This is superficial, let me warn you. Serious stuff is going on all around us, the earth is shaking…and I’m noting hair, shoes and faces. Especially lips. Surface, everything on the surface.
I will explain.
The Hair
When Trump and his ladies first drew our peripheral attention, I saw what they all looked like and how they dressed. My first thinking did not go very deep. (Nor did my last thinking, you might say.) There was the long hair which, as a formerly long-haired person, I knew was a message involving a classic, if reactionary, concept of sexiness. At least to a regressive sort of guy.
All the Trumpery woman had long hair, parted in the middle. In my perception, each head of this hair was nearly exactly the same length as the other heads of hair. Almost as if the Man kept a tape measure in his pocket for measurement.
Some of the hairs have over the course of the past years grown somewhat longer. I see this as a internal power thing, the longer hair asserting superiority over the others. What does the “superior” woman get for her assertion? I’m not sure. More screen time?
Once the most omnipresent Trumpery woman cut the hair to shoulder length. I saw it as a message. An attempt to assert something other than Trumpery? Didn’t last. I sense Someone criticized. Her hair has grown back to the Trumpery length.
Many of the hairs are blond. Blond hair on an adult is not natural. You know that, right? Also, you know it’s expensive and time-consuming for a not-blond woman to have her hair made blond.
So blond, long-haired women have time on and money in their hands. That is, they don’t have serious jobs; they are photo op figureheads thrusting outward from the prow of the Man ship. We can amuse ourselves by envisioning how each of them maneuvers to elbow the others off the prow.
Long hair is problematic. It requires a certain amount of work, often with a variety of plug-in tools and spritz bottles. A permanently affixed hairdresser person could be necessary.
Long hair will stay in place while you’re riding down an elevator but will not when you’re outdoors. If there’s a breeze, the hair will whip around the face and will, inevitably, tangle itself up. Backstage, that hairdresser person must rush over to apply a comb-out. Every time.
The Hair was the first thing I spotted in the Trump realm. Almost every woman who worked for Trump had that same long hair and the blonds all had exactly the same streaky hair coloring.
Without jerking a knee in the direction of the over-used Stepford Wives image, uncoding that message was easy. These women have agreed to be owned by the Man. They have agreed to their consignment of second-class performative citizenship. Some of them have been allowed to work…but only for the Man or his minions.
Let’s zip down from the Hair to the Shoes.
The Shoes
The shoes are as much uniform as the Hair. The shoes are all 7-inch stiletto pumps. (That may be hyperbolic; maybe they’re 6-1/2 inches. I didn’t personally measure.)
Real live women know it is impossible to wear 7-inch stiletto heels. You may be able to slip into them and stand still, holding onto a chair back, say, for a couple of minutes. But you can’t walk on them.
Watch these women “walk” on the heels. They are not walking; they are mincing on the tips of their toes — which were not created to allow this, without the hard rectangular clump in the toe of ballet slippers. (This may be merely anecdotal but ballet dancers do not proceed en pointe throughout an entire ballet.)
We have to give these women some sarcastic credit for getting across a White House lawn without spearing the heels so deeply into the lawn the women suddenly freeze in place and topple over — all while arranging their faces to appear blandly pain-free. (There’s a way they do that; we’ll get there when we deal with the Face part of this exercise.)
Last year, I spend some time watching all 134 episodes of a slightly phantasmagorical Turkish police-romance-soap-mystery, Black Money Love. At the center of the series were three rich young (long-haired) sisters and the improbable and violent things that kept happening to them.
Their shoes fascinated me. They’d come to the breakfast table wearing 7-inch stilettos, along with really tight short skirts. And they’d wear those shoes throughout their fraught days and even fraughter nights. (Don’t ask; I might be forced to tell you.)
Not what you could call realistic.
Indeed, because I was transfixed by the omnipresence of the shoes and watching the actresses’ attempts to walk or strut or trot in them, I began to notice that, unlike Trumpery ladies, they actually had some trouble acting as if the walking was comfortable. I saw some agonized movements and a wince or two, I swear I did.
They were pretty good actresses, especially the lead, but even she couldn’t make those shoes seem more like genuine footgear than instruments of torture.
The decoded message of these Heels is simple. Do I need to elaborate?
OK. I will. The Man mandates the Heels which restrict the women wearing them. No woman can run away in 7-inch stilettos. They are almost entirely immobilized, trapped. They advertise they’re owned by the Man — whose insistence on those heels reveals his fear they’ll escape him if wearing flats.
The heels are prison.
The Face
Over the years of the Trumpery Era, I realized the Faces were expanding in number but not actually changing.
Of course Faces had to be added to the Trumpery show because, well, once you’ve achieved that goal (which I will not name), you need more people around you. And a number of those Face people were TV show personalities. (While I don’t watch that sort of TV, numbers of videos are regularly displayed on Twitter, along with concomitant mockery.)
The Trumpery Faces stayed exactly the same. They did not age, or produce expressions, no matter what was going on in life. They were calculated masks. They began to remind me of those weird CGI women who came close to imitating real people but never quite getting there.
I believe the TV personalities were the scariest of the frozen Faces. There have been times I’ve wondered whether they were CGI. They all wore the same tight dresses, and under the transparent desks where they sat, you could see those 7-inch stiletto Shoes.
There are two ways you can freeze a Face: cosmetic surgery or Botox (or other similar) injections. Cosmetic surgery applied by an excellent surgeon won’t over-stretch the skin too noticeably, but some cosmetic surgeons will (expensively) accede to their patients’ demands and stretch the skin out of reality.
When your skin is stretched, you can’t do much expression with the Face.
Botox injections are quicker and cheaper but only last for maybe six months before requiring a new needling to keep the Face in frost.
I pay particular attention to the Lips on those Faces, blown up beyond verisimilitude and fully lipsticked.
The full name of Botox is botulinum toxin. That is, botulism, but that link is to the CDC and since many women who yearn to become Trumpery shun science, maybe don’t bother to click on the link. It might upset you, especially the part about getting to the hospital immediately if you’re showing symptoms of an attack on your nervous system. I take no responsibility for the rest of you.
Oh, and the make-up covering the Faces is the same for each woman.
The code of the Hair, the Heels and the Face is: these creatures have agreed not to exist as real women with real lives to which they respond. They can’t respond. Indeed, they may actually be dolls, sex dolls, for impotent men.
That’s it, that’s my whole analysis.
Meanwhile, there is Kansas.