Pretty, Part 3: Weighting and the Notion of ‘Academic Pretty’
(Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.)
Like most women, I had thought about appearance in terms of audience since just about always, but once I began to seriously work toward becoming a rhetorician that awareness increased. Appearance has everything to do with audience and kairos and other elements of persuasion, and it also has to do with communicative ethics. The fine line between persuasion and manipulation is one that women face constant pressure to deal with. (The effortlessly persuasive outfit = “She’s so confident and well-dressed.” On the other hand, an outfit that’s perceived as self-consciously constructed and manipulative = slut. Not so unlike the broad difference between conceptions of rhetorician and sophist.)
So I had to figure out how to manage my physical presentation within a new professional/rhetorical situation. Specifically: how would I transition from a corporate-business-development-type into a humanities-writer-type? Idgie and Bridget both commented on the specifics of this problem. The sort of pretty that plays in one sector of the academy doesn’t work in another. Luckily, my particular brand of pretty adjusted fairly well to my field. I have never been able to do super-girly-glitter-pink-femme. Never even wanted to. My brand of femme (corporate era) tended toward being a broad. Shoulder-length or longer red hair, curvy, v-necks-but-otherwise-covered, good bras, good leather shoes. Dark and neutral colors, strong tailoring. Smart, quick, a fair amount of cursing. Drink your liquor straight, no blended drinks and forgodsakes no fruity cocktails. A dame, in the American sense of the word. Played correctly, this sort of construction is approachable-yet-reasonably-intimidating, reasonably hot-but-not-necessarily-obtainable. It’s for a woman who’s one of the guys, only completely not. It works fairly well for me, and I still use it in particular situations — when I was working frequently with my lawyer last year, for instance.
I probably could have just transitioned it into my academic persona wholesale, but for several seasons. The primary problem was pragmatic: it’s a very expensive construct to keep going. To make it work, you have to be buying quality stuff. You can shop sales, but good wool costs what good wool costs, and so do Cole Haans. A $300 piece on a steep, steep sale is still $125 or maybe $80, if you’re really lucky. It’s not a look for a grad student to maintain, and I hadn’t kept my closet in shape, as I described in the last entry. Secondly, it’s a look for a woman who works in a heavily male-dominated profession. I could have just kept it without any problems except money had I gone to law school. But at the time, I assumed that it would never work in a female-dominated profession like Rhet-Comp. It especially doesn’t play well with southern women. Up here, I could probably get away with it more easily, assuming I was faculty. And finally, I wanted something easier. I had already gone from full-on broad to khakis-and-a-polo in my last year on the job, and I was purposefully leaving corporate life. In other words: I really wanted to wear jeans.
Which is what I did. I took some of the elements of my work-look and casual-ized them. It worked just fine, except that it made me look like a well put-together co-ed in sort of a contemporary, slightly edgy Nancy Drew sense of the term. (If that makes any sense at all.) And that accorded me just as much respect as you might expect the patriarchy is willing to give: “Well, aren’t you just so cute and smart? You’ll go so far.” Pat you on your head. Pat you on your ass. And when I say ‘patriarchy’ here, I don’t necessarily mean just men. I mean the people who were in charge. Professorial crushes by students are always strange, but even stranger is the reverse professorial crush. What do you do when a professor develops a crush on you? You accept the friendship, if you genuinely like the person (which I did and still do), and you accept the encouragement and help and just don’t mention it, but it’s still an issue. There’s still subjectivity and power imposed, despite everyone’s best intentions. It encourages a smart woman to feel like she’s not being evaluated strictly on her work, that she’s not really being taken seriously. And so one begins to look for ways to negate the issue.
I won’t pretend that I consciously decided to gain weight as a way of being taken more seriously. I have a tall, sturdy peasant frame, and Irish peasant genes that are always storing up for the next potato famine. All that exercise and dieting that I mentioned back in Part 1? That sort of obsessive attention will whittle me down to a woman’s 14 (American). On my frame, that size generates compliments. (A period of disordered eating in my mid-teens — which eventually contributed to a raging case of pneumonia — brought me down to the mid-150s and comments that I was actually becoming rather thin. When I finally went back to eating more than just a small french fries in a day, I regained every bit of my normal weight as well as a decent amount of nutrition. Don’t ask me why I chose fries and sometimes calamari. I don’t know.) Without constant vigilance that borders on the obsessive, I will gain weight. So will anyone else in my family. That’s the way we’re built. And as anyone knows, grad school has a reputation for encouraging one to pack on the pounds.
I especially gained during my thesis push and PhD program search. It appalled me so much that I became much more vigilant after we moved to Minnesota. I actually lost weight during my first semester of PhD work, which says something. But during my second semester I broke my ankle, and that meant four months of sitting and a pretty solid year of pain. This, combined with the professional pressure to sit and read and write, set up very strong sedentary habits that I’ve not yet successfully broken.
