Thank you Bruce now Caitlyn Jenner for stepping up to be an olympian standard-bearer to assail the stigma of gender dysphoria. Caitlyn’s reveal on the cover of Vanity Fair is a triumph, for transexuals and, one might hope, “women of a certain age”. But that it certainly is not. Caitlyn owes her magazine cover to her celebrity power of course, to sensationalism, and above all to her male privilege.
And there we have the distinction feminists have long drawn between their struggle and that of man-made women. It’s not about whose struggle is greater. But it’s not the same struggle.
As a woman, Jenner now faces every traditional gender disadvantage except obviously the wage gap. With another exception. If you doubt that Caityn Jenner has yet to shed her alter ego’s male privilege, ask yourself when was the last time Vanity Fair put a 65 year old woman on their cover, wearing a bunny suit? Not that female celebrities even twenty years younger would likely consent to being presented as corseted sexpots.
Jenner claimed in her interview that she is asexual, maybe to un-complicate the anticipated male gaze. Or maybe that’s one hurdle too far for our reality-phobic media which needs to repress sex to sell it.
So Vanity Fair couldn’t help but sexualize the cover, but it leaves viewers with nothing to glean but narcissism. Can we fail to feel in Jenner’s gaze, the arrogance of a conquerer? That’s not an attribute exclusive to masculinity, but Jenner’s comes of privilege.
The Wheaties box superhuman decathlete had her beefcake and now she intends to eat it. No one says a trans feminine must be a shrinking violet, but the public reaction has been to coddle Jenner for her courageous act, though it seems clearly an act. When Jenner came out in April, she predicted a “wild ride”. What the audience took for trepidation was really an artful teaser for the magazine cover and the reality TV specials already in the works. Jenner’s Caitlyn races dirt track thrillcraft. Earlier this year she rear-ended a fellow Malibu driver. Jenner’s SUV fatally bumped the woman into oncoming traffic on PCH.
Forty years ago Bruce Jenner defined the hyper-masculine, now Caitlyn claims the impossibly feminine. I see a craftily Botoxed siren and I’m not sure how our culture is served to efface age and gender, especially as human beings, more fragile than we know, yearn to catch on magazine covers authentic reflections of themselves.
Okay, best thing to come out of this? #MyVanityFairCover
Someone forgot to tell Cindy McCain that the fashion word on Sarah’s big night was “populist.” Cin’s half-peeled banana outfit was examined by the couture analysts at Vanity Fair and the numbers look like this:
What’s left for Carla Bruni-Sarkozy? Heiress, supermodel, pop diva, Queen of France. Now everyone’s mind is on her chrysanthemum.