As a young girl, probably in elementary school, I learned a short song that goes (according my memory) as follows:
Beauty is in the eye
Of the beholder.
If you listen with your heart,
Everything is song.
It’s been on my mind as I have been contemplating two recent visual claims on my attention. The first you are probably familiar with, namely, Dylan Mulvaney’s appearance at the 2023 Grammy Awards with a look clearly paying homage to his idol, Audrey Hepburn. The second — Chiara Ferragni — comes from the annual Festival di Sanremo, a celebration of Italian music that is now in its 73rd year. This five-day spectacle is centered around a song competition — all songs entered are newly written and debut at the festival — but manages to encompass so much more. In addition to the regular celebrations of Italian popular music from decades past, there are monologues from the guests hosts and comedy skits. This year, Roberto Benigni gave a beautiful speech to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Italian Constitution — which is a mere two years older than the Festival.
While both of these televised events focus on music, neither Dylan or Chiara appeared as a performer. Dylan, though he walked the red carpet, was a mere attendee; Chiara appeared as the first evening’s co-host (and will, apparently, reappear tomorrow for the finale). While Dylan had a previous career as a stage actor, both he and Chiara now make a living as influencers, and thus owe their fame (and fortunes) to social media. They are thus in the business of being looked at, and it is this commodified need for specifically visual attention that leads me to believe that even a skillful critique — an attempt at which follows — is somehow inadequate to defend against the profound sense of cringe these appearances provoke. I do not think I have ever felt as strong a sense of “I give up” as I have while contemplating these two visual moments.
Feminism as expressive individualism
Chiara Ferragni is wearing a dress designed by Dior. As she was careful to explain when she emerged in this fashion travesty, she is not naked; the dress is not transparent but rather consists of an image of her body. She believes — sincerely — that this display is a form of liberation:
We women are used to making ourselves small in front of tough men. If you don’t show off your body, you’re a nun, if you show it off too much, you’re a whore. Being a woman isn’t a limitation — say that to your friends and fight together for change.
The only way that one might considering standing at a lectern effectively naked while giving a speech — never mind one touching on the classic Madonna/whore dichotomy — an example of the unlimited possibilities of women is when the incentives are in place to monetize the disappearance of shame. And because Ferragni’s entire career depends on being noticed and looked at, she is ideally positioned to equate provocation with liberation and, more broadly, feminism itself with individual self-actualization.
Indeed, it turns out that this no-shame look is directly inspired by the most original of shames, the one provoked when Eve — and Adam — disobeyed their Creator and ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge. But the context could not be more different: the original man and woman became self-conscious as a result of their disobedience, a sort of shame that has nothing to do with the presence of an audience — which is of course the sole context that Ferragni understands. Even when she talks to her (younger) self, she does it in public. And even that revelation isn’t sufficient; she must appear naked as she does it. The apple is no longer offered by a fallen angel; the enemy is no longer evil; the consequence is no longer shame. Instead, the apple is the prize of she who denies all evil and overcomes all shame. The apple is the sign of self-actualization.
In this paradigm, it is entirely possible to believe that a woman actually is merely a form — an image, really — of self-actualization. And so it poses no problem for any genderless human (as Illich would say) to embrace this form, and thus you see Dylan Mulvaney — formerly a gay man — embracing his “true self” as an iconic, glamorous woman.
There is something striking about this side-by-side view; whereas on his own, one might admire the extent to which Dylan “passes” for a woman, the contrast between his overall look and that of Audrey Hepburn is glaring, even shocking. What is appealing, or beautiful, about Audrey Hepburn, is the way in which the curation of her look complements what pre-exists it. One might — indeed I suspect one used to — call this “natural beauty,” a concept that has lost all meaning in a media environment where digital imagery is practically synonymous with filters and other advanced manipulations. When I look at Dylan-as-Audrey, yes, I see a man, but more importantly for the purposes of this specific critique, I see only curation, curation that has abandoned any concept of complementarity to something that exists before or that lies underneath. And yet now that Dylan “identifies” as a woman, pure curation becomes the definition of authenticity — authenticity being, irony of ironies, exactly what the pre-“days of girlhood” Dylan claimed was the secret of his success.
Influencer Feminism
The problem with authenticity, as it relates to feminism, is that it only knows how to look inward. Even the demand of men like Dylan who wish to be “accepted” as women — a demand often presented by “trans allies” as an issue that must be centered to create an “inclusive” feminism — is a demand completely centered on the internal experience of a tiny number of men. These men are motivated in a way and to a degree that many women are not able to appreciate, and thus it is perhaps understandable how a movement that has often suffered from a paralyzing breadth of scope (the liberation of women, in toto) has thrilled to both the enthusiasm and specificity of the demands of a few men. It seems immanently doable and eminently just. And yet this fight for the right for a man to be authentic is not actual feminism.
Much in the way that reality television gained popularity with television networks because it was cheaper to exploit spontaneous (or contrived) conflicts between willing participants than it was to pay writers to invent conflicts between characters (and actors to portray them), the career of influencer emerged as a way for marketers to exploit a pre-existing audience in order to sell their products. In addition to the financial and demographic advantages associated with online advertising, sponsorship has a further benefit created by the sense of intimacy that often exists between content creators and their “followers”. This “imaginary” — in the literal sense, as it is based on the sharing of images — closeness is an incredibly powerful way to spread ideas, thus making it an obvious way to also sell products. However, at a certain point, the advertiser is no longer really seeking the market of the chosen sponsor as much as they are rebranding themselves in the image of the sponsor. This is, in my opinion, the only explanation for a product used only by women — Tampax — engaging Dylan Mulvaney as a spokesman. Whether the decision-makers behind that campaign anticipated any backlash (or simply didn’t care) would be interesting to know, but either way, the decision strikes me as a particularly salient example of the difference between typical marketing and the inward-looking tendencies of an influencer-inspired campaign.
