Charming you: a practical handbook of tips to a lovelier you

Also the book mentions something called "leading with your thighs," After practicing this motion in the living room, I am not yet convinced this lady wasn't on acid, but that is impossible.

Gender determines the shape of our fantasies. Good little boys are supposed to dream about changing the world, but good little girls are supposed to dream about changing ourselves. From the first time we open a book of fairy tales, we learn that beauty is destiny, and when we grow up, we’re told that this destiny is ours to command. If we can consume wisely enough to be beautiful and fashionable, we can transform everything about ourselves.

When beauty becomes mandatory, it ceases to be about fun, about play. Dressing up, playing with gender roles, doing your braids badly in the mirror, and eating half your mother’s lipstick in an attempt to get it on your face: Do you remember when that used to be fun? And do you remember when the fun stopped? Like any game, the woman game stops being fun when you start playing to win, especially if you’ve got no choice: Win or be ridiculed, win or become invisible, dismissed — disturbed.

For modern women in this anxious age of small and hidden gods, the makeover is a ritual of health and devotion and social conformity. It’s the central transfigurative myth of modern femininity under capitalism, and it’s lucrative. Playing the woman game, the game of artifice and self-annihilation, is serious business. A recent survey by shopping channel QVC claimed that the average British woman spends £2,055 per year, or 11% of the median full-time female salary, on maintaining and updating the way she looks. Men, by contrast, spend just 4% of their salary on their appearance, most of which goes on shaving and the gym. Glossy women’s magazines are manuals of self-transformation: Change your body for summer, change your wardrobe for winter, learn to look at the world through smoky eyes, sparkly eyes, or natural eyes, which require as many paints as the rest. Cosmetic-surgery companies plaster public transport with promises to deliver not just physical changes, but emotional ones like “confidence.” Fashion editorials advise us to spend money we don’t have on skirt-suits and handbags as “investment pieces”; you’re not supposed to dress and style your body simply to please yourself but with one eye on your financial future. That skirt-suit really is an “investment” in a one-woman business whose product is you, only glossier. This is what power means to the modern, emancipated woman: terminal exhaustion and a wardrobe full of expensive disguises.

The paeans to disguise and self-reinvention are everywhere, from reality television shows like The Swan, How to Look Good Naked, and the global Top Model megafranchise to the world of high art. Even recent films that have dealt with the few iconic instances of female political power in the recent history of Anglo-American government — Game Change, the story of Sarah Palin’s 2008 vice presidential bid, and Iron Lady, the biopic of Margaret Thatcher — have sold themselves as double-makeover stories. The viewer is invited first to boggle at how well-known actresses (Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep) were transformed to fit the title roles and then at how the women portrayed physically transformed themselves for power — how they manipulated their audiences with cleverly chosen accessories that were, if we are to believe the screenwriters, more important than their policies. The Iron Lady’s vision of Thatcher’s legacy deals with the former prime minister’s epochal battle with mining unions in one throwaway sentence, but it does feature a 20-minute makeover  sequence which could come straight off a reality show as scripted by Milton Friedman. It is no accident thatThe Iron Lady won the Oscar for Best Makeup.

The fantasy is atomizing and addictive. You can be anyone you want to be, it whispers, as long as you know how to play the game. America’s Next Top Model, now in its 19th series with spin-off shows in many other nations, outfits itself in a horror-frock ensemble of neoliberal feminist cliches. The rules of the game are gruelling: The best contestants are pliant and directable, silently submitting to such gymnastic humiliations as being photographed topless on a horse or writhing in a giant bowl of Greek salad. You’re meant to show some character, but never enough to overwhelm “the product” in the eyes of industry “insiders” with an array of frightening hairstyles. Host Tyra Banks is a constant, terrifying presence, offering various bits of grim advice for young women who want to “be on top” — and what more could a modern girl possibly want? Part fairy godmother, part corporate dominatrix, Banks shows the contestants and the rest of us how pliant female bodies and personalities can best be contorted to please the judges. They learn to “smize” — to smile with the eyes, not the mouth, which is almost impossible to do without looking like you’re trying to hold in a fart in a quiet room.

This modern Cindarella story, this identity-quest that is really a quest for many identities, is phrased as spiritual in the most uninspiring manner. Clumsy ritual is broken down into bite-size chunks, reality conforming to the dictats of television, spliced by advertising, replete with incantations, psalmlike call-and-response catchphrases, managed stages of emotional dissolution and  reconstruction, and directed at every point by the host — Tyra Banks, Gok Wan, even the effervescent RuPaul of LogoTV’s Drag Race — who functions as a spiritual guide, as priest, master, teacher. Do you have what it takes? Can you look good naked? Do you want to be on top?