With all the time my kids spend in Arizona, I thought I should get them passports. Even if a judge temporarily blocked the goofball state profiling law, you never know. A few years ago a cop pulled me over on an Arizona road about 90 miles from the border for reasons that were never officially noted, came to the passenger window, and demanded to know if I had weapons or drugs in the car. When she kept repeating the question with her hand hovering over her holster I knew for sure it would not end pretty.
I’ve always thought of myself as someone who looks like they are not carrying a weapon or drugs. It’s my self-profiling. I would probably be image-categorized as a llpstick lesbian except that I am always forgetting to put on my lip-gloss, aka my shiny chapstick. Lipstick itself scares me, with all the lip liner drawing and tissue blotting and the stress of not knowing if there’s lipstick on your teeth. I’m pro-lipstick and I think Winnie looks very fancy when she occasionally wears it. But I’m personally not up to it.
Last week a new lipstick introduced by makeup giant Mac was chased off the shelves by feminist lipstick bloggers. It was white colored lipstick named “Ghost Town”, inspired by the brutality of the women in Juarez as they walked to their midnight shifts at Maquiladoras in the border town of Juarez Mexico. The “beauty blogging community”, as they call themselves, took great offense, outraged that the extreme violence and hardship well documented in this town was a backdrop for a new makeup line. Mac used ghoulish-looking models to promote the “Juarez” launch. They named their new nail polish “factory”. The eyeliner looked like bloody swipes across the brow. Gross.
I was intrigued to learn about the beauty blogging community, and wished I had known these women years ago. A leading blogger Yinka Odusote wrote, “Bad news travels fast and the backlash against both MAC and Rodarte has gained momentum at an incredible pace. Blogs, forums and social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter have all contributed to spreading the word and has informed thousands of people of a situation, many knew nothing about. The women in Juarez are now in the spotlight once more and I hope good can continue to come out of this.”
In the year that my daughter was born I co-founded Love Your Body Day, which has become an annual, national feminist event that raises awareness about the stigma in fashion advertising and the health impact of unrealistic “beauty” norms. At the time we held events like consciousness raising workshops where we all put a round “Love Your Body” sticker on the body part we liked most. In more somber feminist circles most people put a sticker on their head but at other more rowdy events the exercise sparked salacious stickering.
In all of her fourteen years I was always careful about not attributing value to appearance, other than telling her no less than 19000 times that she should stop slumping. I complimented her actual skills, like her insight, her sharp wit, her engrossing writing and her unparalled self discipline. But from her pre teen years I chased off modeling agents who approached us at Penn Station, at the AT&T store, on a random street corner in Greenwich Village. When she grew to modeling height she wanted to watch Tyra so we sat together speculating on which skinny girl would hear the words that I never, for one second, believed would be directed at me, “Congratulations you are still in the running to be America’s Next Top Model.”
Yesterday I got a letter from the U.S. Government rejecting my daughter’s passport application. They said her photos had “staples in the facial area”, which when you look closely actually is a very small acne outbreak.
“That’s so embarrassing!” she said. I’ve been promoting healthy body image since the day she was born, but I had to agree. Now she’ll always have the story of getting rejected by the State Department due to mild acne. Here’s the national security-threatening, rejected acne photo.
