Kiss My Tiara Part 1

KISS MY TIARA.

by Susan Jane Gilman.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother Elizabeth Gilman.

who insisted on living life her own way.

Introduction.

Forget Rules for Catching a Husband. How 'bout Rules for Catching a Life?

My grandma never said, "Let him take the lead."

My grandma said, "Have another piece of cake and wash it down with a gin and tonic."

For centuries, lovers, philosophers, and marketers alike have pondered the question, "What do women want?" Having been an editor for a young women's magazine-and being a woman myself-I've come to find that most women today want two things: (1) some smart, no-nonsense advice about how to navigate the world, and (2) to laugh. Ideally, we want both these things at once.

Face it, today's world is full of contradictory messages and expectations for young women. Why else would platform sneakers have been such a hit with us? We post-Baby Boom Babes suffer from conflicting impulses. "If only I could balance my life the way I balance my checkbook," a friend of mine recently moaned. ("If only I could find my checkbook," said another.) Women of my generation have acquired all the responsibilities that come with s.e.xual equality (i.e., earn your own paycheck), but few of the equal benefits (again: see paycheck). We're encouraged to be "empowered" but vilified for being feminists. We have more career opportunities than ever, but somehow we still get the message that a bustier, not a brain, is the real source of "Girl Power." We're urged to put on Nike cross-trainers and "Just Do It"-but we're encouraged to "just do it" while consuming twelve hundred calories a day and weighing no more than 103 pounds. We're inspired to scale the corporate ladder, but we're fully aware that it still b.u.mps up against the gla.s.s ceiling-and that, more often than not, some guy is still peeking up our skirts as we climb.

Of course, pressure to get married and have kids is always buzzing in our ears like societal Muzak: Hurry up! Your clock is ticking! Unless, of course, we're gay-in which case we experience pressure to "straighten up." And all the while we know that we probably have it better than any group of women in history. But we're still fraught with ambivalence over choices.

Throughout all of this, sadly, many women's personal battles are not in the boardrooms or courtrooms but in our own bathrooms. Though the women's movement has done a lot over the past few decades to right the scales of justice, it has had little effect on our own scales and mirrors. For so many women, our physical appearance is a major hurdle to feeling powerful and confident. And we just can't seem to get over this. "Want to know what today's chic young feminist thinkers care about?" Time magazine crowed recently. "Their bodies! Themselves!" Much as I hate to side with Time, it's true that some of us literally can't see past the nose on our face.

And while we're sitting there immobilized before the mirror, we're reading backlashy, boy-crazy women's magazines that instruct us to do stuff like master the "art" of f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o, wrap our thighs in cellophane, or "put your panties in the freezer, then mail them to him at his office in an envelope full of confetti!"

On top of these, of course, we've also read The Rules.

The Rules came out, like, what, a zillion years ago? And yet people still refer to them so often, you'd think they were the Ten Commandments.

The Rules essentially instructed women to act like diet soda. Be effervescent! Sweet! Chronically artificial! Remain bubbly and fluid, they implied, and you could trick a guy into marrying you.

For us progressive prima donnas, The Rules, at first glance, was nothing but a warmed-over version of the "trade your hymen for a diamond" formula that nice girls followed in the fifties. But the book was seductive. Why? Precisely because it offered, well, rules. It gave young women very clear instructions: Follow these, it promised, and you will live happily ever after. It was a guaranteed formula-a G.o.dsend! Finally, tangible guidelines! Order amidst the chaos!

And the clincher? These "time-tested secrets" supposedly came from Grandma. Who could be more comforting and wise than Grandma? Who can resist Grandma?

In today's day and age, oh, how we want Grandma! How we crave rea.s.surance and permission and advice! How we long for a wise, maternal female to help us navigate an increasingly complicated world-a world where all the old bets are off, the new ones are risky, and the payoffs are less certain. Some women long for Grandma so badly, we buy books called Chicken Soup for the Soul, co-auth.o.r.ed by two guys.

The problem, however, is that some of us don't want a grandma who's fixated on getting us married off. "Catching a husband" sounds a little too much to us like catching a cold. We'd rather act up than settle down. Sure, we want love, but we're also a little ambitious. We have pa.s.sions and interests and dreams.

