Topic 171: Judging by Appearances

Carol:

The “Judging By Appearances Pink ‘N Blues”

In the late 1960’s, Virginia Slims used a logo to capture a new niche, young and hip women smokers. I’d like to think the slogan “You’ve come a long way, baby” was more than a catchy marketing gimmick, that women—people—had come a long way toward breaking stereotypes and moving beyond superficial appearances, but recent news  show that we still make judgments  based on gender stereotypes.
 

Take the story of Storm Witterick, the Canadian baby whose parents decided not to reveal the gender of their third child, delivered at home last January. Their decision twittered and Facebooked into an international controversy, a heated and polarizing debate about gender bias and child-rearing. Some people argue that “social experimentation” on children is tantamount to child abuse; others praise the family for defying stereotypes  that go beyond pink and blue wardrobe choices.  Not that it matters to Storm with his/her beautifully, chubby cheeked smile in photos. Not that it matters to Storm’s older brothers who also look happy and content even though, omigod, they  express their individuality with gender-bending clothing, colors and hairstyles. The Witterick children certainly looked happier than my friend’s son who came home crying from kindergarten in 1986 because the teacher wouldn’t let him cook in the play kitchen with the girls.
 

Or, what about the “SlutWalk Protests,” a global reaction to an April 2011 comment by a Canadian policeman who suggested to a group of Toronto law students that women could avoid being “victimized” if they stopped dressing like sluts. The idea that women are “asking for it” if they dress a certain way is not a new one, but  this particular remark set off a wave of protests around the world after it found its way onto Facebook.  SlutWalk marches have been held in Canada, the United States, Australia and Great Britain. Rallies have attracted all manner of folks in all manner of attire.The “in your face” reactive tone of the SlutWalk movement now includes rallies with workshops on stopping sexual violence and educating law enforcement and public agencies about sexual assaults. Five thousand people were expected to show up at a rally planned for London.
 

I’ll end with a favorite recollection from teaching at a community college where the rich mix of students simply defies stereotyping. I overheard an early morning conversation between two women and a man in my composition class. One of the women was probably in her late 30’s and wore the typical “uniform” of generic blue jeans, tank top and sweater, no flash or boobage . The other was younger and much edgier, with vivid maroon hair, the generic blue jeans, tank top but no coverage so that the head and wings of the large, intricate and quite beautiful dragon tattoo on her back spread out from underneath the straps of the shirt. The man was a bit older, a Vietnam Vet with a scruffy beard and generic blue jeans, a Harley Davidson tee-shirt covering the beginnings of a beer belly. The Vet was doing most of the talking. The women punctuated the conversation with clucks of agreement and nods of understanding, full of compassion for a fellow single parent’s frustrating efforts to get his three little girls to sit still long enough to brush the tangles out and braid their hair.
Gotta run, She Who Must Be Obeyed wants to see Kung Fu Panda 2, and we know who is top dog in this household.

Sources: “SlutWalk’ Marches Sparked by Toronto Officer’s Remarks.” BBC News US & Canada. 8 May 2011.

Stampler, Laura. “ 'Genderless' Baby Raises a Storm of Controversy.” Parentdish.com 26 May 2011
  

Megan:

The Appearance of Being Judged

You might have noticed yesterday that I’ve changed my avatar in the cartoons to reflect my haircut. A few weeks ago, in an impulsive and emotional mood, I went into a local discount hair salon and cut off nearly 24 inches of hair. I guess I was thinking, “Change my hair, change my life.” I have a friend who, after he split up with his long-term girlfriend, cut his hair and shaved his incredibly bushy beard. It’s a common enough ritual. Thing is, I thought having shorter hair would mean less time spent on styling it, but it actually requires more work. This is a lesson I have forgotten and  learned again and again.

The amount of time and effort I put into my appearance varies depending on my mood, where I’m going and whether I expect to meet someone I would like to impress. I get dressed up to go to lunch by myself, but not to go to the grocery store. I put more effort into my appearance before a softball game than I would if I was going to a movie. I’ll still be wearing yesterday’s makeup when I meet a friend for coffee and then die a little inside when we run into a friend of her husband.

In the prison, appearance was very important to the inmates. Most of them spent hours in the gym cultivating body-builder-type physiques. They saved their small salaries for months to purchase the newest and flashiest looking trainers (or tennis shoes). They put enough pressure on themselves and each other that it was fairly obvious that they ones who didn’t take care with their appearances were either bullied, mentally ill, or incapable of dealing with prison life. The habitual self-harmers, and the ones who didn’t wash or clean their cells were generally shunned by their peers because, frankly, they were awful to be around. For some, maintaining an aura of filth (ala Pigpen, but not cute) widened their circumference of personal space in an institution where privacy of any kind is nearly impossible.

