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Gay-bashers assault Quentin Crisp (John Hurt) in the 1980 film 'The Naked Civil Servant'. Photograph by John Soares.
Gay-bashers assault Quentin Crisp (John Hurt) in the 1980 film "The Naked Civil Servant"

Fatal Mascara

"Why can't men on Wall Street and in Washington flatter themselves with eye shadow in shades of, say, paterfamilias peach, takeover teal, or million-man mauve?" asked Katherine Stern, junior fellow of Harvard's Society of Fellows, in a recent talk at the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies. "Men fashion the world around them; women are expected to be content to fashion themselves," she answered. "But this familiar feminist critique of artifice has been half-blind. I would like to turn the cosmetics question around and ask, How has it affected men to be debarred from this art of the body?"

Surprisingly, Stern says, virtually nothing has been written about men's exclusion from beauty culture, or what that tells us about the other side of cosmetics-not their oppressiveness, but the psychic freedoms that men are being denied. Her forthcoming book, Men in Makeup, will address this scholarly lacuna. For Stern, the aesthetics of femininity and effeminacy are not only interchangeable, but unexpectedly heroic: "Persons of that type, no matter what their gender, have this adventurousness, this courageousness in relationship to self-transformation. Usually we think of femininity as weak or dependent, but there's significant risktaking involved in being feminine or effeminate."

It may be hard to find a necktied broker risking blush, gloss, and the latest eyeliner on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, but Stern identifies "the man in makeup" as a familiar figure in the Decadent literature of the fin de siècle, including that of Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, and Arthur Symons. But whether the character is a pierrot, a dandy, a vain young man, or a vain old one, Stern observes that once he undergoes feminine artifice, he quickly declines-often into a "fatal swoon." In The Portrait of Dorian Gray, the most famous death-in-makeup story, Wilde's hero lives a "nightmare of feminine body-consciousness," as Stern puts it, and dies a narcissistic suicide. The death-in-makeup narrative also appears in the twentieth century, in works ranging from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice to contemporary films such as Mascara and Blue Velvet.

"What causes the male aesthete's encounter with feminine artifice to end in death?" Stern asks. "Is it homophobia, misogyny, decadent cliché?" While these have been sufficient cause for most critics, Stern wants to determine why "something that was not dangerous or deadly for women, was dangerous and deadly for men."

Her research has unearthed centuries of anticosmetic tracts: the self-decorating impulse allegedly arises out of vanity, shame, and the will to deceive the self or others, and has long been associated with death and decay. "Behind all this is the very old idea that people decorate themselves to prostitute themselves," Stern explains. Another ancient idea is that to decorate your body is to desecrate an image created by God. For Stern, what is most intriguing about such proscriptions is that, for the most part, "Men actually live within those taboos. Women live with them as well, but they constantly break them."

Stern, whose background is in comparative literature, hopes to provide a broader definition of femininity/effeminacy and masculinity-one not limited by biological gender. "We can see femininity as that aspect of being human which has to do with going through change," she says, "and masculinity as resistance to change." The downside is that "masculinity ends up being this very narrow median on a continuum where everything extreme in any direction is feminine," Stern says. "Feminity is self-expanding, but masculinity is always policing itself. I'm suggesting that no one can ever be consistently masculine."

The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century man, with his passion for decorative black velvet face patches and rouge, or hair powders in blue, pink, and lavender, had a more capacious definition of masculinity. But despite this period of culturally-sanctioned cosmetic use by men, makeup has never lost its feminine status and become gender-neutral or masculine in any Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian culture. However, Stern claims that outside those traditions-especially in cultures where makeup has a magical value-cosmetics are considered masculine.

The makers of the recent wave of films about men in drag-from The Birdcage and To Wong Foo... to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert-are banking on this magic. "Making fun of men in drag has been going on for centuries," Stern claims. "But what's happening now is that there's actually a good feeling about men in drag. They're being used in films to create a sense of well-being in the audience."

This sea change may be due to the advent of what Stern calls the "feminine postmodern," explaining that feminine characteristics that were formerly denigrated are now accepted as universally human. For example, she asserts that "with cosmetic surgery and all the new technologies for making the body exactly what you want it to be, the culture is becoming more feminized. There's more and more pressure on men-commercially and in the media-to enter into this cosmetic cult." That can be quite a threat, she notes, yet "this comic celebration of men in drag-seeing that masculine heroes like Patrick Swayze [in To Wong Foo...] can put on a dress and look good-reassures men that they're going to be able to encounter this future." In fact, according to Stern, "The image of a man in drag is, in a way, an image of the future of masculinity."

~ Harbour Fraser Hodder
Katherine Stern may be e-mailed at kstern@fas.harvard.edu.

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