“Does she even know she’s a girl?” Stacy on WNTW
So my bucketloads of free time have yielded yet another interesting hobby; watching fashion shows on TLC. Am I proud of this fact? No. Do they come on enough that it fills up all of the free spots in my day that aren’t eaten by food or blogs or my bosses elliptical machine? Why yes, yes they do. The most odious of these shows in my mind, more disgusting than even 10 years younger, a show that puts women in a glass box and allows onlookers to express exactly what aspects of the patriarchal beauty imperative they can adhere to if they want their faces, breasts and… wait, women don’t have any other parts anyway, right? Yes, the only show that I find more insidious than that is a program that is dubiously called self help, What Not To Wear.
Sure, the show is about as addictive as crystal meth, and the prospect of getting 5000 dollars to shop in New York sounds like an orgasm waiting to unleash itself upon me but the INSANE amounts of gender bias, heterosexism, and racism always shines through just enough to make my fingers curl into a Spritzhead beating fist. For those who are not familiar with the show, it involves a team of pornifing fashion consultants, hairdressers and makeup artist who take an “unattractive” ugly duckling who doesn’t even have the sense to make sure that all of their clothes are picked out by a jury of their peers into a “beautiful” and thoroughly pornified sex object.
As if strict adherence to the secretive rules of the beauty imperative were not enough to damn the show in my bitter, bitter, hateful little eyes, Stacy and Clinton (the shows hosts) consistently tell women who may very well not own a mini pencil skirt, backbreakingly high heels, or some other sort of “girl” coded clothing that they must not know that they are indeed “girls”. That’s right, the idea that women can age out of the beauty imperative is no longer valid, so look out dyke auntie the botox brigade is comin’ for that ass! Most notably for me was the episode (to my knowledge there is only one) where they have an out lesbian on the show. They proceed to tell her how to get an hourglass figure which of course she wants to know because she’s a “girl”. Exactly when do “girls” become women, might I ask? A better question seems to have been asked by the professor “what if we didn’t expect women to look like girls and girls to look like women?”
Now, yes, I am indeed a big black dyke, but am I anti-fashion? Ok, yes, who am I kidding, I do hate fashion as a woman killing merchant of death industry that promotes eating disorders and broken ankles by using waif thin women on stilts (stilts which I now own, the patriarchy affects us all) while telling them to look 7 and a half by hook or by crook. I suppose shows like this worry me because expanding the beauty imperative to all women eliminates the little pockets of safety from the beauty brigade that existed (i.e. age, lesbianism, membership of the academe, radical feminism) and the new virus says that this is no longer the case.
