Anonymous asked: I totally look up to you, Lena. I've followed your blog for really long time and let me tell you that even though I don't know you personally, I really admire and take a lot from you experiences. You are a strong-ass womyn for doing all that you do.
I've always had this question though. I know that you sometimes do Anatomy of an Outfit and stuff like that. How do you explain your own inclination towards what can be labeled as.. materialism? How do you incorporate your own attraction towards hair salons, brand name clothing, etc with your feminist views on beauty and capitalistic consumption?
Great question, and not one that I necessarily have an answer to. I’ve actually wanted to address this issue for a while. Perhaps I haven’t because there’s not really a pretty way to say this: I’m not a model feminist and probably won’t ever be in this regard.
Anonymous is referencing the Anatomy of an Outfit series in which I break down what I’m wearing any given day. I first started doing this wayyy back in the Sex and the Ivy days, and I still do it, despite railing against beauty ideals and privilege and capitalism. There are attachments I have to getting a nice haircut, wearing cute clothes, putting on makeup, etc. which will probably never go away completely. Perhaps these things will become less important over time, but the truth is that I do like looking a certain way and cultivating a personal style (whatever that means) and I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that in itself.
What is wrong is the importance placed on being “beautiful”, which is often a mainstream standard that most people can’t or don’t want to meet. And the consequences of not conforming can be really nasty and are never deserved. When I was 20 pounds heavier, for example, I would not hear the end of it, because 130 pounds is apparently too “fat” for a respectable sex blogger. So instead of engaging with my arguments, commenters would derail discussions by informing me that my (non-existent) cat is more attractive than me. These comments bothered me at one point in time, but I learned to not take them personally. They were just a reflection of people’s unrealistic beauty standards and particularly misogynistic expectation of thinness. Through trial-by-fire, I realized that it’s not impossible to teach yourself to care less about how you look, to unlearn all those things we are taught about self-worth and appearance, and to still try to look good without beating yourself up when you don’t.
Recently, I found this old but still relevant blog post, where I documented my beauty regimen in 2007 versus my beauty regimen in January 2009. A lot has changed since then, and even more has changed in the past year. About 90 percent of my closet now comes from a consignment store. I no longer wear make-up on a daily basis and only bother the three or four times I go out every month. I just went three weeks without shaving my legs and wore skirts on all the warm days. These are really small changes and incremental in the grand scheme of things, but they’re highly significant to me, since these changed habits signal that I’m less self-conscious than I used to be.
I don’t have a particular attachment to “Anatomy of an Outfit”, but I was inspired to continue the series on The Chicktionary after I started reading Jessica Schroeder’s blog What I Wore (which has become wildly famous since). Part of the reason why I really like Schroeder’s site is because nothing she puts together is particularly expensive, and she relies on a lot of the same secondhand bargain-hunting that I do to stock my closet. It’s not so much about worshipping at the altar of Dior than it is about making do with what you have. As time has gone on, I’ve used “Anatomy of an Outfit” to document some of my more ridiculous get-ups, including duct-tape pasties (NSFW) and a last-minute Halloween costume as a BDSM submissive. But who am I fooling? I can try to be as fashionably transgressive as possible, but ultimately, when I’m prancing about in size-2 designer clothes — which, even if thrifted, are not available en masse —, I shouldn’t be surprised if people call me out on the hypocrisy.
I’m open to the possibility of not doing these kinds of posts anymore, since I’ve begun to realize that there’s a kind of responsibility when writing for a large audience that I didn’t used to feel when I was blogging for my friends and peers. Let me know in the comments what you guys think, and I will definitely consider your input when doing future posts.
More burning questions? Ask them here.
