Photo: opensalon.com

By ELIZABETH DONGER

May 19, 2010

Senior Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazim Sadeghi declared last month during a Friday sermon in Tehran that “women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which consequently increases earthquakes.” The fact that seismologists have been predicting an imminent catastrophic earthquake in Tehran for some time makes the statement all the more dangerous. Sadeghi’s words were widely reported by a range of western media outlets; however, the most provocative reporting came from a young blogger in Indiana.

Jennifer McCreight, a self-described “liberal, geeky, perverted atheist feminist trapped in Indiana,” responded to Sadeghi’s words on her blog, Blag Hag. She suggested that women should test the cleric’s ridiculous statement by collectively wearing “the most cleavage-showing shirt [they own]…the one usually reserved for a night on the town,” to see if an earthquake would result. She dubbed the experiment: the “boobquake.” This post was picked up by the wider media and the idea quickly spiraled; the boobquake was covered by CNN and Blag Hag received almost a million unique visits and thousands of emails over a few days. On April 26, over 100,000 women, recruited through Facebook and Twitter, participated in the boobquake experiment. The scantily-clad women did not affect the statistical frequency of earthquakes.

Jennifer McCreight claims that “the majority of people – including earthquake researchers, feminists, and many Iranians – thanked me for this exercise in skepticism.” Although the exercise was, according to McCreight, “light-hearted mockery,” the reasons why this exercise was perceived as amusing are more serious: Jennifer McCreight is pointing out the absurdity of Sadeghi’s belief that earthquakes can be caused by women’s clothing (or lack thereof). However, McCreight is also pointing out the absurdity of Sadeghi’s insistence that women be dressed “modestly.” She responds to this reasoning with an act of defiance: “cleavage-showing” tops and “immodest” attire.

The boobquake is an exhibition of the western ‘liberated’ woman’s ability to choose to wear whatever she likes, which automatically establishes the oppressed Muslim woman, who is forced (by men such as Sadeghi) to wear “modest” clothing, as the antithesis to this. This overlooks the fact that some Muslim women who dress modestly do indeed choose to dress this way. Foreign audiences are not always in the position to decide whether these women are oppressed; the belief that no Muslim women can rise above social pressure to dress in a certain way, but western women can, is misguided. Further enraging, McCreight places this commentary within the context of “light-hearted mockery” which is far from ideal. Half-hearted mockery of men who use their authority to control female behavior and perpetuate discriminatory norms does not chastise them but rather is only a benefit to our own sense of superiority. The dichotomy of the Western/Muslim woman established by the boobquake doubly overlooks the complexity of ‘cultural’ female Muslim dress and also lacks an appreciation for the danger and impact of Sadeghi’s attitude towards women.

The boobquake assumes that our right to dress provocatively is a sign of our liberation. It pits immodesty against modesty, establishing women with the liberty to choose immodesty as the opposite to those who do not. Western women’s choice to wear revealing clothes is, ostensibly, freely made. However, our belief that these clothes “look good” is the direct result of a male-created paradigm of beauty. The male desire to see female flesh and men’s perceived right to observe our bodies create our shared standards for female beauty. This is a classic example of patriarchy embedded so deep in our consciousnesses that we do not pause question it. I do not know what feminists thanked McCreight for her experiment but they clearly need a talking to. McCreight wrote in the Guardian that, “As a scientist and a skeptic, I firmly believe that we should test claims people make, especially when they’re ridiculous.” Jennifer McCreight is a self-identified feminist and the boobquake experiment is not only pointing out Sadeghi’s questionable science; it inevitably makes a (questionable) statement about Islamic women, modesty and female liberty.

Elizabeth Donger is a sophomore in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

April 16, 2010

The premise of The Nine Rooms of Happiness, a book written by the editor of Self magazine and her psychiatrist friend, is that a woman’s mind is like a house. It needs to be tended to by the lady of the house. When it is clean, the woman who owns it is happy. Every morning we women should wake up and ask ourselves, “Where’s the mess today?”

Questionable? I think so.

Lucy Danziger and Catherine Birndorf, M.D. presented this hypothesis at a Master’s Tea in Pierson this past Thursday. Their newly published self-help book aimed at women attempts to make psychodynamic therapy friendly by presenting it in an easily digestible and stereotypically feminine format. The book is full of short sentences, and examples are drawn from the life of an “ordinary” woman on a hard day – troubles at work, troubles at home, and, of course, troubles with weight. At the tea, Birndorf said that she wrote the book because she wanted to bring therapy down from the “ivory tower.” Nevertheless, the authors’ assumptions are suspiciously condescending.

