Paint: How to Reclaim Your Body Under Capitalism

Once again, I am mindlessly scrolling Instagram. Once upon a time, I believed that my loyalty to this app lay in a desire to keep in touch with others, but I admit these days that this is a lie. When you are too worn out to concentrate on anything else, you, too, will understand the appeal of that instant flash of dopamine. I don’t know when the algorithm, the obedient robot that people treat like flesh, pinpointed me as someone easily hypnotised by make-up. It is a quick and satisfying fix. The artists in these videos draw a perfect line from A to B, and they are much better at it than me. They are prettier than me; they are wealthier than me. They always undergo a fairy-tale transformation from beautiful to more beautiful; their bare skin was covered with foundation and concealer before the camera even started to roll. They decorate their faces with the shapes favoured by modern fashion – sharp cheekbones, sharp eyeliner, full lips, thick lashes. They are usually women, and when they are not, they are homophobically harassed for their perfectionistic adherence to a female beauty standard in the comments.

Occasionally, they will invent trends that they claim are anti-beauty industry. Anything with a pop of colour is ‘man-repellent make-up’. Any decoration that vaguely deviates from the usual fashion is, apparently, alternative.

What happened to the punks who first stuck their anti-capitalist flag in alternative fashion? They certainly haven’t made it big on Instagram. The do-it-yourself ideology – the love of the process, the thrill of looking a little bit worn at the edges or smudged from sweat – is antithetical to the quick dopamine fix of social media, its perfect skin, its perfect end result. Social media shows you something that looks beautiful.

I don’t want to look beautiful. I want my skin to feel like my own again.

***

I am not the first person to criticise social media, and I will certainly not be the last. You are probably rolling your eyes as you realise what you have got yourself into, here we go again, kids these days can’t put down their phones! (Daily Mail, call me?) No, we can’t. Send help, I’m stuck on a sinking ship weighed down by misinformation and rage bait!

It is difficult to quantify social media’s impact on society, no less on the way we – at least, my brain-dead-out-of-touch-TikTok-bedrot generation – learn. I wish I had first learnt feminist and queer theory from a book rather than an Instagram infographic.

There is something so ridiculously out of touch about the feminism spouted on the trans side of social media – it seems to forget that the entire reason gender transition is contested is because (cishetero)patriarchy paints all gender transgression with the same brush: failed-woman/failed-man. Isn’t this the whole point of transness, that we are a diverse group of individuals fighting against the rules that the patriarchy wants to apply to our bodies? Trans people can be misogynistic themselves, of course – plenty of trans people latch onto restrictive gender roles as a source of gender affirmation, in much the same way that cis people do. We all, be we trans, cis, female, male, none or all of the above, have the capacity to behave misogynistically and be harmed by misogynistic beliefs in equal measure. Misogyny is not an ephemeral substance floating around the ether that poisons the brain of anyone who dares to, however briefly, identify as male. Misogyny is the belief system that perpetuates the patriarchal functioning of society by oppressing anyone it sees as female and, by proxy, anyone it sees as other.

I don’t care what your birth sex or gender identity is, reader: the way you inhabit your body has almost certainly been impacted by misogyny.

This is not to diminish the role that individual male hatred of women plays in patriarchal society at large. Rather, it is to illustrate an analogy that underpins my core beliefs about feminism, ethical consumption under capitalism, and the not only inevitable but intrinsic overlap between the two:

YOU SHOULD NOT EAT MEAT WITHOUT RESPECT FOR THE ANIMAL THAT IT CAME FROM.

Humans are omnivorous, and those who don’t eat meat or animal produce often struggle to get all the nutrients that their body requires from their diet. However, in an economic system that prizes efficiency over decency, animals that are born to be slaughtered are systemically, brutally mistreated. Knowing this fact is half the battle. Do you respect that the animals we eat are living things that have as much right to exist as we do? Does this affect the way you consume them? If (and that is a strong if: under the current economic system this is rarely the case) you could afford the money and time to ensure that the animals you eat lived and died humanely, would you?

