(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
On February 28 at 17pm I took a pedicure and manicure on West 79th street, Upper West Side. It's in my notebook. About this I write briefly and soberly: “An older white woman sat next to me and gave detailed instructions to a younger Asian woman on how she wanted it. Talked about getting old. Described himself as a brown, shrunken apricot. " This is how I started my American letter for Ny Tid last week. The correspondent's letter revolved around being a feminist, a woman and getting older. Is the policy of aging also the policy of resignation, I asked, pointing to how profiled feminists seem to have abdicated to an industry that makes a fortune on women buying the idea that we can and should stay forever young. I was actually going to write about completely different things this week, had it not been for the New York Times two days after my last letter was in print, the news of slave-like and harmful conditions in New York's nail salons was released. The news calls for critical self-examination and a far more sophisticated commentary on what feminists often refer to as "beauty tyranny". First a few facts: The New York Times' report was based on interviews with over 100 employees in nail salons. They found that the average price for a manicure was well over ten dollars. The women work up to 66 hours per week, and only live on tips for the first few months. Overtime pay and weekend breaks are among the rarities. About a quarter of the 150 nail workers the New York Times was in contact with received the minimum wage, which is about nine dollars an hour. Ethnic discrimination is widespread. Korean nail workers earn 15-20 percent more than their colleagues, simply because many salons are Korean-owned and they prefer to pay "their own" better. The Korean workers also take precedence over work in more "shina" salons on Madison Avenue, where white women with strong purchasing power flock together with wrinkle-free foreheads, restylane lips, bag dogs and well-groomed toenails in Jimmy Choo stilettos. "We can not really do it anymore," my friend Heidi said over a brunch at Bedstuy last weekend, a few days after the New York Times report. "But if we pay properly then?" I objected. "It's what we all say, but it probably does not make much difference. You might be able to give them a hotline number if you go anyway. Many of us are wondering what to do next. " After a short UN career in Uganda a few years ago, I first got a taste of manicures and pedicures – an everyday luxury at a reasonable price that all expat women indulge in. After I moved back to Norway, the visits became fewer. In Oslo, a cheap manicure costs just under 700 kroner. In New York, on the other hand, I get both manicures and pedicures for $ 20. Even when I tip the Asian nail worker on the Upper West generously, let's say with 30 percent, I save over 500 kroner. Which of course is totally wrong. And unethical. It is quite obvious that with such low prices, someone pays the price for beauty tyranny. And it's not me (or any of the other white women with well-groomed feet and hands that I practice yoga and chant for peace with, for that matter).
"I have deserved this," we say to ourselves.
The report in the New York Times triggered a landslide of readers' letters. One said that from now on she would take care of the nails herself, another that the last thing the industry needed was a well-meaning consumer boycott, while a third said that for the sake of the environment one should "vote with the wallet". A fourth reader's letter, from a salon owner, wrote "with great sadness and anger" that he had never done anything wrong, and had only "wanted to live out the American dream." On twitter, a teenage mother raved: "Now I can not even get my nails done without feeling white guilt. Can't I have ONE THING ?! » And here we are at the core. There are more and more white women who think we deserve this little extra. Manicure. The massage. The Polish cleaning aid that relieves us a bit in a daily life with a time squeeze. Maybe a bag that is a little more expensive than we want to be familiar with? "I have deserved this," we say to ourselves. Some of us say this more and more often in a society where the answer to more stress is not to work less or to lower consumption, but to buy more luxury. Another word that is difficult to translate into good Norwegian is entitlement, a perception that one is entitled to certain privileges or special treatment. In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf writes that as women have gained more power and formal rights in the last 100 years, the demands for female beauty have accelerated. The repression is far more subtle and dangerous, she believes, because it is a kind of psychological warfare where you hit the woman on the most painful point – who she is and what she looks like, not what she says. There are several interesting and precise points in Wolf's nineties bible. Nevertheless, the analysis would have been stronger if it had been specified that it is in step with privileged women to gain more power, that the demands on their beauty have increased. In addition, the beauty industry's repressive mechanisms are internalized and camouflaged in the comfortable, muscle-relaxing and stress-relieving luxury atmosphere of self-care. There is nothing like escaping from the academy's pursuit of achievement, and from the photo – retouched butts on billboards in the public space, and into a massage clinic. I promise. The policy of aging is strongly racially and class-divided in the United States. While some of us sit in the massage chair and dread being dried apricots, others start the work day before dawn. They travel from their small apartments in Queens and the Bronx, gently take us in their hands while silently sitting and removing dead skin and files and varnishing nails, hour after hour, while inhaling acetone and getting nail dust in their lungs. They have to endure hearing customers say idiotic things like, "I can't live without shaking my toes and my hands every four weeks." For wealthy, and especially white, women, the policy of aging is about gnawing poor self-esteem. That's bad enough. But for all the others it is more about pure survival from day to day. All of this brings my thoughts back to my first visit to the United States in 2007. Then I interviewed the black feminist and position theorist Patricia Hill Collins for the journal Fat. I shut up. To my hopeless question about what white women can do to "help" black women, Collins replied in cash: "We do not need your pity! Assess your own privilege! ” The nail ladies do not need help or alms in the form of generous tips or a phone number for a hotline, as the New York Times and several of their readers suggest. They need privileged Americans who use their influence to advocate policies that change their own power relations. The American feminist Audre Lorde is said to have said that the most important focus for revolutionary change is not the oppression we ourselves are trying to escape, but the oppressor who is planted deep inside us. According to Collins, it's not about comparing and ranking who's the worst. It will only bring us into a stalemate where we compete for attention, resources and theoretical superiority.
Anne Bitsch is a social geographer and regular columnist in Ny Tid. Visiting researcher at Columbia University in the spring of 2015.
