Saturday 7th November was such an historic day as for the first time in over 200 years of US politics, a woman became the Vice President-Elect. Senator Kamala Harris will become the 49th VP since the office came into existence in 1789. And this is not just historic due to her being female, but also because she is a woman of colour; her father was Jamaican and her mother Indian, and it stops a pattern in the history of VPs:
How striking is that graphic. What a moment in history. What an achievement! She was a District Attorney in San Fransisco, The Attorney General of California, elected to the US Senate in 2017 and will enter the White House in January 2020 with President-Elect Joe Biden. So I was a bit surprised this week when I was scrolling through Twitter and saw this headline from The Telegraph Newspaper:
“Why Kamala Harris is the modern beauty icon the world needs.”
This stopped me scrolling, as I sighed that her ‘war paint’ was the thing they wanted to focus on: Kamala Harris as a beauty icon. And it’s left me feeling all… bleurgh, about my feminism!
Feminism is the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of the equality of the sexes. It is the belief in full social, economic, and political equality for women. And it leads me to believe that women therefore have agency over their choices. The choice to wear makeup, or not, is therefore the choice of the individual. As is the choice to read about the makeup regime of another woman, and thus the choice to write about it. But VP-Elect Harris is not a beauty expert, a makeup artist, a model; she’s a politican who’s been elected to the second highest office in the United States. So to write about her as a beauty icon, it just feels… well, bleurgh, again!
I did some googling while writing this post btw, and found another Telegraph headline: “The secret formula behind Kamala Harris’s winning politician hair.” Politician hair. Winning, politician hair…
Anyway…! So now I’m left with this feeling of conflict: I’ve since read a couple of pieces about why it’s not sexist to have written about Harris’s makeup. That the beauty and fashion industry, and the writers and journalists who write about it, are predominantly female, and that to suggest their work is misogynistic, is in itself a misogynistic act. Which, ooo, makes me start to feel all bleurgh again. I don’t want to be a misogynist!
For me, in trying to unpack these conflicted feelings, I’m leaning towards: why did they choose to focus on that, of all the things they could have talked about? It doesn’t sit comfortably with me. Now, people also talked about Kamala Harris’s choice of a white pant suit for her speech on Saturday night. And this I don’t mind so much, and here’s why: it was a nod to the white outfits worn by the women of the original suffrage movement. Paying tribute to those women who fought then, to allow this to happen now.
So talk about her outfit: good. Talk about her makeup: bad? A bit tricky eh? And one of the reasons why I think of myself as a feminist in progress, a term I first heard the wonderful human being that is Jameela Jamil use. I don’t profess to be an expert, I’m learning and self correcting all the time. I want to be able to have the confidence to say, you have a point, I’ll take that on board or, I think you’re right. But on this one, I don’t think it was a good call to lead with a headline about beauty, on the night the first ever woman was declared Vice President Elect of the United States of America. That pant suit was on point though.