The meat industry, whose produce we quite literally consume, illustrates the most brutal instance of unethical production and consumption under capitalism. But this school of thought can be applied elsewhere. For example:

People should be free to decorate their bodies however they choose; to take this right would be to remove their bodily autonomy. However, the make-up industry profits off insecurity. It didn’t invent beauty standards or gender roles, but it invests in them, promising people a vision of perfection that they can embody if they use just one more product. People feel inadequate if they can’t afford it. People feel inadequate if they can’t use it right.

People forget that they were worth something before the product made them perfect.

This is not an essay about the unethical production of make-up products under capitalism. Frankly, I don’t know enough about it – I can’t afford anything other than the cheap, low-brow make-up products I use as a rare treat. Call it poetic license; call me a hypocrite. This essay is a manifesto to my hypocrisy.

***

I am hesitant, these days, of the idea that ‘representation in media’ amounts to activism on behalf of the socially silenced, but as an adolescent in a consumerist world, it felt like everything.

I didn’t see myself, anywhere. I wasn’t trans yet; I didn’t know that I was autistic yet. It made me angry that there were no quiet girls, and no girls whose friendships felt like the friendships I had. I read books about paper ideas of girls, strong female characters; strong, because they held knives and occasionally made cutting remarks about the men around them while failing to truly hold them accountable. They were cardboard fantasies of girlhood that, apparently, other girls like me wanted.

I looked for queer girls – perhaps that was what was missing for me – but still, these representations felt empty. I invented my own, proud of myself for gravitating towards weird women and messy sapphic relationships, but none of them made me feel the way that representations of men made me feel.

I respond to representations of masculinity with a sense of want from somewhere deep in my gut. For a long time, I felt that it was some patriarchal influence on writers, that none of them truly understood how to write compelling women and it was up to me, the most feminist of all, to fill in that gap. But I couldn’t do it. I wrote women that compelled me: women I related to, women I thought were hot, women I just thought were cool, but still, femininity could not fulfil the fantasy that masculinity could. I was obsessed with the way that men in films dressed and carried themselves, the way they interacted with each other, with women, the way they talked, the way they smiled. Representations of masculine beauty always felt so much more real to me than those of feminine beauty – the effortless tousle of the hair, the laughter lines; the rebellious freedom of boyhood; the dark eyes that glow under grainy film, the stubble, the markers of exhaustion that make me look haggard and him look gorgeous.

I need to make it clear that I am not describing a sexual attraction. I am old enough now to understand the difference between wanting to look at someone and wanting to become them. Is this how it feels for straight women who long for other women? This longing to become was so central to my girlhood. I never wanted to grow up into one of the perfect women everyone I knew lusted for. Masculinity, especially queer masculinity, called to something I didn’t have the language to understand yet.

I never sought it out, only stumbled upon it from time to time. Growing up on fandom Instagram and Tumblr, I knew that girls could, under no circumstances, feel this way about queer men. It was denounced as fetishism – dirty. I’m not denying that, culturally, we sexualise queer men, and fandom culture, at least when I last engaged in it, exacerbated this sexualisation in frankly bizarre ways. But I was so afraid of being one of those girls that I refused to grant the longing truth. I let it fester. I blamed it on sexist writers and internalised misogyny. I let it affirm that I wasn’t attracted to men at all.

Oh, films where Ben Whishaw wears period clothing, we’re really in it now.

Now that I know where to look, I love well-written stories about women and girls. I love reading about women who feel palpable and real, and I love stupid sexist romcoms where the chemistry between characters makes me feel fuzzy inside. These days, I find it hard to care about stories that fail to centre women; I find they are often built upon principles of misogyny. But these days, I think I read to understand myself rather than to escape from it.

***

I don’t know a lot about drag. I have been to pantomimes, I have seen the adverts for RuPaul’s Drag Race, and I have seen queer people on the internet drag RuPaul through the mud. In my younger and more tribal years, I believed I shouldn’t be interested in drag because I was not, at that time, a gay man. Nowadays, as I experiment with make-up and fashion, I watch on from a distance with a tentative interest. Like many men, I feel a little uncomfortable with the idea of dressing as a parody of a woman. I am not secure enough in my masculinity; I am afraid of the reasons it is funny. This is, after all, my current gendered status in society.

