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Emily Alford

Fantasy Images and the Beauty Inside: Some Musings on an August Afternoon

By Emily Alford

Female, male, or someplace in between, everybody but everybody in the western world is bombarded by images of female allure. Much of the imagery is commercial. Cute little girls, fresh ingenues, sexy vamps, cool professional women, warm mother figures, elegant matrons: these sell clothes for both sexes, as well as music, films, cars, houses, magazines, cosmetics, alcohol, cigarettes, jewelry, and the sort of dreams that a person wishes money really could buy.

That includes selling womanly dreams of being as lovely as she who is in the picture, as effortlessly pretty as the model who in fact is carefully prepped, dressed, made up, taped, posed, and lit. Such imagery can appeal to male lust, even if woman-oriented products are on sale. Just pick up a Vicky’s Secret Catalog. But any sensible woman understands that beauty-industry imagery and the lives most people live most of the time do not always intersect. She realizes that bringing about such an intersection can take as much effort as prepping a model and that costume and cosmetics are not what make her herself. That is true whether the woman is born, or surgeon-and-hormone made, or part-time.

Recently, though, I’ve seen a beauty-industry ad that comes close to speaking the truth. I noticed it in Vanity Fair, which I read sometimes, but it probably has run elsewhere. It’s for the lingerie line also called Vanity Fair and it plays with the conventions of beauty advertising in some interesting ways.

The photos in the two-page, front-of-the-book, prestige spread are conventional enough. Against a black background, a woman poses in the bra and panties set the ad is intended to sell. One image has her seated on a chaise lounge, with sumptuously folded silk half surrounding her. Her arms are open, as if to embrace. Her legs, however, are curled to the side, knee to knee, with one ankle held behind the other. She looks to the side as well. The other photo has the same model head-and-shoulders, facing the camera directly, with a small smile playing on her closed mouth. Despite the intimacy of her costume, she shows no sexual availability in either pose. This is not the sort of lingerie ad that is intended to provoke a desirous male gaze.

The model is interesting as well. Her body is elegant, but she is well past her youth. In the head-and-shoulders close-up we see that she has lines at the edges of her eyes, and around her mouth. She is elegantly made-up but without any pretense that youth can be recovered from a bottle. Her cosmetics simply bring out the face behind which this woman has lived, probably for as long as the fifty-four years I have lived behind mine. Interesting, too, is the accompanying text: "There comes a time in life when finally (how long has it taken?) you are simply true to yourself. Like breathing, you instinctively follow your truest impulse . . . and you trust that truth inside and it shows in the beauty that you, finally, own. At last, you’re comfortable."

The obvious parallel is with being transgender all one’s remembered life and, at last, being entirely comfortable with it. Just on that count, and in thanks, I’m going to buy myself something from Vanity Fair. But it strikes me that the ad says more. I certainly picked up overtones of what my own father used to say decades ago, when I was a very troubled trying-to-be-a-boy: "To thine own self be true." (Did he or my mother have any inking why I had that eczema and hated the school playground? I’ll never know.) I coped then by playing the role of "brain." Now I'm a scholar and I picked up overtones not only of my father but of the nineteenth-century American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson. I recall Emerson writing somewhere that indeed the task is to be true, to show oneself somehow for whatever one is, whether the showing be discrete or overt. I don’t have a complete Emerson handy, and couldn’t find what I wanted in the few essays of his on my shelves. But I did find him writing "on Beauty," and saying there that "Veracity, first of all, and forever. Rien de beau que le vrai [nothing is beautiful that is not true]" which is close enough to what I remembered, and, perhaps to Vanity Fair’s ad.

Next to that volume sat a complete Walt Whitman and I started leafing through it. (Yes, I meant that pun.) In his great "Song of Myself" I found him writing "I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, and I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man," but I knew that line was there and I was looking for it. What seemed more in line with the truth that Vanity Fair’s adwriter proclaimed was Whitman's large project. Many poets before him had tried to capture and express the unique, unprecedented truth about America. Almost invariably, they failed, falling into the trap of imitating their European forerunners in subject matter and style alike. Whitman understood that his world was different from any that had gone before, and that he needed a new poetic style to do that world justice. Only when he found that style could he express the truth inside, sing of all the selves he was, and show to the world the beauty that he, finally, owned.

It isn’t often that a piece of advertising copy produces a train of thought. An ad’s job, after all, is to induce a signature on a credit card form. Perhaps this particular lingerie ad was written by a graduate in American lit who was subtly showing off.. No problem if so: classical composers and great bluesmen get ripped off for sales purposes too. But the ad did express a truth that my father, Emerson, and Whitman all perceived, and that every transgender person ought to feel in the bones. Only if we trust the truth inside can we own our beauty and, at last be comfortable

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