In keeping with her co-author, Danziger’s attitude throughout the tea expressed her conviction that all women are fundamentally alike. She claimed to be an excellent editor of Self, not because she herself was a “guru,” but because she struggles with the same issues that the gurus on her staff intend to solve. In an effort to illustrate her everywoman status, Danziger spoke about her tendency to binge-eat, her constant obsession with thinness, and her celebration of her loss of 25 pounds in 18 months (she had learned to control her psychological rumination, she said). She also described the “negative editorializing in [her] head,” her constant worry that she should have been “thinking about Haiti.”

Danziger’s psychological model is hardly universal. While she herself may suffer from these afflictions, they are not necessarily ones that plague all women. Not every woman needs to allay a lurking suspicion that she shouldspend more time devoted to big issues and less time fretting over her personal life. Indeed, it’s an individual’s prerogative to concern herself with Haiti and other major catastrophes. Danziger also complained about worrying about a fight with her daughter while she was in a board meeting, claiming that she was inappropriately bringing one “room,” that is to say, one realm of her life, into another. But it is not the case, as she claimed, that distraction from home is an almost exclusively female issue. Neither is it the case that every woman ought to focus all of her emotional energy on the task at hand.

The cover of the book features a cartoon of a slim white woman in a slinky red dress and heels. She has perfectly coiffed straight hair and bangs. In one image, she leaps with joy, her arms in a Vegas v above her head; in another, she has the (literal) key to her house of happiness in her hand and a large pink bag on her arm; in a third she kicks one leg behind her in a parody of female bliss. It’s telling that the authors chose a cartoon to portray the psychological life of women. Like Self magazine, The Nine Rooms of Happiness claims that it’s just being honest about women’s concerns while insidiously dictating what those concerns should be.

Danziger and Birndorf propose to treat women’s problems with precisely the close-minded, gendered sensibility that created those problems in the first place. Their fluffy medicine may produce a warm feeling in some, but it can hardly be applauded as “self-help.” It’s just another form of the role-reinforcing “help” that women get all the time from the outside world.

Annie Atura is a junior in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

April 5, 2010

In 2007, the first time Choose Life At Yale (CLAY) applied to be a residence group of the Women’s Center, I was on the Women’s Center’s Board.

At the time, Peter Johnston ’09 was the president of CLAY and quickly becoming influential in the conservative movement at Yale. Intellectually, I had grown to know him well, due to the fact that we both took Directed Studies and were in nearly every section together, a proof that God, if existent, is not without an exquisite sense of irony.

CLAY was founded in 2003, a few years before Johnston took it over. The public relations problem confronting it was typical of those faced by other “pro-life” organizations, though, of course, harder to solve at Yale. Ronald Reagan and David Reardon first realized in the 1980s that the “pro-life” movement was damaged by the growing perception that it did not care about women. This perception was compounded by the most visible pro-life campaigns of the 1990s, which often portrayed women who’d had abortions as “baby-killers,” and, perhaps, by a spate of clinic bombings. To detoxify their political brand, “pro-life” organizations rephrased their argument in a feminist cadence. Women, as opposed to the unborn, became abortion’s primary victim.

I was very impressed by Johnston’s decision to apply to be a Women’s Center resident group: It was smart politics. Still, the Board voted unanimously to reject its request, on the grounds that the Women’s Center was pro-choice.

Shortly afterward, I ran into Johnston. Ever cordial, he asked how I was, and I asked how he was; briefly, we discussed the Board’s decision. He expressed feeling some disappointment, but no surprise. I told him I thought the political strategy he had tried out was extremely clever, fearfully so.

We were both earnest believers. But what I always enjoyed about Johnston was that our conversations on such matters were professional: there was no pretense that we were anything but partisan students of America’s abortion debate.

Johnston’s application to the Women’s Center was a bet; I respected it. It didn’t cost CLAY anything to place. Though it lost, he, I thought shrewdly, chose not to publicly whine about it.

CLAY’s current leadership apparently lacks Johnston’s acuity.

Last week, Isabel Marin ’12, CLAY’s “Women’s Outreach Coordinator,” authored a column that argues CLAY should be “supported under the Women’s Center umbrella” (“A place at the Center,” March 31). It goes so far as to attack the Women’s Center’s repeated rejections of CLAY’s application as unworthy of its name and contrary to “the spirit of feminism.”

