Be Honest: Do You Think This Lipgloss Makes Me Look Less Literary?

Trick question you don't have to answer because I actually have self-confidence, THANKS VERY MUCH.

This essay is dedicated to hot bitches who read. The hot bitch in me sees the hot bitch in you, my friend.

There’s an essay floating around that criticizes Katie Kitamura’s Strategist interview, where she shares some of the things she likes to use. They are disappointed or skeptical of her daring to include a $24 lip gloss. “She just came waaay down in my esteem scale,” one male commenter wrote. Wow! Who knew that admitting to using beauty products could completely discredit the critically acclaimed body of work a woman spent years producing? It's almost as if you were looking for a reason to dismiss her.

I tried so hard not to write a response. I took a walk and touched grass. I lit incense to my ancestors. I commiserated with other authors. But the rage remains—perhaps because my body knows I’ll be in a similar position soon. My book also comes out this year.

The discourse around being an Author in Public is always kind of excruciating but Asian women like Kitamura (and myself) are in a double bind of how to appropriately present ourselves. What does it mean to look literary? How do you answer questions and come off as both interesting and cool but not too cool so people still relate to our work and our personas? Oh, the trials of relatability. Do you think male authors have to worry about relatability? No. They get to let the work speak for itself. How nice for them. Relatability in writing is overrated. There’s real adventure in difference, and I wish more people would train themselves to seek out discomfort rather than cling to the familiar. When a woman writer dares to offer something humanizing about themselves, they are seen as oversharing, distracting, contradicting the project they put out. Because acknowledging them as human beings makes you uncomfortable as a reader. You don’t want to relate to a human, you want to subscribe to an idea.

Women authors are held to a double standard when it comes to professionalism and presence. They’re expected to look polished—but not too expensive, or it’s “distracting.” Never mind that history shows the messier a male author, the more he’s described as passionate. Hemingway’s temper and alcoholism is legendary, and somehow that doesn’t distract readers—it endears him to simping male snobs. I have no particular admiration for Hemingway or the old white dude literary pantheon. Men are frequent literary thieves and owe much of their access to the “Professional Literati” club to the women around them. The whole world is their Room of One’s Own, because the women in their lives are structured to care for them. Artist Residencies are mostly the gift of being taken care of rather than be your own caretaker.

Hemingway specifically is a great example of a literary thief. Martha Gellhorn, an incredible war reporter and his wife at the time, had taken Hemingway on a reporting trip to report the Spanish Civil War while she was reporting for Collier. Hemingway stole her reporting job from her shortly after. Gellhorn ended up stowing away on a hospital ship to be the only woman to report on World War II’s D-Day anyway. Her recounting of the hospital ship journey is one of the best pieces of writing I have ever read and in general Martha Gellhorn was a far better writer than her ex-husband. (This is not purely my own bias speaking; other reporters also stated this in public record.) Do you know the level of loser your ex-husband has to be for The New York Times to write about him as being your Biggest Mistake? Sorry—I digress. It’s natural for me to go from ranting about lip gloss to dissecting war journalism. Apologies if that makes me less literary. But you see—femininity and womanhood in writing are always framed as liabilities. People talk about how hot Gellhorn was and how successful Hemingway was. BORING. It's all ancient misogynist bullshit disguised as literary critique.

I find it telling that Kitamura’s dignity was called into question because she mentioned a beauty product once. That this scrutiny is leveled at an Asian woman, while dozens of others featured similarly go unquestioned, feels racial. It’s easier to fixate on a beauty item than address racial dynamics head-on, so you cling to the lip gloss like it’s a symbol of moral failure. Kitamura also shouted out her rice cooker and artisanal salts, but you zeroed in on the gloss—and smugly remarked that you “just use ChapStick.” Congratulations? Does your demure lack of pigment make you feel superior? More intelligent? Do you think a moment of human vanity cancels out an entire body of work? Do you realize how reactionary and dismissive that is on your behalf?

If she had used La Mer, a $300 cream, I would understand where you are coming from. The inaccessibility of that cream is its entire schtick. But the average cost of lip gloss is just… that. Maybe you don’t realize this—you're seemingly so immersed in serious matters that you probably don’t even wear SPF. The product she mentioned is relatively popular across America among the many people who do in fact like lipgloss. Clinique lip products are a multi-generational, best-selling classic. Kitamura mentioning Clinique probably makes her more relatable to some readers, just not readers like you.

We both know it’s not about the lipgloss but what it represents; you think beauty has no place in intellectualism. You believe that conversations about beauty distracts from authority and serious discourse. And that makes you wrong and determined to stay that way, proud that your lack of concern of personal appearance somehow shields your own artistic merit. It does not.

Sometimes entering literary spaces as someone who cares about aesthetics makes me feel like Elle Woods going to Harvard or Miranda Priestly explaining cerulean. What do you mean you got a book deal without an MFA and you wear nice clothes? Don’t you know writers are supposed to be disheveled and suffer? As if we do not reify some writers style in person as much as we do their diction on a regular basis. But the critics of Kitamura already know and own up to this, it’s just their examples of appropriately admirable literary celebrities are old white people. No disrespect to Joan Didion for CELINE - it was a cool partnership. So was the Ocean Vuong for Helmut Lang affair. What makes one more dignified than the other if not their whiteness?

I am particularly incensed by this reception of her because I am used to dealing with it myself and know it will be inevitable in my own press junket. Kitamura doesn’t write explicitly about beauty, she was just answering a question posed to her. My forthcoming book, The House of Beauty, is quite literally focused on the empire of aesthetics and capitalism. I know a lot about lipgloss. And for my entire career as a writer on beauty I have dealt with peoples eyes glazing over as soon as they ask what I write about. I am used to it, the dismissiveness. One hears beauty and thinks shallow depths. The reality is I’m not writing for those who dismiss beauty but for people who know the risks and benefits beauty offers and how it shapes the world.

One of the most common responses to hearing about what I do is the half-sincere question, “So can you recommend me a mascara?” Men ask this with disdain and women ask with shy welcome, as if they have finally have permission to be publicly owning their interest. I get it. The story of beauty is mostly about what you need to buy to attain it. Ultimately that isn’t the kind of writing I do. I interview service workers on working conditions in times of crisis and pandemic, disability advocates and product designers on packaging and visibility and neglect. I have written about warfare and spas and beauty at protests. Sometimes I compose trend reports for brands because not only is beauty big business but it is a pillar of culture just as much as what you may be reading. These reports ask for examples of cultural movement spanning books, products, music, theater, scientific innovations, and semiotics. Just like the latest novel reveals something about our world, so does the beauty product a so-called “undignified” reader might wear while reading it. One isn’t more important than the other, and by deifying one and forsaking the other you miss the full picture.

When you understand beauty culture you understand culture, period. It is part of being human, as much as a literary life is - oftentimes more so, because more people buy beauty and skincare than have Paris Review subscriptions. I don’t get when people are dismissive or scolding about beauty in literary conversations. It signals a dismissal of a part of life that is so interesting and telling about one’s character. Being curious about beauty compelled me to better learn global market economics, the history of labor and exploitation, introduced me to cutting edge research on synthetic biology, privatized surveillance technologies, climate crisis mitigation. All of these lessons made me a better writer and a smarter human.

Anyway. Let Kitamura wear her lipgloss. If you’re threatened by the idea that smart people might also want to feel pretty, that’s a reflection of your narrow definition of intellect—not her character.