You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing1
In early 2013, I spoke at an author lunch for my eighth novel, Assassin, the final volume in the crime series that launched my writing career. Afterwards, during the signing, a woman approached me with a story to share. As I sat behind the signing table, pen poised over her copy of my book, she explained that in 2000 she and her partner saw me walk through Sydney airport and she said, ‘Oh, she must be a model.’ According to the recollection she felt compelled to share with me, I then proceeded to sit down nearby and read a book as I waited for my plane, while they joked that I was ‘probably reading the book upside down . . . because I mean, obviously, right? You’re too beautiful.’ The woman went on to say: ‘When I heard you talk today about what you went through when you were first published . . . I just needed to let you know that I was one of those people.’ She smiled cheerfully, her confession made.
This story is by no means unique. A review of one of my other novels, published recently, summed it up well: ‘My expectations were low for this one,’ the reviewer wrote. ‘I am ashamed to say, I think I was a little biased towards the author, but Tara Moss dispels the myth that models are air-headed clothes horses.’ This was a professionally penned review of my work, coming after thirteen years of being a novelist. In other words, had I not gradually over the period of more than a decade built up the possibility of this reviewer reading my work, she would have almost certainly continued to believe that I was an ‘air head’, end of story.
I have heard variations on this theme nearly every week of my writing career, from men and women of all ages. It’s not exactly a terrible burden to bear, ranked against other obstacles or even other damaging stereotypes, but it does trouble me for a few reasons. Naturally, there is the fact that I’ve only heard all this over the years because I am a published author; it is safe to say that if my only public career had been that of fashion model, I would not have heard these stories – certainly not as ‘confessions’. As I grow older this reaction is no longer the problem it once was, but what troubles me is the certain knowledge that mine is not an isolated experience.
There are a lot of people who walk through life being pointed at, and sniggered at, and underestimated for no logical or meaningful reason whatsoever, thanks to a variety of unpleasant stereotypes to do with physical appearance, size, disability, race, the status implied by their clothes, and so on. Some people will find out that others perceive them that way. Some won’t. Some will have the chance to address the prejudices against them, as I have over the years in great abundance, thanks to my writing and the opportunities afforded by countless interviews, blogging and social media, and that infamous polygraph test. But most people, I’d venture, will not have that opportunity.
Now I have certainly never uttered the adage ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ while referring to anything other than literal book covers, and I doubt I have ever said, ‘Don’t judge me by my appearance’; nonetheless, these sentiments do explain a theme that arose regularly throughout at least half of my lived years so far, from my teens to the age of thirty-five – not so coincidentally, the age window during which models and actresses generally get the most work, and the age range of most of the ‘visible’ or celebrated women in our culture. As the theme does come up in this book, it is important to clarify my own position here: ‘Don’t judge me by my appearance’ is quite a different statement from ‘Don’t judge my appearance’.
While judging someone’s non-visual attributes by their appearance is at best misleading and at worst outright harmful, if I were to claim that I wanted to rail against all visual things being judged in any form, that claim would not only be naive but also out of keeping with the fact that I enjoy aesthetic things as much as, or perhaps even more than, the ‘average’ person (whoever that is). It’s no secret that I actively enjoy adornment and visual expression.
Everyone with functioning eyes uses their vision, and some of the things they see strike them as interesting or vibrant or otherwise aesthetically pleasing, and some do not. Aesthetic visual judgements are often intuitive and always subjective, but are nonetheless present, consciously or not, in the lives of those who have sight. The fact that aesthetic judgements have become extreme and harmful in certain circles, with body policing, bullying, body dysmorphia, eating disorders and so on, does not mean that the ultimate goal can or should be the denial of the sense of sight, or a selective sense of sight when it comes to anything attached to the human condition or human form (wherein it is acceptable to notice and appreciate artwork but not a garment or hairstyle or physique). So yes, by all means, judge appearance. Judge art and design and the cut of coat and cuff. Glance at a face and decide whether you find that face attractive or not, all the while knowing that it is a person’s face, not a person’s character, that you are looking at. Judge appearance on appearance – just don’t judge intellectual capacity, personality, politics, personal interests or sexual habits by the way someone happens to appear to your eyes.