Too often, women are confronted with the social equivalent of Sophie's choice. Which "children" are we willing to sacrifice, we're asked: our hearts or our minds? our independence or the prospect of intimacy? our careers or our families? Although we're aware that "having it all" may not be realistic (or even desirable), we don't want to relinquish one part of our soul for another. We want to achieve some balance and richness in our lives. We still want to prevail.

We'd like a sage female voice to counteract all those other grandmas telling us to lose weight, grab that engagement ring, and produce grandchildren before our clock runs out. We'd like a voice to help us deflect all the negative and contradictory messages that fill our heads every day. We'd like a guardian angel perched on our shoulders, helping us to stand tall, be ourselves, and not take any s.h.i.+t. Never mind "self-esteem" and "self-help." We want a bad att.i.tude, thank you, and a good set of power tools.

Well, that's why I've written Kiss My Tiara.

For in certain ways traditional feminism just isn't cutting it with us. For women today, feminism is often perceived as dreary. As elitist, academic, Victorian, whiny, and pa.s.se. And to some extent-G.o.ddess forgive me for saying this-it's true. I'm not knocking the women's movement of the past years. I'm a huge advocate and beneficiary of choice, workplace-protection laws, and domestic-violence legislation. But I also realize that feminism seventies-style is just about the only trend from the disco era that young women today have not rushed to resurrect. Rhetoric about "reconfiguring the phallocentric modalities of the patriarchy" just turns us into zombies. A lot of us could do without the folk singers, too, thank you, not to mention the Birkenstocks and the sanctimonious veganism. I mean, some of us prefer slaughtering sacred cows to eating tofu any day.

But really, the problem is that a lot of feminist ideology simply doesn't translate well into real life. It doesn't empower young women on a practical level. Even media-savvy Naomi Wolf offers prescriptives like, "Let us start with a reinterpretation of 'beauty' that is noncompet.i.tive, nonhierarchical, and nonviolent." Sounds good, but does anyone actually know how to do this? For that matter, does anyone have the time? h.e.l.l, I barely have time to do my laundry, let alone overhaul the aesthetics of Western civilization.

We Short-Attention-Span Gals could use some practical magic, if you will. Some unconventional, empowering common sense. Some smart, neofeminist rules. And it's important that these rules address the whole range of concerns in our lives that we're struggling to balance-love, money, health, food, careers-not just politics, not just husband-catching, not just o.r.g.a.s.ms. For us, these issues are all tangled together.

And instead of casting us as victims, we'd like a manifesto-excuse me, a womanifesto-that draws upon our strengths.

Well, that's where my grandma-and this book-come in. My grandma never said things like, "Let him take the lead." My grandma was a midget Amazon. A combination of Fran Lebowitz, Queen Latifah, and Jesse Ventura. My grandma campaigned for women's rights, welfare rights, workers' rights-but cut in front of her in the bank line and she'd kill you. She was the type of woman you'd want standing behind you when you're negotiating a raise or getting ready for a hot date. My grandma said things like, "Have another piece of cake and wash it down with a gin and tonic." My grandma said things like, "Take a few lovers, travel the world, and don't take any c.r.a.p."

And she's hardly the first grandma like this in the universe. For the thousands of grandmothers who tells girls to keep their legs crossed and not to wear white shoes after Labor Day, there are always a few salty matriarchs who encourage us to put on a pair of psychological Doc Martens and venture out fearlessly in search of love, glory, and adventure.

This "rules" book is infused with their spirit. It's a voice of irreverent reason to help young women triumph-to help us resist the toxic values of our culture-through chutzpah, intelligence, humor, and feasible action. It is, in short, a guide to wit, power, and att.i.tude.

Because, as I said before: The second thing most women want is to laugh. We gals know instinctively that humor is the most effective weapon-and power tool-we can have in our a.r.s.enal. After all, it fulfills a double purpose: It's forceful without being threatening, and it allows us to be subversive with a smile. What better way to bridge our conflicting desires? What better way to reconcile a contradictory world?

Besides, there is so much comedy in gender relations, it's not funny. For example: Just a few years ago, a breast-cancer study was conducted on men. Or, in another move that Monty Python could've scripted, legislators actually tried to get health-insurance companies to cover v.i.a.g.r.a but not birth control or fertility treatments. Or, take the fact that a bunch of Christian extremists actually got men to spend their whole weekend huddling in a football stadium-away from their wives and children-to demonstrate their devotion to family values. I mean, you can't make this stuff up.

