Making a woman out of you
When Elliot Page stepped out of the shadows into his true self, one of his observations was that Ellen was forced into dresses and make-up by film studio executives. For him, the entrapment into a form of femininity to project onto the press was oppressive. For Kristen Stewart, post Twilight saga she has unleashed a version of womanhood onto the media that projects an almost fuck you to the executives, yet is also highly curated and a projection of a personal statement about herself. Linking Elliot and Kristen, and all other women in the public eye, is a balance between the need to reflect a personal truth and the desire of both audiences and the media to reinforce a certain message about womanhood.
It is telling that when Elliot came onto the public stage the first thing he did was project a sense of relaxed masculinity, a version of manhood wrapped up in his own identity as removed from Ellen’s enforced femininity as he could make it. Elliot Page became his own man, a manicured image that said to the media that his manhood should speak for itself. The central pivot for much of the media was immediately to grasp at Ellen, show her to the world as something before, rather than simply accepting that Elliot had the right to exist in the moment, in the present, on his own terms.
This enforcement of a certain image, that womanhood in its rawest saleable form, must convey a certain vulnerability. It comes with notions of excessive fabric, of decorated and painted faces, of all the things that are the opposite of masculinity. To make a woman, at least a woman in the media’s eye, a person must become adorned, preened, and superfluous. To be masculine, to be a man, is to strip all of that back, and become a palette for the women in their lives onto.
Kim Petras’s Grammy red dress projected a femininity that screamed look at me. All the photographs of her captured a woman making a statement, yet on stage next to Sam Smith she was elfin, a projection of Sam’s image. Her fantasy was a curio, a phantasm, for the viewer. This woman sculpted and remade in her own image, a woman made out of surgical skills, yet there on stage projecting a version of womanhood as wrapped up in marketing and hype as all her fellow female stars. Kim has worked hard to cultivate a glamour and public hyperfeminity which compliments her music, much like Madonna and Gaga in their early phases. It is shocking because it needs to sell both her and the music she creates. It is a womanhood projected, a version of herself that intrigues and is desired.
Those who consume media project onto it our wish fulfilment, our fantasies, and our distastes. Yet, what matters is that we keep engaged with the image that is being projected. Womanhood, the manufactured and consumed sort, is designed to make you think, to engage you on a level that will keep you coming back. Stars and singers evolve, the woman they were yesterday different from the woman they will be tomorrow. If they remain the same, we get bored, and boredom is the death of clicks. When they make a woman out of you it is to keep those who consume intrigued and hungry for more.
Why would anyone put themselves through that process? If the answer is fame and potential fortune, then it is often fleeting. If the answer is an insatiable desire that can only be quenched by the spotlight, then I think it begins to get at the kernel of this manufactured version of womanhood. Of course, this is nothing new. Babylon, Rome, Tudor England, 1920’s Hollywood all used star power to sell an idealised version of what a woman should be and what a woman should become. Taste, that ephemeral suffusion of in the moment and desire, is as fleeting as autumn leaves, yet in the manufacturing of identity it is the consumer who is left the hungriest and potentially least satisfied side of the media deal. Selling that lipstick, that dress, that perfume, all of which will get you a footstep closer to the ideal, that is what they hope to achieve.
Kristen Stweart’s evolution into lesbian, or at least bisexual, siren song is part of this process. Her Twilight persona and romance with Robert Pattinson evoked a need in the audience to believe, for Bella and Edward to be a literal manifestation of love. Except that Kristen escaped from the saga’s orbit into something of her own making. That her love life, fashion choices, and films are of interest to the wider world is as wrapped up in each other as it is her own identity. Given that in the Golden Age of Hollywood Greta Garbo’s bisexuality was clamped and hidden, Kristen’s open and honest love for her fiancé shows just how far the manufactured media image of womanhood has come in 70 years.
This queering of identity, with Kim and Kristen at the forefront, is an evolution in our cultural ideal of womanhood. Madonna and Lady Gaga both projected a sexualised version of themselves when they emerged, the sex selling far more than the gossip ever could. The fact that Billboard’s February 2023 interview with Kim is hyper sexual in the same manner as many other emerging starlets shows that the sex is as essential to success as it always has been. Elliot Page’s retreat from that, and the media’s determination to keep reminding consumers that Ellen existed, shows just how powerful manufactured womanhood is.
