The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Contrarian Take on Susan Boyle

I didn't see the Susan Boyle clip until Sunday, and unlike everyone else in America, I didn't find it moving. Instead, I found it to be a savvy, cynical piece of TV editing. The visual sequence (the one now on YouTube) is perfectly designed to elicit a crude catharsis in its viewers—to borrow a crucial critical term from one of our earliest drama critics, Aristotle. The skeptic in me hardly believes it wasn't scripted. All the obvious reasons why so many have found it so "moving" have been trotted out. Letty Cottin Pogrebin proclaimed it a powerful strike against pervasive "ageism," a clip that showed us how wrongly snide we are about the dreams of a plain 47-year-old woman. And on one level, that's right. Boyle's life has been changed. (For now, at least.) But the real catharsis the sequence offers is that it lets us indulge as a group (this is crucial) our culture's superficial feelings about appearance, age, sexual worth, and then expel them. (Boyle is as unerotic as it gets; actually, she's an-erotic, since she has never even been kissed.) Watching at first, we too are the sneering audience members, the young girls who roll their eyes. (Note how carefully edited the audience shots are.) But—then, cue the music, and even as Boyle is just opening her mouth, people's faces are lighting up. She has relaxed into herself and her voice is... pretty good. (Not great.) And so we get to exhale and let our saccharine hearts soar with the schmaltzy music as, for a moment, we see "proven" on TV that looks and sex aren't everything. For that moment, the light mantle of eros even seems to rest around Boyle—she smiles, she has some cultural worth, someone, we think, might even kiss her one day! Thus, release. In a sense, Boyle inhabits the role of the scapegoat of early village traditions whom we punish with exile (or sneering), but whom we now, through the magic vehicle of TV, welcome back into the fold, surprising ourselves with our capacious hearts.

But do not take this for a moment to be a blow in the face of ageism. Or a sign that we're becoming a more thoughtful culture. Just listen to the condescension in beautiful, tanned, made-over Amanda Holden's language when she tells newspapers that the moment they give Boyle a makeover would be the moment "it's spoilt." Indeed, it would be. It would mean we couldn't for that moment feel our little hit of catharsis, of canned "uplift," before going to our usual over-valorization of erotic value and celebrity plasticity. In one sense, Robin Givhan was wrong yesterday to suggest we're fooling ourselves if we think Boyle doesn't need a makeover. She does. But my bet is that the makeover will only disenchant us with her over time. We got the hit we needed, and like any stimulant, its effect will decrease as we try to re-experience it.

The First Tweeze is the Hardest

Tweezers, Please

A post from Slate's Emily Yoffe:

Like Dahlia and Bonnie and E.J. I am enchanted by Susan Boyle and her angelic voice. However, I have seen enough makeover shows to know that after "they" get a hold of her and do her hair, pluck her eyebrows, put lipstick and mascara on her, and get her some flattering clothes, when she sees herself in the mirror she'll cry at how pretty she looks and how much she likes looking pretty. As she said in the Mirror story E.J. mentions, "I had my hair curled especially for the show and wore a dress I'd bought a few months back for my nephew's wedding." In other words, like just about everyone else, she'd like to look her best. This doesn't mean she had to submit herself to knives and injections. But now that she seems on the verge of what could be a big performing career, not plucking those eyebrows would eventually just be an affectation.  

Will the real 47 year old please stand up?

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!

47 is the new 47?

E.J., I think the only disagreement between us was that you thought I said Susan Boyle looks like an ordinary suburban women, where I in fact said she looks like a normal 47-year-old. At least where I live, a lot of 47-year-olds look more like Susan Boyle than the plucked, processed, creamed and lacquered suburban babes you describe. But when I wrote “normal 47-year-old” I was also thinking more about the natural aging process that has upended itself in recent years. I suspect that until a few decades ago most 47-year-olds looked more like Ms. Boyle than Paula Abdul, Marcia Cross and Sheryl Crow and the rest of the cohort of ’62-ers that—as you note—look closer to 29. I just can’t tell whether Susan Boyle doesn’t notice or care about her appearance. Even if she didn’t she probably does now.

I imagine if we see her at next year's Golden Globes in a sleek blonde blowout and a size 2 Reem Acra dress, we will have our answer.

Innocents on Stage

Well, Dahlia, I disagree: Susan Boyle doesn't look at all like an ordinary suburban woman. I'm as in love with her video as everyone else, and yes, appalled by the condescension with which she's being treated. But I think I understand it. In our era, ordinary suburban women overpluck their eyebrows, overdose their with hair with coloring and cream conditioner, and worry about when they can get to the gym. They don't confess to being 47-year-old virgins on international television. Susan Boyle looks like a throwback to a pre-modern era, a WWI Scottish villager, before 24-hour television, before self-improvement magazines, before the onslaught of the cosmetics and body improvement industries. She's astonishingly innocent of all that hyper-self-consciousness that a generation of para-feminists have been discussing, Naomi Wolf, Susie Orbach, and all the rest who wring their hands publicly about Barbie and absurdly slim models and adolescent bulimia in the Marshall Islands, about the vaunted pressure on girls to be perfect—gorgeous, brilliant, athletic, charming, and sexy all at once. Most human beings are sensitive to how we are perceived—and for many, that has become hypersensitivity in our media-tized world.

Susan Boyle seems like a kind of miracle: immune to, even innocent of, all that—and yet with a extraordinarily developed and sophisticated voice hidden in her extraordinarily unsophisticated package. It's that contradiction, I think, that has made her a huge hit. Most people would have been afraid and ashamed to appear on stage with an appearance that's so in conflict with how contemporary women are expected to present themselves. How refreshing to see someone who doesn't appear even to notice her appearance—and yet who is proud to carry that fabulous gift!

The Anti-Cougar

Now here’s the team from CBS’s Early Show this morning (clip below), insulting her again: Maggie Rodriguez’s patronizing “you look lovely, Susan” starts the interview—the way you might talk to a small child in clown shoes, and she then repeats the question about how Boyle managed to perform “even though everyone was laughing at you?” Co-host Harry Smith, fearing perhaps that Boyle is too provincial to have any cognitive abilities at all, presses her, “Do you understand that? Do you understand what a big deal this is?”

The reason everyone seems to feel the need to insult Susan Boyle to her face all the time is that she looks like a normal 47-year-old woman, and not like Stacey Anderson from The Cougar. That it’s OK to laugh at her for that, and to assume that she should be laughing along with us, makes me want to cry too.

Revenge of the Dowdy

I love this video of 47-year-old Susan Boyle in her audition for the new season of Britain's Got Talent, the U.K. version of America's Got Talent. Boyle, an unemployed village lady from West Lothian, was saucy but awkward in her short pre-audition interview with the panelists, and came off as a provincial, drab, stylishly frumpy, biddy with an unrealistic fantasy to be a professional singer on the scale of "Elaine Paige." As with the U.S. version, reality impresario judge Simon Cowell typically says insulting things to untalented contestants. Susan, seemingly selected for her comic value, was a sure target for Cowell's opprobrium until the decidedly unglam ma'am brought the mic to her mouth and rocked the room to standing ovations. Boyle had apparently never performed outside of her church choir before the televised audition, but her interpretation of "I Dream the Dream" from Les Misérable impressed the unanimous panel to put her in the season's competition. Unfortunately, the panel members couldn't help insulting Boyle a little bit, anyway. After the wild applause, Piers Morgan told her "everyone was laughing at you" before, and Amanda Holden delivered the heartfelt bulletin, "everybody was against you."