Holy Streep!

I love your blog post and of course I adore both you and Meryl and can think of few other pairs of humans with whom I’d enjoy a spa, Pip. But, and as you asked for comments and as I have been thinking a bit lately about ye olde “Body Image” vis-à-vis glossy magazines and the like, I am moved to question the premise that the appearance of La Streep on the cover of Vogue is, as you suggest, good for the gender.

First, and most obviously, Streep is gifted of such elegant DNA as to make the rest of us feel like amoebae by contrast. Yes, she is in her sixties but she looks, for all the world, like a 40-year-old who has just been attended by the planet’s best stylists. I do not, in any way, resent her great beauty. I, as it happens, have an almost natural inclination to slaver at pictures of gorgeous women and I do not think that this act, in itself (what some people might call “objectification”) is in any way criminal or questionable. But, if we take it as read that the reproduction of impossible standards of female beauty is a bad thing, then, isn’t this a bad thing, too? To wit, it’s okay to be 62 but only if you look considerably younger and slighter. I’m sure there are many 62-year-olds ready to tear her a new one for daring to look so improbably good.

Second, I just don’t know if magazines can really deliver the sort of escape for which we ladies seem to hunger. On the one hand, we rail against the existence of a system that now mass produces a Princess and the Pea ideal. On the other, we want the system to work for us and deliver, as proposed by Brittany Gibbons in her recent and very popular TED talk, “real” women.

There’s a logical flaw for me in this argument. It goes something like: mass visual culture produces pictures of women who don’t look like me. It should produce pictures of women that look like me and then everything would be better.

So, say it did mass-produce women with Gibbons’ silhouette with a force sustained and persuasive enough to make her body shape more recognisable, what then? What have we achieved? My body shape has not been represented. The many different bodies of east Asia have not been represented. The bodies of disabled women have not been represented. The bodies of women who have had messy c-sections or crash diets or ill-advised tattoos or time in the Marine Corps have not been represented. And so, we’ve just ended up, thanks to the nature of mass reproduction, with another ideal. And why is Gibbons’ body more acceptable than, say, Miranda Kerr’s as a mass ideal? I guess the answer would come, “Because she is more real.” I doubt that I’m the only woman who would find it as challenging to attain Gibbons’ body as I would to simulate Kerr’s.

Why do we applaud some women for their participation in the production of images at all? Personally, I don’t give a toss. If someone wants to show themselves in a bathing suit or a couture gown for financial or social gain, that’s entirely okay with me. Go etc. But I can’t get worked up about it as I don’t see it as a move that does anything beyond affirming the primacy of a mass culture which, in the end, is the enemy. And not the bodies of women within it.

When I was a really young feminist, we never expected that it would be magazine covers that would deliver us from oppression and into a new era of genuine equality. We never thought that being looked at (and that is all anyone can do with a photograph; please spare me the “inner beauty” rave when it comes to mass produced, two-dimensional images) was our route to salvation; our route from a world in which the look of a woman was an indication of her moral register.

It doesn’t matter what shape the ideal takes; slight, stout or “real” (whatever that is) it is still an ideal. The fact that there is an ideal, or a handful of ideals, at all is the problem. And, taking off your clothes for TV in Times Square of being 62 (looking 40) on the cover of Vogue is nothing more than the promulgation of a new ideal for mass culture. Maybe what we should be doing, if we are genuinely troubled by this mechanism that delivers us ideals, is stop buying these magazines altogether. Or, at least, buying into the myth that these prisons can offer us freedom. Sure, we can renovate ‘em. What we really need, though, is to tear em down.