"Mirror," the tag.

That last post really needed the tag "mirror." How did I come so far without a tag for mirror? I made one, then had 22+ years of the blog to search to add the tag retrospectively. It was easy to search for the word "mirror," but hard to separate the posts that deserved the tag — the ones referring to the object, a mirror — from the ones that did not — the ones using "mirror" as a dying metaphor (ideas "mirror" other ideas and so forth). And then there's the drudgery of adding the tag and republishing. But in the end, there's the fun of clicking on the tag and peering into the kaleidoscope.

There was "Fun with Mirrors" in 2008:

There was, also in 2008, the convex mirror I loved and wanted to buy:

"It's expensive — over $1800 — but as I thought about possibly buying it, I realized what I wanted it for was to take pictures, and therefore what I really should buy is a fisheye lens for my Nikon D50." So I got that fisheye lens. If you're nostalgic for those days, click the tag "fisheye." 

There was this advice about dolphins, in 2014: "People, can you just leave the dolphins alone? They don't want to swim with you, despite the 'expression' you see on their faces. The love you think you are experiencing is nothing more than self-love. Stay home, save your money, and stare in a mirror until you get a deep, accurate assessment of how true your self-love is. Is there a fixed smile on your face? I hope not, but if there is, it's not because you share the spirit of the dolphin. The dolphin is 'smiling' because nature played a dirty trick on him, drawing idiot humans into his domain. Get out. Leave the dolphin alone."

There was the mystery of what a monkey sees in a mirror, back in 2005: "What's in the monkey's mind when he looks in a mirror? Higher minds -- human beings, great apes, dolphins -- figure out, when they are looking in a mirror, that they are seeing themselves. Other animals, it's long been thought, think they're seeing a stranger. But a new study shows that the monkey occupies a middle position, where it doesn't see itself, but it doesn't see a stranger either. The monkey sees a 'Puzzling Other.'"

In 2024, I had Grok outline a book for me. It was titled "Through the Glass/Exploring Mirrors as Portals to Other worlds."

I was surprised to see that, back in 2013, I'd contributed to my long-running men-in-shorts theme with this stark advice: "Take a good look at yourself in the mirror when you've got your shorts on. Ask yourself if I were a woman, would I fuck me?"

There was this good question, in 2013: "If someone holds up a mirror and you say 'I look like an idiot,' is the mirror-holder calling you an idiot?"

There was the sunset in my rear-view mirror as I drove 500 miles to see Meade in 2009:

"Many Christians believe pride is not only a sin, but the original one, and the worst of them. It is demonic, 'the complete anti-God state of mind'..."

"... as C.S. Lewis wrote in 'Mere Christianity.' Pride is a turning away from God, and an exultation of oneself.* The mirror is a symbol of pride and vanity, but it also symbolizes our incomplete, earthly knowledge. As the Apostle Paul wrote about God in his first letter to the Corinthians: 'For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.'... In Islamic mysticism... a smudged mirror is a metaphor for the human soul. It is only when the ego is annihilated, and the surface is polished clean, that the divine becomes visible.... In 1967, Michel Foucault darkly described the mirror as a kind of threshold, a mix between a fantasy world, a utopia and some weird other place on the margins — which he called a 'heterotopia.' The mirror is one such strange place because we discover our presence and our absence at the same time. 'I see myself there where I am not,' he wrote, 'in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface.'"

A small sample from "All This Staring at Our Faces Is Messing With Our Heads" (NYT gift link), by Catherine Shannon.

___________________

* Shouldn't that be "an exaltation of oneself"? Are we not talking about raising ourselves above God (as opposed to jubilating over how wonderful we are)? Think about it. We say "an exaltation of larks," not "an exultation of larks." 

"Capes that flowed into skirts, coats on top of denim jackets and socks worn over tights.... layers were bright sweaters or cozy scarves... many people were covered up [or] wearing shorts, high-slit skirts or other layers...."

In case you want to feel as though it will be perfectly fashionable to throw on as many oversized comfortable layers of whatever you happen to find in your closet, look at the photographs at "Layers Upon Layers of Lively Fall Fashion/Capes that flowed into skirts, coats on top of denim jackets, socks over tights — and don’t forget scarves and sweaters" (NYT)(free-access link).

