By now it should be obvious that my signature style is neither a floppy hat nor a robe nor a combination of the two, but a pattern of dependably unreliable highs and lows that decorate my ceaselessly evolving moral outfit. It's exhausting to have to annually, biannually, n-annually reason with myself why I continue to blog about fashion when my interests are elsewhere. I'm always taking breaks from my blog and vacations from real life. I travel manically. I jump into unsustainable relationships because I'm a bored escapist. When the going gets tough, I get going. I revel in the social acceptability of "soul-searching" but am usually first to criticize my fellow millennial narcissist friends for griping over the agony of their privileged self-awareness. I'm a lazy hypocrite, and I'm egotistical for even having the patience to take enough free online personality tests to come to that Jungian conclusion.
I won't offer a defense. I will offer an honest explanation of why I (we) continue to blog and what I (we) get out of this. My condition is not unique, and I don't say that to absolve myself of the lone responsibility to change. I say that to draw attention to the lack of control I and a lot of women my age have given the physics of our conscience's interaction with culture.
A vain career is insured by its value to corporations that commercially
thrive on feminine insecurity. And I work as an accomplice to these
conglomerates because my survival – daresay conditional excellence- depends on
the reliability of such a lucrative Idea’s infrastructure. The more I encourage
you to value beauty, the more ideologically founded the beauty industry
becomes. And the more money I can
potentially make by investing in it. I know better, but I submit regardless.
What’s worse is that my submission, though obviously conflicted, is not
reluctant. I’m not sure that in fashion blogging I am doing the ‘bare minimum’
to demonstrate my concession to The House. I seem to be giving extra, offering
my creative efforts instead of my impersonal and detached labor as a physical employee. But in this context,
I can at least superficially play along with the delusion that I am my own
boss.
I’m sure some of you
are already prepared to undermine my inconvenient proposition with some
iteration of postindustrial capitalism's most reasonable self-defense, one that
I may aggrandizingly assume I played a role in disseminating: material
self-enhancement in the form of makeup and apparel levels out the
non-egalitarian playing fields that nature, in its eerily harmonious rhythm
between stasis and chaos, guarantees. We don’t all look the same. We’re not all
beautiful. Our bodies don’t represent our personalities, only our gene pool.
What I, and what my supporters, fail and have failed to
counterpoint is that valuing a beauty standard
is not necessary to happiness, that tastes are not indicative of personalities,
and that choices are not uniformly representative of our mental process, but instead of our alliances with fluid cultural
frequencies and exposure to forces as influential as they are invisible (ergo
dangerous, but that’s just my opinion). Our tastes don’t really even belong to
us. They belong to the world, and we simply rent them out during our short (and
all the while eternal) time on earth.
But in order to feel better about our cooperative roles in
such an oppressive system, we re-present the morbid façade to ourselves, more
or less hacking the syntax of the process, to protect us from guilt. We talk
ourselves out of anxiety because we are infected by an uncanny mutation of
Stockholm Syndrome. Somehow, through some series of psychological or
sociological impressions, we have learned to romanticize our imprisonment in an
effort to tolerate our captor: Materialism.
This blog absolutely cannot be political because it is my
job. I profit from this platform. And to assuage my raging cognitive dissonance
for choosing to continue bolstering ideology, I offer you the tools to trust
that everything you read here is, deliberately or otherwise, corrupt. Know better.
Everything is infinite (pretty sure this isn't actually true),
Bebe
