Confession Time: I Wear Make-up For a Man, You Guys
It’s time I told you all the truth. I wear make-up. I know it’s OK to wear make-up, as long as you wear it for yourself, but I’ve been breaking that rule for a long time now. You see, there’s this guy …
Before we even started dating, I was wearing make-up for Micah. Yeah, it’s that bad. Before I even realized that I like liked him, I was wearing make-up for Micah. I was pretty attracted to him, to say the least. And I kind of wanted him to be attracted to me (he was, by the way — with or without the make-up). These things happen.
Lest you think that in the entire 3 years that we knew each other before getting married, he never saw me not looking like Audrey Hepburn walking onto the runway in that scene from Funny Face —
— let me hasten to assure you that, because of the fact that we ran in multiple, overlapping social circles including work and church, he had had ample opportunity to see me looking like a complete mess before making the plunge into the depths of everlasting matrimony. Take, for instance, our weekly Ultimate Frisbee meets, where, thanks to my Finnish heritage, I usually looked like my head had been replaced by a large tomato with hair. It never seemed to bother him.
By the time we started dating, I knew him well enough to be sure that even though I knew he thought I was cute, that was not the only thing that attracted him to me. Even though I knew that I didn’t “need” to, I always made a ritual out of getting ready for a date. I changed clothes after coming home from work. I did my hair. And yes, I wore make-up. I felt like it was particularly important because we had been close friends for a while, but our relationship had not been overtly romantic until now.
Once, probably at about the point of our third date, I went shopping in between getting off work and going home (oh, to be young, have few expenses, and be able to impulse-shop!) and bought a new top for no other reason but to wear it on that date. Micah noticed it (he’s a noticing type), and I pointedly told him I had bought it that afternoon.
“Wait — you mean you actually bought it for going out on a date with me?”
He couldn’t stop grinning. Because he didn’t expect it — but he appreciated it. I realized then, how much it meant to him to know that I had put effort into how I looked because of him. I knew he still liked me when I looked like a tomato-head. I knew he still liked me when my make-up was all worn off at the end of the workday and my hair was a sad, drooping mess. I knew that he saw me as an equal with thoughts, opinions, and ideals that he respected. But I also knew that he saw me as a woman … and all that that implies.
I should mention that this has always been a two-way street for us. When we were dating, Micah would always dress nicely and he even bought a bottle of cologne. Then there was the time he bought a shirt I liked for himself, just because I liked it. He still wears cologne every day just because he knows I like it.
A couple years of marriage and a baby has made me a little more lax in my beauty standards, but I still try to look nice for him. I still send overt signals in the way I dress to let him know that, even though I believed him when he made a promise two years ago to be faithful in sickness and in health and in hotness and in not-so-hotness (OK, that wasn’t actually part of our marriage vows) I still care about impressing him.
Now I’ll make another confession: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me.
The “don’t wear make-up for a man” campaign isn’t really about make-up, of course. It’s about the idea of putting effort into the way you look specifically for the benefit of a man, or men in general. It could be the clothes you wear. It could be the skin care regimen you go through every day. It could be the way you do your hair. These things are all fine, they tell us, as long as you do them only for yourself.
Here’s a different idea: what if I do it for both? What if I do it for “us”? Putting effort into the way I look is both an expression of love and an expression of my own sexuality. Those two do not have to be mutually exclusive.
I think this fixation with making sure that women never do anything “for men” is an attack of a symptom, not the actual disease. When a body is sweating profusely, that could be a sign of a high fever, which is a symptom of all manner of alarming diseases, but it could also be the natural effect of exercising vigorously, which is normal and healthy. When diagnosing a patient, you have to look at all the symptoms the patient is presenting, and interpret what that particular combination means. If all you have is sweating, that does not a disease make.
If you want to look good for a man and you are afraid of losing him if you don’t look like Scarlett Johannson every second of every day, that might be a problem.
If you want to look good for a man and you are afraid he might cheat if you don’t look hotter than every single other woman he has or ever will encounter, that might be a problem.
If you want to look good for a man and you wear things you don’t feel comfortable with to keep his attention, that might be a problem.
If you want to look good for a man and you get up at 4 in the morning to “put your face on” so that he never sees you without 3 pounds of make-up on, that might be a problem.
But if the only symptom you have exhibited is wanting to look good for a man, I would not jump to the conclusion that there is anything wrong with you at all.
The problem is, getting bombarded with the message day in and day out that if you wear make-up and cute stuff you are still a slave to the patriarchy — it kind of gets to you. You start to develop a sort of psychological hypochondria. You start to wonder if you do this stuff because you feel like you have to. You start to wonder if maybe this thing that you thought was fun and beautiful and good is actually very bad, and very, very ugly. You start to wonder if maybe you are a victim and you don’t even know it. You start to look at the man in your life differently. You stop seeing the face of the person you love the most in the world, and instead you see just another brick in the wall of the patriarchy.
How do I know this? Because it happens to me.
It happens to me, people. I who am married to a kind, respectful, caring man — the sort of man who just last week weaseled his way out of an invitation to the bar with his co-workers because he really just wanted to get home to me so we could play Age of Empires together. I am a lucky SKUNK, you guys. And yet … I catch myself questioning.
“Am I just doing it for him? Does he expect this?!”
“Oh, I bet he expects me to look like Scarlett Johannson all the time. This is REAL LIFE, buddy-boy!”
“What — what?! I guess I don’t look like the photo-shopped girls on the magazine rack.”
He doesn’t think any of those things. He did not put those thoughts into my head.
But he’s also not perfect. He does the wrong thing or says the wrong thing once in a while — or doesn’t do/say the right thing. Sometimes he comes home distracted and he doesn’t notice my effort. Or there was the time that he pointed out that my face was literally the same color as the bright pink shirt I was wearing (he wasn’t trying to be mean, it really was true — tomato head). And of course, pregnancy was an emotional minefield that he did not escape from unscathed.
We live in a culture that is conditioned to see the entire male sex as the ultimate problem. So instead of seeing one man making a mistake, and then having an adult conversation about it, I am tempted to see it as just another outworking of a hopelessly corrupt system, and react accordingly. And for a moment I’m not looking at my husband — I’m just looking at a mindless foot soldier in the “war against women”.
I know better. But the temptation is still there.
We all have a choice. I am choosing to give my husband the benefit of the doubt. I am choosing to live in the truth that I know him better than some talking head knows “all men”. I am choosing to remember that my relationship with him is one of the very best things about my life — and that fighting to preserve and nurture that is more important than trying to protect myself from the very person I trust most.
It’s okay to give of yourself for the person you love. It’s okay to celebrate the beauty of being a woman. It’s okay to do both at the same time. That’s why I wear make-up for a man. And that’s why I’m not going to stop.
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