I've gotten back into "mainstream" pop music over the last year, and thanks to the way the Internet works, that means I've started watching more music videos. And the ones I've really enjoyed -- "Bad Romance" and "Tightrope," of course, but also Rihanna's "Rude Boy" and even Christina Aguilera's "Not Myself Tonight" (which I enjoyed more than Alyssa did) -- have shared a femininity that's so costume-y as to be deliberately artificial.
Janelle Monae and Rihanna use their pompadours to play with androgyny, while GaGa and Christina push high-femme hyperfemininity so far that its similarity to drag becomes obvious. (GaGa, in particular, is nobody's third-wave feminist: sex may be central to the plots of her videos, but she consistently manages to look less like a sex object than an art object. I wish she hadn't felt the need to lose her curves to turn her body into a high-fashion mannequin, but still.) But all of them arrive at the same point: an image that's perfectly constructed, but still very obviously a construct. In a post-GaGa age it's easy to take this for granted, but if you click on the link above to Alyssa's Christina Aguilera post you'll see just how different it was in the mid-Aughts -- music videos weren't any more real, but the costumes looked more like outfits than they do today.
As a fan of queer theory and a sucker for high femme, I'm really glad that artificial femininity is back, and is being done in a way that makes femininity itself seem sort of artsy and unreal. But not only is this fun and subversive, it's actually radical.
Chloe Angyal wrote a really stellar post earlier this spring about the expectations placed on women in everyday life to look beautiful without looking like they're trying. Obviously, the "cult of effortless beauty" is a ridiculous myth for those women who can manage to pull it off after hours of practice. Furthermore, though, the emphasis on what a woman "naturally" looks like excludes whole groups of women who can't squeeze their way into contemporary American standards of beauty by primping in front of a mirror: the less women are "allowed" to do to manipulate their appearances, the fewer women are able to end up looking "attractive," much less the way they ought to look. (To look at it another way: the corset was a monstrous invention, but the insistence that today's women have toned, fit, tan, able bodies in the absence of shapewear is a bit tyrannical in its own right.)
No one could take a look at the women in these videos and think that they'd just rolled out of bed looking like that. They're showing that not only is femininity chosen in general, but that they've chosen their particular takes on femininity -- and that their images are about more than their bodies. I won't pretend that their range of options isn't limited, and that we shouldn't be working to expand the boundaries of how women can present themselves. And I won't pretend that this isn't easier for them as lithe, able-bodied women who happen to conform to our society's beauty standards no matter what they do -- though Beth Ditto, for example, also uses the way she dresses to retain control over how her body is perceived.
Obviously musical artists are touchstones here, and I don't think that there's anything you could borrow from GaGa's closet for everyday wear. But the cult of natural beauty has shut out a lot of relatively mundane ways to look a bit more artificial or theatrical -- I haven't seen many younger women wearing bright lipstick, to cite just one example, and I wonder if suspenders will ever make a comeback. To be too-cutely counterintuitive about it, this might be one regard in which women should stop focusing on looking "natural" (since "natural" so rarely actually means natural) and take a very figurative cue from the ladies in the music videos.