We gals know an absurd world when we see it.

To address women's issues without humor in this day and age is sort of criminally negligent. Because, really, it's the only sane choice. If we don't use humor and irreverence, what are the alternatives? Anger, fear, and victimhood-and G.o.ddess knows we've had enough of that.

Also, since we gals generally prefer reading menus to following instruction booklets, the chapters in Kiss My Tiara can be read a la carte, either sequentially or individually. In this way, it's a profoundly pro-choice book, sort of like the Yellow Pages. Just open it up and read about whatever grabs you at the moment.

Last, even though this book is meant to be funny-and thus neatly sidesteps any pretenses of speaking the Definitive Truth for All Women-a few confessions are in order.

We progressive prima donnas are often sticklers for inclusion and diversity. Yet, in putting this together, I drew upon the insights of a very limited pool of women. Yeah, they were from different races, religions, and ethnicities. Yeah, some were gay, some were bis.e.xual, and some were straight. And, yeah, while the majority of them were middle cla.s.s, there were a few waitresses and debutantes thrown in.

But mostly the women had one overriding characteristic: They each had a big, fresh mouth and a laugh that could peel paint off a wall. And if that makes this book in any way h.o.m.ogenous and elitist, so be it. As my grandma used to say, "f.u.c.k 'em if they can't take a joke!"

Part I.

Mistress of Our Domain.

Chapter 1.

Beauty Tips from Mental Inst.i.tutions.

"Any girl can be glamourous.

All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."

-HEDY LAMARR.

A while ago, I got a call from my brother. "Guess what I'm doing?" he said. "I'm making Cindy Crawford's t.i.ts bigger."

As a production a.s.sistant for Esquire, it was his job to digitally "improve" centerfold shots taken by the magazine's photographers. If the editor-in-chief decided that Naomi Campbell's waist should be smaller or Christy Turlington's eyes darker, my brother would have to perform virtual plastic surgery on them: tucking a tummy, bolstering a breast, or bluing an eye with a click of the mouse. "Sometimes we change the women's photographs so much, they look nothing like the original," he said. "I mean, they might as well be Marge Simpson."

Marge Simpson?

Uh-oh.

It used to be, if we gals wanted to look like a model, all we had to do was be born with extraordinary genes, grow to five-foot ten, subsist on lettuce, and maybe develop a c.o.ke habit. Now, it seems, we've also got to have our looks "enhanced" by an underpaid production a.s.sistant with a fifty-thousand-gigabyte hard drive.

As my grandmother used to say: Oy.

Now, I'm not dissing beauty. I love to feel like all that; I'm a fetis.h.i.+st for Viva Glam lipstick as much as the next gal. But, frankly, so much of what pa.s.ses for the business of beauty these days seems to have been concocted by the inmates of a mental inst.i.tution.

Pluck out all your eyebrows so you can draw them back on with a pencil.

Pay a doctor to remove the fat from your a.s.s and inject it into your chin.

To make your legs look fabulous, wear shoes that will give you varicose veins and bunions.

Have leaky water balloons surgically embedded in your chest.

I mean, if I didn't know better, I'd think these ideas were the ramblings of Quack-Quack, the paranoid schizophrenic dressed in Saran Wrap and duct tape who used to hang around my corner and shout at the local women, "I shoot poison in your face! I cut off your chin!"

Too bad Quack-Quack couldn't get his act together and become a plastic surgeon on Madison Avenue, because these are exactly the things that doctors are charging a bundle for nowadays. In fact, who knew that Quack-Quack would be such a trend-setter in the fas.h.i.+on department, too: Cosmopolitan magazine has actually suggested that we gals wrap our b.o.o.bs in duct tape. Maybe magazine editors should stop flying to Milan for inspiration and start scouting out-patient mental facilities instead.

And if this isn't crazy enough, of course, there's now all this "celebrity beauty" craziness, too. Magazines devote whole sections to tracking down the brand of exfoliant used by Jennifer Love Hewitt. Cher gets her entire body renovated, Courtney Love buys herself a new nose, Britney Spears reportedly gets a b.o.o.b job, and Joan Rivers's face has been reincarnated more times than the Dalai Lama. "Even I don't get up looking like Cindy Crawford," Cindy Crawford has said. And yet the media implies that these women are chronically, effortlessly, naturally beautiful-and that we can look just like them if we buy the same lip gloss and thigh cream as Cameron Diaz.