Our eyes are wonderfully useful. They help us to navigate and better understand the world. But, make no mistake, our eyes also deceive us. Or perhaps, more accurately, our interpretation of what we see deceives us. Many people mistake balanced features for balanced personalities, yet a handsome young man named Ted Bundy was one of the most notoriously vicious serial killers. Some of the stockiest people are the fittest (shot put, anyone?), as are some of the slimmest (marathon runners). Both Stephen Hawking (physically disabled) and Sharon Stone (able-bodied and ‘conventionally beautiful’) have Mensa IQs. Rock stars and those who dress like them are usually thought of as rebellious and anti-establishment, yet rock stars also become politicians (Peter Garrett) and are knighted by monarchs for their charitable work (Bob Geldof ). The stereotype of a black man as an anti-establishment figure still persists, yet Barack Obama is the current US president.
You cannot accurately assess a person’s character by noting whether or not they are fit, fat, frail, thin, old, young, able-bodied, disabled, black, white, Asian, tattooed, male or female. It is irrational to judge the character of a person by the appearance of the body they inhabit, and it is precisely this tendency to judge a person’s interior by their exterior, often at first sight, which has led to fatal errors of judgement, and unnecessary divisions between individuals and entire social groups. The divisions caused by physical differences help excuse atrocities like rape, murder, genocide and slavery. The history books are filled with stories of entire peoples who looked different and were deemed to be subhuman as a result.
That’s what he [Martin Luther King Jr] was saying, the civil rights movement . . . judge me for my character, not how black my skin is, not how yellow my skin is, how short I am, how tall or fat or thin [but] by my character.
Pam Grier
Skin colour is not character. Clothing is not consent. Feminism is not a lipstick or a body shape. You cannot reliably determine someone’s past, present or future, their sins or their virtues, from their appearance. Despite this, visible differences are given too much weight, and this diminishes us. In public discourse we police appearances at least as much, or perhaps more, than we police actual crime. We unnecessarily ostracise people who don’t look ‘right’ (i.e. like us) and this tendency encourages bad decision-making and, importantly, encourages biases ranging from the minor to the very serious. Effeminate men are beaten. Women with short hair are harrassed, abused. The colour of a person’s skin still brings judgement.
This problem of disproportionate judgement on appearance has a particularly significant effect on women and girls.
In late 2013, the University of Messina published the results of a study in which 1100 fake résumés were sent out to 1500 advertised job openings. The résumés were identical except for the pictures of the ‘applicants’ and the names and genders used. A hundred university students had graded the applicant photos (which were reportedly downloaded from the internet and then Photoshopped so that the original people would not be recognisable) as either ‘attractive’ or ‘unattractive’. The study found that attractiveness played a large role in whether the applicant would make it to the next stage of the application process. This was true for all of the (fake) applicants but particularly true for applications using women’s photos and names. ‘Attractive’ female applicants were called back 54 per cent of the time. ‘Unattractive’ female applicants were called back only 7 per cent of the time. This compares with ‘unattractive’ male applicants, who still got a call-back rate of 26 per cent – a rate nearly four times higher.2 Though the study was not designed to determine whether the more attractive applicant was ultimately more likely to get the job, the study did show that job opportunities for most people, but particularly women, were profoundly affected by perceptions of appearance.
And the downside of the very same perceived attractiveness that may increase your job chances?
As Naomi Wolf writes in The Beauty Myth:
Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men’s eyes when deciding what provokes it. A woman employer may find a well-cut European herringbone twill, wantonly draped over a tautly muscled flank, madly provocative, especially since it suggests male power and status, which our culture eroticizes. But the law is unlikely to see good Savile Row tailoring her way if she tells its possessor he must service her sexually or lose his job.3
The notion that a woman not only has a physical appearance, but is the sum of her physical appearance as seen through the eyes of a spectator, a watchful judge who can tell every important thing about her and her life by a glance at her physical form, is a fiction that many women encounter on a regular basis, and it has its roots firmly in the past, when women were (literally) the property of men, and were chosen primarily for their beauty and fertility, so they might provide healthy male heirs. Today many men and women, but particularly women, have come to believe that if they could only look right, they would finally be right in the eyes of that ever-watchful spectator. They would finally gain acceptance, happiness, success and love. This belief, which is unconscious in many of us, has been manipulated for commercial interests. This is why it is no longer enough to decorate our body and hair: we must also change that decoration regularly, in step with the trends of ‘fashion’, as promoted by various designers and businesses.
In the common fiction directed at women, there is an idea that beauty and clothes maketh the woman. The (ever-changing) beauty standard is the mark by which many women are measured in both their personal and professional lives. This goal has launched a thousand beauty products and fashion lines, as the (always temporary) achievement of that beauty creates repeat consumers.