I know enough about drag to understand that, in politically correct terms, it is not about being a man pretending to be a woman: drag is about exaggerating gender roles, exaggerating beauty standards, exaggerating our limited idea of personhood to the point of ridicule. The aesthetics of drag are a satire of the manufactured cleanliness of beauty. A drag queen can demurely bat her eyelashes and ask her audience do I look pretty? and she will always get a laugh for it, because the audience knows that, despite her in-your-face femininity, being pretty was never the point.

Prettiness is a particularly delicate subset of beauty: girls who look like porcelain dolls; feminised boys in classical art. By necessity, prettiness deserves protection from that which wishes to erode it, that which is too brash. Beauty, in particular prettiness, is by definition, not brash. Instead, beauty represents a Platonic ideal of personhood, who one could be if they stripped everything that disgusts them from their flesh. Acne. Wrinkles. Fat. Body hair. Scars. To be beautiful, you must pare down the shape of your face, your nose, your waist, your thighs. Cut yourself into the shape of the moment, through illusion or a surgeon’s knife, and grow yourself back when the moment passes.

Youth, pretty, delicate youth, is beauty’s idolised object: it is the innocent moment you were still malleable to its whims. To be young is to have your finger on the pulse of what everyone else is thinking and root it in your skin. Within the ideology of beauty, one is expected to stick their dollar in the fashion of the moment over and over again lest they seem old, until they can’t pull it off any more. Until the flaws of their body outweigh the money they have to cover them up. Use this product to prevent wrinkles; use this to cover your blemishes; use this to remove hair; use this to stay thin. Use this one to keep every carefully perfected line of paint in place – for a little longer than it would otherwise, at least. Until you have to paint your perfect self on again.

And you can’t even tell you’re wearing it!

Beauty is the constant strive to freeze the moment your exterior was perfect: the moment you didn’t sweat, your hair didn’t grow, your period wasn’t due, you hadn’t eaten a decent meal. It is what you are seen to not do, rather than what you actually do. To be as permanent as plastic while passing as flesh. Oil-on-canvas, breathed into life.

Is this ideal of beauty not, too, a parody of a woman?

Drag parodies, not womanhood, but beauty itself. To parody beauty on a stage reminds us of the performance and the work involved, of the painted costume it necessitates – that is why it is a radical act of gender non-conformity. Implicitly, a drag queen is a man dressed as a woman but I don’t think women dressed in the fashions of drag look especially typical for their gender, either. In drag, your gendered costume is no longer built upon the capitalist principle of lack thereof but of TOO MUCH! By embracing the fact that you are performing in costume, you are inviting your audience to examine the seams that hold it together.

We are born naked; the rest is drag. RuPaul, I think? He got at least that one right.

***

Recently, I received a letter from myself that I wrote the blink of an eye and a lifetime ago. I’d just started playing with make-up, and I’d started questioning my gender in the same breath. ‘It’s all so confusing,’ I wrote; ‘Have you found peace with it now?’ Reading it again, I was struck by how bothered I was by what it means to be cis versus trans, as though one’s privilege under patriarchy is gained and lost through nothing more than the labels they use. It’s easy to highlight this irony as a university graduate who’s read Judith Butler, but how many teenagers grow up within this paradigm, stuck believing their gender is a purely internal phenomenon rather than one forced upon them? How many cis people? How many trans?

I wouldn’t say that I’ve found peace with my gender identity, but the two of us have come to a truce. I have accepted that a non-binary gender identity was not something I chose. Instead, I was landed with it, labelled non-binary by the fact that I am inescapably queer. It doesn’t matter that I wear make-up and dresses, I sit with my legs crossed, I speak only when spoken to. Nor that I have breasts, a male partner, a menstrual cycle. Everyone, without a second’s hesitation, assumes me a lesbian – not-so-subtly hiding their assumption that I am other. No matter how I try to perform correct womanhood, I am inevitably failed-woman; woman-without-man; woman-without-child. Queerness wasn’t really a choice; queerness happened to me. So I embraced it. You have to.

