Cosmetics

I was browsing through my Feedly app this morning looking at all the feeds I am tracking with the site and I ran across a site which displayed what it would look like if a woman applied 365 days worth of makeup in one day. It was gruesome. She looked, at the end, as if her face was melting. It was downright ghastly.

Which got me thinking about cosmetics. All the things that women do to make themselves “look beautiful” and that of course started me thinking about a chain of thoughts all linked one to another and the further I went the more silly it got. Now, none of this is actually honestly an argument, but it is a inside look as to one way I carry on with coming up with these ideas.

There is a constellation of things that some women do to themselves in order to make themselves look beautiful. Now I would posit that this is a fallacy right from the get go, why can’t a person who is hygenic and unadorned not be considered honestly beautiful? Eh. So let’s carry on with all the playing blocks to this chain of thought. Women adorn themselves with various bits and pieces. High heels, shoulder pads, brightly (sometimes colored) skin applications to the face, lipstick, eye shadow, eyebrow shadow, lip gloss, mascara, and of course, all the shaving. Shave the arms, the legs, the face. Pluck pluck pluck, wax wax wax.

What have women done? They have changed their shape and their form, at least when it comes to high heels and shoulder pads they have elected to become taller and more masculine, especially with the shoulder pads. The accidental overloading of shoulder pads is where the real comedy gold lies, women can sometimes accidentally have too much shoulder and look foolish because they stop looking like women and more like… linebackers.

Oh god, is this where it’s going? Bright colors, ruddy cheeks, colorful lips, tall, pronounced shoulders, it really argubly starts to feel like a relatively unfocused gender warp. Women are attempting to become beautiful by emulating men? Does the application of cosmetics and all the other bullshit that men expect women to go through masculinize them? When you get dressed up, are you on your way to becoming a drag king?

But then there is all that shaving. Denial of body hair. Which creates a very specific condition of masculinized pre-pubescent adrogyny. Male-boy-male. That’s really troubling to think about. At the end, could it be that the entire cosmetic industry, the entire cultural structure that women have been sold, about how they should look, be thin, be hairless, be tall, have pronounced shoulders, look aggressive, look excited… where do you go when you play all this out? Where do you end up?

Do you end up with straight men fetishizing women through the lens of unfocused pedophilic homosexuality? You turn your women into lithe young men who just ran 5 miles. The sheen of sweat (shiny), the red lips, the shoulders, the hairlessness, the ruddy cheeks, the tallness…

Boys who do Girls like their Boys… Ahem.

Not that it actually is this way, but what if it was?