“On the other hand, a lot of anti-makeup sentiment– particularly anything that starts talking about how “frivolous” and “shallow” makeup is– is also misogynistic and femmephobic. Makeup is a form of visual art. If making your face beautiful is shallow, so is making a canvas beautiful or a block of marble or a hunk of plastic. If you understand why someone would feel satisfied and happy when they make a gorgeous print, you understand why someone would feel satisfied and happy when their makeup looks perfect. I do not think it is accidental that the form of visual art almost entirely practiced by women is the one that gets accused of frivolity and where the talent exhibited by many of the artists is ignored or denigrated. - Ozy Frantz”

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Other People’s Makeup Use: None Of Your Business – Ozy Frantz’s Blog (via brute-reason)

Draw on everything 2k13 has definitely extended to All Cat Eye All The Time.

(via bananafin)

sid’s brain fumes on this:

I also think that there’s something at play here about ephemerality, and how it relates to gendered attitudes about creative output.

A completely not-backed-up-by-anything claim that I have found to be true in my personal observations: The more physically imposing a medium, the more strenuous to work with, it is not only seen as more long-lasting, but often both a) of greater import and b) coming from a more masculine source. What up marble sculpture and steel skyscrapers? I see u there, with your gravitas and your hot, sweaty men wielding dangerous tools. If “women’s media” are textiles, paintings, drawings–things that do not last–pretty, delicate things that must be preserved by men with disposable income, then cosmetic art is an even more palpable example of this.

You paint your face and it lasts mere hours. It is assumed that you do not do this for yourself, to bring yourself pleasure through your personal aesthetics, but for male attention and/as material gain. It is considered shallow, pointless, not art but fashion–as if the distinction between those two things has ever been unproblematic. Just because it is not lasting, that does not mean it cannot be art. Look at theatre, some of which is inextricably caught up in the idea of the ephemeral performance, the moment that is unrepeatable. Only those lucky enough to be in the audience (/in your presence) at the right moment will catch this specific aesthetic experience.

Makeup, like literally every form of aesthetic choice-making, can be a tool. A tool for personal creative expression, for conformity, for rebellion, for political statement, for getting laid, for hiding something, for emphasizing something, for putting up barriers and for taking them down. (The choice of the absence of makeup is, of course, folded into all of this as well.) And sure, it can be shallow.That is totally also okay. But it doesn’t have to be, and categorically writing it off as a shallow and heteronormatively feminine (and it doesn’t have to be) form of aesthetic expression is symptomatic of some super wack nonsense about gender and ephemerality.

Apologies for the incoherence of that rambling, I haven’t finished my coffee yet and may change my mind about all of this by the end of the day.