I’m not happy with my current weight, and don’t want to maintain here. But it is also not lost on me that transitioning from big-boned to thick to fat has solved a lot of my pretty problems. Out in the world, everyone knows that heaviness causes credibility problems. If I was still in business development or if I had gone to law school, this weight would be a huge problem that would have to be dealt with immediately. (Or really, I would never have let it get this far in the first place.) But here within the academy, and especially within Letters, we have a higher tolerance of freaks and geeks and less tolerance for pretty. At this weight, I am simply taken more seriously. People look me in the face instead of in the chest. They pay closer attention to what I’m saying and writing. When I sit in a committee meeting full of men or go to breakfast with a male colleague, the dynamics indicate that they are more generally registering me as ‘colleague’ or ‘additional mind/opinion’ rather than ‘omg female!’. My heft and height contribute to my authority in the classroom (and I’ve been lucky enough to keep a reasonably pretty face, so there hasn’t been much evident appearance-based impact on my teaching evaluations.)
Of course, there are other factors. The realities of shopping for a plus-sized body means that I’m dressing less hawt than before. I’ve experienced these bodily changes in a very liberal part of the country; it might be different if I was still living down South. As I’ve become more educated, I’ve simply become more confident in my arguments and public speaking.
But I read so many blogs written by smart women academics in various disciplines all over the country. They’re publishing and speaking and making names for themselves. And I can’t help but notice that the ones who most rigorously defend their right to the pretty (as they should; everybody’s got a right to be pretty) are the ones who also complain most often about physical and verbal sexual harassment, about not being taken seriously, and about issues with classroom authority. One old colleague of mine, who is simply wired up to like pink and glitter and girlieness and works hard for her slenderness, has had so many problems along these lines. The sad cultural fact of the matter is that pretty is not often respected. Even the academy, which theoretically evaluates on smarts and merits*, isn’t so sure that pretty and smart can really exist in the same human package. And for me, oddly enough, weight has been a way out of this problem. So much so that when I think about getting back to my former weight, I also can’t help but think about the price I might pay for doing so.
*Yes, I know this is a fiction.
Comments
When I was a kid, my mother would fairly frequently hear comments about her sons. Probably even worse (for her) was the fact that my brother was the pretty one: curly blond hair, blue eyes. I don't think he wanted to be pretty (and he grew into a football player and handsome man), but then, neither did I. I'm just not wired that way. Pretty never interested me.
I've opted out of most the social constraints on female appearance. Sure, the harassment can be worse, and expectations can range from annoying to outrageous, but for the most part, it is understood I'm playing by different rules. This means in the geek, academic, and business world, I get along with guys mostly as "one of the guys" and I either get along with women or not (other personality issues aside) depending on their tolerance for other women living outside their framework. Usually if they can't stand that idea, they can't stand me. Or they need time to see I'm not out to convert them or their daughters and everything is fine. Strangely, it often seems to ease things when they find out my partner is femme. Some people need to hang things on a traditional gender framework, no matter how much ridiculous bending that requires.
I've always believed that straight women are the most zealous appearance police (second perhaps to some gay men, but they don't really see me so they don't bug me about how I look) and frequently wondered why they do it to themselves. Your series of posts helps me to understand the tradeoffs in this a little better.
After years and years of extremely short (think flat top or buzzcut) hair, I have hair now. This surprises most people who know me, and does mean I get called Sir less often. I have teasingly been called girly, mostly by folks who know I'll be annoyed by it. I'm comfortable not fitting the norms (thankfully tech has no real dress code, when I had to muster up business casual on a daily basis it was painful), I just wish I was always comfortable. I think that is a worthy goal, but I'm not there yet.
Posted by: jspad | December 10, 2007 1:03 PM
Hi, Krista!
I (Fresca) am a friend of Sally ("Already Pretty"). I've been following you two's discussion about having a female body and what to do with it, and I just now posted a BBC article about Mauritania's girl-fattening farms on my blog gugeo (gugeo.blogspot.com).
I decided to cut and paste the whole darn thing here as a comment, in case you care to read and share it---we white Americans of means are not the only ones in the world who take the pursuit of female attractiveness into the realm of abuse.
I enjoy your blog. I haven't been near academia in many years and I enjoy catching a whiff of it through your thoughtful writing.
Here's my post:
Monday, December 10, 2007
"Fat Farms"
As I mentioned in the post "Being Pretty," Sally (alreadypretty.blogspot.com) got me thinking again about the issue of what it means to be physically attractive and how we as individuals choose to pursue that, or not.
One fun (or disturbing, it depends) aspect of that issue is looking at how different people and cultures define beauty.
One of the wackiest examples comes from Mauritania, in West Africa, where fat women are preferred in the Arab culture. (This is the dominant class in the country. The black Africans are generally of lesser standing.)
While some American kids are suffering in diet camps to gain the coveted skeletal look, some Mauritanian girls are suffering in diet camps in order to look like giant pillows. Just goes to show Americans have no corner on the out-of-whack-body-image market.
