To begin to understand any human practice, it’s useful to imagine oneself to be an alien observing the practice for the first time.

1. Countries: boundaries across space that groups of people collectively hallucinate and the people or institutions within those hallucinated boundaries.

2. Parties: areas of spacetime in which at least three homo sapiens gather intentionally for this mysterious agenda called “fun.”

3. Noodles: ground up grain or rice that has been formed into symmetrical, skinny forms which are designed specifically to be snapped easily before being boiled and nearly impossible to eat with a fork after-the-fact, for reasons that have nothing to do with nutritional value.

Makeup. When I put on a bit of makeup for the first time in a decade a few months ago, I felt like an alien. I’d forgotten that a significant percentage of women adorn their face in myriad powders and gels either daily, regularly, or on special occasions — for the sake of altering their likeness. This fact felt newly bewildering; I’d nearly forgotten about makeup for the decade I wasn’t wearing it. For the sake of understanding, bewilderment is the beginning.

In explanations of makeup use, convenient non-answers are frequently provided. People say, “enhance your natural features,” in a breathy way that makes coloring in your face seem natural, like walking or eating. Women oftentimes say, “I do it for myself,” in response to the accusation that they are attempting to be more attractive, or to otherwise give a different impression to others than their plain face would. I find this response to be uncompelling — mostly because I suspect that human beings hardly ever do anything solely for themselves. We are a hyper-social species. Without other human beings, I would stop doing entirely. How can we do a thing only for ourselves?

The prospect of putting on makeup for oneself is more bewildering than doing most things for oneself, for one glaring reason: while going through life, we, for the most part, cannot see our own faces.

Narcissus stared in a pool all day, but he drowned. Most of us have to swim, and we kill the mirror surface with our movement. So, if the experience of beauty were desired, it would be best to go to an art museum or a forest. If creative generativity were desired, it would be best to paint a picture, write a poem, build a sculpture, etc.

Creativity lies on a spectrum. Elaborate, novel face paint is incredibly creative. It’s no less creative than any art. Conversely, “no-makeup makeup,” is quite constrained and non-expressive, despite taking impressive technical skill. Choosing an eyeshadow color is a little micro-jolt of agency akin to picking a shirt. It might give someone a bit of confidence in their ability to choose for the remainder of the day, but it hardly compares to composing a symphony. At best, creativity is only part of the explanation for daily makeup wear.

Unless we do actually plan to stare in a mirror all day, the remaining explanations for make-up use involve, in one way or another, the gaze of a secondary being. The gaze needn’t come from a man. The gaze needn’t be about sex. The gaze might even be envisioned.

Internalized Gaze

Someone may feel and act differently because they imagine some hypothetical person will believe they look better.

One variant of this hypothetical person is the internalized male gaze. Women are frequently conditioned to imagine themselves from the outside rather than experience life directly. To wear makeup might feel pleasant to someone conditioned in this way because her internalized external judge approves of how she imagines she appears, going about. We are intelligent, imaginative beings who perceive the invisible, after all. The stories that hold up our self-esteem are not directly seen.

Perhaps this is why makeup-wear can impact the psychological state of individuals independently of an actual audience. Consider the confidence boost human beings can derive from cosmetics. Confidence can, in turn, improve performance, potentially generating a virtuous loop. In one study from 2016, participants who were instructed to apply makeup performed better on a test than participants who listened to positive music or applied face paint. The mechanism, presumably, is that makeup increases global self-esteem, and global self-esteem improves performance.

This might seem simple enough, but I’d like to invite a socially-aware analysis. Why should applying makeup, which is known to be temporary, improve global self-esteem? The makeup is, quite literally, skin deep. There is no direct causal pathway for the makeup to change anything about the personality or the intellect. The explanation, then, likely hinges on the envisioned, internal gaze. For at least some percentage of the population, global self-esteem seems to depend on how pleasing an individual imagines they look in the present moment.

