I would have separated teeth. The two upper incisors, that space technically called the diastema that makes a world of super, if you’re Léa Seydoux, and if you’re Amy Winehouse you’re a drug addict doomed to an untimely death.
When I was in elementary school, my cousin tripped over me, I fell face forward (was always very mobile), my front teeth broke. The dentist reconstructed them attached to me. More than forty years have passed, I’ve had to redo them a couple of times, and each time I’m tempted to say: leave them separate. Then I never do that.
If you’re Madonna Ciccone and you put on makeup and hair for two hours before going out and there’s no part of your body that isn’t toned because you’ve spent the time I’ve devoted to eating greasy carbs to stay fit, then have the separated teeth is a habit. If you’re Guia Soncini and you’re going out in stretchy pants because you’re not on a diet and boobs jiggle because the bra bothers you, then severed teeth are all it takes to look like a bum and see that you decline. Access to public places.
Twenty-three years ago, when it premiered in Notting Hill, London, Julia Roberts was thirty-one, in her prime, had just filmed the best turn-of-the-century romantic comedy and had armpit hair. Some of us, unfortunates who were paid to tell the costumes of celebrities and their reflections on the mortal universe, tried to talk about a new trend, but we laughed: it’s Julia Roberts, it seems to you that hers hair can have the effect mine?
On Friday I received a message from an Instagram activist about the presentation of the book. The person who was there wanted to know what the point was that a dirty balcony and all that stuff didn’t have fifteen seconds to shove a razor under your armpits.
The new militants say they need to change the aesthetic criteria. Criteria that have their own logic: they used to get fat because being fat meant having unlimited access to food and thus being rich; those who are rich can now afford tofu and pilates and become slim (very surprising: aesthetic criteria are class criteria).
What the militants want to say is: aesthetic criteria must be abolished, we want an aesthetic in which we are all considered beautiful. Only that there is beauty when there is ugliness: everything beautiful is like no other beauty, everything beautiful means that “beautiful” is worth nothing anymore, it’s a runaway devaluation. What they should be saying is: But who cares about being beautiful if you don’t get paid to be beautiful, if it’s not your job to be, if you don’t have the genetic luck to be effortless.
But they can’t say, because from the Mughals and Baptists up and down the dialectic of the people has been shaped by telling each other that we’re still beautiful, not that we’re half-finished, but luckily we’re going for rated something else.
And that’s why they say we need to change the criteria to include armpit hair as an attractive detail. And no one objects that changing the criteria means changing the category of the excluded: whatever criteria you set, some will be excluded, perhaps the one with armpits with alopecia. Nobody raises this objection, not even me, because today I want to formulate another one: how do we say it with desire?
Desire can’t be controlled, and you can work hairy armpits in all fashion shoots, but you can’t force someone to find hairy armpits or severed teeth or tripes with pant covers attractive. The absence of desire is also very comforting (I usually open conversations with strangers by saying that to get over the drama of having lots of boobs in the hot season, I keep beer bottles in the fridge to put in the sweaty attic ; at this point it is quite certain that the stranger will not regard me as an object of desire and the evening will pass peacefully); but to appreciate it you have to be more determined than most people.
The story of the trans teacher-who killed herself is dramatic for all viewers, even those who profess to take joy in the belief that gender change will ease your life’s pain: We are an era so dumb having turned the illness into intellectual ambition. Friday on Repubblica, they interviewed a former student of hers, who stigmatized the behavior of her former schoolmates (the others are always insensitive) and her parents, who considered her a freak.
If we laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel in the cinema, is it because we know how to separate cinematic fiction from real life? Or rather, because you’re running from laughter, you’re running from laughing, and then in life, maybe after five seconds you ask what he missed, if he’s hurt and needs help, but the first five seconds you’re laughing? Something ridiculous is culture, not nature, my little readers will object, and the suicide students needed to be educated in diversity, as did their parents. But that’s not how it works: you can teach them that someone has the right to have equal rights, you can teach them not to be so rude and to laugh in public, but you can’t force them to find someone funny , monstrous, different. Ridicule, like desire, cannot be commanded.
As we have further committed to telling ourselves how to be tolerant and non-judgmental (“don’t judge” is the dumbest imperative of contemporary militancy: “I like hair in my armpits” is judgment as much as “I do it doesn’t like it”, judgments are the way living beings behave), we neglect the most terrifying detail: the appropriation of a corpse. Nobody, not even those who do it, knows why one commits suicide; but we know that it is about continuing the controversy that interests us at this moment.
Many years after that spring of 1999, a goodwill activist hailed Julia Roberts for her feminist gesture, for this canon-busting, for this identity-affirmation. Roberts replied no, she was really wrong when she calculated how wide the dress was and that if you raised your arm to greet the crowd, you would see the hair. “It’s just that I’m stupid,” she concluded. Except because she was Julia Roberts, she wasn’t ridiculous and hairy and creepy: she was Julia Roberts, she could afford armpit hair too. It was Julia Roberts, so she had guaranteed pleasure. Because times and aesthetic criteria change in human society, but one thing remains constant: It’s unfair.