And of course standards of beauty have changed over time, and are different across cultures and classes, but the point is every culture and subculture has them. So while of course it's good to question where they come from, and to step outside them and look for the less obvious forms of human beauty, it's unlikely we'd be rid of them ever, class society, patriarchy or no. And who doesn't enjoy beauty, whatever it is? I think most of us really like looking at the beautiful or well-turned out (however we define that), of any gender, class or race, and, once out of high school, we are also of course capable of seeing beyond physical appearance.
Something further about class and beauty: while fashion can be very class-exclusive - brand name stuff does cost a lot more -- beauty products and manicures/pedicures are not. the latter are seen as something that the woman who isn't rich can do to make herself feel a lot prettier. you'll notice that women's magazines targetting the working class (like Cosmo) or the young (Jane, the former Mademoiselle) have very little fashion advice, but lots of stuff on makeup, nail care etc. Editors of these magazines say, our readers aren't really interested in high fashion because they can't afford it, but they can and will buy a new lipstick. In fact, lipstick is sometimes seen as an economic indicator: in bad times, sales of lipstick go up, because if you can't afford a new outfit, a lipstick is something quite cheap that can be equally satisfying. Poor neighborhoods have more nail salons than rich ones - partly because it's an inexpensive business to run and to start, but also because poor women who can't go to restaurants, buy fancy clothes, etc, can still get their nails done. Agree with those posters who have suggested that for (white) men, fussing with nails and products is associated with yuppie prosperity, but I think for women it's another story altogether.
Liza
> From: Kelley <the-squeeze at pulpculture.org>
> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 08:57:52 -0400
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org, lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Queen for a Day: My Gay Makeover
>
>
>> At 10:00 AM 7/15/03 -0700, Miles Jackson wrote:
>> Again, it's not just because people naturally desire
>> pedicures: it's because there is a beauty industry that generates
>> and enforces this standard of how toes should look and obviously
>> profits from the reinforcement of this standard.
>
> it doesn't prove that we _should_ not care about appearance or that "not
> caring" would be a consequence of eliminating class society. i don't think
> you're saying this, but too often people seem to think that, by resisting
> hegemonic norms of beauty, etc., then they are somehow participating in the
> elimination of class society or, at least, that there's a great deal at
> stake if we don't try.
>
> i agree that these are socially, historically constituted standards. what
> i'm not comfortable with is the implication that over those 1000s of years
> of which you speak there were no attempts to adorn oneself and that those
> attempts were simply about class society. i'm pretty sure you don't mean
> this, though, do you?
>
> all we really know is that hegemonic norms of beauty and attractiveness
> have accompanied class society and that those norms have often been defined
> by an elite.
> we don't really know if the desire to adorn oneself or to make one's
> surrounding and self as nice looking as possible is caused by class society.
>
> and, even if it is, do we want to give it up? is it necessary to give it
> up, as long as those norms don't have any meaning--in the way some of us
> tried to argue it ought to be with sexual difference? "Yes, that's nice,
> you have a bigger penis than I do and you liked to be called a man. Next."
>
> we can probably say that inequalities of income, welath, well-being,
> status, etc. have been reproduced, aided and abetted by hegemonic norms of
> beauty. those who fail to meet them have been sanctioned, particularly if
> those norms appear to be something one can actually _change_, an idea that
> becomes very powerful in the context of a society that assumes that status
> position is one's personal responsibility.
>
> (My students from well-to-do NE backgrounds could tell me the difference
> between white trash and hick, identifying them by clothes, music, cars,
> food. they also marked differences between the morally superior hick who
> works hard and has proper moral values as opposed to the white trash who is
> a failure because s/he wants to remain poor. As others have pointed out,
> working class whiteness has been racialized, at first in attempts to show
> that they had different body types (bow legs, sway back, etc) and facial
> features (buck teeth, crooked teeth), as well as by defining what they
> wear, their comportment, hairstyles, complexions, posture, and diction as
> disposable attributes. Those who didn't shed them or try to shed them as
> best as possible are seen as responsible for their poverty.
>
> we can also observe, perhaps arguably, that hegemonic beauty norms become
> detached from more stable, more monolithic religio-political systems with
> the rise of mass communication. today, hegemonic standards of beauty
> operate in a cultural-political terrain that is more fluid and dynamic,
> less under direct control of elites. this opens up fissures where people
> can carve out spaces for defining alternative standards by which to measure
> oneself--to resist dominant hegemonic beauty norms. that doesn't make the
> resistant norms any less normative or any less about the socio-historical
> constitution of style, taste, beauty.
>
> as Hilary (IIRC) points out, these "rebellious" rejections of hegemonic
> standards of beauty become another aesthetic where "the natural look"
> becomes beautiful and the "make up look" becomes ugly and sometimes it
> signifies a certain cultural-political orientation.
>
>
> Kelley
>
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