I came across this article about Mauritanian fat farms, below, while I was researching neighboring Mali a couple years ago.
Mauritania's 'Wife-Fattening' Farm
By Pascale Harter
January 26, 2004
BBC, Mauritania
Obesity is so revered among Mauritania's white Moor Arab population that the young girls are sometimes force-fed to obtain a weight the government has described as "life-threatening".
A generation ago, over a third of women in the country were force-fed as children - Mauritania is one of the few African countries where, on average, girls receive more food than boys.
Now only around one in 10 girls are treated this way. The treatment has its roots in fat being seen as a sign of wealth - if a girl was thin she was considered poor, and would not be respected.
But in rural Mauritania you still see the rotund women that the country is famous for. They walk slowly, dainty hands on the end of dimpled arms, pinching multicoloured swathes of fabric together to keep the biting sand from their faces.
"I make them eat lots of dates, lots and lots of couscous and other fattening food," Fatematou, a voluminous woman in her sixties who runs a kind of "fat farm" in the northern desert town of Atar, told BBC World Service's The World Today programme.
Although she had no clients when I met her, she said she was soon expecting to take charge of some seven-year-olds.
"I make them eat and eat and eat. And then drink lots and lots of water," she explained.
"I make them do this all morning. Then they have a rest. In the afternoon we start again. We do this three times a day - the morning, the afternoon and the evening."
Punishment
She said the girls could end up weighing between 60 to 100 kilograms, "with lots of layers of fat."
Fatematou said that it was rare for a girl to refuse to eat, and that if they did, she was helped by the child's parents.
"They punish the girls and in the end the girls eat," she said.
"If a girl refuses we start nicely, saying 'come on, come on' sweetly, until she agrees to eat."
Fatematou admitted that sometimes the girls cried at the treatment.
"Of course they cry - they scream," she said.
"We grab them and we force them to eat. If they cry a lot we leave them sometimes for a day or two and then we come back to start again.
"They get used to it in the end."
She argued that in the end the girls were grateful.
"When they are small they don't understand, but when they grow up they are fat and beautiful," she said.
"They are proud and show off their good size to make men dribble. Don't you think that's good?"
Change
However, the view that a fat girl is more desirable is now becoming seen as old-fashioned.
A study by the Mauritanian ministry of health has found that force-feeding is dying out. Now only 11% of young girls are force fed.
"That's not how people think now," Leila - a woman in the ancient desert town of Chinguetti, who herself was fattened as a child - told The World Today.
"Traditionally a fat wife was a symbol of wealth. Now we've got another vision, another criteria for beauty.
"Young people in Mauritania today, we're not interested in being fat as a symbol of beauty. Today to be beautiful is to be natural, just to eat normally."
Some men are also much less keen on having a fat wife - a reflection of changes in Mauritanian society.
"We're fed up of fat women here," said 19-year-old shop owner Yusuf.
"Always fat women! Now we want thin women. In Mauritania if a woman really wants to get married I think she should stay thin. If she gets fat it's not good.
"Some girls have asked me whether they should get fat or stay thin. I tell them if you want to find a man, a European or a Mauritanian, stay thin, it's better for you. But some blokes still like them fat."
And while there still men who like their women big, Fatematou is on hand to fatten them up with her years of experience.
I asked her if she ever felt cruel, beating and force feeding children?
"No! It's not cruel to make girls fat!" she said.
"Me, I've seen 10-year old girls give birth. I tell you, 10 years old!
"Once they are fat and beautiful they can serve their men well, once they are fat they can be married."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/africa/3429903.stm
Published: 2004/01/26
Posted by: Fresca | December 10, 2007 3:17 PM
Man, am I ever grateful for my obliviousness (oblivion?) to innuendo and flirting. My friends actually have to TELL me when I'm getting hit on. I simply don't speak that bizarro unwritten language. If I did, I'd be a ball of nerves. More so than usual, I mean ...
Also, having worked for nearly 10 years in female-dominated book publishing, I hardly ever had to deal with sexuality in the workplace. Unless, of course, it was there and I was oblivious to it. I can only imagine how infuriating it must be to know you aren't even coming up on the radar as a colleague simply because you are a good-looking female. BLEH. I will be interested to see how this plays out as I become more entrenched in the sciences. I can't imagine it being much different/better.
When I think about changing my wardrobe, Krista, I see taking the same casual-izing path as you, but rather less willingly. Although my career future is completely and happily uncertain at this point, there is a very real possibility that I will end up as a Jeep-driving park ranger, waterfowl-counting DNR employee, or (if the heavens smile upon me) jungle-tromping Animal Planet host, searching entertainingly for the elusive Honking Bespectacled Night-Badger of Brazil. What good will my enviable arsenal of Boden skirts do me THEN, I ask you?
Posted by: Sally | December 11, 2007 11:23 AM