That three of the faces of 2023 so far have been a trans woman, a trans man, and a non-binary singer speaks volumes about the nature of manufactured identity. Sex will always sell, mystery will always sell, and if the viewer is left intrigued then so much the better. Gone are the days of trans women losing everything when their past is revealed, it is now a time of commercialisation and unique selling points. To be a manufactured woman is as much wrapped up in your social media campaigns, Twitter account, and YouTube video as it is splashy headlines. Maybe gone are the days of an all controlling studio, and in its place is the self-manufacturing image that all your followers can buy into.
If this is the case, and with the conviction of the likes of Harvey Weinstein and R Kelley, maybe women can finally reclaim the manufacturing of their own identities without it becoming oppressive and exploitative. Projecting yourself into the world, especially if it is part of your job, is about cutting through the noise, getting people’s attention, and making then see you and your star product. Kim’s self-promotion grabs headlines, making us pay attention to her. Her self-curated Twitter feed as much a part of her success as any studio. We see her in vaguely her own terms, though as always, we never see the other side of the lens. All the messiness is swept out of sight, and we see the starlet emerge. That she is trans is the unique selling point. That her music is great and attracts fans of its own accord even better. Wrapping it up in a red dress as the Emmys, genius.
Womanhood is so self-owned by Kristen, Kim, and other stars becomes essential for their longevity. If you give it all away at the beginning of your career, if you sell yourself on an idealised form of womanhood too early, there is always the risk that you become irrelevant once the next incarnation of saleable womanhood comes along. You become yesterday, and them today. To become tomorrow takes skill, and the willingness of your fans to move with you. Or you just become Genesis, George Cluny, Tom Cruise…. Oh, wait, they are all men, who get to exist in a permanent sense of nostalgia. Women do not. They age up, age out, or marry out. It is toxic all the way up and down, yet women still want to both become part of the process and buy into the myth that the process is in fact glamourous.
Media products still sell, still attract an audience, so is this really a manufactured lie if we all choose to believe it? Toxic behaviours exists on both sides of the consumer/creator relationship, from the producers and directors who exploit young women to consumers who demand ever more from them. If the pressure to remain relevant is so acute, is the manufacturer or the consumer who is the problem? Through gender and sexuality in the mix, especially when being a trans woman is the unique selling point, and it makes for a fraught conversation. That all of this places as much of a yoke on those who consume, the desire to buy that eyeliner or lose that weight or purchase that iPhone just because all my friends have it and without it I will not be cool. Pressure, multiplied, because to become a woman is to be a consume of the things that society inherently says make you a woman.
All of this is a root cause of the making of celebrity, at the heart of why they exist in the first place. Why was the move from sheet music to grammar phone to silent movie to talkies to television such a fertile time in the exploitation of young women? Because it enabled manufactures to shift more product, to sell the glamour, to make you, the consumer, feel that without these things you would never come close to the stars on stage and screen. All celebrities exist, and are paid to exist, because they sell you this image of a life just out of reach, just waiting if only you buy that car, buy that handbag, watch this show.
Babylon (2022), for all its faults, captures this heart of darkness with a piquant pinch of tears and cocaine snorted by Margot Robbie. It is clearly meant as the anti-Singin’ in the Rain (incredibly on the nose), showing that the star machine will eat you alive unless you step away before it is too late. That Margot is the mercurial thread running through the film highlights the need for sex appeal to make the film work. Singin’ in the Rain was a product of its time, very chaste by 2023’s standards, yet still showed how women were spat out by the system. It is as much reflection on modern audience’s needs to reconcile the bleakness of stardom as it is a potential reflection of the period.
Coming full circle, is this manufactured womanhood a prison for the women caught up in it, or is it merely a facsimile that they step out of once the cameras are looking else where. There is no way to answer that definitively, as only the person themselves can answer, but the truth is likely that the glamour and manufactured self is just a part of the job. The person behind the manufactured image is someone far less structured, and it is this persona that is kept wrapped up and sheltered, as much for the celebrity’s sanity as it is to keep the mystique.
As Elliot closed the door on Ellen he trod the same path Jan Morris, April Ashley, and Kim herself took in created a new version of themselves for us to consume. That he rejected the manufactured woman in favour of a manufactured manhood is just as interesting as Kim standing on stage in her red dress. It allows us, the consumer, to deconstruct womanhood to its bear bones, and asks us to accept Elliot for this new man that he is. We become validators of his masculinity, as much as we validate Kim. In making a woman out of her, we build Elliot into a man affirmed. From Greta to Kim in sixty years, with Elliot deconstructing the whole system. We made women out of all of them, and he took an axe to the whole lot.