Selvaggia Lucarelli, a journalist and podcaster, levels essentially the same critique — that of self-involvement — against Chiara Ferragni’s monologue.
When they told me — long before she announced it — that Chiara Ferragni was going to write her monologue herself (meaning with her manager, which amounts to the same thing), I had the confirmation of what I’d always thought about her: she has an emotional, professional and cultural horizon that goes no further than her Gucci slippers. Not knowing anything about the world, not having interests in or curiosity about anything other than herself and the self-image that reaches the public, she is neither modest enough nor aware enough to understand her limitations and the room for improvement. Ferragni thinks she doesn’t need anyone outside of her magic circle, a typical attitude of anyone who is looking to preserve her status by surrounding herself by worshipers and relatives, and keeping at arm’s length anyone who tries to tell her “maybe you could work on this”. A guy-manager-stylist-ghostwriter-whatever wrote the monologue for her, her most trusted friends are her sisters and mother, her media shield is the friendly press — who are at this point a bevy of influencers at her service in exchange for handouts.
Ferragni mistakes exposure for liberation; indeed, she equates exposure with liberation, given that it is self-referential image production that has given her fame and fortune. But she is too shallow and too ignorant to realize that, despite her popularity and material success, there are people who cannot be distracted by — and thus fooled by — images, however provocative.
Between her misunderstanding of simple questions and a vocabulary worse than a contestant on Temptation Island, the sensation was that of seeing the king — or rather, the queen — naked for the first time. So much so that her nakedness on the stage didn’t shock anyone. The Chiara with no clothes was the one replying to journalists [at the press conference that morning], not the one in an unusually ugly Dior dress.
This is the problem with “digital feminists” (Lucarelli’s expression): they replace substance with surface — much in the way that platitudes and (as the phrase goes) thought-terminating clichés now pass for activism, including “trans women are women” and “be kind”.
Feminism with our eyes shut
Beauty is a strange thing; it exists in unlimited varieties and in unfair distributions; it is rigorously standardized and commodified and yet remains, in the wild, as idiosyncratic as any eye of a beholder finds it. For a woman who makes a living based on the consumption of her image, however, it becomes a currency, one subject to the cruel fluctuations of a market where there are always fresher, younger faces.
It is not entirely false that the social media reaction to Madonna’s new look represent “ageism and misogyny,” as the star said, but the negativity about a woman who many fans now find not just ugly but unrecognizable is not the common, generalized ageism and misogyny that nearly all women have (or will eventually have) experienced to one degree or another. Madonna is in the purely curated class, and while she is of course “free” to do whatever she wants to and with her image, it only follows that the consumers of that image — the public — are free to reject it. Many people in Hollywood have been mislead, one way or another, down a path of unfortunate surgical interventions; in some ways, Madonna herself — as someone who has consistently cultivated a brand by pushing the limits of mainstream acceptability — seems sadly the exact sort of person who would fall victim to this contemporary movement that equates extreme intervention with authenticity.
I happen to find this imaginary rendering of the Madonna-road-not-taken quite beautiful, mostly because I can recognize the star who was still young when I was little. (And since I didn’t watch the Grammys, when I first saw that picture making the rounds on Twitter, I had zero idea who it was.) Despite the above image being fiction, there is a continuity there that Madonna’s actual face sadly lacks. For it is continuity that signals that Madonna is more than whatever latest look she takes on; she is a real woman — if perhaps more beautiful, and certainly more famous — just like the rest of us. To argue, as Teak does, that since she is going to get shade thrown at her either way, she might as well just “get the work done” is to presume that Madonna herself somehow views this work as intrinsic to her own authenticity, which seems to me a relatively new view. Indeed, I can remember the mainstream criticisms of the plastic surgery that Michael Jackson underwent on the basis that he was erasing or effacing his true self (with the added racial element that he was becoming ‘whiter’).
It seems to me that the only way to combat this notion that curation is authenticity, or that any cultivated image must be accepted — under penalty of social death — as a kind of sacred truth is to discover a path of resistance to the images themselves. While I care deeply about the dangers posed by accepting men as women (both in law and society), and will fight that battle where it must be fought, I realize that I am in fact essentially entirely free to never see another image of Dylan Mulvaney (or Madonna) again. A lot has been made of the data revealing how damaging image-based social media are for young people, especially girls. The more I think about it, the more I think we are all in similar straits, and we should act accordingly. If a teenager can opt out of Instagram and TikTok, get a flip phone, and start a club for modern-day “Luddites” (a bit of an unfortunate name, as the Luddites weren’t really against technology per se, but that’s another story), then all of us can make an effort to avert our eyes in order to free our minds — even if only a little bit — from the madness.
One way to combat the bombardment of curation is to listen to regular women telling regular stories. Here’s a 20-minute summary of the epic Let Women Speak event in Glasgow from last weekend. The more we listen to one another — and come together in the real world — the more beauty we will find in each other and in the world.