The article is by Simbarashe Cha, who works in the tradition of the much-missed Bill Cunningham. Scanning the photographs, I get the feeling he was working on sets that didn't pan out. One unrealized set is "twins" (2 individuals out and about while dressed somewhat like each other). Another is the double breasted jacket. Those pictures are tucked into fashion's biggest catch-all: layers.

I was reminded of the famous advice attributed to Coco Chanel: 

"Going to a party and thinking about what others are thinking about you is a pretty surefire way to have a terrible time."

"It’s such a reliable way to feel terrible that social psychologists in the ’70s and ’80s used to have people sit in front of a mirror and think about themselves when they wanted to study how negative moods affect behavior."

Said Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science, quoted in "How to Get a Party Buzz Even When You’re Not Drinking/These tips for sober socializing may not have you dancing on tables, but they’ll help you have plenty of fun" (NYT).

Thinking about yourself while looking in a mirror is a pretty distorted form of thinking about yourself. And I'm not even sure what "they" means in "they wanted to study." Is it the "people" or the social psychologists? When I first read that, I thought the subjects — the "people" — were receiving therapy and being taught that they look worse when they're thinking about themselves. So quit focusing on yourself and you will do better in social settings. But then I saw "social" before "psychologists" and realized this isn't individual therapy. The "people" were subjects of a study, and they were looking in the mirror... why? To ensure that they were thinking about themselves? Or was it to produce "negative moods"? Doesn't seem like a well-designed study!

Anyway, do you go to parties and think about what other people are thinking about you? Are there any mirrors around? Are you able to dance without drinking?

ADDED: I'm having a very interesting discussion with Grok about mirrors. At this point, it's pretty much written a complete book for me. I'll just show you the cover:

Pointing my fingers... pointing my fingers... at you....

ADDED: And Trump already replicated the mirror routine — here, with Jimmy Fallon, back in 2016. The Mick Jagger routine happened in 2001. There may be earlier examples of this routine, or similar things, like Harpo and Groucho in "Duck Soup," and, replicating that, Harpo and Lucy on "I Love Lucy."

"The concern of gay men with how our bodies look often gets labeled a fixation, an obsession or, most glibly, an expression of narcissism."

"What’s less frequently acknowledged are the forces of insecurity and anxiety driving that obsession. For gay men of all ages, types, statuses and lifestyles, body image remains such a fraught, weird, private, painful subject that, even among friends who talk about everything, it’s often off limits for discussion. Officially, we’re all supposed to look fantastic while not caring. Get caught peering in the mirror too closely and you’ll be called vain; fail to look closely enough and you risk an even harsher judgment.... For decades, the body image that gay men craved, although it morphed as tastes evolved, was predicated on monitoring straight male culture, identifying whatever the heterosexual world had decided was masculine or sexy at that moment and then tailoring, editing and selectively italicizing it.... Turning your appearance into a calculatedly self-aware physical performance of straight masculinity, with a flourish or two of ironic detailing, gave gay men some autonomy and subverted straight culture by reinventing it as something gay, a look one could wear as a costume that might be visible only to the like-minded...."

Writes Mark Harris, in "Gay Men Have Long Been Obsessed With Their Muscles. Now Everyone Is. In Hollywood, on Instagram and beyond, the male-on-male gaze still decides what’s hot and what’s not" (NYT)(full access link, because this is a long and surprisingly substantial article (with a nice "a collection of gay-coded photographs of male physiques over the years")).

"Stroppy."

"Etymology: From obstropulous, obsolete slang form of obstreperous, +‎ -y.... Adjective: (UK, Australia, New Zealand, slang) Ornery, fractious, belligerent, or obstreperous, and hence difficult to deal with.... Quotation: 2010, Gillian Bloxham, W. Doyle Gentry, Anger Management For Dummies‎, UK edition: Even today, women who show signs of anger and who express themselves in some assertive way may be labelled stroppy for doing so" (Wiktionary).

I encountered the word "stroppy" this morning, reading Maureen Dowd's new column, "Catch the Smug Mug on That Thug!" (NYT).

[Trump] no doubt workshopped his stroppy mug-shot look in front of the mirror, trying to convey “Never surrender!” as he was literally surrendering. And in another master stroke of projection, he accused the prosecutors pursuing him for election interference of “election interference.”