If the binary of masculinised/feminised underpins how we, me and you, reader, interact with one another, I am non-binary because I far too carefully walk the line between the two. To say that gender is a spectrum is to articulate that, while ideals of gender may influence how people present themselves and interact with one another, they cannot fully write that social script. That is, we behave as ourselves; others map our behaviour onto their gendered ideals, and treat us accordingly. These ideals are, inevitably, unattainable. Trans people are acutely aware of this – remember, we are gendered inescapably other – but anyone who accepts the gender binary as fact will be forever stuck chasing them.

Gender is a semiotic exchange between oneself and the viewer. To identify with one gender or another relies upon a sense of self as representation. The complexities of my desire to become are rendered as flat as my face in the mirror.

Doesn’t it feel better to imagine a world where you’re in control of how you are seen? To turn the paintbrush back on the voyeur in your head?

You can use make-up to hate yourself, or you can wash away the costume you wore yesterday and begin again. You can repaint the guise of your body – if capitalism wants you to live in a costume, let that costume be unrecognisable. Let it be forever changing, forever TOO MUCH to put in one pared-down gendered box or another. I was a prim and proper girl, and I hated every second. Why would I want to transition into a prim and proper man? If I have to live in a gendered costume, I would rather its gendering was in my hands.

Use the consumerist products to fulfil the consumerist ideals that made you hate yourself, or costume yourself anew, less perfect, more beautiful by the day. They say that confidence is the most attractive thing in a woman, after all.

***

And yet, in spite of every criticism I have of the beauty industry, I am not immune to the desire to overcome the humanity of my body. A thing made of flesh is hard work to look after, painful work when you get something wrong. I fantasise, a lot, about reinventing my body over and over again – going through a second puberty into manhood, then a third where I grow wings and claws. A fourth transforms me into a semi-aquatic mammal; a fifth means I grow thick fur and sharp teeth when I’m due on; after a sixth, I am a Baba Yaga figure, the kind of bitter old witch you only find in fairy tales…

It isn’t going to happen. Certainly, my body will change as I get older. I can take steps to change it. I could eat better. Go on hormones. Start working out. Get tattoos, piercing, plastic surgery – but no matter what happens, the flesh I am made from will still have grown from the seed of my body.

No matter how I – or you, reader, for that matter – feel about my body, it is the one I am stuck with for the rest of my life. Might as well get used to it.

Make-up, for me, is the closest I can get to truly embodying these fantasies of transformation. I like that paint on skin is a sensory process: it stops me getting too caught up in imagined versions of myself, bringing my imagination that little bit closer to my flesh.

I play with eyeliner mostly. I’ve convinced myself that wearing it under my eyes rather than on my eyelids makes me look more masculine, which is probably not true. Nonetheless, I think it’s fun to play with what shapes suggest, and to see how I can reimagine make-up in different, less conventionally pretty ways. I try to embrace make-up’s artificiality and avoid covering anything up. I avoid concealer on principle, instead colouring my dark circles in different shades. I draw dots and crosses under my eyes, my eyebrows, around my nose. I paint stars and love hearts on my cheeks.

I paint grander, when I’ve time. I grow gardens across my cheekbones and neck, sometimes arms and legs, and wash them off, and paint them again. I dress like a doll with patches and stitching, heart-shaped lips, bursting seams and clockwork arms and legs. It feels good to play with these ideals of beauty rendered inhuman. Paint is best embraced as an elaborate game of let’s-pretend.

I’m not scared of looking older yet, but I’m scared that when I do, I won’t be able to express myself in the same way. I’m scared that my cheap make-up and tacky clothes will no longer flatter my aging skin, and that that will drive me to call my body flawed. My mum calls it mutton dressed as lamb: the failure to accept that your body has changed and desperately trying to make yourself look how you did at twenty, back when you were, apparently, beautiful. Nostalgia is seductive, even when you know that it’s a liar.

I hate the idea that an old person is a failed beautiful person. Why should you never ask a woman her age? Age doesn’t change how long anyone has been on this earth, what they know and don’t know, whether or not they are happy in themselves. It doesn’t even change what they look like! She looks wonderful for her age, as though to age is to negate one’s capacity for wonder. Our bodies will, inevitably, change beyond our control. They will wrinkle and sag, gain weight or lose it, become brittle, tired, damaged – and that’s assuming that they’re not already. You might go through menopause. You might stop being able to get it up. You might lose your teeth.