Wackier still, we gals are supposed to employ these "beauty secrets" to look as if we haven't done a d.a.m.n thing to ourselves. Meanwhile, cosmetic ads refer to beauty as "a science," full of "breakthroughs," "patented" processes, and "state-of-the-art technology." And people accept these claims unquestioningly-even while they refuse to believe in evolution. (Mascara? Sure, it's a science. But not Darwin.) Go figure.

Now, you'd think we SmartMouth G.o.ddesses would have a field day with this stuff, right? I mean, how ridiculous is a society that thinks it's nifty to inject botulism into our lips?

But for so many of us, unfortunately, beauty just ain't no laughing matter. It's our Achilles' heel-except that it's not just located in our feet, but in our hair, our face, and our body.

For all the "human progress" over the past two thousand years, we still feel an obscene amount of pressure to be beautiful. And we can all name the culprits: The media. Boys. Patriarchy. Capitalism. Calvin Klein. That moron in elementary school who insisted on weighing everybody publicly in gym cla.s.s.

But frankly, some of the pressure to look beautiful is self-inflicted, too. Survey a bunch of us with XX chromosomes, and we'll tell you that we like to look stunning. We like to feel lithe and muscular, gorgeous and s.e.xy. We like the "power" that beauty gives us. And we'll tell you that makeup is fun and that feminism means being able to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies, thank you very much.

Sure, we know that there is more, that there should be more, and that there has to be more to us than meets the eye. But this doesn't preclude us from wanting, on some level, to win the Miss Universe pageant, too.

Unfortunately, forces in our culture are only too happy to feed these longings and insecurities of ours-and inflate them to epic proportions like they do Cindy Crawford's b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

And so we women end up believing on some level that we're only beautiful if we're under forty years old and 110 pounds. We end up believing that, in order to be beautiful, we've gotta treat our bodies and faces like Humpty-Dumpty, delicately smas.h.i.+ng them up and then trying to put them back together again-except better this time. (Newsweek has reported that an increasing number of average women-waitresses, nurses, students, and moms-are opting to spend our life savings on liposuction instead of on stuff like down payments for a home. We'd rather have fabulous abs for a few years than a financially secure future.) We dissect and critique ourselves like a poultry inspector: "Ugh, I hate my thighs. They rub together so much, it's a wonder sparks don't fly when I walk."

"Don't even get me started on my hair. In a third-world country, it would be harvested as a grain."

"The only thing that could improve my forearms at this point is a taxidermist."

Obviously, if we chicks are going to be seriously powerful in this world, we've got to learn how to appreciate our own natural, G.o.ddess-given looks, to work with them as best we can, and then get over ourselves a little. Otherwise we'll just drive ourselves crazy.

Sure, this is far easier said than done. But let's think about something else for a moment: bungee-jumping.

Somebody has actually convinced folks that if they pay a guy one hundred and fifty bucks to tie a rubber band around their ankles and kick them off a suspension bridge, they'll have the time of their lives. Similarly, somebody has actually persuaded folks to buy John Tesh records. And somebody has actually persuaded folks that teaching a six-year-old to hunt with an a.s.sault rifle is a perfectly reasonable way to spend a Sat.u.r.day afternoon.

So surely we gals can persuade ourselves to value beauty just a tad differently, no? Surely we can learn to love our looks without losing our life savings-or our minds.

How might we righteous babes withstand the barrage of beauty gar-bage? How might we begin our own mental makeovers?

1. Remember: Famous beauties are just as miserable as the rest of us. What do supermodels do all day? Stand still, shut up, and wear clothes. Ugh. These are probably my three least favorite things to do, short of getting root ca.n.a.l.

Sure, famous beauties have starred in the fantasies of millions of p.u.b.escent boys, but just how difficult is that really?

It's always a.s.sumed that celebrated beauties are happier and more loveable than the rest of us. I guess this is true. After all, Christie Brinkley has been married four times now. Jerry Hall married Mick Jagger, who publicly cheated on her for twenty years until announcing that, hey, guess what, honey, the wedding was bogus to begin with. Claudia Schiffer remained engaged for years to a guy who could make himself disappear at will, until the engagement broke off altogether. Marilyn Monroe's life was a succession of tragedies. Kate Moss checked herself into rehab ... and blah blah blah. You get the idea.

