This is really a girls-only post, but I'll keep it open for the guys out there who pluck/shave/wax their uni-brows (and I know you do it, even though you claim otherwise).
Having been born and raised in Seattle, I never really caught onto makeup because it's a pretty granola city where wearing jeans and fleece is kind of the norm. In general, growing up, nobody really wore makeup, so I didn't either. Every time I went to visit relatives in Iran though, it was clear that I was out of place. They asked me if I was a "hippie" and wondered why I was acting more Islamic than they were acting in the Islamic Republic. They were totally confused: If I was an American, why the fuck did I not "look" like one (i.e. the typical chick on MTV). I mostly just judged them and went about my business, feeling superior and "feminist."
My dad grew up hating Persian culture (now I understand it's probably because his uncles killed his mother), was always an outsider, and resented my mother for her fancy family who looked down on him. He expressed this anger through his hatred of all things artificial. Every time my mom dyed her hair, he would scoff at her and chastise her (and, in turn, I learned to scoff at my mother too). There were constant fights about her materialistic leanings due to her polished nails or the shade of her lipstick. He was always yelling, "How can you pray and still wear eye-liner!" At the time, I thought this was all very noble because he was right: Women shouldn't be so obsessed with how they look. It was so fake.
It's all pretty ironic because, at the time, I thought I was being all feminist because I didn't do these artificial things, whereas by not imbibing, I was only following a paternalistic order. When it finally became imperative that I pluck my eyebrows (seriously: not a pretty sight, and I waited all the way until my sophomore year of college!), I was in Iran that summer and my aunt told me it was time to stop being so old-fashioned. I was coerced only because my father wasn't with me that summer in Tehran. But my God, what a difference! I can easily say that getting my eyebrows done was one of the major turning points of my life. This sounds trite, but it truly was a sort of revolution. Me and one of my cousins (the one four years younger than me) walked back to my grandmother's from the secret underground beauty salon (because, yes, makeup and all sorts of beautifying are illegal in Iran, although that's like trying to enforce prohibition in the U.S., so it's kind of an open "secret"), and we reveled in our new identities, sitting in front of the mirror in my grandmother's bedroom for the rest of the night admiring ourselves.
I did not go back to Iran for a while after that. Each successive picture of my cousin that I received contained a more and more stylized look with excessive makeup... while I went on the granola path at Whitman College. She got a perm. She got into eye-shadow. She went to Dubai specifically to purchase MAC makeup. She got a nose job. And finally she left Iran to pursue her advanced degree in physics in Canada where she lives right now (and regularly posts to Facebook). People always ask me if I ever thought about what it would have been like if I'd been born and raised in Iran instead. Someone at work asked me this the other day. "I mean, jeez," he said. "You could have been wearing a burka!"
People say stupid shit like this all the time, so I'm past getting offended--they just don't know any better. For one, burkas are only worn in Afghanistan. They mask the entire face. Women in Iran wear chadors and roosaries, and their faces show. And, yes, I think about growing up in Iran all the time. I would not have been some crazy conservative person. More likely, I would have emerged with at least four plastic surgery procedures by now. I don't know what to make of this. I think a simplistic approach is to judge it, like I once did. But now I am just not so sure. Take my cousin for example: She's a fucking nuclear physicist. If that's not feminist, then I'm not sure what is. She grew up during the Iran/Iraq war and lived through bomb raids and food shortages, yet she underwent surgery to alter the shape of her nose. What lofty cause did she fight for when there were underground demonstrations against the government? The right to date in public. The right to wear skirts. She and her peers risked their lives by flouting the government's rules, wearing lipstick and sandals. These supposedly anti-feminist things--makeup, surgery--became devices by which my lady friends expressed revolt. Those women wore their revolutions on their faces, in their clothes.
Okay, but this is all reverie. What I mean to be getting at is: This year, in my quest to date Persian men and become "part" of my culture, I have discovered makeup. A few years after I graduated from college, I started using a bare minimum of blush and lipstick, but it all really took off this year. I GET IT. I finally GET why Sephora and the MAC counter is so fun! I wake up in the morning, mostly because I can't wait to put on my makeup and to drink coffee. It started with the Bare Minerals foundation powders, and quickly graduated to the NARS multiple sticks, Laura Mercier concealer, lip-glosses, eye-shadows, EYE-LINER... then, THE PROFESSIONAL FLAT-IRON. I GET IT. And, just recently, over fried pickles with Alice at Ninth Ward, I began to feel a little guilty. "Is it awful that I love makeup so much?" I wondered out loud. "Hell no," she said. But I still wondered.
When the Shah's father was in power in Iran, he made a concerted effort to "Westernize" Iranians. One way he did this was by outlawing chadors and forcing women to go out with their heads uncovered. My great-grandmother was so un-used to this that she took to staying indoors at all times, confined to her house, imprisoned. This is worth repeating: Imprisoned by a law that forced her to be "free." My grandmother, who was a young girl at the time, left the house forgetting not to wear her chador. She gripped the black cloth around her body as she walked down the street. A policeman found her and yanked the chador off her head and beat her. Which leads me to think: Is it not so much about the particular "choices" we make and those results, but really just more about being able to make the choice?
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