On a bus, crossing the central park on the 92nd street in uptown Manhattan, I am seated next to a lady in a smart skirt suit with the most delightful bag on her lap. The risk of initiating conversation with a stranger in NYC ranges from being ignored to being spat in the face. Or worse, shot in it. I take that risk for that eccentric but beautifully made bag. As it turns out, the lady is a talker, she tells me all about the designer, the theme and…and…and…gives me info on where to buy it. That too on sale!!! And I eventually do. Two!
Nothing remarkable about the above mentioned story you say. But it is. We spoke. I asked, she answered. She derived joy by telling me about her prized possession and I learned a few things. Win-win! How many of us can say we have win-win random conversations on any given day? Let’s boil it down to, how many of us have conversations? Period. We don’t have friends. We don’t want friends. We want followers. Growing up, the biggest thing was getting to know a celebrity, like be friends and meetup with them. Then about 20 years ago it became about being seen with a celebrity, a selfie, a video or something. And now, we just want to become celebrities.
With a phone and some (read a lot of ) shameless self -promotion, most people think they are celebrities in a virtual world because 10K people follow and like them. Now if this was an organic thingy, it’s fine. Say someone has spent decades curating clogs, crocs and mules and the Imelda Marcos foundation inducted them into their hall of fame. Wow! Well deserved! But if someone is a shameless, lazy, sociopathic, idiot with ONE pair of Blahnik’s (Manolo Blahnik for the uninitiated) and think honking about THAT one pair on instagram, youtube and tiktok will somehow give them instant recognition. They don’t have a brain. I see poor girls (and women) posting odes to their own beauties. Yes! Read that sentence again. Such a poor shot at quarantine minutes of fame!
This self-validation for their feminity and beauty is not just limited to vapid, vacuous, wannabe, whatever it takes, women. It is the bane of all women. Even the so called successful women. Women with careers, children, access to power still look for self-validation of their physical appearance. Which is kinda, sorta okay in a ‘we can do what we want to' feminist way but the lengths they go to, in order to achieve this validation is a slap on every feminist’s hirsute nether regions. Finding boutiques to sponsor outfits and jewelry and then having to @ all of them, getting up at 5 in the morning to find locations to get shots and then taking someone along with no photography skills to take pics that they need to alter with free filters on their phone, all for a like from someone with a voyeurism fetish. That doesn’t make them a celeb, it makes them a victim.
I love beautiful women, I enjoy their beauty and I admire beautiful, successful women. I love outfits and jewelry. I truly do. What’s not to like? Imagine Madeline Albright modeling her outfits in the 80’s in some local magazine to get an ego fix. No way she would have her pins/brooches on exhibition now. She wouldn’t even have a long, powerful, glamorous, glorious career. She wouldn’t have been the celebrity that she is now. There is no alternative to hard work especially if you already have a BLOODY job! Man or Woman.
Speaking of jobs and men, we women are trying to break stereotypes and pry more and more jobs away from men. Right? But why have we given them our vanity case? Have you seen the make-up women are expected to put on their faces? It’s not to beautify your face. The make-up alters it. Go to youtube and see what’s popular. No just look at any woman on a bill board. The make-up is not an enhancement it is a renewal. The mouth has to be bigger, the eyebrows arched, the cheek bones chiseled, false eyelashes, and not a patch of skin should show. Concealer and foundation should cover EVERY pore between your neck and ears. Who do you think invented that? Drag queens. Men! Men who need to make a transformation and BECOME women. We already are. They need to cover their stubble and soften their face. We have oestrogen! We have soft, luminous skin. Their eyebrows need to arch way high up into their foreheads. We already have comparatively narrower foreheads. It’s great to be a drag queen - men wanting to look like women - but women wanting to look like men who want to look like women is just daft. We have to value ourselves more. There is a reason why some men want to look like us - because we are fabulous!
The one thing we women having going for us is that when we bond we talk about love, life and career. We talk, we have conversations. It makes us understand ourselves better. When I was quite young a long, long while ago, the (quite young) husband came back from office all flabbergasted. He was accosted at the water cooler by a senior colleague in uniform who used this opportunity of small talk to bandy about gruesome details about his urinary tract inflammation. What a shock? Generally, men neither divulge nor digest such information. We women, such empathetic beings that we are, talk about UTI’s, abusive husbands, truant children and uncomfortable underwear ALL the time. We also talk about our successful recipes, super talented kids, our fitness regime and the sides effects of buttocks (and botox). We communicate. We soothe. We placate. We vindicate. And most importantly when we have a good circle of friends, we validate. We validate each other. 'You look good in that Saree’ from ONE dear friend is worth a million likes.
One friend in real life is worth a 100 thousand followers!