Marin’s column is riddled with distortions. For instance, Marin quotes abstract, carefully selected sections of the Women’s Center’s constitution, choosing to omit the clause that declares the Women’s Center to be a pro-choice organization. Furthermore, Marin’s attempt to ally CLAY with Yale Men Against Rape under the category of “non-stereotypical feminist groups” is disingenuous. The goals of Yale Men Against Rape are feminist in the most conventional sense of the word and the movement; it is she who is doing the stereotyping.

Marin argues that the Women’s Center should unhesitatingly grant CLAY “the appellation ‘feminist.’” Unfortunately, the word “feminist” means something, both to the Women’s Center and apart from it.

The central failing of the column is Marin’s willful misapprehension of this fact. Feminism is an ideology; the women and men who subscribed to it are those who won women the vote, the right to own property, access to education, protection from sexual harassment and legal abortion. Feminism is definitively pro-choice; it defines abortion as a civil right and insists that the withholding of abortion is discrimination. This is the position of the Yale Women’s Center, National Organization of Women and every major 20th-century feminist thinker.

More offensive than Marin’s indifference to history is that the role that she proposes for CLAY — providing pregnant women with help — is already played by a Women’s Center group. The Reproductive Rights Action League, has long labored to address all aspects of sexuality and family.

Marin is right that “the pro-life women in CLAY face glass ceilings and tough choices as do all women.” The Women’s Center merrily fights for all women, including pro-life women. It is possible to be both pro-life and a feminist; pro-life women have certainly made serious contributions on many feminist fronts; I am sure that Marin holds many feminist opinions with which I passionately agree. But the pro-life ideology seeks to limit women’s choices, is opposed to women’s freedom, is itself anti-woman and will always be anti-feminist.

In denying CLAY its support, the Women Center did not imperil the future of feminism, or its relevance, but rescued its life. Feminism is an authorizing legacy. In invoking feminism, pro-life organizations — even pro-life women — seek to steal feminism from its history, and, wittingly or not, reduce it to a meaningless term.

For the pro-life movement, that’s smart politics. Peter Johnston would have known that. Perhaps that’s why I miss him.

Chase Olivarius-McAllister is a senior in Yale College.

March 13, 2010

Every time I hear Kathryn Bigelow’s name, I remember Barbra Streisand’s face. At the Oscars this week, it was Streisand who presented Bigelow with her Best Director Oscar. Botoxed and smug, Streisand’s face brightened at the opened envelope and her lips opened to intone, “Finally, the time has come.”  Then she uttered Bigelow’s name, having successfully affixed a permanent preface.  The next day, news wires and film blogs would declare, “First woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow.”

I think Sunday night was great.  I always enjoy it when women win honors previously monopolized by men.  And the journalists who noted that Bigelow’s was the first female win in the award’s history did so appropriately.  Streisand’s misguided commentary, however, imposed a feminist story arc onto the win that undercut Bigelow’s personal accomplishment— and introduced a tension between progress in gender and ethnic politics.

How nice of Barbara to share “Bigelow’s award” with all of us womenfolk.  After all, as the aging star perfectly showed through her personal theatrics, this win really belongs to her—and everyone else with a vagina.  Why else would she distract us from Bigelow’s personal victory in the very moment of its announcement?  A woman of such understated demeanor could have no ulterior motive.

Yet despite Streisand’s selfless sharing, it is unclear how, exactly, this Oscar constitutes a feminist victory. It is wonderful that the industry has opened up from its explicitly sexist early days to allow talented women to rise to positions of power, the sort of positions that allow them to produce Oscar-worthy films.  However, the trends of the Oscars are not necessarily indicative of trends in the workplace: the San Francisco Chronicle reports that there were proportionally fewer women directing top-grossing films in 2009 than in 2008, dropping down to the same percentage as in 1987.  Nor does Bigelow’s win provide a heightened platform from which to fight for women’s issues (as, say, a presidential win would).  Further, this win does not set a precedent that allows more women to achieve, like Elizabeth Blackwell’s admission to medical school; it seems highly unlikely that whatever old boys’ club mentality keeps women out of directing will dissipate because of this award. 