If someone’s self-esteem did not rest on appearance at all — as the body neutrality movement advocates — potential mechanisms for increased confidence with makeup wear becomes somewhat scarce. Given this, I believe we should see the impacts of makeup on performance not as absolute but as socially contingent.

If women frequently equate their worth with their subjective degree of beauty, we should expect the confidence boost from makeup to be stronger. I do not wish to be reductive; bright red lipstick might signal boldness, and boldness might increase confidence. But it does seem as though the importance we place on beauty in women (arguably, a patriarchal construct) is a crucial step in the causal nexus that allows women to improve their academic performance via makeup wear.

Empowered or not, it’s an uncanny valley variant of bootstrapping. In a sense, it’s brilliant.

Intersubjectivity

Actual human beings are relevant, too. Suppose that makeup is successful. Suppose the changed likeness the makeup produces changes the impression of some secondary being; the makeup wearer is seen as more attractive, more trustworthy, more competent, more sociosexual, more prestigious (by men), more dominant (by women), less approachable, or more approachable than they otherwise would have been, depending on style. This does happen. In these cases, the makeup-wearer may be treated differently. This changed treatment may alter the makeup-wearer’s experience of life.

In this sense, dressing for the perception of others can be for oneself, nontrivially. Someone who is frequently approached might gain more social experience, for example. Appearance can influence income, income can alter personality, etc. It is sad that qualities like weight, appearance, gender, and race can impact employment or social outcomes; this goes against meritocratic ideals. But, in practice, they tend to.

This is where intersubjectivity comes in. When people — men, women, folks of all kinds — wear makeup, I argue it’s almost never true that they do it entirely for themselves or entirely for some other. When a person is perceived differently, for any reason, it tends to impact that person’s direct experience of life. We do not navigate a fixed, perception-devoid space. Rather, we navigate the variable, perception-sensitive world of other human beings. We point, we speak, we label, and continually see differently due to each other.

Clothing and makeup can become a kind of language. In Dressed: A Philosophy of Clothes, Shahidha Bari discusses the poetics of clothes. Purses hold mystery. Dresses both reveal and contain, selectively. Jackets carry indicators of socioeconomic position.

Similar commentary can be made of various makeup styles. Blue lipstick signals a willingness to be unconventional. Pink might evoke gentleness, and orange, happiness. In Ancient Egypt, a clean, black cat-eye indicated status on both men and women. In many cultures, specific tribal markers show group belonging. Among Hindus, Jains and Buddhists, a red dot between the eyebrows on the forehead — called a Bindi — represents the universe, among a complex matrix of other things.

The history of makeup demonstrates its seeming inconsistency. Consistently, it’s biologically-inspired. At the same time, it’s socially constructed, utterly.

Makeup is biologically-inspired in the sense that the most common makeup emphasizes female secondary sex characteristics: higher contrast between skin and eyes, fatter lips, etc. This exaggeration of biological traits underpins the effectiveness of practices like applying lipstick and mascara. Higher facial contrast, which standard makeup provides, is associated with youth. Increased contrast is extreme in traditional Geisha attire, in which dark red lipstick is applied over white face powder. To a less extreme degree, most makeup practices across cultures increase overall facial contrast, outline eyes, and emphasize lips.

At the same time, specific makeup styles are particular to an individual, culture, time, status, and place. We invent the makeup. Groups of people produce it. People teach it to each other. Whether and how it is worn varies by geographic region. Human beings use it — intentionally or otherwise— to signal status, personality, occupation, gender identity, and belief.

In the 1910s, suffragettes wore red lipstick as a sign of rebellion. At the time, red lips were deemed illicit and unladylike. Feminists used these pre-existent connotations to engineer a new meaning.

Nietzsche, Butler, and Performativity

The idea of makeup soaks into our concepts of gender — and not always for good. Some misogynists see the likes of makeup and seem to not distinguish between pieces of attire and the human beings who wear them. They call women “shallow” and “manipulative.” This complaint is not new. Famously, Friedrich Nietzsche published the following passage in Beyond Good and Evil, among many other, similar quips:

What is truth to a woman! From the very first nothing has been more alien, repugnant, inimical to woman than truth — her great art is the lie, her supreme concern is appearance and beauty.

