En Yeni Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West Sözleri ve Alıntıları
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One of the great powers of feminism is that it goes so far in making the experiences and lives of women intelligible. Trying to make sense of one's own feelings, motivations, desires, ambitions,actions and reactions without taking into account the forces which maintain the subordination of women to men is like trying to explain why a marble stops rolling without taking friction into account.
Women may well say makeup empowers them but the interesting question is, what disempowers them about being without their mask? The constraints imposed by sexism and racism and the political structures of male domination are likely to be responsible for women's discomfort about moving into the public world "barefaced".
It could be that the wearing of makeup signifies that women have no automatic right to venture out in public in the west on equal grounds with men. Makeup, like the veil, ensures that they are masked and not having the effrontery to show themselves as the real and equal citizens that they should be in theory. Makeup and the veil might show women's lack of entitlement.
Feminists who want to dismantle gender, because they see it as a product of male dominance, do not "trans" gender, they simply get over it. Transgenders are so attached to the notion of gender, albeit to a different one from that in which they were brought up, that they spend huge amounts of time, energy and money in order to acquire their gender of choice. Transgender politics are fundamentally conservative, dedicated to retaining the behaviours of the dominant and subordinate classes of male supremacy - masculinity and femininity.
Feminist social constructionists have not accepted this biological explanation. In the first and still the most comprehensive feminist critique of the medical profession's construction of the phenomenon of transsexualism (first published in 1979), Janice G. Raymond explains that the "first cause" of the phenomenon is the political idea that there should be two distinct genders that founds patriarchal society (Raymond, 1994). She sees transsexualism as a construction of medical science designed to achieve three purposes: profit from the surgery, experimentation towards the achievement of mastery over the construction of body parts, and the political purpose of the allocation to acceptable gender categories of those gender rebels who are seen to be disrupting the two-gendered system of male dominance. The transsexual, she argues, simply exchanges one stereotype for the other and thus reinforces the sexist social fabric of society. Transsexualism, in this analysis, is deeply reactionary, a way of preventing the disruption and elimination of gender roles which lies at the basis of the feminist project, and "The medical solution becomes a 'social tranquilizer' reinforcing sexism and its foundation of sex-role conformity" (Raymond, 1994, p. xvii).
In choosing the role for women of sexually exciting men over covering up, Abu-Odeh is stuck within the duality that is offered to women under male dominance, sex object or veiled one, prostitute or nun. There is a third possibility: women can invent themselves anew outside the stereotypes of western and non-western patriarchal culture. Women can have access to the privilege possessed by men of not having to be concerned for appearance and being able to go out in public barefaced and bareheaded.
Beauty practices can reasonably be understood to be for the benefit of men. Though women in the west sometimes say that they choose to engage in beauty practices for their own sake, or for other women and not for men, men benefit in several ways. They gain the advantage of having their superior sex class status marked out, and the satisfaction of being reminded of their superior status every time they look at a woman. They also gain the advantage of being sexually stimulated by "beautiful" women. These advantages can be summed up in the understanding that women are expected to both "complement" and "compliment" men. Women complement men by being the "opposite" and subordinate sex. Women compliment men by being prepared to make an effort to adorn themselves for men's sexual excitement. Thus men can feel both defined in manhood and flattered by women's exertions and, if the women are wearing high heels for instance, pain endured for their delight. Those women who refuse beauty practices are offering neither complement nor compliment and their resistance can be deeply resented by members of the dominant sex class.
Graham offers an explanation for why many women believe that their "femininity" is biological and inherent and why, "we believe that we would choose to wear makeup, curl our hair, and wear high heels even if men didn't find women who dressed this way more attractive" (1994, p. 197). Women believe this, she says, because "to believe differently" would require the acknowledgement that our behaviour is controlled by "external variables"; that is, men's use of force and its threat. Recognizing this would mean that women would have to "acknowledge our terror" (p. 197). She says that "It is scary for women to contemplate no longer being feminine" (p. 199) and concludes that examining what it is that is scary about giving up femininity may lead to the decision to give it up altogether.
The powerful take up more space. Not only do employers have larger offices but men will have more space in their homes and the world which is theirs alone. They take up more space with their bodies. Thus men may stretch out on a bus seat or on the sofa. Women are expected to keep their legs and arms tucked into their bodies and fit into the space