Editor’s Letter

The Feminine Mystique

The stunning debut of Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair may be the ultimate beauty moment. Her transition—and the way people have embraced it—is a milestone in our culture. It also says all kinds of things about women and beauty.

The idea of transformation is as old as fairy tales, taken, in this case, to a whole new dimension. It’s interesting that Jenner assumed the hyperfeminine look of a Hollywood movie star, with long hair and an hourglass figure in a satin corset, for her first public appearance. The glamorous makeover is a classic Hollywood trope, and in Annie Leibovitz’s powerful photographs, Jenner could be Joan Crawford or Gloria Swanson. In one, Jenner sits in a director’s chair in her bathroom wearing a lace corset and heels, surrounded by beauty detritus—there’s makeup everywhere, loofah sponges, body creams, and a power strip loaded with hair appliances. It’s a retro image for a very modern story about putting on your face and becoming a woman.

Jenner told writer Buzz Bissinger that she was most looking forward to having “girls’ nights…where…you can talk about outfits. You can talk about hair and makeup.... It becomes not a big deal.” Jenner’s furtive experiments in femininity as a man left him yearning to “be able to have my nail polish on long enough that it chips off,” he told Diane Sawyer in his last interview as Bruce. There’s poignancy in that simple desire, where the quotidian annoyances of being a woman are the ultimate markers of femininity and a symbol of identity finally realized.

In many ways, with her facial surgery and her new body, Jenner is adopting the aspects of femininity that have been associated with holding women back. “Now you’re a woman,” Jon Stewart joked, “and your looks are really the only thing we care about.” There’s clearly a double standard at work. “In any other celebrity, that surgery would be criticized. Look at the howl over Renée Zellweger when people thought she had changed her eyes,” says Allure contributing editor at large Joan Kron, who specializes in plastic surgery. And you can’t help wondering how long it will be before the tabloids say Jenner looks fat or tired or like she’s having a bad hair day. These feminine archetypes of beauty are both comforting and slightly disturbing.

Perhaps Caitlyn Jenner’s openness about her transition, and her recognition of the “pressure that women are under all of the time about their appearance,” will also encourage a sidebar conversation about the outmoded feminine ideal and the power it still holds over women and men.

Jenner shows us that appearance and gender are more malleable than they have ever been. They can be shaped and manipulated according to an individual’s desire, and they can express the potent truth.