As a thinker, I quite like Nietzsche. But, unfortunately, our beloved friend Friedrich appears to hate women. He has quite a few brethren in this sentiment. Aristotle called women passive. Kant believed women were driven by a “beautiful understanding.” I’m sure men on the internet express similar sentiments in the modern day.

There is a sense in which they are right. As Judith Butler famously argued, gender itself is constituted by habitual and socially constrained performativity. By Butler, daily makeup doesn’t merely express gender; it is part of what it means to enact gender, which they deem to be a thing that is done rather than a state of being. At the current time, I don’t fully endorse their theory. But in the least, gender has performative components. The act of repeatedly applying lipstick may generate identity, even as it expresses it, from how the habit of self is altered by the lipstick’s influence on social perception and treatment.

Social perception and self concept are deeply entwined. A prevalent kind of relation between the two involves the social categories we imagine ourselves and others to belong within: mother, father, woman, man, friend, employee, boss, etc. Among many other things, the concept of womanhood is associated with aesthetic performance. Sadly, time taken engaging in aesthetic performance is time not taken engaging in other pursuits. Less time commitment can amount to a genuine diminishment of capacity.

This is what Nietzsche was likely responding to. He saw the performance. He didn’t appreciate the circumstance. He didn’t see how the women he saw were acting in response to punishments and rewards from their social world, as does everyone.

Concluding Thoughts

We find ourselves with a somewhat sour picture. There is genuine incentive for women to engage in time-consuming aesthetic practices for varying types of social gain. But when individuals act on these incentives, they risk condemnations of frivolity from those who have not noticed that the shallow and the deep are impossible to unlace. The skin-deep is absorbed, and the internal creeps into surface-level expression, not unlike the twin sides of a Möbius strip.

I’m not saying anything particularly new. It’s the classic “damned if you do damned if you don’t” double-whammy feminists are quite familiar with. It’s sad, possibly oppressive, and also lovely, in the sense that things which might have been originally used to amplify biological signals can be hijacked by individuals to express their particularity. Recall the feminist use of red lipstick, and the deep religious connotations of the Bindi.

In many cases, the positive and negative valences present in aspects of a system do not cancel out. I take the system of beauty labor to be one such situation, and so lack a bold moral thesis.

But actions can indicate attitude, and I admit I’ve started to wear a little bit of makeup, occasionally. It’s not a solitary behavior. It’s a kind of advertising, which, in my case, signals: “I’m willing to be noticed, I’m willing to be observed, I’m willing to be seen, and you might know me.”

Sexual empowerment sounds nice. But with high rates of sexual assault, chronic bias against promiscuous women, a striking lack of mutual kindness in sexual culture, America’s Puritan roots, and patriarchal aims subverting good-faith attempts at honest sexual expression, it isn’t easy.

It isn’t even clear what sexual empowerment entails. Choice-based feminists might endorse OnlyFans, power-based kink, or dressing in a way that appeals to the so-called male gaze “for themselves.” Others—not so much. They question what it means to make choices in a world that only truly rewards a limited array of female expressions.

Thus, I ask: when are actions women attempt to take for themselves subverted to support purely male agendas? When, if ever, is choice genuine? When we seek sexual freedom, what is really being sought?

Embodied Feeling

When Lily Phillips slept with 100 men in a day, I was struck by the black-and-whiteness of the response. When she broke down in tears after-the-fact, most said, “of course.” Few people seemed to see her as an intelligent person who might have informative insight about her own experience. Still, at the end of Josh Pieters’ documentary focusing on her exploit, she said the following, disjointedly: “I think sometimes… I [was] feeling so robotic… by the 30th [person]… I’ve got a routine of how we’re going to do this… sometimes you dissociate… it’s not like normal sex at all.”