It always seems to me that the importance one places on others’ appearances corresponds to the effort one puts into one’s own. My grandmother never steps foot outside her house without being fully dressed up. In fact, it wasn’t until a couple weeks ago, when I went to her house without calling first that I had ever seen her without makeup on (that includes the time she was in the hospital recovering from a hip replacement). She makes comments to me about what other people are wearing, and I know that being well-dressed is important to her – that she considers it a measure of success.

And of course, the reverse is also true. I had a college friend in England who saved money on food by dressing in her worst clothes and going to the farmer’s market at the end of the day. By giving the appearance of poverty and homelessness, she got free food from the stalls. Judging (and being judged) by appearances is part of life. You get better service if you look nice. People take you seriously. I both resent and appreciate this fact, depending on my mood. Sometimes I enjoy the boost in confidence I get when I know that I look good. Other times I resent the fact that I know I am more interesting than I appear, and that’s really hard to convey without being superficial.

Topic 116: Face Value

Carol:

What’s the Value of a (Pretty) Face?

Every woman in the United Sates participates in a daily beauty pageant, whether she likes it or not. Engulfed by a popular culture saturated with images of idealized, air-brushed and unattainable female physical beauty, women and girls cannot escape feeling judged on the basis of the appearance. YWCA. "The Consequence of American's Beauty Obsession on Women and Girls."

When my daughter was about 13, she received a subscription to a teen magazine  as a gift.  Thumbing through the magazine, I was appalled.  The “tween” models in the fashion ads were pencil thin, made-up,  junior versions of the high fashion models in Vogue and Cosmopolitan. Not a real girl in the lot, certainly not anyone who looked like Megan and most of her friends.  What bothered me the most was the advertisements, which were already bombarding 12-14 year-old girls with the messages that (1) beauty is the key to popularity, and (2) you can buy your way to beauty. 
 

The beauty industry is big business and not  just in America. The British department store Debenhams  released  a study on February 9, 2011 showing that the most expensive item in a woman’s  purse was not her cell phone or her I-Pod, but her make-up kit, the equivalent of $407,  professional women between 35-44 having the most expensive make-up bags. Debenhams concludes that women should consider adding make-up to their insurance inventory along with the digital doo-dads in their purses (source: Debenhams homepage).
 

Many studies look at female body image, about eroding self-esteem and increasingly narrow standards of beauty, but what is interesting about the YWCA 2008 report Beauty at Any Cost   is that it considers the economic impact. Women in the US spend $7 billion dollars a year on cosmetics. The study notes that the average money spent in 5 years on cosmetics is equivalent to a year’s tuition at a public university.
 

What about their daughters?  According to a Feb 14, 2011 article in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the number of girls between the ages of 8-12  who use eye make-up has doubled in the last 2 years, and 43% of 6-9 year-old girls already use lipstick or lip gloss. Wal-Mart is getting ready to market its own line of “tween” beauty products, but that’s okay because they are “eco-friendly.” The target age group?  The 9- to 12-year olds.
 

If beauty products aren’t enough to transform women into happy, successful beauty queens,  there is always the next level of artifice.  The American Society of Plastic Surgeons’  2009 “Quick Facts Sheet” shows that the number of cosmetic procedures has increased 69% since 2000.  Surgical procedures have declined by 20%, but  “minimally-invasive procedures” have increased by 99% with Bo-tox the #1 treatment. Typically Bo-Tex injections are about $500 a shot, and need regular repeats. Other popular non-surgical procedures include facial fillers, dental veneers, laser hair removal and electrolysis.  According to the 2009 Quick Sheet, 91% of all cosmetic procedures are performed on women.
 

There is another economic reality to the beauty fixation which affects both women and men.  “Lookism” shows up as work-place discrimination. According to the YWCA report , workers with “below average” physical looks tend to earn about 9% less more money than those judged as “above average.”  I doubt, however, that any woman will tell you she has $400 worth of make-up in her purse so that she can get a salary increase.
 

My daughter at 13 decided to give away her magazine subscription after she took a close look at the ads. How much make-up she carries in her purse is her story to tell. Me? I quit wearing make-up because of allergies, But, I have a drawer in the bathroom with about $50 worth of cosmetics I bought out of total vanity and used only once.

