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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!
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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.
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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!
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