Recently, I decided to publish. Sitting in the frame reading a book and discussing the trauma of the 90s. I did the first one, and I was shocked when the audience took the trouble to tell me I didn’t look sexy. It would seem, what a moment, what a reason? Actually, I was talking about children dying of starvation. Yes, I am a married woman under the age of forty with a small child. And go and see – you are reproached. They also told me that at that age it would be necessary to paint the lips and even without makeup it was somehow … messy.
You know, I’ve been interested in this phenomenon of our society for a long time. On the one hand, we lived under the forced emancipation of women for 70 years. This is not a joke, not a nice phrase: the USSR was indeed a state advanced in many respects towards women, and therefore its population was a happy (good or unhappy) bearer of advanced values in fitness. women for bob haircuts, ladies’ commissary jackets, maternity leave and high altitude plumber vacancies.
But that’s one side. The other of us is patriarchal, terrible. Headscarves, traditional values, godparents for protective holidays, a number of regions in general are turning to the veil. And now, in a country that has been torn between so many different fires for the second century, I don’t understand how the need to sexualize a woman’s behavior continues.
No, I understand all about high competition, premature male deaths. They smoke, drink, roll in drunken cars, get off the pier (now there are very few women in this type of work). Everything is clear, a Russian woman who is already 25 years old is forced to compete for the attention of socially wealthy men. It used to be quite tragic, now it is better: they drink less, a kind of business has appeared. However, the imbalance is still huge. This is clear to me.
And the aims of the players in the beauty industry are understandable: if money can be made out of the air, why not create it from a dream of beauty? Even if this requires a woman to lie, flatter, almost forcibly persuade herself to drag her “eyebrows”, “eyelashes” and embarrass those who do not. All this is understandable: we have a lot of cheap extra hands ready to create and sell beauty.
And I understand rag manufacturers very well. This market is capitalism. He was persuaded to buy more – he won. Persuasion is not forbidden. Everyone wants to be beautiful. But what if you lie to a fat woman with under-eye bags as if she’s going to be pretty with a new dress, bun, and shellac on her nails? A little compliment is not a crime. The main thing is that it is voluntary.
I understand everything. What I don’t understand is how society itself explains why women are encouraged to sexualize their appearance. There are some motivational differences in that. If we say that our country is patriarchal, we assume here that men control women and claim the right to dispose of the female body. However, controlling a beauty in a miniskirt is more difficult than controlling a girl in a floor-length dress. Here’s a little man sitting: a couch, a beer belly, mourning for the PlayStation. It’s nice for him to think that he’s still the king and god on earth, the lord of the house, the peasant at work. He wants to be responsible, to be on top, to control everything, to keep everyone under control. He wants to stay at home from his wife and fry syrniki for him in the morning. He wants a salary to keep his wife at home. A girl will be born – she wants to decide for herself who she will be, who will study.
At the same time, he wants all the women around him to be “groomed”. A completely cursed word that hides an abyss. Being well groomed is not nice. This replaces the beauty that not everyone can access. Beauty – thick hair, white even teeth, good skin, toned elastic body. All this is very expensive. Maintained is cheaper. This is, roughly speaking, an indication of a woman’s desire to please. A messy woman looks repulsive in the eyes of a little man from the couch, even if she is a well-fed aristocrat in expensive brands, because she does not make an effort to attract attention to herself. If she doesn’t apply, it means she doesn’t appreciate attention, doesn’t value it, doesn’t compete for little boys, oily looks. This is a big minus. When I gave birth, I got fat, started wearing long dresses, walking in strollers, and even breathed a sigh of relief: Those evaluative eyes disappeared. But in the eyes of our autochthonous men, some contempt for me emerged: after all, I stopped striving for them.
Because our men value grooming as a sign of attention. And until now, the older ones speak contemptuously about Americans and Europeans: they call them well-groomed. That is, they do not go out of their way to arouse desire. They won’t try. The patriarchal man does not forgive this. He only appreciates direct, direct signals, because they allow him to proudly think that they are specifically meant to seduce him, that he is especially needed and valued. She perceives makeup and recruiting outfits as “I would have given it to you”. Hence all this “yabyvdul”. Such a response to a recognized signal.