And then, on the other end of the spectrum, there are people like my friend Eliza, who's never been considered a "babe" in her life. What does Eliza have to show for her lack of pulchritude? A Harvard Ph.D, a kick-a.s.s job heading one of the most prestigious news bureaus in the world, a big fat paycheck, a family that could smother you with love, a devoted circle of friends, and, oh yeah, a kind and gorgeous husband and a kid. So go figure.

Next time we're tearing our hair out over our hair, it may help us to remember that beauty may attract attention and adoration from strangers, but it doesn't guarantee anyone love or happiness. And it certainly doesn't immunize us against the pain of being alive. For that we need a series of narcotics or a slot in the cryogenic freezer next to good ol' Walt Disney-neither of which, from what I understand, is terribly good for our looks.

2. All life is not high school. It's a feat unique to human nature that if we're called "warthog" or "dork-a-rina" for three years in high school, it can effectively abolish any sense of our own attractiveness for, oh, the next forty years. So it's important for us SmartMouth G.o.ddesses to remind each other: Looks will never be as important as they are for those few years when we're all hormonally insane and have yet to pay income taxes.

Once we make it though the Wonderbra Years, we should find we have better things to do than go on grapefruit diets with our girlfriends or hang around a mall evaluating each other's hair, weight, and clothes. People who continue to adhere to the value system of high school after graduation are, frankly, pathetic. Sure, cheerleading squad is great exercise but not something we can put on a resume. And unless we get pregnant during prom night, the shelf life of its importance is virtually nil.

Besides, nine times out of ten, anyone worth knowing later in life was generally miserable in high school. And in the workplace, n.o.body cares if we were a svelte homecoming queen or voted Most Beautiful. n.o.body cares if we were called "warthog" or "dork-a-rina," for that matter, either. All they're interested in is stuff like money and vacations and not getting caught downloading p.o.r.n from the Internet.

3. If we cannot love our bodies, let's break both our legs. My friend Sarah has recommended spending a few months in traction. Or in a wheelchair. She once spent an entire summer in a body cast after a bike accident. "Nothing, but nothing, in the world makes you appreciate your body so much as not being able to use it," she says. "You may hate your thighs now, but after they've been encased in plaster of paris and strung up over your head at a forty-five-degree angle for an entire summer, trust me: There will be nothing more beautiful than seeing them bare again-especially if they still enable you to walk."

4. Art museums beat Vogue any day. Serious art is an amazing way to retrain our eyes to see beauty differently. Artists over the centruies loved to paint women of all sizes and all shapes. Granted, these artists were mostly white men, and so the women they painted were mostly white and naked, but their bodies and features were vastly different. And n.o.body, absolutely n.o.body, during the Renaissance painted Kate Moss.

5. Bad hair days are inevitable and unavoidable. And no matter what we do, bad hair days are largely out of our control. Ditto for the rest of our looks. Unless we're fabulous freaks of nature, chances are we'll have our G.o.ddess days and our G.o.dawful days.

Of course, the beauty industry would love to trick us into believing that a seventeen-dollar tube of "night creme" and some overpriced pseudo-European hair gel will actually enable us to defy nature, but c'mon: If someone truly had discovered a way to do this, wouldn't they have received the n.o.bel Prize already?

Besides, we all know Murphy's Ugly Law of Beauty: No matter how hard we work to look breathtakingly gorgeous, the one day we run into our ex-lover is inevitably the day we've just had our wisdom teeth pulled and are staggering to the pharmacy in our sweat pants.

6. Plastic surgery is f.u.c.king painful. There's lots of money to be made convincing young women today that knives and needles are our best beauty tools. If we don't like something about ourselves, heck, we should just hack it off.

These brilliant ideas are being promoted, of course, by the same people who, in a different time and place, would sound very much like Quack-Quack.

Plastic surgeons are eager to convince us that a nose job, b.o.o.b job, or cheek implants are as easy and harmless as, say, a makeover or a haircut. They have cute little computer programs that can morph our driver's-license photos into an Esquire cover in about three easy clicks.