Framing Bigelow’s win as a feminist victory was particularly ill-advised in this case, given that African-American director Lee Daniels was also up for the award.  Political movements—even those without mutually exclusive goals—will always compete. The resources at stake are scarce; there is only so much political will to go around.  And when every victory by a member of a marginalized group is a victory for the movement associated with that group, any competition between people who are not middle class white men takes on undue significance.  Daniels could have been the first African American director to win the award for his film Precious, so when Streisand declared that “the time has come” with a triumphant grin, we knew it had come down to the black guy or the chick.  Of course, only one of the “times” could have arrived, and Streisand’s ecstatic preface made it clear she was more concerned with a supposed “feminist win” than a “racial equality win.” And her posturing asked us to choose as well.  Obviously, the Academy was not choosing which cause it cared about more; it was judging the artistic work of Kathryn Bigelow and Lee Daniels.  To paint this award as anything more is both incorrect and unfair.

Next time, Barbra, let the woman speak for herself.

Alexandra Brodsky is a sophomore in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

February 24, 2010

According to Rupert Murdoch, arbiter of our times, La Huff is a thief, a parasite, a content kleptomaniac.  But speaking at the Yale Law School on Monday, Arianna Huffington appeared quite capable of propelling herself entirely on her own momentum, oozing self-confidence on the day she announced the launch of HuffPost College. This latest section of Huffington’s eponymous news website will collate material written by students on “issues that matter to students,” culling its finds from the websites of college newspapers across the US.

It is this very pursuit of “aggregation” that so angers Huffington’s rivals.  It was little surprise, then, that in Huffington’s talk on “net neutrality,” she argued that aggregation plays a key role in opening up the internet, and encouraging citizen journalists. Echoing Hilary Clinton’s suggestion last month that “freedom to connect” be added to FDR’s basic four freedoms, Huffington defined “freedom to connect” as “freedom of assembly…in cyberspace.” Aggregation, therefore, facilitates assembly. It was in the same vein that she praised the power of citizen journalists, arguing that it is easier for governments to dupe or bribe a few reporters than it is for a whole nation of on-the-spot reporters to be so swayed. Apparently Ms. Huffington was not familiar with the phrase “Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

Huffington’s celebration of citizen journalists, however, stems from a sound understanding of the weakness of the professional journalist. Huffington is keen to circulate the term “journalistic capture,” a new understanding of the ways in which journalists can become sucked into the world of those on whom they report– and end up colluding in the practice of covering up for the establishment. Huffington likens the process to “regulatory capture” on Wall Street, in which regulators develop vested interests in maintaining the financial institutions around which they operate. Keen to advance the web as a tool for journalistic and political emancipation, Huffington also called on the government to prioritize an increase in broadband access–currently only 60% of Americans have access to broadband. At the same time, however, she called for an end to the culture of anonymity on the internet– again, in the interests of transparency. Huffington also insisted that the age of pay-per-view content is over. In a heavy accent, she reminded the audience of her Greek heritage, invoking “my favorite Greek philosopher, Heraclitus” in her assertion that “we cannot step into the same river twice.”

Such appeals to her Greek roots form a key element of Arianna Huffington’s glamorous image, an image to which feminists have responded with mixed feelings. Certainly Huffington cares about female enterprise: two years ago she was standing at the same platform to open the Women’s Leadership Initiative conference, when she talked with feeling about the need for female role models and mentoring. Yet she has been accused throughout her career of using highly traditional, invidious forms of female power. As a college student, she invited British intellectual Bernard Levin to give a speech at Cambridge, seduced him, and spent her twenties being introduced to literary London on his arm. When the relationship ended, she left for America and married a billionaire, produced his children, and later divorced him, receiving a settlement that has funded her political projects ever since. According to the narrative of her detractors, even her constant references to her Greek allegiances serve to confirm her role as the exotic feminine. Three different contemporaries of hers at Cambridge have told me that “she arrived at Cambridge speaking English with a slight Greek accent– by the time she left, the accent had become overwhelming, because she discovered that men liked it.”

Huffington’s defenders argue that such carping comes from those jealous of her success– and she has indeed been successful. It is the fact of this success that most discredits those who would seek to dismiss her as someone who has charmed her way to the top: the extraordinary success story that is the Huffington Post was created when Huffington was a single mother, and is fueled entirely by her own creativity. The fact of her power in the world of the internet strikes a blow for women in the masculine culture of the technological industries. One blast of her phenomenal energy is enough to convince even the most skeptical observer that she is quite capable of earning her own success. The very accusations against her entail such traditional misogyny that it is hard to tell whether they are valid critiques of Huffington for conforming to misogynist expectations, or merely expressions of entrenched prejudices.

