and heart, distilling it into that nutrient-rich brain juice that usually only lasts for short spurts of time and energy before it can be squeezed again. And in that interim, I can return to pleasant preening and idle self-admiration. It is slightly ironic to revisit this now, during a time when being hot is very low on the list of concerns and all the hot shops are shut — no salons, no gyms, no spas. When faced with imminent death, it's not so surprising that appearance anxiety is a knee-jerk reaction. We are all aware of the season's agenda of thirst-baiting and heavy petting that looms in our future while we walk the halls of our chambers, kept company by our own reflection in the mirror...possibly the only thing we can exert control over now. We'll allow normality to take a lot of abuse. Normality is always in a constant flux of gradually shifting routines anyway; it's always changing too slowly to see until it's done. You can convince yourself of almost anything if you don't have to look at it.
Working in beauty, I realize that the job has less to do with looking at things as it does being looked at. Beauty™'s 21st-century rebrand is like a constantly ongoing global focus group. It has heard our demands for inclusivity, for acceptance, for fresh vistas of humanity that reflect who we are and who we are capable of becoming (and it is more than happy to sell us the tools of our own self-making). Perfection is no longer as profitable as it once was, revealed to be an abstract concept dangling a carrot onwards to misery. And yet, beauty's trajectory has splintered off into thousands of destinations of self-expression, to be performed, consumed, savored, or experimented for the sake of studying itself, now having graduated from its former occupation of economic seduction.
Beauty's agenda no longer serves the visual appetites of men, even though women have been writing the menus for centuries. We have always known how much a feast can be enjoyed before the first taste. Who better to understand desire than those who spend their whole lives wanting? I'd always understood that there was a point to it all, even if I wasn't ready for that point at the time. I learned to mimic those visual cues as my limbs stretched further from my body and my neurotransmitters choreographed fireworks across my synapses to rewire the horny neural expressways in my brain. All women born under the patriarchal gaze bargain with vanity as a means of self-worth and desirability because that is where we are raised to believe our value lies, even as we are encouraged to determine our own worth outside that currency system. (Our patriarchal society is very enthusiastic about the commodified feminism it benefits from, these sentiments included.)
With men no longer being the sole access to power or economic stability, beauty's conventions can take leave, rendered redundant. The time has come to seduce ourselves instead. Because it was never really about men, was it? It's always been about power, which is so much more appealing and enduring than men. And beauty is nothing if not very powerful.
It doesn't really matter what you look like because women are always being watched regardless. All women know this. I don't know a woman who doesn't possess that sixth-sense of knowing when she's being watched as she walks down the street and as she enters spaces. Women look at women the way men look at women, which is the way the world still looks at women. Rejecting the male gaze does not define a female one.
But how do you reclaim beauty from its own subjugation without first doing away with the systems of the subjugator? I've no reference whatsoever to the kind of society that doesn't have a specific image of the "correct" woman. I try to imagine how I would make myself look if I never knew any of that, and I truly cannot. I realize that what I know to be my choices and my expressions are in response to that, subconsciously or otherwise.
We style ourselves how we want to be seen and how we want to feel we are seen. We wear makeup for the selves of us that have absorbed, filtered, disseminated, and ultimately rejected the structures that adore us for all the reasons we are considered less than them. How do you reclaim beauty on those terms? How can you redefine beauty with the language of the patriarch? How do you depoliticize centuries of exalting women's bodies as both divine and corrupt? It's like a careless virgin sacrifice gone tits-up, evoking demonic goddesses. We regurgitate all the references that we've been fed and stitch them together to form our own Frankenstein creature of beauty rehashed with liberating menace, still longing for love amid the circumstances we've been dealt. What other choice do we have but to make ourselves divine on our own cagey terms? There are more possibilities than paths. It is possible to make ourselves more beautiful than they have decided we're capable of with the grace of extremity — like unpeeling an onion, cocooning layers of translucent armor around us that upon peeling once more, will beckon you to tears.
Mirror mythology suggests that our reflections are no reflections at all, but beings in a parallel universe who mimic us to study our behavior so that they can one day emerge into our world and take our place. You would know that time had come when you look into a mirror and your reflection was no longer there, now stalking you in your world to devour your soul and take your place. For now, our mirror selves are our confidants, confirming our own self-creation. We have time to acquaint ourselves with our mirror twins, to establish common ground, to get our stories fucking straight, until we're one more than our common enemy. And in time, when we reenter our own world reinforced in our own divine and demonic image, it will no longer be a question of how to be hot because we will have rewritten the rules of how we will allow them to look at us.