Eyebrows and identity with Emer O’Toole’s Girls Will Be Girls
Amy Fox reviews Emer O’Toole’s brilliant new book Girls Will Be Girls, before getting distracted by her own eyebrows. Again.
This year, I am obsessed with eyebrows. I have spent two months growing mine out and I have literally been kept up at night thinking about them. The ideal shape, the perfect arch, the right thickness. Staring, mesmerised, at this gif of Aria from Pretty Little Liars.
But I’ll come back to that in a minute.
In 2012, Emer O’Toole wrote for the Vagenda about why she had stopped shaving, and the reaction she received. It went viral. Then she went on This Morning with salon owner Michelle Devine and spoke about the same subject. It went viral.
Body hair, Emer argues, is something that women are trained to remove from a young age. We don’t see it on other women in the media, jokes are made at its expense, and men find it disgusting. So of course girls want to get rid of it. Of course that is happening sooner and in more extreme ways all of the time, and of course that can be really damaging.
And so she stopped getting rid of it. In doing so, she started a conversation about body hair, and she subtly changed the way that thousands of people thought about it. Two years on, and the guardian is now calling dyed underarm hair “2015’s most subversive trend”, something which I’m sure makes Emer very happy.
What I love most about this story is the power for change — publicly doing something differently and not being ashamed of it made people rethink an entire beauty regime.
In Emer O’Toole’s brilliant debut, Girls Will Be Girls, (published by Orion, on sale today!) she explains why.
As a society, we perform and construct our genders every day. Not consciously — we don’t wake up a blank slate each morning and then choose who we are going to be that day; clearly identity goes much deeper than that.
But it’s not necessarily something we’re born with either. All babies in nappies look pretty gender neutral — you can’t instantly tell if they are a boy or a girl. But if they have a bow in their hair, or a blue Thomas the Tank Engine jumper, you’re more likely to make a snap judgement about the gender they have been assigned. In baby world, a bow or a steam engine isn’t just a fashion choice on behalf of the parents, it’s a symbol which means girl or boy. We all recognise these symbols because we have encountered them many times before.
The theory of performativity argues that this is how our identity works. It is something created every day by our actions, informed by the society around us, constantly being reinforced but also open to reinterpretation.
There is nowhere this is clearer than the way we present our bodies to the world, and no binary quite so obvious as gender. Women wear make up and they are allowed to wear dresses and their hair is often longer. Men do not wear make up and they are not allowed to wear dresses and their hair is often shorter. Why? Because those are the rules. That is how we express our gender identity to the world. RuPaul says it best: “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.”
But what if we changed the rules? What if we stopped shaving because we no longer felt like we had to? What if shaving instead became something that certain people chose to do just because they felt like it, regardless of their gender identity?
Girls Will Be Girls isn’t just about armpits. It’s about all the different ways in which society informs ideas about our gender — through our speech, our clothes, the way we have sex, our beauty regimes — and how those things are often damaging. But when we play with those ideas, and subtly start to change the rules, the world becomes infinitely more exciting.
What I love most about Emer’s writing is that she is not only able to explain complex ideas about feminist theory in a way that is engaging and relatable (I particularly enjoy her teenage self going back in time to argue with Aristotle), but it is also really funny. When she talks about gender and her experiments with it, you often find yourself laughing along with her. If you love reading feminism which is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking, this book is the obvious next step up from Caitlin Moran. Get your hands on a copy.
Anyway. Back to the eyebrows. If you’ve been paying attention to women’s beauty at all for the last two years, you’ll have noticed that eyebrows have become A Big Deal. I love how strong and dramatic they can make a face look, and I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to get around to sorting mine out.
Shaping our brows is another way of performing our identity. It is a decision we’ve made about how we will present our faces to the world, and it can make you feel confident and strong. But there’s no denying that — at the moment — it is also a way of signalling femininity. And because “good eyebrows” are so hot right now, they also have the power to make women who don’t have them feel bad about themselves.
When I was explaining my eyebrow journey to my friend Ollie the other week, he had no idea what I was talking about. I tried to explain what an arch was. I told him that my naturally thick eyebrows have the potential to look incredible, but I spent so long plucking them thin that I fear I have done permanent damage. I said that I have been filling them in as best I can while I wait for them to grow out, but they are starting to look a bit scary.
He had no idea what I was talking about.
It wasn’t until his girlfriend Tilly got out her eye palette and filled in his own brows for him that he was able to look in a mirror and really understand what we were saying. It’s not that surprising; most men have never had to think about the shape of their eyebrows before because it’s a complete non-issue.
But why should it be?
Personally, I reckon Ollie looked great with his brows filled in. That’s the thing about make up: it works. So why shouldn’t men wear it too if they feel like it? And why does wearing make up mean I can’t also wear a tux, or that I have to keep my legs shaved? And why do any of those things mean that people can make assumptions about my personality or my sexuality?
The way we think about and perform our gender is so important. Of course we don’t have to suddenly change our behaviour and burn all of our make up. We just have to be aware of how the way we perform ourselves affects our relationships with each other, with friends and partners, with ourselves — and we have to have fun with it at the same time.
And I honestly think the world would be a better place if everyone started reading a copy of Girls Will Be Girls right now.
Originally published at abstractmag.com on February 26, 2015.