Kate Maltby is a senior in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

April 2009

The “opt out” idea is as infuriating to feminists everywhere as it is satisfying to pretty much everyone else.  For its supporters, the “opt out” concept, with its handy catch phrase, solves so many problems.   It vindicates “choice feminism” and makes clear that the cranky liberal feminists back in the 1960s were misguided when the founders of NOW wrote, “We do not accept the traditional assumption that a woman has to choose between marriage and motherhood, on the one hand, and serious participation in industry or the professions on the other.” The phrase reassures us that decades of rising labor force participation among mothers have been no more than a fad, one that sensible women are tossing aside like tamagotchis.  (Remember those?) It doesn’t bog us down with concerns about structural inflexibility in the workplace; business is business, and we can’t expect to change that.  Best of all, it does away with the idea that gender functions as a system of social constraints, forcing men to stick with their jobs and cheering on the women who abandon theirs.  No, gender is what science says it is, and science says moms are happiest when they’re taking care of their kids at home.  And baking.

These were some of the claims I was expecting from journalist Leslie Bennetts at the panel on “Workplace Flexibility” that took place at the Yale Law School on March 28.  Bennetts had been invited to speak as part of the Yale Law Women’s conference “’Opt Out’ or Pushed Out: Are Women Choosing to Leave the Legal Profession?” Based on the unfortunate title of her book, The Feminine Mistake, I figured Bennetts was another dime-a-dozen critic set on rebutting Betty Friedan’s seminal work half a century too late. So it came as a surprise to me that Bennett wasn’t there as an advocate for the women who “opt out.”  Her argument was, in fact, the opposite: that the women “opting out” were the ones making the “feminine mistake,” deciding to leave their jobs without recognizing the financial vulnerability that they’d face as a result.

Bennetts broke away from the familiar dichotomy—“opt out” or “pushed out”?— that the conference was promoting.  While panelists like attorney Michael Teter stressed that inflexible workplaces explained why some professional women were leaving their jobs, Bennetts suggested that gender norms were just as much to blame.  No, she wasn’t claiming that women opting out just like being moms better than they like being accomplished professionals.  Instead, she argued that many men and women end up in high-stress jobs that they don’t like and want to leave, but only women have an excuse to get out.  Few people bat an eye when female professionals claim that full-time motherhood beckons, but pretty much everyone seems aghast if a male professional wants to make the same choice.  What’s so bad about women who don’t want to work having the option not to work?  Lots, Bennetts explains, since women who don’t work end up a lot less happy and much more economically dependent than those who do.

Most of us take advantage of gender norms and expectations from time to time, and for precisely the reason women who “opt out” do: it’s convenient.  I’ll take the seat that a man offers me on the subway because I want to sit down, and I’ll accept his help carrying my bag because it’s heavy.  A man won’t clean the bathroom because it’s unpleasant and won’t cook dinner because he’d rather do something else.  The women who opt out are doing the same, becoming full-time caretakers because being full-time workers is a drag.  Bennetts reveals that when opportunistic gender performance comes into—and out of—the workplace, women themselves end up suffering the consequences.

Alexandra Harwin is a 1st year student at the Yale Law School.

April 2009

A woman in a swimsuit stands on a diving board. Sleek and muscled, she secures her swimming cap and prepares herself to jump. Taut, strong, ready, she awaits an internal gunshot, some cue to start. Bang! She dives. She moves, slick, sleek, through the water, crisp, cutting through the waves of the pool, flying, past the speed of sound. She’s magnificent, she’s powerful, she’s sixty if she’s a day and she’s moving better than I can at 21.

“She needs Beauticontrol!” my aunt screams behind me. “Her body is okay but her face is a mess!” I stare at my aunt in disbelief. This woman has the body of an 18-year-old cheerleader. She’s fantastic, fit, active, and healthy. And all my aunt can think about is her skin care regime.

To be fair to my aunt, however, that is her field of expertise. My aunt sells make-up and skin products for a living—that is, in fact, what Beauticontrol is: a brand of makeup and skin products made of natural materials and heavily marketed to Latin American markets. She’s actually really good at it, my aunt, she’s earned a huge amount of money for her family, and she’s one of the most successful saleswomen of this product in her area. On many levels this has been a deeply empowering career for her. She’s gained a huge amount of confidence, she controls her hours and her earnings, she’s lost weight, and she’s happier than I’ve ever seen her.