Using UK/Australia/New England slang is a sign of elitism. 

"I was never told a woman’s hair should look beautiful. But, definitely, my hair was the most hated — in my culture, in my village..."

"... because in Iran, when I was growing up, oh, my God, curly hair was a disaster. People mocked me, called people with big hair a specific name — it meant 'big-head woman' — to shame us. When I was taking an English course [to prepare to attend university in the United Kingdom], a woman asked me, 'You straighten your hair?' And then she took off my headscarf and said, 'My God, look at your head. What are you doing? You just straighten this part because when it’s out of your scarf, you want to show you have straight hair?' I said, 'Yeah, because I don’t have time. I straighten my hair just a bit.' And she told me, 'Don’t.' I went back to my mirror and she said, 'Just look at yourself.' At first I didn’t know why. She said: 'Just look at yourself and don’t make your hair straight. Just look deeply at your hair. You are going to love it.'"

From "Here’s what it’s like to be persecuted for your hair" (WaPo).

"His decision to get the [face] transplant came about because he didn’t want his children to be bullied and be labeled as 'outcasts' due to his disfigurement."

"Having people scream at the sight of you is upsetting, and I couldn’t imagine that happening in the company of my own children,' he said. He recalled the aftermath of his accident... no one would show me a mirror until my ex-girlfriend at the time came to visit and brought one with her.... I can’t describe the feeling I had when seeing myself like that, it didn’t feel real. I was unrecognizable....'"

Leave it to ex-girlfriends to confront you with the awful truth.

Here's the article, at the NY Post, "I had a full-face transplant and it was the best decision I ever made."

I'm not going to confront you with the visual truth right here. You can click on the link. You will see a terrible disfigurement and a really nicely accomplished face transplant. I have followed face transplants here on the blog since the first one — Isabelle Dinoir — whose nose, mouth, and chin were bitten off by her Labrador retriever. (She was unconscious. Don't judge the dog. But spare me the theory that the dog was just doing his faithful best to wake her up.)

Here are the before and after photos of Dinoir. It's impressive how well it was done the first time:

"I couldn't even begin to imagine it was my face or my blood - or that the dog had chewed my face," she says. The injuries to her mouth, nose and chin were so extreme that doctors immediately ruled out a routine face reconstruction. Instead they proposed a ground-breaking face transplant. 

"From the first time I saw myself in the mirror after the operation I knew it was a victory. It didn't look that good because of all the bandages, but I had a nose, I had a mouth - it was fantastic," she says. "I could see in the eyes of the nurses that it was a success."

"For the young, social media filters that smooth skin and inflate their eyes’ proportions are almost ubiquitous, like a popular 'Pixar' filter on Snapchat..."

"... that made its users look like the cartoons of their youth, or the popular Facetune app. It is a short leap to 'Facetuning' in real life. Patients used to approach surgeons with photos of celebrities; now it is more likely of their own filtered face. 'It’s exceptional now to see a photo on social media without a filter,' [says Dr Olivier Amar, one of London’s leading cosmetic surgeons]. 'Patients are comparing themselves to something that doesn’t exist. And because they may only ever see themselves on a phone, using their phone as a mirror, they may not even recognise themselves in a real mirror. If they get these treatments they feel they can have the life as people seem to have online.' Why, then, has this 'bug-eyed' face emerged ahead of all the other cultural standards of beauty? David Bainbridge, a reproductive biologist at the University of Cambridge, wrote in his book Curvology that females are more evolved than males: humans have smaller teeth, flatter faces, smaller chins and less hair than primates, especially females. Many of these qualities are emphasised in 'Instagram face,' the distinctive narrow-nosed 'heart-shaped' face. 'We do not know why women should be more "modern-looking" than men,' Bainbridge writes, 'but it has been suggested that many of the characteristics men find attractive are the same as those which make them look distinctively human.'"

From "Love Island and how young people fell for cosmetic surgery/A surgeon says women want an ‘alien’ face: sharp cheekbones and big lips. Why?" (London Times). "Love Island" is a British reality TV show. 

