The XX Factor: What women really think.

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  Will the real 47 year old please stand up?

  Posted Thursday, April 16, 2009 1:28 PM | By E.J. Graff

  Yes, Dahlia, you're right; I misread you. Perhaps Susan Boyle does look like a "real" 47 year old, pre-media-consciousness. But I wasn't talking about Westchester- or Alexandria-based suburban "babes"; I was talking about the women I see in the gritty working town of Worcester, Mass., or in train stations or at bus stops in various parts of the country: The plucking, colorizing, and gym-going isn't necessarily done in a sophisticated manner. (I really do mean over-plucking; skinny and abruptly abbreviated eyebrows of the Jennifer Garner variety are among my perhaps, um, excessively long list of pet peeves, right up there with the misuse of "reticent" to mean "reluctant.") These women don't necessarily look great. They certainly don't look like Madonna or Sheryl Crow. But they do look as if they've been watching too much TV and idling too long in the drugstore cosmetics aisle—as Susan Boyle doesn't.

  As for Susan Boyle herself, our heroine of the day: The Mirror says here that she was oxygen-deprived at birth, learning-disabled as a result, and sang to escape her childhood bullies. I don't think she'll be looking polished any time soon—and thank goodness for that. Susan, fight off those tweezers at all costs!
  

  Filed under: barbie, Britain's Got Talent, Susan Boyle, lookism

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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