Whenever I visit her, my aunt showers me with body scrubs and eyebrow pencils, while my mother is given anti-aging creams and wrinkle fighting concealers. Well-meant as these presents are, they always strike a dissonant note in me as I stare at them, sitting innocuously in my medicine cabinet. My aunt thinks she is giving me a kind and considerate gift, the sort any young woman would adore. She thinks she has given my mother a valuable and joy-inducing product that will help her fight age, the common enemy of women over forty. I know she means well. But I can’t help but be troubled by these presents and their implications. When my aunt looks at these things, the lip-gloss and the eye shadow and the firming serum and the foot lotion, she sees all the things that will help me be my very best self. When I look at them, I wonder if she’s telling me I need the help.

One of the things that has always struck me as positive about Yale is the lack of vanity among its students. It’s not uncommon to see a classroom or lecture hall full of students in sweatpants and pajama bottoms. In fact, it would be more uncommon to see a room full of girls in skirts and heels. And I always thought that that was a good thing, a sign of an environment that valued intellect over appearance, that placed more importance on the interior then on the exterior. Isn’t that a part of feminism? Disregarding the vanities associated with femininity, discarding the frivolous and menial pursuit of some exterior aesthetic being, and placing them aside in favor of true intellectual exploration? That sounds right, doesn’t it? If the pursuit of beauty has been one of the traditional millstones hanging around the necks of all women, then surely to pursue beauty in that way now, in the face of female emancipation and the feminist movement and Hilary Clinton and all those Dove ads…

The beauty industry feeds us pages of ads and hours of commercials showcasing products that will improve our faces, highlight our eyes, plump our lips, hide our wrinkles, destroy our pimples, and having done so, improve our quality of life. (All that in a mascara? Sign me up!) But we at Yale, surveying the land from atop our feminist high horses, should laugh at these wonder drugs and the women who pursue them as we trudge around the campus in our aged sweatpants and sneakers. That’s the feminist thing to do, right?

Well the thing is, my aunt makes more money shilling face cream than her husband does consulting for a bank. She put a down payment on a new house with the money she made in a year of selling margarita-scented glitter spray and brown sugar perfume to her friends and relatives. She may yell at commercials, movies, and even women on the street and try to get them to buy her potions and gels, but she also has her own business and in a matter of years has become the primary earner of her family and an example of a successful Latina business woman in her community. And the other thing is, when I use her little shimmery gifts, I don’t feel less intelligent or capable; I feel put-together, strong, attractive and energetic. Her highlighter does the work of a cappuccino without the calories. I participate more in my classes, I feel better about myself, and I’m more motivated to do my work efficiently. I don’t feel anti-feminist, or like I’m playing into a heteronormative construct. I feel good.

And the other thing is that as I looked around Yale’s campus I began to realize that while the women around me may be wearing sweatpants, those sweatpants were designer-brand, and paired with cashmere sweaters and lip-gloss. Even when they are most casual, Yale women are as obsessed with appearances as those at say, Florida State. Certainly very few women I meet here are comfortably identifying themselves as a feminist or would categorize their clothing and make-up choices as feminist or anti-feminist.

It is the unconsciousness of this that most bothers me. Susan Lori-Parks posits that race is always a performance. I would add that gender might well be a performance as well. If this is the case, then cosmetics are included in the costume. Cosmetics make up part of the mask with which we play the part of “female” or “woman” or “girl”. And it’s important to be conscious of those roles as you play them, to understand what image of women you are participating in as you get ready in the morning. This to me marks the line between what we do because it makes us feel good and what we do because we feel like we ought to.

A friend of mine says that men feel more comfortable with women who dress according to their prescribed gender role– that is, women who wear skirts and dresses and articles of clothing traditionally associated with femininity. However, it has been my experience that whenever I don an outfit that doesn’t include an elasticized waistband, I make most of my male peers uncomfortable. They twitch in their seats, they squirm, they dart their eyes from my face to my décolletage and back again, and they have trouble speaking in complete sentences. They don’t seem to be able to deal with someone who can look good and think at the same time. I’m not saying it’s for everyone, but if Beauticontrol can give my aunt a career, give me confidence, and give the arrogant men of Yale College a challenge to their concepts of female intelligence being disproportionate to female attractiveness… well, sign me up.

But I still think the swimmer in her sixties doesn’t need a goddamn thing.

Leah Franqui is a senior in Yale College.