The term "alien face" is used in the article. It's a reference back to cheesy 1950s movies and has to do with "diagonally pulled-up eyes... narrow nostrils and a glazed, expressionless stare" or something like "the image on the front of Space Raiders crisps, this kind of overbuilt cheek, overbuilt temple, skeletonised, sharp features that just didn’t look correct."

It's interesting to take that observation and extrapolate a reason why so many people would decide that's the most beautiful look. So Bainbridge offers his theory, that we somehow aspire to more and more evolution and are projecting into the future, trying to look like humans a million years from now. How do you know where evolution will take us? 

It seems as though you take your cliché image of a caveman, imagine what is needed to get from that to standard human being of today, then whatever you just did to the caveman, do it again to the person of today, and that's the ultra-evolved human being. Or — to follow Bainbridge's idea — you accept that a woman of today already has that "more evolved" look, so you plot a straight line from modern man to modern woman and keep going. What do you see? Now, get a plastic surgeon to translate that fanciful vision onto your actual face. 

Won't you look weird? Not if you've been using your phone as a mirror.

"Don’t do acid and drive. Control your set (i.e., the people you’re tripping with) and setting. Don’t ever look in the mirror."

"... or, alternatively, do look in the mirror. And, as Marc Maron says he was once told, during a bad trip: Just hang in there, man. According to Maron, that’s advice he still gives people today, although it sounds pretty banal."

From "Talking about LSD sounds funnier than taking it in 'Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics'" (WaPo)(reviewing a Netflix movie).

"My literary heroes were not Julien Sorel, Raskolnikov, or the local yokels of Yoknapatawpha County; they were Batman, Superman, the Flash, the Sub-Mariner, Hawkman."

"Yes, and Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny and Archie Andrews. Folks, you are reading the autobiography of a misanthropic gangster-loving illiterate; an uncultivated loner who sat in front of a three-way mirror practicing with a deck of cards so he could palm off an ace of spades, render it invisible from any angle, and hustle some pots."

From Woody Allen's "Apropos of Nothing."

Also: "I always took to anything that required solitude, like practicing sleight of hand or playing a horn or writing, as it kept me from having to deal with other humans who, for no explainable reason, I didn’t like nor trust. I say 'no reason' because I came from a large, loving, extended family who were all nice to me. It’s like I was a genetically born louse."

Julien Sorel is the protagonist of "The Red and the Black." I had to look it up... even though I read "The Red and the Black"... about 50 years ago. Do people still feel like they need to have read "The Red and the Black"? Well, back in the old days, we did.

As for the Sub-Mariner and Hawkman — never even heard of them.

"The bathroom is simultaneously more personal but less revealing than the bedroom. If you film in your bedroom..."

"... people are going to judge you on what stuff you keep around or what posters you have on your walls, said Joshua King, 14. It can feel too revealing. The bathroom is neutral, even uniform, but still feels intimate. 'It’s quite awkward to film a TikTok, so the bathroom is an easier place to do that,' he said.... The most common bathroom portrayed on TikTok is the type found in millions of suburban middle-class homes. The aesthetic in general is Home Depot: a neutral colored sink and low countertop with a massive fixed mirror above, with composite doors and air-conditioning vents.... Bathrooms with busy wallpaper or yellow lights can be problematic. And TikToks shot in messy bathrooms don’t perform as well. Ryan Ketelhut, 17, said that shooting TikToks has made him clean his bathroom at home more often. 'I keep it cleaner now because I am in there making TikToks,' he said. 'You need to have all your stuff and all your candles and whatever else not strewn everywhere. I had to clean up a little bit before I filmed my last TikTok. I usually have clothes laying in the bathroom. I cleaned the sink out a little with a Clorox wipe and I sprayed down the mirror so it’s not as grimy.'... 'I should be moving to L.A. in the next month or so,' Mr. Alberto said. 'A hundred percent I’m going to make sure that I like the setting of the bathroom. It’s a silly thing, but the videos on my channel that get the most views are in the bathroom.'"

From "We’re All in the Bathroom Filming Ourselves/It’s got lights and it’s got action. The American bathroom is the stage set of the moment" (NYT).

It's interesting that these kids want attention to themselves as individual persons but they do not want to appear within a space that reflects their individuality. They're choosing the neutrality — Clorox-wiped sterility. Don't reveal too much. See me! Don't see me!