To act without feeling, dissociated from oneself—I suspect this is the source of quite a lot of sexual despair. Not sleeping with five men, or one-hundred (albeit, embodiment and mutual recognition may be more challenging under tight time constraints or gang-bang-esque arrangements).

In “The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde spoke about this beautifully. “To share the power of each other’s feelings is different from using another’s feelings as we would use a Kleenex. When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us.” This—the pornographic—is put in contrast with the erotic. Lorde calls the erotic, “…a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” She elaborates:

“…the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors brings us closest to that fullness.”

In summary: if we know the joy our bodies are capable of, we can seek it out in all areas of life. This drives us, she argues, to expressions that challenge patriarchal norms. When we attend to what is bountiful for us, in a deep, embodied sense, we no longer tolerate the unacceptable. We become braver. This is a kind of power, both within the erotic, and on its account. “Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So, we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex,” Lorde adds. When the erotic is deemed trivial or relegated to the bedroom only, under darkness, we lose our potency.

Choice does not always involve going towards something from this sense of acknowledged feeling and embodied integrity. Sometimes, people make politically or economically coerced choices under hard circumstances—I don’t wish to deny these choices are a kind of choice. Nevertheless, a more substantial sense of empowerment likely comes when we are able to make choices that arise from the core of our beings, rather than mere survival—from what Lorde calls the erotic. The poet concludes:

“Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.”

Female Bodies

Sadly, most representations of “sexual empowerment” in the media do not include reference to a deep sense of embodied integrity.

Consider, for a moment, the beautiful onomatopoeia, “WAP.” Within the pop hit, Cardi B and Megan The Stallion express desire, which puts it above many depictions of female sexuality. Perhaps they state things they genuinely want. Perhaps they state things it would be marketable to want. Perhaps the pressures of marketability shift their genuine desires. In any case, they also brag about their desirability within our white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy:

“He bought a phone just for pictures of this wet ass pussy / Pay my tuition just to kiss me on this wet ass pussy.”

To desire and to be deemed desirable are not the same things, but under the umbrella of “female sexual expression,” these two things are often equated. Women are taken to express their sexuality when they show their body, even though the appearance of someone’s body might have little to do with their felt sense of want. In WAP’s music video, the camera traces the singers’ bodies. It does not show the shape of their desire.

In other words, female desire is talked about, but attractive female bodies are shown. Both the desire and the bodies are depicted, unambiguously, as something that might serve men.

There is nothing wrong with men being the beneficiaries of female sexuality. In an ideal world, everyone would be a beneficiary. I only mean to note that we chronically confuse exposing the female body with showing sexuality itself, as if the appearance of bodies has some objective magnetic pull, or some kind of intrinsic meaning. It does not. To show the desire of a woman might instead involve showing what she desires. Perhaps that thing would be the body of a man. Such inner sense could be conveyed through poetry, literature—and it has been.

Anaïs Nin wrote erotica—some of which involved women who gaze voyeuristically at men. In the short story “Marianne,” a young studio artist encounters a man who is aroused only by receiving physical admiration. As Marianne paints his form, she gains a frustrated kind of satisfaction from bestowing this admiration. Afterwards, she confesses:

“I looked at my drawings, and to one of them I added the complete image of the incident. I was actually tormented with desire. But a man like that, he is only interested in my looking at him.”

This surprised me—within pornography, female voyeurism is a rare motif. But why is it rare? How could we be so chronically blind to what it might mean to show female desire or attraction, even within feminist circles?

My unsubstantiated sense is that women still need desirability to express desire, with a passing level of acceptability. Women deemed beautiful are punished for their expressions, and women deemed un-beautiful are punished all the more (possibly through sexual violence, or the threat of it). I hardly ever hear from women deemed un-beautiful, about their desire, in the public arena. This is a shame, since desire is a crucial part of being a person, rather than a thing.