But I’m excited! I’m excited for what it means to grow old, to learn new things about myself and the world. To leave the scared girl of my childhood further and further in the past, to comfort the version of her that I carry with me everywhere the more confident I become about whatever the fuck life has to offer. I don’t fear that aging will lose me some beauty that is/was inherent in my youth. I have most certainly not reached my prime yet.

In school, I was obsessed with the way friends would sit in class and doodle on each others’ hands, like decorating one another is a human urge. It is a reminder of touch, I suppose, much gentler, much more deliberate than a hickey or a bruise. I like the idea that life marks itself on your skin in the same way.

***

Gender is a semiotic exchange between oneself and the viewer; it is complex desire rendered as flat as one’s face in the mirror. But it is permanently mutating. What do you see written in the strokes of my paintbrush? I am a Barbie doll with a buzzcut and a crayon wound on her chest; I am porcelain girl with round ringlets in my hair, round rouge on my cheeks; I am a boy held together with poster paint and glue. I am an underwear model whose tits are too small; I am a drag queen whose dress doesn’t fit; I am a highly-strung man in a business suit. I am a walking womb, a failed-woman, a never-really-tried-man. I am that little bit too confusing for cis people, which means I am the representation that I needed growing up. I am in a state of transition that you will never see in a thirty-second video chronicling a perfect line drawn from A to B.

My ribs, I’ve been told, look like angel wings.

Recommended Reading

This essay was not something I sat down and researched; I think it’s something that’s been in me, waiting to be written, for a long time. As such, I can’t really provide a bibliography beyond ‘I’ve been an angry feminist since I was ten’. I accept that, unfortunately, I am likely parroting a lot of watered-down theory that I have absorbed from social media over the years, and am unable to properly cite. That being said, there are a few texts that I definitely think influenced my writing of this essay that I want to pay homage to.

On Beauty

I highly recommend the video essay I watched immediately before I started to write, Rowan Ellis’ ‘disfigurement, disgust and the dark side of pretty privilege’. I… don’t really think anything in my essay directly responds to the questions Ellis brings up in this video, but she prompted me to question my own relationship to beauty and make-up in particular, which spiralled into the nearly year-long passion project you just read.

Partway through writing, I watched the partner video to Ellis’ video on disfigurement, ‘ugly is evil: the dystopian legacy of 2000s makeover tv’. Using several television shows I remember vividly from my childhood as a vehicle, she brilliantly explores our cultural disgust at perceived excess, be it weight, make-up, or, of course, queerness.

On Feminism

It took me a long time to finish this essay, because I knew there was something missing to it that I was struggling to put into words. Jennifer Cox’s Women Are Angry finally helped me articulate it, although probably not in the way Cox intended it. The book is a powerful exploration of how women internalise gendered ideals over the course of their lives and subsequently fail to articulate their needs – but Cox makes the mistake many cis women do: failing to remember that there will always be exceptions to the rule. As a neurodivergent person, I don’t think I’ve ever succeeded in controlling my anger as well as Cox claims all those raised female learn to do. Although I found a lot of Cox’s subsequent analyses of interpersonal gender relations fascinating and sometimes relatable, the book began to make me wonder how ‘raised female’ I really am.

In this vein, I can’t not credit Andrea Long Chu’s Females, which I read in one sitting about six weeks prior. In the way only a trans person can, Chu satirises the assumptions inherent in the belief in a social gender binary: if femininity is defined by being a victim of a gendered system, is it possible for anyone to ever be anything else? (If you only ever read one book I recommend you, please let it be Females.) Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History makes a fairly similar claim, just fifty years earlier in the heat of the feminist porn debates. I think both books are brilliant companion texts to each other, but that’s a subject for a later essay.

On Myself

There was a strangely long gap of time between when I first saw the title for manmadezines’ ‘I Am A Transmasc Femboy’ and when I finally read it, so I suppose the damage was done long before I actually read the zine. I think just seeing those words next to each other really embedded into my head that I can do whatever I want forever.