ADDED: I'm reading the comments over there, and they're all harping on that "We're all" in the headline. Oh, they're not all saying that. I'm just using a figure of speech, the one the NYT readers are too stodgy to let the NYT use. All that work writing the article, gathering cool new stuff, and the boring readers get stuck on the first 2 words. Eh. Serves the NYT right. That's what you get for thinking you can bring the news about teenagers to the middle aged folks who still read the newspaper.

"Now, this rising generation of autistic adults is joining others in the movement to change autism discussions that, they say, have historically been 'about us, without us.'"

"More and more, they are influencing policies, leading protests against misleading anti-vaccine messages and the marketing of quack treatments, pushing for fair representation in media coverage, movies and TV shows, such as 'Sesame Street,' and helping to reshape language and outdated opinions about what autism really means. (For example, many self-advocates ask to be called 'autistic people' rather than 'people with autism' because the latter implies a disability.) More and more autistic people, such as 16-year-old climate change activist Greta Thunberg, are taking pride in their identities. This month, she called autism her 'superpower.'... [Self-advocates object to teaching] autistic people to mimic neurotypical behaviors that are not natural to them. [Jillian Parramore, an autistic person in California] said providers would come into her preschool class to teach her how to 'walk and talk and breathe like a human — one that they understood to be human.' Parramore, who did not fully speak until she was 10, said trainers would also force her to practice facial expressions in the mirror to convey emotions, saying, 'show me happy, show me sad, show me angry.' 'To this day, I get really freaked out when I see a mirror in public because I immediately want to go through the facial expressions,' she said. 'I’ve even learned to put on lipstick without a mirror because it’s too much for me.'"

From "How a ‘Sesame Street’ Muppet became embroiled in a controversy over autism/Autistic self-advocates are changing discussions that, they say, have historically been 'about us, without us'" (WaPo). Despite the headline, the article is not mostly about "Sesame Street." The comments at the link are fantastic, with some very articulate autistic people dominating. Example:

It is wrong to put a child through conversion therapy which drives them to PTSD just so they can appear neurotypical in ways that do not disable them at all. Cosmetic behaviors like stimming are not corrected for a child's benefit, but rather for the benefit of an ignorant public.

And (from another comment by the same person):

I feel it is rational to assert that society as a whole could benefit if more people with autism could be understood and provided with a better opportunity to contribute. I feel fewer people with autism would end up in institutions, jails, and unemployment lines, and I feel that more savants would be able to step up and make the one-to-species contributions that we are known for.

It isn't a matter of entitlement. The question is: What choices are good for both a minority that needs to be protected and for our society as a whole? The answers come out the same. Encourage understanding, not cruelty, in the general population. Offer *reasonable* accommodations. Don't try to force us to be like everyone else.

"I really like trying to re-create bad haircuts I gave myself when I was like 6. I think there’s something powerful about re-creating looking in the mirror..."

"... and going, Oh shit, this was a horrible idea. I shouldn’t have done this with these scissors. A lot of my inspiration comes from people cutting their own hair and kids cutting their own hair, for sure.... With a step, you lose all the hair around your face — you lose any opportunity to hide, which is cool. I think bangs are there to kind of hide behind a bit. But with a step, there’s no hiding; you have to have your face out in the open.... When you hit the lobes, there’s something about it that feels medieval and kind of pre-Raphaelite; it’s something you can recognize. The second you take it past that, it completely fucks with the golden ratio in your head. You start going, Why is it doing this? It’s not supposed to look like that, which I also like doing to people, I’m not gonna lie."

Said the hairdresser Dylan Chavles, quoted in "Can You Handle These Bangs?" (NY Magazine). This hairstyle is crazy, but it may hoodwink kids too young to think "mullet." Chavles even says, "Youʼll have two bobs — a little ’20s bob up here and a regular bob in the back," which is sounds a lot like "Business up front, party in the back," the classic description of a mullet. And yet "’20s bob" sounds like the party and "regular bob" sounds like business, so it's actually more party up front, business in the back, but that doesn't make it any more aesthetically pleasing. Here's Chavles’s own proud promotion of his work:

View this post on Instagram

Little step for Sienna 🌹

A post shared by Dylan Chavles (@dylanchavles) on Jun 28, 2019 at 3:24pm PDT

"I learned many things from Mad: who Spiro Agnew was, the plots of R-rated movies like 'Coma' and show tunes like 'I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin''..."