Woman at her Toilette

 

Sources:

American Society of Plastic Surgeons. http://www.plasticsurgery.org/Documents/Media/statistics/2009-US-cosmeticreconstructiveplasticsurgeryminimally-invasive-statistics.pdf 

Debenhams homepage. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/02/prweb5043704.htm
“Girls are Wearing Cosmetics at a Younger Age.” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
          http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/lifestyles/family/s_722835.html
YWCA Beauty at any Cost.
    http://www.ywca.org/atf/cf/%7B3B450FA5-108B-4D2E-B3D0-C31487243E6A%7D/Beauty%20at%20Any%20Cost.pdf


 
Megan:

The Value of the Face

This is one of those days where I need to produce an essay in 15 minutes or else I won’t have time to take a shower before we leave the house to do important things (like see a movie).  And this is also one of those days where washing my hair, which is the most troublesome and lengthly part of the shower, is non-negotiable. It simply has to be done today or my hair will bond together in a single, waist-length, lock of dred. And then I’d have to shave my head.

Mom has the same time pressures on her today, not because she needs to take a shower, but because she is the one who has to be somewhere in an hour and a half. She isn’t anxious about it even though she has not finished her essay, she’s not dressed and is in the kitchen making toast. She has also been awake a lot longer than I have and has obviously put some thought into today’s topic because she asked me whether I remember the time I exercised good judgment about a teenage magazine. I didn’t remember that particular incident but it must have been a defining moment in my life. Criticizing advertisements is the reason I yell at the TV for having diet commercials at 10:00 in the morning (“They’re trying to make the stay at home moms feel fat and useless!”), and that is why I can’t watch day-time TV – the yelling upsets Milo.

But her question about the teenage magazine and the makeup advertising also brings to mind something that happened only yesterday. I went to the mall to buy more of that liquid make up that goes on your face after the moisturizer but before everything else. There’s a word for it, but I can’t remember it right now. I always take the old bottle with me because if I don’t, I cannot remember the brand I prefer. Anyway, I have been using this particular shade and type of this particular brand for the past 5 or 6 six years, but I knew that yesterday would be different. Despite the fact that I have applied sunscreen to my face every day for the past 10 years, I was going to ask the helper lady to find me something with a “little more coverage.”

And the helper lady said she could help me, that they had the very thing, and that it would indeed provide me with… and then she forgot the word and I had to say it again. Coverage. For my face. I need to cover my face. 
I handed her the old bottle so she could see what shade I used. The shade was 0, by the way. The very palest shade they had and she said, “Oh no no no. Your face is too pink. You have a very pink face.” So, she picked out another color, while I called her names in my head.  “I used to live in England,” I said, by way of explaining why I would have required such pale makeup and also because I wanted to feel like I once had a more interesting life, when buying makeup was not the main event of the day.

Then she told me that if I could wait a week to purchase the new makeup, it would come with a gift bag worth $60 of additional makeup and I said, “Sure! Sign me up!” and I know when I go to collect it next Monday, it really will be the highlight of the day. Unless I go to a movie afterwards.

Topic 115: Personality in the Handshake

Carol:

You Can Shake On It 

Frankly, I am at a loss for words. Yep, I don’t think much about handshakes although my husband has been reminding me lately that handshaking is a way to spread winter colds and other germs. I think handshakes are kind of a guy thing.  And maybe a kid thing, too. Oh, and definitely a cowboy thing.
 

I say a “guy thing” because most of the handshakes I ‘ve seen that have any  personality have come from men. I saw two guys do a “high-five” kind of fist bump on a reality show last night, a show that is so shamelessly trashy that I don’t want to admit I watched it, but there was the redemption of seeing that fist bump, which came after several hours of drinking in a Texas bar. Earlier in the evening I had watched a few minutes of a Suns basketball game where all kinds of hand-shaking, hand-slapping gyrations accompany the traditional show of good sportsmanship at the end of the game. Once the drinking and the sports is over, the 21st century business world apparently still considers an assertive (but not aggressive) handshake as the way for a man to make a good impression. Women not so much.
 

Well, the kid thing is all about learning some of the etiquette—shaking hands after a soccer game or meeting an adult for the first time—but it’s also about having fun, especially with the little ones. When our kids were little, they knew right after they started walking what to do when Mom or Dad called out “Gimme 5.” And the current batch of family toddlers have their own greeting rituals and variations of high, low, fist, knuckle, slap, elbow greetings, guaranteed to escalate into either silliness or violence. 
 

The cowboy thing I’ve observed from living in ranch country, or the remnants thereof. Our introduction to cowboy culture came in the mid 1980’s through visits to the Bonhams’ Skull Valley,  50-acre Juniper Well Ranch,  which had once been a part of the larger Bar-U-Bar Ranch.  Despite having been raised in southern California, Dave Bonham not only looked like a weather-worn, range-bred cowboy, but he took to the lifestyle and fit right in with the local ranchers. Dave told us about “kickin’dirt,” the kind of stand-around, look at the ground, low-key, slow-key way the cowboys shared information, conducted business, etc.  The cowboys I met at Bonham barbecues were about the politest folks I ever met, with a clear etiquette of hat-tipping and hand-shaking, whether it was the 20-something cowboy cum artist or a much older Fred Patton, who had run the neighboring Bud Webb ranch for years (source: Edith Ballew Patton, Sharlot Hall Museum).  You wouldn’t see any fist bumps or high-fives from these guys after cow-branding or fence-riding.
 

