It's a nice variant of this:
I have a problem. I don't have nice eyebrows.
This problem is I hit adolescence when this was the feminine ideal:
I am not blonde. My hair is so dark I cannot even convincingly purchase blonde. I also had thick eyebrows. My mom always drew comparisons to Sela Ward or Brooke Shields, but they were passe when the girl next door poses for Playboy. So for years, I mutilated my brows with tweezing and waxing. There was one awful experiment with a tool that was akin to sandpaper. It would have been a fantastic case study for Sheila Jeffries.
The brows worked for a while. They were complimented for their sheer perfection. I think you call this "on fleek."
But then Cara Delevinge hit the scene. A girl was learning motor skills when thin was in. Ever since then, it's been we like big brows and we cannot lie.
Big brows are the signal of youth and beauty now. What would have been considered abominable during the years I trained to be an acceptable woman is now a near obsession with endless vlogger eyebrow tutorials, eyebrow makeup products, and even eyebrow transplants.
The ones who believe the dictum to "never trust someone with bad eyebrows" probably haven't become tired of being yanked around on the fashion hamster wheel where women are subject to the constantly changing whims of patriarchy, shelling out time and money to keep up, but you will.
But never mind me. I have bad brows. It's hard to tell. You are too distracted by my perfectly cut bangs that rival Zooey Deschanel to notice they did not grow back in to my teenage glory and require help from a pencil. But it really important I do not leave the house with that. Otherwise, my two graduate degrees would be completely useless and nobody would listen to me. My life must be on fleek.
I am glad I manage to squeak by. Some women not only have bad eyebrows but bad hair too. Others wear mom jeans and tapered pants. Definitely do not trust them. Some lead large agencies that perform critical missions and others made breakthroughs in medicine. A few even wrote prize-winning works of poetry or fiction while a handful drafted legislation. But they are irrelevant. Their lives are not on fleek.
Barnard College president Debora Spar wrote once about the number of hours she spent achieving beauty standards, hours that men do not spend. She write about the pressure to be a Wonder Woman. Sometimes I wonder with the time I spend flat ironing my hair everyday how many journal articles I could have written for peer-review. I was once told at a major conference that I was "too pretty" to work on a PhD. So don't take it from me.
Frankly, I am tired of "on fleek." Rarely do my dinners appear anything like my Pinterest cookbook. My desk looks less like studyspo and more like a nuclear disaster area. I am also tired of drawn on caterpillar eyebrows.
I had a professor some years back who was very attractive and svelte but wore clothes that appeared to harken from the 1990s. "Come on, Sarah," one of my classmates whispered. "You would be a knock out if you didn't wear those frocks." She was young and youthful, stunningly intelligent, but even I wondered what she would look like if she colored the silver streaks in her hair.
It is kind of funny though. Her frumpy dresses and tinseled hair did not make an impression on my life. The interviewing techniques I learned to memorialize oral histories did impact my life. Eliciting narratives from men and women so they tell their stories, narratives, thoughts, desires, fears whether it is about their medical care to facing discrimination. I still have not found a useful medium for drab jumpers. My hair is starting to develop a silver lining.
I hope you enjoy your life on fleek. But don't tune us out so quickly. One day you may even laugh at your brows. A double-chin or skin tag may appear and there is nothing you can do about it. But you will still have a lot to say.
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