Contrary to popular sales pitches, there is no truly ‘correct’ way for a woman to look. For women, any appearance or mode of dress has consequences. While a business suit, which confers economic status, can get an adult male through all professional interactions and many social ones, an adult female will find herself pigeonholed by the same uniform. If it is not the right suit, worn in a pleasing way, she will not get that job interview call-back. In the boardroom her dress must be serious, but not too severe. In the evening she must change her shoes and jewellery at the very least, though an entirely different outfit is advised. Wearing a business suit on a date is thought to send all the wrong signals (‘But you want him to see you as sexy, don’t you?’), but the wrong length of skirt or depth of neckline could be ‘asking for’ harassment or rape. Such is the quagmire of dress code for women that there are many tutorials to be found on appropriate wardrobe choices to achieve the desired social acceptance, determined by age, weather, season, the hour of the day and the setting. These are found even in contemporary magazines. And for all the money and time put in to running this particular race, as presided over by a changing beauty standard, there is no winning post, only the certainty that you will one day be put out to pasture.
Now any discussion about beauty is somewhat fraught, but here is the reason why, in my view, the way we treat conventionally attractive women matters (hear me out):
• In developed countries we have never been more exposed to advertising, entertainment and popular media than we are now.
• Women in advertisements are almost exclusively conventionally beautiful.
• Film and television shows cast a disproportionate number of beautiful actors, particularly when the role is that of a female character. The most famous and celebrated women in entertainment are, with some rare exceptions, conventionally beautiful. Generally they are also portrayed as sexually attractive, and their roles thin out once they no longer fit the youth/beauty/sex symbol ideal. (This is true of many male actors also, though the standards are not as narrow and the presentation is rarely as sexual).
• Women’s visibility plummets outside of advertising and entertainment.
• The perception of beauty is a key aspect of many women’s experiences in life in mainstream western culture, in how they are perceived or valued by others, and in many cases how they perceive themselves. This could be said to be emphasised through popular entertainment and advertising, as stated above, in that it almost exclusively presents beautiful women, and makes women who are not young or conventionally attractive symbolically invisible.
So here’s the rub: if, as I’ve outlined above, a large proportion of women are encouraged to strive to be ‘beautiful’ in a way that is sexually appealing to men, and are judged on, and judge themselves on, how well they conform to those conventional ideas of beauty, and at the same time those who are conventionally beautiful – the women who are by far the most prominent examples of what a ‘woman’ is expected to be – experience culturally endorsed assumptions that they are stupid, slutty or deserving of hate and mistrust, this allows us, as a culture, to hate, ridicule and dismiss nearly every woman we see in mainstream culture. That is, in my view, a problem.
This paradox at the very heart of our mainstream popular culture does the status of women no favours. Attractive young girls are encouraged to be models and actresses, who are frequently portrayed as the ‘ideal woman’. Everyone wants to look at them, or so we are told, and, it seems, we will also want to hate them or dismiss them for precisely the same reasons. Of course, those who don’t fit conventional ideas of beauty may be labelled stupid or slutty as well. No woman in the public eye can guarantee she comes away without labels regarding her physical appearance. Think of ‘Here comes the weather girl’ being hissed by the opposition at Senator Kate Ellis in parliament. Think of author Bret Easton Ellis’s response to Kathryn Bigelow winning an Academy Award for Best Director in 2009 (for The Hurt Locker): ‘Kathryn Bigelow would be considered a mildly interesting filmmaker if she was a man, but since she’s a very hot woman she’s really overrated.’4 Think of the assumptions of stupidity and vacuousness, accusations of whorish gold-digging, the ease with which we dismiss women when they have bodies we like to look at and, significantly, bodies that arouse our sexual interest.
The dynamic is something like this: Without sexual currency, women are thought to have nothing. With sexual currency, women are treated as objects, something which is acceptable because ‘they asked for it’.
Notably, there is no true male equivalent to this paradox. While an attractive man – George Clooney, for example – may be the envy of men and the ‘sex symbol’ of choice for many heterosexual women and homosexual men, he is not a ‘sex object’, as he is not reduced to or by his appearance, which is rarely presented in an openly erotic context, as this would put off male audiences. A handsome and talented man like Clooney is not hated or dismissed for his beauty in the same way his female co-stars frequently are. Take Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman, for example. Or Charlize Theron. Like Clooney, they were elevated in their profession thanks to a combination of physical beauty and acting talent, yet these women nonetheless must balance the tightrope between exploiting their physical gifts so as to stay relevant, while not letting the same physical gifts obscure their talent. Both actresses, for instance, needed to mask their beauty to win an Academy Award (Charlize Theron with significant weight gain and unflattering makeup for Monster, and Nicole Kidman with a prosthetic nose for The Hours). Because actresses are still disproportionately hired for their sexual currency, as objects of desire, as they age they will be excluded from many roles for no longer being ‘bankable’ enough. If they attempt to avoid this career death with cosmetic surgery, they will be judged vain and, in some cases, if the result of the surgery is considered unsightly, unemployable. For many of these women, to ‘grow old gracefully’, as the saying goes, is simply to disappear from view without a fight. Those women who manage to pull off the incredible feat of remaining sexually attractive to a broad audience while not appearing to have succumbed to surgery (Helen Mirren, Susan Sarandon) are praised most of all, though their work opportunities are still scant compared to their younger, more conventionally alluring counterparts.