It is not clear how all this fits in one box with conservatism and family values. A married woman, and not yet her first youth, is accused of her reluctance to “take care” of herself, that is, to be attractive to random men? Why do we have half of these series about beauty and transformation, which started with the sentence “I didn’t take care of myself”, that is, I didn’t try to be sexually attractive? They’re going to put an aunt in her fifties on the podium: she’s gone through menopause, her kids have graduated from college, she’s given birth to her eldest grandchild, she’s the shop manager, her husband is a colonel, she’s convicted. : “Groomed!”. And they teach you how to take care of yourself. This is sexual attraction.
Why? And most importantly, what does society think of all this? It cannot reflect, but it cannot reflect. Autoreflex is usually characteristic of any society and social group, people normally always want to know what impression they make, how they evaluate the behavior and motives of representatives of other groups.
And what does our society think of all these grooming celebrations? And about the accusations of the older generation towards the younger: the girls, they say, have completely stopped taking care of themselves. So they no longer try to look assertive and inviting. This is a crime from the point of view of the elders. And most interestingly, the requirements for the sexualization of women are supported by the older women themselves. They almost hatefully condemn young girls who do not want to transfer their first earnings to cosmetics and wear kapron.
It always has been. Even I, when I was quite young, caught on: I remember how the advertising managers of our provincial editorial office, women under the age of forty, just like me, scolded me for walking in hot pants, but here they are running in a “kapronchik”. In winter! in Siberia! I was afraid that no one would marry such a woman.
Anyway, they got married. Even three times. And now aunts embarrass me for making videos without makeup, hair and “elegant” clothes. Once I went on the air with a comment about the capture of a maniac (not sexual, sorry but an ordinary person who was just killed) and they told me I was completely “not well groomed”. Although I had clean hair gathered in a neat ponytail, an ironed shirt and, by the way, I was expecting a boy from art school at that time.
In general, it is interesting to conduct an experiment: if the director of a consulting agency, a forensic investigator or a journalist like me will only be shown in sexual images. Imagine, they ask me to comment on the news about the capture of another scammer from an NGO, and I turn on the air with a deep neckline, fleece, glossy lips, five-layer shadows. The same aunts and uncles will ask in surprise when talking about grooming: dear, shame on you, you have a husband, a child, goats, chickens and you dress like that? That is, people do not know what they want: they need a respectable housewife and a well-groomed lady with half-faced lips and high heels.
I don’t understand what our society thinks about religiosity or anything else. In theory, if we are that conservative, then women’s unbridledness should be perceived as a threat. But in Russia, on the contrary, it is considered a marital strengthening trait: a woman is told to “take care” of herself so that her husband does not go to such a “groomed” another, fortunately, his armies roam under him. It is unclear whether they are protecting their husbands or preying on strangers.
Confused and lost in the historical whirlpool, aunts and uncles object, “You can put anything together.” And that’s the thing, you can’t. And somehow we have to decide: either we accept that everyone is different or we put everyone under the same brush, and then sorry, since we are a country with traditional values, we have to look at it accordingly. Russia has an extremely eclectic society that cannot agree on the most basic rules of coexistence. It’s not so bad that we have a multinational and multi-religious country: even within the same ethnic group and one religion, our people are so radically different from each other that it’s amazing how we all get along with each other.
Here orthodox Muslim women can wear miniskirts and make-up at home, but no one tells them to do so on the street. Everything is clear and precise. In a supposedly corrupt Western society, a woman is discouraged from sexualizing her behavior. Although our person is no longer so clear, everything is clear. In our case, the situation is the opposite: it is supposedly very patriarchal, ordinary, but no one can say why a married woman under the age of forty should paint her lips and wear high heels to be considered well-groomed.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.