I've never heard of the Money with Katie Show podcast, but this past week I kept seeing links to an episode featuring sociologist and New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom, so I finally listened to it. It's about an hour and 10 minutes long, and all worth listening to, but a few parts of it really grabbed me and made me transcribe them. This is about halfway through:
TMC: Beauty is about power. Beauty is the only power that women are allowed to legitimately use but never own. It's the only political power we are allowed to pursue without being stigmatized, but we can never control it.... There's no good moral choice in a system of power where your body is the only capital you're allowed to use without sanction. There's no good beauty. There's beauty that's more or less painful. And that's not beauty's fault: beauty is supposed to be naturally available to all of us, as bell hooks once pointed out, right? There's a natural component to beauty, the sky is beautiful, nature is beautiful and that should be freely available... all of that.
But the reality is, that's not the world we built. The world we built makes everything from beautiful art to beautiful people a commodity. Your preferences are always operating within the limits of the commodity of beauty. And that's hard for people to accept because the last safe place for us to be ruthlessly racist, sexist, classist and ableist is when it comes to bodies. You can get the most dyed-in-the-wool radical leftist [man] you've ever met... and everybody they've ever dated has been blonde. And they will look you dead in your face and tell you that those two political realities have nothing to do with each other.
She then describes research on dating sites, which found men with leftist signifiers in their bios, "who only respond to 19-year-old blonde white girls who weigh less than 128 pounds."
TMC: Those are your politics. That's all I want people to understand. Those are also your politics... What you're sexually attracted to is not just natural. There's tons of research about the fact that what we find beautiful is an average of the things we've been exposed to.
School segregation, she points out, has shaped those desires. "Preferences don't matter more than power, and what we prefer is very political."
The host, Katie, cites another show guest named Jessica DeFino, who said something like, "We can't confuse what makes us feel powerful with being empowering." For instance, body modification like plastic surgery is not feminist, because feminism is liberation from gender oppression, not some feeling of empowerment.
A couple of other lines from this segment, partially paraphrased:
- Power is the ability to wield it, to define the terms.
- There's survival in accommodating, but you can't confuse it with freedom.
A while later, they discuss the transformation of Kristi Noem.
After describing Noem's propaganda photo trip to El Salvador, including photos not usually shown that reveal how much of a setup the whole thing was (shared by Jeff Sharlet), they switch to talking about the MAGA fetishization of exaggerated femininity from plastic surgery:
Katie: There is this very stunning physical transformation [Noem] undergoes. We know it takes a tremendous amount of labor and money. Typically with things like plastic surgery, aesthetic performance as a woman, there's a game you're playing where you want it to look natural enough. If you are upper class your work should be so good that people wonder. I think the overtness she's putting on is the point, the detectability is the point, that she's signaling, "I'm willing to do the work."
TMC: That's right - which is the ultimate achievement of allowable womanhood, allowable femininity. The safest femininity is to say that you are a willing participant in being shaped by the male gaze and its expectations: I will conform. One of my favorite studies is about the power of makeup. They did a study — they measured people's response to women who wear makeup in the workplace. And one of my favorite conclusions there is that even when women's makeup is bad — meaning super obvious, not flattering — they still get a bump in likability from the person judging them because at least they tried. What women are judged on is their effort to conform, then. You don't even have to be attractive.
The fat positivity movement (and Lizzo in particular), they say, were unacceptable because they were inherently "trying" not to be attractive. Beauty has to look like effort, to the Right... like a cartoon. Trump judging a beauty contest was perfect for him, TMC says.
TMC: What always matters is how close are you to power? And Donald Trump understood that. If I get enough power, I can get people to reject all these things they said they believed in: looking natural, being a good person, believing in diversity. Everybody gave that up immediately when he became president because all that matters is power, Donald Trump proves that. And women like Kristi make a career out of being able to accurately decipher what powerful men want and give it to them.
Kate Manne calls it "conspicuous compliance."
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