why do people find it so hard to understand that critiquing makeup culture/societal expectations of makeup is not a personal attack. you don't need to defend wearing x amount of products just pls understand the forces behind it. otoh refinery29 posted a 'what its like getting permanent lip liner' article and reading that headline deactivated my almonds. and uh weird way to end this ask but happy 2019!!
I mean if you want a sincere answer to why that happens, I think it’s because we’re at weird point in capitalist hell where brands, particularly the beauty industry, have finagled their image in such a way that buying makeup or wearing heels or shaving your legs genuinely does feel like a badass #empowering choice for a lot of women
and, like, zero shade on women who do enjoy those things, because that includes some of my dearest friends in the world and we’re all in this hell together anyway and the individual consumer is never the root of the problem, but. but but but. “I like wearing makeup” has been conflated into “I like wearing makeup and it’s therefore a deeply feminist action” which is… patently wrong.
idk how long you’ve been on tumblr and I can’t speak to exactly how far this goes back, but I remember being like 14/15 and seeing all these posts about “weaponized femininity,” which was basically this idea that you could be really conventionally hot - sharp eyeliner, red lipstick, high heels, etc - and that this was somehow going to give you an edge over the men™ by…. tricking them into thinking you were just a pretty woman? when actually you were going to crush their dreams beneath your heels or slit their throats with your eyeliner? or something? it was never exactly clear.
and obviously you can be a conventionally feminine woman and excel in any field you want and compete with the men, but that has absolutely jack shit to do with your lipstick.
but now you’ve got all these marketing campaigns that conflate self-acceptance and confidence with buying beauty products. some of them are subtle, like those Dove ~real beauty~ campaigns I hate with a passion, because they always resolve around this theme of making women dredge up things they’re insecure about and then going “no!!! don’t worry!! you’re actually beautiful!!! buy our soap!!”
and this is seen as like… intimate and emotional and affirming, when it’s actually the most shallow inspiration porn imaginable, and doing nothing but reinforcing the idea that a woman’s value is affirmed through her beauty more than anything else. which is basically a huge co-opting of the body positivity movement - originally started simply to affirm that all bodies can be good and functional and worthwhile bodies that don’t determine our worth, now commodified into “all bodies are beautiful uwu buy a face mask.”
(not that I don’t love a good face mask, but that shit gets sold like it’s supposed to fix your life, you know?)
and then you’ve got the really in your face ridiculous ads. my favorite was an Ulta video that started popping up before things I wanted to watch on youtube awhile back, where they’d play that Alessia Cara song that goes “you don’t have to change a thing” over images of women with full contour and sculpted brows entirely unironically. which is this really fun new spin a lot of beauty industry adverts are taking now - acting like makeup is just a fun way to enhance your beauty that totally already exists, just More!
which would be fine, if makeup actually was just a fun optional extra, but like I’ve said approximately 228 million times now, the daily reality for a lot of women is that it’s not. jobs that have nothing to do with physical appearance require women to wear makeup to be considered professional, trans women are too often required to wear makeup just to be recognized as women, there are girls and women of all ages who feel like they need to at least slap on some eyeliner for a casual night with friends, as if there’s some beauty bare minimum they need to fulfill to exist.
but makeup and beauty culture is deeply ingrained in women’s lives that it’s easier to like it, so women who do enjoy wearing it and otherwise performing conventional femininity have a choice to make: either acknowledge that you are participating in a system that exploits women, or call it empowerment. acknowledging that you’re part of a hurtful system sucks - especially when it’s one that you opted into. Natalie Wynne made a great point about vegans in her video “Apocalypse” that I think is a fair comparison - many non-vegans, when confronted with veganism, feel attacked by the reminder that veganism exists, and that they, as non-vegans, are implicitly doing something that may be morally wrong. rather than confront that part of themselves, they lash out.
ditto with makeup. and I’m not saying that either people who wear makeup or eat meat are wrong (I have no moral high ground on that second one; I was eating a chicken chimichanga last night), but they are part of harmful systems that it’s easier to ignore. and so critiques on makeup culture are often read as attacks on individuals who like wearing makeup, even when - as in my case, always - that wasn’t the intention at all.