In an advertising-soaked culture, those who do the work of product promotion have reached new levels of celebrity. But for all of the elevation of models (and the actresses and reality stars who have now taken over the professional model’s job as the ‘face’ of products) to superstar status, even the status of ‘role models’ by some, we simultaneously admire and resent their presence in our lives. Every advertisement is a display intended to show us what we don’t yet have but could, if only we tried hard enough, were clever enough, and spent enough money. We resent the influence of all that superficiality and product promotion, and we resent the envy we are encouraged to feel, yet our resentment is directed almost exclusively on the subject pictured in the advertisement – the one who is, in the vast majority of cases, the least involved in the creation of what we are seeing, is the least invested, and actually has the least to gain. The model in most advertisements is literally taking the role of a living ‘mannequin’. Before I began modelling I assumed that models were on the top rung. I soon learned that they were on the bottom. Expendable and interchangeable, the model often has little or no say in how she is presented.
Though we may admire their beauty, may be aroused by their bodies or compelled to purchase products in light of their pleasing aesthetic, we resent the models used to sell to us. Why else would the Sydney Morning Herald write in 2012 that ‘Tara Moss has overcome her “model” tag by more than proving herself as a successful author’.5 A ‘model tag’ must be ‘overcome’, it seems, like syphilis or a criminal record. But if becoming a model is something one must overcome, why do we have top-rating reality TV shows about becoming one of these tainted creatures? It’s a curious paradox.
Why is it commonplace to pretend we want to kill a woman for her appearance, as when I took to the Town Hall stage for a panel at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2012, and author Kathy Lette gestured to me and joked ‘sisterhood is powerful but she has to die.’ (There were huge laughs. To be clear, she is a wit and I like Lette a great deal, but having a packed town hall laughing about your necessary murder moments after being introduced onstage is, well . . . uncomfortable.) It is okay to pretend this, because ultimately, on some cultural level, we have come to expect that: a) women are natural competitors because they evidently can’t exist without male attention and their primary value is aesthetic, so a woman will naturally wish another woman death if she is younger or thought to be prettier (take the film Malèna, starring Monica Bellucci, in which the town’s women physically attack Bellucci’s character for her beauty); and b) ultimately, again on some cultural level, it is what ‘she deserves’. These links are reinforced with regularity, and not normally with the irony and levity of Lette.
The trope of alluring dead (female, always female) beauties persists in storytelling, perhaps most obviously in the action, horror and crime genres (genres I enjoy and have produced in my fiction). To return momentarily to film, consider for a moment film noir classics past and present (in which the supposed ‘femme fatale’ doesn’t literally prove fatal to anyone and is herself knifed, shot or strangled), Hammer horror films (in which beautiful women are impaled with vampire stakes in their lovely cleavage), and the popular James Bond franchise (in which Bond girls make rather a habit of being killed off in fetching ways: naked in bed, or covered in gold paint or oil, or . . .) Yet this trope also crops up with stunning regularity in even the work of the most modern and experimental directors. Take Quentin Tarantino’s reimagining of World War II, Inglourious Basterds, in which the male heroes who have killed numerous Nazis are allowed to live by the Nazi colonel Hans Landa, while Bridget, the beautiful German film actress, ‘got what she deserved’ – being strangled by him, while wearing a stunning sequinned dress displaying her décolletage. And despite her wonderfully well-rounded, and non-stereotypical role, even our magnificent heroine Shosanna, one of my favourite-ever women on film, has to die in her most beautiful dress at the end, therefore making certain that all of the named female characters are both beautiful and dead. Likewise, in Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control – a film that subverts noir racial stereotypes and narrative form – the only two central female characters are, despite the experimental nature of the film, straight out of the playbook. Both are beautiful, both are victims, and the one who appears the most often is – as her name ‘Nude’ suggests – naked throughout and asking for sex with the male protagonist, before ending up dead and unclothed in his bed. (Her opening line is: ‘Do you like my ass?’)
