78uuu lumière des étoiles

Dusty:Starlight:Culture



Whitey Wins!
2005-01-13   6:15 p.m.

As much as I like to say that nothing should surprise me, things consistently do. And often in poopy ways.

Though surely I could have chosen a more academic term than "poopy", that about sums up my feelings in regards to the state of American pop culture - and in particular how the oppressive ills that generally plague our culture - racism, sexism, homophobia - are exploited for profit.

Today I had the pleasure of sitting through two amazing presentations given by my current WS students. One discussed an idea we'd covered earlier in the week: that the exploitation of activism - or the practice of being activist - has been "discovered" recently by advertisers as something that can effectively sell products. A new ad for Dove Shampoo that my student found, for example, presents images of women walking around a town that looks suspiciously like San Francisco (the site of much historical and current activism) in blond wigs. The women meet in some central square, and then proceed to rip off the wigs and fling them in the air. A silky voice then says "how long have you been chasing someone else's notion of beauty?", while close-up shots of impeccably dressed, beautiful women shake out their (gasp) brown, red, dirty blond, short, long, straight, or wavy hair. I don't think I need to say that there were no dark skinned black women donning Afros.

Anyway - we saw the commercial's message as two fold: on one hand, the ad seeks to deconstruct the old beauty myth, and attacks that "gentlemen prefer blondes" stereotype. This can be extremely helpful, as just the implication that there is more than one way to see beauty or to be beautiful can be extremely liberating for women (and men!). On the other, while the ad purports to dismiss a restrictive or narrow beauty standard, the images we get of the thin, beautiful, and mostly white women (or "ethnic" women who look pretty darn Caucasian) tell us something different. Oh, and don't forget the not-so-subtle implication that to "restore your natural beauty", you must do so using a BEAUTY PRODUCT, and in particular, dove shampoo.

See? Poopy. Hooray indeed, let's protest the man - but let's do so in a way that still insures our propensity to buy bottled beauty. AND, since activism is so in, I suppose, since the modern woman is so aware, let's reach out - and reach into their collective purses - to relate. And lest you think this is some massive over-reaction, a student who works for a marketing research company that often contributes to advertising for cosmetics companies told us that his boss brought up the "large number of women voters" this last election, and said she "wondered how we might take that into consideration".

Gah. But what was even sicker was a second discussion we had about the "Miss World" pageant, which my student said might as well be called the "Miss Whitest" pageant. When beauty goes global, it almost follows Westernized ideals. Take, for example, Ms. Ethiopia:

Notice anything strange? Possibly that she doesn't look even REMOTELY ETHIOPIAN? I thought, when Natalia - who is Tanzanian, by the way - pulled up the image, and we were all surprised by her, er, non-Ethiopian-ness, that the contestant must be more of an exception rather than a rule. But the same goes for Ms. Peru,

and Ms. Ghana:

...and many, many, MANY of the other non-white contestants.

When I was walking around on Labadi beach on the west coast of Ghana, I didn't see anyone who even remotely resembled Ms. Ghana, who says she's "proud to be a representative of the women in her country".

What bothers me most about the pageant isn't the superficiality or the bikini nonsense - that's what pageants are about, and I accept that they exist. It's the professed "diversity" that the pageant claims to include - the "different shades" of beauty that it proclaims to present. In each contests' profile, there are specific statements about the "ethnic activities" each participates in - local traditional dance, music, cooking, etc. "Listen," I feel the producers are saying, "just because she looks like she's from Cincinnati, doesn't mean she is. See how "ethnic" she is? She makes EMPINADAS! She dances the MAGUNJU!"

I think what disgusted my student the most was how slender all the African contestants were - something which she, growing up in Botswana and Tanzania, does NOT see as representative of Southern or Eastern African "standards". "This is a very Western idea, this skinniness," she said. And yet even Ms. Ghana - who comes from a country that really looks down upon stick-thin frames and whose people encouraged me to "eat, eat, eat, for God's sake!" when I was traveling through - is thinner than most American women I know.

She also was aggravated that of all the African contestants, of which there were dozens, NONE had natural hair; all had long, chemically straightened locks with Western style cuts.

I think the implicit - or perhaps explicit - message this sends is that the closer to "white" that women are, the more beautiful the "world" will deem them. Blackness = ugliness; the darker the skin, the uglier the girl. The fatter the body, the farther she is from attractive. I can't emphasize enough that this is not true in all cultures - that many exist with very different notions of beauty, that there still exist in many West African and Middle Eastern countries "fattening farms", where women go before they get married to - well - fill out a bit more. Why are we so reluctant to admit, admire, or even allow truly diverse notions of beauty? Why can't a chunky black African with kinky hair become miss world? Or a darker-skinned Indian from South America? Hell, why not a chubby Japanese chick from Chicago who hasn't had her eyes surgically altered?

When what is Western is projected as Global, I really get pissed off. How wonderful globalization can be when it provides modern standards of sanitation and health care that prolong and improve people's lives. And how disgustingly awful it can be when it disseminates and reproduces the impossibly restrictive, narrow, toxic standards that have been psychologically poisoning the West for so many decades.

In dealing with my frustrations when issues like this arise in my classroom, I always come back to a good place: I love my job. I love, love, love my job. I love the research it keeps me doing, I love the rewards and the thank-yous and the light bulbs that pop on over my students' heads. Damn the man, indeed.


xo,