In “On Having No Head,” D.E. Harding describes what it is like to live fully in one’s sensory experience without projecting the narrative of selfhood—history, appearance, abstract traits—onto oneself. People cannot see, from their own eyes, that they have heads. In some ways, this seems the preferred way of experiencing eroticism: facelessly. Sex, from this perspective, is not a way to validate beauty, but to destroy it, to forget how you seem, completely. To eliminate the invisible camera you put on yourself as you walk down the street, and to instead look out at the trees.

Power-to and Freedom-from

I’ve discussed Lily Phillips, Audre Lorde’s sense of the erotic, WAP, female voyeurism, and what it might mean to show genuine female desire rather than merely female form. Women might find humanity in celebrating their own subjectivity, their own joy, their own pleasure.

None of this answers my original question about empowerment. Naturally, empowerment ought to mean to come into power or to be granted power. But power is a bewildering business. When we say, “women should be sexually empowered,” we generally don’t imagine the impossibility of absolute power—we don’t imagine women who control the weather, or the stars, or who can shape-shift at will. Instead, we imagine something much more limited.

In “Rethinking Power” (1998), the philosopher Amy Allen usefully distinguishes between power-to and power-over. Power-to is the capacity for an agent to complete an end. Power-over is the ability of an agent to alter another body—another person, environment, structure, institution, or the self, I might add (though Allen does not). To this roster, freedom-from, or the tendency for one’s actions to not be unwillfully manipulated by a specific external agent or structure, is a natural inverse.

As Allen points out, concepts like power-to and power-over intersect in practice. They express relations rather than absolute states. To have the power-to for toast-making, I must have power-over the toaster, the bread, my hands, the air around my body, etc. Nevertheless, I find Allen’s taxonomy allows for more easeful distinctions.

I do not reckon it is possible to have complete freedom-from the cultural forces we find ourselves in, for example. People view promiscuity negatively, and this will impact what someone is able to disclose while receiving acceptance in certain forms of employment or neighborhood barbecues. I can’t imagine that away—nor can any other single individual.

As a general thing, human beings require a cultural backdrop to develop. The notion of a baby who grows up both unwounded and unenabled by “society,” in a perfect “natural” state, is an impossible dream. Who we are—who we really are, how our authentic desires formed in the first place—was built on our history, a history that touches inequality, and structural limitation from innumerable angles, over time. History leaks in through genes, through chemicals in the womb, through what we see. There is no neutral default. There is no ultimate escape.

Preliminary Conclusion

I do not wish to pretend that individuals can simply opt for full empowerment, as pop feminism sometimes slips into. Yet, within cultural restrictions, there are choices, or ways in which power-to is available. I can go to the local coffee shop, or not. I can choose substantial aspects of my own diet. I can look at this, or that—I can alter the direction of my own gaze. I can talk, and people may or may not give a shit. I can fuck, or not.

The range of power-to depends on the individual, but it is always present to at least a limited extent. This is where embodiment returns. We can use whatever power-to is available to us for actions that are, as much as possible, grounded in erotic integrity. With difficulty, we can choose to prioritize our own direct experience over sexual self-objectification, and to make choices from this centered place—or, we can try, at least. This is the kind of sexual empowerment available to the individual, or what we ought to mean when we talk about a “sexually empowered woman.”

However—this empowerment is limited by both the physical world and culturally coercive forces. I cannot leap to the moon, and many women are sadly in conditions in which either the use or the restraint of their sexuality is required for a basic standard of living. Consider many sex workers, women who rely on their husbands for sustenance, and those deeply embedded in religious institutions. Under the lens of freedom-from, these conditions do not exemplify the social condition of empowerment.

In any case: perfection is impossible, but perfection is not required for “much better.” There is no particular set of behaviors it is sensible to call “empowered”—instead, what seems to matter is both the embodied integrity of a choice, and the degree to which that choice is coerced by limiting conditions.

So, dance to WAP, if you want to. Use power-based kink influenced by hundreds of years of patriarchal control, if it helps you to find your sense of subjectivity and genuine eroticism. Alternatively—don’t.

The world is inescapable, but perhaps you can live in it.