IT’S easy to dismiss lipstick, mascara and powder as trivial things. They’re just face paint. They’re fake, they’re false, they’re phoney, and reading my favourite beauty columnist every Saturday means wading through idiots in the comments section who say things like: “How is this important?”
Yes, make-up is left open to ridicule by the daft Instagram generation who streak their faces with highlighter, dab some smudges under the jaw and cheekbone to create “contour”, and then push their glossy lips out into a pout.
But while they may look silly, to other people make-up has nothing to do with posing or pouting. When you’re coming out of a depression, or are back on your trembling feet after a week of the flu, you can nudge your recovery along by dabbing a bit of strawberry balm on your chapped lips, adding a flush of colour to your drained face, and removing the shadows from your weary eyes.
Instantly, you feel better, and you’ll feel better still if you can get out of that sweaty Primark nightgown, peel off your boyfriend’s cycling socks, and put on some proper clothes.
After a period of illness, whether mental or physical, wearing make-up and some nice togs proves to the world, but more importantly, to yourself, that you’re getting stronger. It’s nothing to do with looking girly or, God forbid, being appealing to men. It’s the weak, haggard part of you finally saying enough’s enough, let’s sort ourselves out!
I am reclaiming colours and my favourite dress and that weird jacket with the gold fringes. I’m putting on some bold blue eyeshadow. I’m rebelling against my weakness by wearing my hair puffed up and bundling it all on my head with a leopard-print scarf.
No wonder, then, that women’s clothes and cosmetics are often used against them. That skirt’s too short. That hair’s too much.
The make-up is slutty. Tone it down. Be meek. Be pale.
Be anonymous.
Last month, the BBC reported that, with the retreat of Daesh from the Iraqi city of Mosul, life is slowly being restored, and one of the main symbols of recovery is the re-opening of shops which sold cosmetics and colourful dresses. Joyless feminists and other prim, judgemental sorts might scowl, but a dress and some lipstick can mean freedom and choice, not tarting yourself up for a bloke.
Margaret Atwood knew this, and so, in her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (C4, Sunday) women are stripped of their identities. Every woman is slotted into a class, and must wear the strict, plain uniform of her group.
Anything that helped make a woman individual, whether it was a name, a hairstyle, her own bank account, a favourite pair of jeans or a signature lipstick shade, is gone. Now, they walk with heads bowed, looking exactly like one another, and reciting religious greetings.
This new series was originally shown only in America, but people on this side of the pond were yelling for it, so Channel 4 stepped in.
Now we can watch it each Sunday and how lucky we are!
It’s simply one of the best, most shocking, things I’ve ever seen on TV. Handmaids are young, fertile women, but the ability to bear children is a curse, not a blessing. They are living in a future America, now called Gilead, which has been taken over by violent, religious extremists. Gilead is constantly at war, and some unnamed disaster has occurred, spilling poisons and toxins into the land.
This means most women are now infertile, and those who do manage to have a baby often find he or she is deformed (in the parlance of the book, such babies are called “shredders”).
So the government has gathered together all fertile, unmarried women, cloaked them in long red dresses, hidden their faces and hair behind puritan white caps, and put them through a severe re-education at The Red Centre.
If you don’t sit up straight and pay attention, Aunt Lydia will buzz you with a cattle prod. One rebellious student is dragged away to have her eye plucked out as punishment.
On leaving the centre, the women are assigned to wealthy, powerful families who cannot produce their own children. In a horrible ritual known as The Ceremony, the Handmaid is raped once a month by her “Commander”
in the hope of producing viable children for the regime. Through a series of flashbacks we see how this horror occurred. It happened slowly, with the government gradually introducing repressive laws in the name of combating terrorism. Then they cancelled women’s bank accounts, made it illegal for them to work, and forbade them fleeing the country. Such gargantuan horrors occur in baby steps.
Banning women from jobs and society calls to mind the early repression of Jewish people in Nazi Germany, and the forced rapes for reproductive purposes is similar to the plight of the Yazidi women.
Of course, Twitter is mainly concerned about linking this to Trump, even though American women are wonderfully free and privileged. If we cut through the Trump hysteria, we might see this frightening story for what it is: a warning to everyone.
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WHILE we are on the subject of Trump, he might have ruined something else.
Not the climate, global security, or America’s reputation in this instance – no, he might have ruined House of Cards (Netflix).
The new series began this week, and everyone’s been wondering how this drama about an evil, scheming president could possibly outdo reality.
I think they’ve tried too hard.
The first episode was shrill and sometimes silly.
The sight of the president staring down at a captured terrorist as the prisoner paces his cage like a mad tiger and then headbutts the glass, hissing and spitting at Frank, was just daft.
It was Frank played as a lurid pantomime baddy. Bigly!
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