"... which the writers of Mad evidently assumed would be familiar enough to 10-year-olds of the ’70s to parody — 'I Got Plenty of Muslims,' sung by a black militant. I also learned about black militants. I also learned from Mad that politicians were corrupt and deceitful, that Hollywood and Madison Avenue pushed insulting junk, that religion was more invested in respectability than compassion, that school was mostly about teaching you to obey arbitrary rules and submit to dingbats and martinets — that it was, in short, all BS. Grown-ups who worried that Mad was a subversive influence, undermining the youth of America’s respect for their elders and faith in our hallowed institutions, were 100 percent correct."

From "The World According to Mad Magazine/Grown-ups who worried it was a subversive influence on America’s youth were 100 percent correct" by Tim Kreider (NYT)(Kreider is a cartoonist and essayist).

ADDED: Here's an example of a cartoon by Kreider: "Male Anorexia." If you like that, consider buying "The Pain: When Will It End?" I did. The back cover has a high-level blurb — from David Foster Wallace:

“I have had the cartoon ‘Male Anorexia’ on my bathroom mirror for seven months. I cannot floss, shave, or pimple-scan without it. I am it; he is me. Kreider rules, and also has a simply mammoth penis–you’d (almost) have to see it to believe it.”

AND: The cartoon "Male Anorexia" is cited at the beginning of an article by Jennifer Finn Boylan, "What It Was Like to Be a Transgender Woman in 2003" (2015):

"I was smugly pleased with my apparent lack of wrinkles and quite content with regard to my personal grooming."

"I did have a little trouble navigating the streets of my new home town, but, all in all, I felt pretty good about things. All that changed with my too successful cataract surgery! My first glance in a mirror disabused me of my fancies of being wrinkle free - what's more, apparently I neither pluck my eyebrows, nor am I able to apply eyeliner in an actual 'line.' Moreover, I'm an astonishingly terrible housekeeper. - I thought the dirt was part of the linoleum pattern! I do, however, now realize that Austin has street signs..."

Writes a commenter at a NYT op-ed titled "Seeing Really Is Believing/How cataract surgery changed my life" and teased on the front page with "I Wasn't Crazy. The World Really Was Getting Darker." The teaser title doesn't reveal that it's about cataracts, but I guessed that it was. The column itself, by Jennifer Finney Boylan, is a little too sentimental and arty for my taste.

ADDED: I liked the comment. It was funny, and as a cataract patient myself, I identified with the point of view. But I've got to say that the part about eyeliner is confusing. If the bad application of eyeliner was caused by bad eyesight and she didn't notice the problem before the surgery, why would there be a problem after the surgery? You go in for the procedure without makeup, and you're forbidden to wear eye makeup for 2 weeks. So by the time she could see the makeup, she would have had clear eyesight for putting it on. But it's hard to put eyeliner on straight, and it's quite possible that seeing what you're doing wouldn't solve the problem.

Something made "pettish" seem like the right adjective with "heiress," so I wondered if "pettish" was to "heiress" as "scantily" is to "clad."

I don't want to write in clichés. I eschew triteness here. I wrote "pettish heiress" and felt artistically compelled to Google the phrase...

Far from trite, "pettish heiress" hasn't been (googlably) used since 1891, in "Mr. Zinzan of Bath, Or, Seen in an Old Mirror."

"bold, courageous, beautifying, radiant and captivating when there’s a story and based on a conversation that led up to it. It’s not just an image. It shows an element of trust."

A man rhapsodizes about the photo of a "full-frontal bare vulva" texted to him by his his 24-year-old girlfriend. Quoted in The New York Times in "The Selfie That Dares to Go There/Men are not the only ones texting pictures of their private parts."

Much of the article is about how to take a good "v-selfie":

“Snapchat filters banish blemish and razor bumps,” she said, adding that when she gets really fancy she uses Photoshop. “My mother is a photographer — lights and background are everything. Sometimes filters can make the ‘v’ look shaved even if it’s been two days and you’re stubbly. You want your ‘v’ to look good, so whatever light, filter, position will make your ‘v’ look best, that’s the one you should use. I use it as a narrative, as if you’re telling a story. It’s an aspect of that, it’s not just a vagina.”