The arbiter of cowboy etiquette seems to be Texas Bix Bender, whose quotes show up on websites for Ford Trucks, western gear shops, and Alberta guest ranches. You can find most of his humor books online, but not a lot about him. Turns out Texas Bix Bender is the pseudonym for Steve Arwood, a Texas humorist who worked in radio. According Bender/Arwood,    

 Nowadays, a lot of folks greet you with a question: "What's up?" "How ya doin'?" or "How's it goin'?" The proper cowboy greeting comes from an awareness of where the sun is in the sky and consists of the word "Mornin'," "Afternoon," or "Evenin'. (source: Fordtruckfanatics.com)

I promised my daughter I would finish this essay before I head out for a busy day. We didn’t exactly shake on it, but in Yavapai County we keep our word (s).

       
Sources:
Juniper Well Ranch homepage. http://www.juniperwellranch.com/home.htm
Patton, Edith Ballew.” More Memories of Old Skull Valley.” http://sharlot.org/archives/history/dayspast/text/2009_04_11.shtml
Texas Bix Bender quoted on Ford Truck Fanatics website. http://www.fordtruckfanatics.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10064

Megan:

Personality in the Handshake

Well, as you know I am looking for a job. To aid the search, I subscribe to a number of listservs, twitterfeeds and other advice-giving informational resources about how to build good resumes, what not to do at interviews, and how to market yourself online. Just a minute ago, I purchased a domain name for my portfolio website. This was an impulsive decision and quite possibly a mistake because now I can’t figure out how to connect my existing website with the new name. Luckily, I am spending next weekend with my computer genius cousins and maybe they’ll be able to help me out. Otherwise, I just blew $20 of my mother’s hard earned retirement. On the bright side, no one else is going to be able to use meganchammond.com for the next 2 years.

The reason I brought that up is that I wasn’t sure what I could say about this topic. Maybe back in 1915 it was a novel thought (although probably not – people have been shaking hands for hundreds of years), but now the idea of personality in a handshake seems like a masculine cliché.  So I Googled handshake personality and whaddayaknow! A whole bunch of job search/ recruiter advice columns popped up. (I wonder how many otherwise qualified candidates blow their chances with a limp wrist and sweaty palms. ) I’ve never given much thought about shaking hands and what my handshake says about me. I only ever notice others’ when their hands are so flaccid I can’t even feel their bones. Apparently this is known as the "Dead Fish" and indicates a passive and reserved personality. 

(As opposed to the "Live Fish" handshake -- too wriggly to keep ahold of -- indicates flightiness and undependability.)
 

Ok,  I know body language is an important part of face-to-face communication. I’ve taken training courses in dealing with difficult customers through library management trainers and also within the prison. I can tell when a fight is about to break out, or if someone is feeling intimidated, but I’m not sure I subscribe to all that psychological stuff about handshakes. Same with handwriting analysis. I can mimic any handwriting I see, and my own style changes depending on my mood and my pen, so how can anyone interpret the whole story based on a couple handwritten lines? I designed my signature when I first moved to England and needed to use traveller’s cheques and realized that how I signed my name was part of my identification. I don’t think it says anything about me.  So maybe this is all nonsense.
 
And then I found an article on WebMD, which I always supposed to be a reputable online source of medical information. And here they are posting an article with about as much scientific veracity as astrology. I thought. (Before I read it. Cuz I like to jump to conclusions. Especially  wrong ones.) Anyway, apparently there was a study. Men and women (gender was a factor in the results) filled out a few personality questionnaires, and shook hands with the researchers, who didn’t tell them that the handshake was part of the test. You can read the article yourself, but one point the article makes is that a firm handshake in a woman is a good way  to promote herself without seeming “too forward”.  From this, we can gather that other forms of assertiveness in a woman can make her seem “pushy.” Presumably, a pushy woman is intimidating to a man, who may attempt to assert his own dominance by engulfing her entire hand – but don’t worry, WebMD has tips on how to avoid that too.  

Please excuse me now, while I attempt to practice the proper degree of feminine assertiveness.

10 Types of handshakes: http://blog.sironaconsulting.com/sironasays/2007/10/the-top-10-hand.html
WebMD! http://www.webmd.com/balance/news/20000807/handshake-is-worth-thousand-words