Although both the feminine and the masculine represent social constructions, detached from the realities of who people are, it is important to realize that we attach to femininity a series of external, and therefore performable, qualities, while we attach to masculinity more qualities that are internal, native to the self. Try to make a list of the qualities we associate with men: Strength, intelligence, conviction, opinion, reason, declarations, freedom, anger, violence, forcefulness. Then try to list what you read as feminine: Good hair, good makeup, vacillation of opinion, caring for others, and gentleness, perhaps. The first thing you’ll notice is that feminine qualities are more superficial and less descriptive of identity. The second thing you’ll notice is that it’s harder to make a list of internal feminine qualities because we in fact don’t really talk about what women really are, below the surface of what appeals to us.
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I am saddened by the backlash against Lana Del Rey. I am sick of this kind of horror at a woman laid bare—and sick of the fear and disgust that arises when we discover a woman is less than perfect. This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. There’s a famous poem, “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” written in 1732, in which the satirist Jonathan Swift describes sneaking into a woman’s inner chamber to watch her undress and take off her makeup. He’s shocked by what he finds: Beneath her “Lace, Brocades, and Tissues,” lie “oyl,” “wrinkles,” “sweat,” “ear-wax,” and “hair.” The whole poem reads as strip tease meets a horror story. At the end, the woman takes a shit, and the voyeur nearly passes out. It’s a hilarious—and also very disturbing poem—and in some ways, it’s a metaphor for what everyone wants to do with Lana these days—that is, peel back the layers and pick her apart in order to uncover the fact that she’s pretending.