I was going to say the use of "v" was a convenience for those who know the correct word is "vulva" but feel they ought to say "vagina" to fit in with those who don't.

Lexi Stout, 27 and the executive director at VSpot Medi Spa on Madison Avenue, which provides grooming services for the nether regions, has flashed her iPhone flora, stored in the cloud, to friends at a bar. “When I was in high school, if you had pubic hair, it was embarrassing,” Ms. Stout said....

“We’re in a generation full of people that want cosmetic improvements so they can share images,” [said adonna’s dermatologist Dr. Paul Jarrod Frank]. “I think the feeling of one’s sexuality is very much a center point of one’s image of themselves.”...

“I sit on the bed, prop the phone on a pillow and set the timer,” said [lingerie consultant Stephanie] Ms. Moreno, a petite brunette with large luminous brown eyes and tapered nails painted bright sapling-green. “It’s not just sexual, it has artistic merit and beauty. It’s sentimental and more intimate than sending my face.”

Later, a friend of the author's opines that if the woman doesn't include her face in the shot it looks "like leftovers at a cannibal dinner party."

The article descends into darkness with the discussion of women who don't "feel empowered" by taking and sending "v-selfies." A modest or revenge-porn averse woman is framed as a coward, "afraid to look at or experience their own intimate feminine beauty."

Nick, a 31-year-old software salesman and former Marine who served two combat tours in Iraq and the Republic of Georgia, brought up his girlfriend’s sexual inhibition to his PTSD therapist, who prescribed they take V-selfies over a mirror.

“She was very unsure of herself, very unconfident,” Nick said. “We didn’t have sex very often. It wasn’t something she was super-comfortable with, but I was in love with her. I was like, ‘O.K., well I guess I’ll find a way to make this no longer an issue.’”

A subsequent lover was far more overt, sending some images “including her face, which I thought was ambitious and I would advise against it, but yeah — she just wasn’t afraid.”

Wow! What happened between those last 2 paragraphs?! Did Nick dump the woman he loved because she didn't step up to the therapist-prescribed porn shoot?! Where's the #MeToo spirit now? Does it drop out of the picture whenever it interferes with some giddy theme of the joys of sex?

This article caused me to do an image search...



... I had to wonder what the hell is "sapling green," that color on the "tapered nails"?

"Despite the physical changes wrought by the hormones, Abby continued to suffer from a profound self-consciousness about her face."

"She felt that when she was seen from the front she looked persuasively feminine, and even striking, with abundant hair that framed her face, and wide-set eyes. But when she turned her head she looked far more masculine: the bossing of her brow showed in profile, as did the length of her jaw.... Abby’s self-consciousness in the company of others was nothing compared with the unhappiness she felt when faced with her own reflection. Whenever she passed a mirror, she saw the ghost of her former self, and it appalled her. Though [the surgeon] Ousterhout had developed his [face-feminizing] procedures on the premise that his trans patients wished to move through the world without attracting unwelcome notice [and 'gradually came to believe that he should try to make his patients look not just like average women but like beautiful women'], Abby’s desire to undergo the process was more interior. The person whose reaction to her face she most wanted to change was herself."

From "The Story of a Trans Woman’s Face/For one patient, facial-feminization surgery gave her what she needed to just be herself" by Rebecca Mead (in The New Yorker).

Consider the argument against face-feminizing surgery that comes from a transgender activist, the actress Laverne Cox:

“There are many trans folks because of genetics and/or lack of material access who will never be able to embody these standards. More importantly many trans folks don’t want to embody them, and we shouldn’t have to to be seen as ourselves and respected as ourselves.” A few years ago, Cox launched the hashtag #transisbeautiful, explaining on her blog that she wanted to “celebrate all those things that make trans folk uniquely trans.” She has spoken of being grateful that, by the time she could afford facial-feminization surgery, she no longer wished to undergo it.

If you assume that it makes sense for individuals to say that their true identity is different from what their body actually looks like, would you necessarily have to go along with the idea that the true identity of a person born with a man's body and face is not just a woman's body and face but a beautiful woman's body and face (or an unusually-feminine-looking woman's body and face)?