If I say to your face that you prepare a face for the social market that has exponentially expanded in our cut-throat contemporary world which treats every saleable product as having not only value but also intrinsic virtue, you are surely going to be offended. But if you go out even once, for example, without your made-up face, you would be offended much more. Your natural face would be treated as fake and worthless, hence unacceptable to your horror.

The world is more used to your appearance than your reality. This is because by and large your appearance is what the world has forced you to manufacture for its own specific needs whose fulfillment is the raison detre of social structures erected to direct and control the society. A man must have the appearance of the man, a woman of the woman, a bourgeois of the bourgeois, a worker of the worker, a peasant of the peasant, and a lord of the lord. The man, the woman, the bourgeois, the worker, the peasant, and the lord are defined and stereotyped. The categories are given and one has no choice but to fit into a straitjacket of normality. A man must look a man; strong, in control, macho and protector vis-a-vis a woman. A woman must look a woman; womanish, weak, pliant and dependent vis-a-vis a man. A bourgeois must look bourgeois; opulent, suave and go-getter vis-à-vis a worker. A worker must look a worker; skilled, malleable and non-protesting vis-à-vis a bourgeois. A peasant must look a peasant; rough, rustic and hard-working vis-à-vis a lord. A lord must look paternalistic, layabout and commanding.

Appearance is imposed by way of the norm, which is a product of historical practice. It has such a ubiquitous presence that it is taken as natural. In the words of T.S. Eliot, you ‘prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’. And the time comes when we forget that we prepare the face. So our appearance—the assumed one – doesn’t look like an act of imposition or coercive in nature because we have internalised it.

When we internalise something, it seemingly loses its character of being imposition or coercive. The process of internalisation eliminates the rough edges of what is otherwise external and alien. This is the point when we start confusing appearance with essence. So much so that we imperceptibly replace our essence with appearance. The solid evidence of such a phenomenon is amply found in the life of women. They spend so much of their time, energy and resources on ‘preparing the face’, putting up appearance. They feverishly desire to be desirable at the social market. Such a desire has historical roots; women’s experience of being treated as worthless or less worthy has a long history whose origins lay buried deep in the differences between female and male anatomy which initially gave males an unfair advantage over females.

The advantage of physical strength has had a cumulative effect. It added to the males’ social power. This difference consequently made man dominant through the creation of power structures and sociocultural constructs that heavily tilted in his favour. So women, when declared lesser human beings, were forced to evolve their own strategy in order to survive; they started using every resource at their disposal to make themselves more desirable which implied that they learned to wage the war against male domination through, what one can call, softer means. What has helped them and still helps is their appearance, their image that can titillate and tantalise men. The get-up, both in the physical and metaphorical sense, helps construct appearance. It’s a wonderful guise as it comes in handy in your effort to be other than what you are i.e. the role you choose or are forced to choose for yourself. Haven’t you seen actors who with the help of get-up successfully appear other than what they are. Their mask becomes their face, their reality. So is with women and men in real life; they act out their compulsions, obsessions and dreams on the social stage.

For men, their physical appearance isn’t as significant as it is for women. Men flaunt their appearance concealed in, what we call money and power, which can get them what they want. Money can be conflated with power and power with money.

Karl Marx, in The Power of Money, writes: “I am ugly but I can buy for myself the most beautiful women. Therefore, I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness-its deterrent power is nullified by money. I, in my character as an individual, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore, I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and therefore so is its possessor…”

The same is the case with power. William III, the King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, who was quite ugly, married beautiful Mary II in the seventeenth century.

But a counterargument could be: what’s wrong with the desire to appear more delectable and appealing than one actually is? Nothing wrong if the desire is as innocent as it looks; if there is not a far more serious phenomenon of social distortion hidden beneath it. Generally, men and women don’t feel compelled to be what their innermost feelings want them to be. They mostly act out the role dictated by their conditioning, which is a product of power structures. Conditioning creates conformity, which is veiled servility, the acceptance of the status quo. The act keeps the social machine oiled and running to the advantage of those who monopolise power. Those who wear appearance are under the illusion that the appearance is not their real self and it emerges only out of social compulsion. They are fooled by an illusive sense of comfort because in the social arena what is needed is their solidified appearance, not their amorphous self with no identity.

Our social system behaves like a wily tyrant; it’s on track as long as its dictates are followed regardless of whether it’s done so willingly or willy-nilly. So beware of your social garb; it reveals as much as it conceals. And in the process what it reveals is contradicted by what it conceals and what it conceals is contradicted by what it reveals. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, January 31st, 2022