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A hairdresser asked me in front of my daughter if I planned to cover the grey that is slowly taking over my dark hair. And lest you think four-year-old girls are not attune to the messages we send women about aging, my daughter announced as I started the car, "I think the grey in your hair is beautiful because it sparkles. Don't change it, Mommy." How long do you think it will take until she's singing a different tune?
On Friday, the Huffington Post published photos of Anna Wintour, style icon and editor of Vogue, in a series of close-up shots that have become the Internet's equivalent of W.E. Hill's optical illusion of the beautiful woman/hag.
Some bloggers admonished the Huffington Post for publishing what they saw as a post mocking Anna Wintour, pointing out her wrinkles with the extreme close-ups. Mamapop wrote,
It's hateful. Not least because it suggests that there is something mock-worthy, something ick, about the markers of age. About the crows feet and laugh lines and sagging arms. About the physical changes that every woman - every human - goes through, unless they cut and freeze their faces and bodies into submission. In pointing a mocking finger at the aging face and body of Anna Wintour - regardless of whether anyone believes that she 'deserves' it for being unpleasant or for being a purveyor of artificial standards of beauty via Vogue - HuffPo points a mocking finger at the aging faces and bodies of all women. And that's hateful.
After accusing Huffington Post of being offensive, Jezebel followed suit by focusing on age with their line: "Arianna Huffington, no spring chicken herself, should know better than to perpetrate girl on girl crime against another alpha female." Gawker, after admonishing Huffington Post for this "bizarre swipe" and "cheap shot" insults Wintour with "It seems Vogue has lots of beauty secrets to share, but none that can turn Wintour's face and arms into the tight, baby-smooth softness that her waif-y models possess (No wonder she's never been on the cover!)."
Bloggers, while chiding Huffington Post for what they saw as an anti-feminist post, stated that she looks great and exudes self-confidence, promising that they are not falling victim to Huffington Post's assumed message.
But was mocking Anna Wintour their message?
The Huffington Post's response to the uproar was to say that the post was meant to be a visual reminder of the message behind Arianna Huffington's recent book, On Becoming Fearless. The New York Observer reports a quote from Roy Sekoff, the site's editor:
In On Becoming Fearless, Arianna does indeed talk about aging and body image, and about beauty emanating from within. I don't think this post is inconsistent with any of that. I guess it's all in how you look at it. For me, I look at the Wintour pictures and think she looks great and exudes the kind of self-confidence and self-assurance that Arianna called 'the ultimate turn-on.'
In other words, if you jumped to seeing the hag, you were missing the point that you were supposed to be seeing the beautiful woman, and this optical illusion is more a commentary on the reader's preconceived ideas of what they thought they'd see than what was actually there.
Well played, Huffington Post, well played.
More problematic for me is not the original post's intention, but how we need to scramble to point out that aging is beautiful. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it makes sense that we would not all agree what is ascetically pleasing and what is repulsive. Personally, I'm fine with one person finding wrinkles unattractive and opting to treat them with Botox as long as they are fine with my crush on Helen Mirren (what can I say, aren't we all looking for a version of ourselves? And who else to admire but another grey-haired beauty?). The problem comes when we try to define beauty or defend beauty or, in the case of Huffington Post, use flat visuals to try to convey what is only accessible through experience with a personality.
If you clicked over to see some hot nude photos of saucy women...well...I'm sorry. I meant naked in the Jamie Oliver sense of the word: pure, unfussy, simplicity. Women being women. Women accepting themselves as women and not leaving their