Of course we recognise the familiar texture of this storytelling, and the directors play on it to great effect. It’s entertaining, after all, and ultimately we are left taking this link for granted – the glamorous and sexually attractive woman must die. If they are beautiful but virginal/wholesome, they may be granted life, upon being saved by the hero, but the sexy ladies? Spoiler alert: like Elizabeth Taylor’s gorgeous bed-hopping character in the 1960 film Butterfield 8, for which she won her first Academy Award, we know these women will die tragically in the end. The moral lesson is clear.
What is most notable about this trope is not so much these particular storytelling moments (I enjoy all of the films mentioned above, even the ridiculous Hammer films. Call me a B-film diehard), or even how often this trope plays out (though it is frequently annoying), but that there is no equal opposite trope, wherein we know that a seductive man, whom the protagonist(s) are attracted to, must die by the end, preferably nude or in revealing and sensual attire. There is no film graveyard of dead gigolos or Lotharios, dead male strippers or glamorous dead boyfriends. There just isn’t.
The fact that this phenomenon co-exists with a dominant commercial entertainment/storytelling/marketing industry wherein women commonly must exploit or be exploited for their sexual currency in order to be successful or relevant seems, at best, problematic.
*
A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself . . .
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Women cannot possibly miss the implication that they themselves have an image, the characteristics of which may have a real-world impact on their lives, but we love to hate and ridicule women who seem even fleetingly aware of this – particularly if they take control of their image.
In 2012 the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, was photographed topless, on private property, with a long-range lens used by a photographer who was approximately one kilometre away. When the royals successfully sued the magazine that published the photos, the publication was fined a measly $2600, a mere pittance compared to the profit made with their front-cover exposé and the five pages of topless photos inside. (A Danish magazine published twenty-six pages of the shots. Twenty-six pages!). Yet it was the duchess’s apparent wrongdoing that was roundly condemned by many media outlets and pundits. The Sydney Morning Herald ran an article with the headline: ‘Topless Choice a Bit of a Booboo’, and Donald Trump commented on Twitter that: ‘Kate Middleton is great – but she shouldn’t be sunbathing in the nude – only herself to blame.’ She only had herself to blame for her exploitation, you see? Her choice was a ‘booboo’. Being on private property, far from the reach of human eyes, did not enter into it. If she could be photographed with the technology of a long lens from a kilometre away, that was her fault. She should know that her body belonged to the world – all of it, all the time.
Harry Potter star Emma Watson found out on her eighteenth birthday that even wearing a simple skirt was a liability: ‘It was pretty tough turning 18. I realised that overnight I’d become fair game . . . The sickest part was when one photographer lay down on the floor to get a shot up my skirt. The night it was legal for them to do it, they did it. I woke up the next day and felt completely violated by it all.’6 Presumably she only had herself to blame for wearing a skirt, so let’s not talk about that. Let’s not think about the disturbing sense of public ownership shown over women’s bodies and instead talk about the images young women choose to show of themselves. You know, selfies. Let’s talk about that.
These self-photographed images, existing as they do in an image-saturated culture, reflect some real aspect of people’s experiences. They are neither inherently empowering nor inherently disempowering. How can we pretend that beautiful young women in advertisements are just good old capitalism, that the publication of revealing paparazzi shots should be blamed on their beautiful, unsuspecting subjects, but selfies are morally dangerous because they sometimes reveal that young women (shock, horror) may try to look pretty or even hope to appear attractive? They are so self-absorbed! Narcissistic! So, we talk about what a big problem it is that women are taking photographs of themselves, without a middle man, and choosing to present those photographs publicly, for their own purposes, rather than the fact that images of women are used to sell everything from beer to automobiles to magazines.
The fact remains that the majority of the women we see on billboards, on TV, in film, in magazines and advertisements are both conventionally beautiful and sexually attractive, that is precisely the reason they have been selected, and because of that very same fact they fit a stereotype that provides a culturally acceptable excuse for the rest of us to demean their intellectual capacity, dismiss their achievements, underestimate them, ridicule their vanity, dehumanise them as ‘gold diggers’, ‘slags’, ‘hot morons’, ‘skinny bitches’ or ‘vacuous starlets’, invade their privacy and blithely announce that they must obviously die. If we can judge a woman more harshly for the invasive images taken of her body without her consent than we do the people responsible for that invasion of her privacy, what does that say about the role of women and their bodies in our culture?
If the majority of the women we see in public life can be safely regarded according to this standard, it goes a long way to excusing that treatment for every woman.
And in my view that really is a problem.