This is a small diary on a small aspect of a large topic.
I do not, ultimately, care very much what Markos said about John McCain. John McCain has "assumed the risk," as lawyers say, of criticism by his venturing out as a public figure. I think it may be a really stupid move, especially if it does turn out that McCain's teeth are as they are because they were knocked out of his skull while he was held captive in Vietnam, but that is not my issue here today.
Markos's many defenders have been pointing out that he's not attacking McCain (heaven forfend!), but his media advisors, for putting up an ad where McCain has yellow or light brown teeth. They should not have been so negligent, the argument goes, because teeth of that color are "gross."
Objectively gross, apparently.
Well, I have yellow teeth -- apparently from thin enamel -- and my wife's teeth are not white (except for the caps). My stepchildren had lousy dental care, growing up poor by U.S. standards, and may well end up with non-white teeth as well. Their skin isn't white either. If anyone told then that their lovely skin color was "gross," I would be inclined to smack them. So, the question is, should I be nicer when someone says that the color of their teeth is gross?
Prejudice based on tooth color is maybe one hundredth as bad as prejudice based on skin color, probably even less, but I find the similarities fascinating. The former is argued to be OK and that latter not because, supposedly, the former is mutable and the latter fixed. Hearing this argument makes me wonder how much time people (other than Markos) have spent around people of color in situations where they weren't putting up a polite front for white folk.
Tooth color, as many people have testified today, is not necessarily mutable. It is partly a function of biology, for one thing, of the thickness of dental enamel. Partly it can be changed by dental treatments or even cosmetic products, but I think it bears note that the tooth whitening industry -- and it is that, and like other cosmetic industries it depends on both generating and producing dissatisfaction about appearance -- simply hasn't been around very long, and yet somehow we all survived in those dark-enameled days of yore. Those treatments are temporary, not good for your teeth, etc., but there's a simpler fact to trot out: they're expensive. In a time of economic insecurity, what sort of political move is it to make people feel even more insecure about their teeth, even less able to be upwardly socially mobile, because the color of their teeth will trump the content of their character? Gleaming white teeth -- fake-looking, often as not, as Katherine Harris's 2006 boob job that she got when preparing for her own campaign -- is a luxury for many Americans, from whom some of us would evidently set themselves apart.
And, skin color, of course, is mutable as well. I don't just mean the extreme and tragic case of Michael Jackson. I mean every day, among Blacks, South Asians, East Asians, Western Asians, Latinos, and even Mediterranian whites, where families caution about getting out of the sun before you look like a Black person and where there is a great industry in lightening and whitening creams. I will be spending years deprogramming my stepdaughters from the damage done to their psyches by well-meaning relatives who want them to look as white as they can. I don't know if Barack Obama faced any such pressures, and I will bet that Malia and Sasha didn't, but I will bet Krugerrands to donuts that Michelle Obama knows what I'm talking about. She does not have the light brown, Halle Berry, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey skin tone that for a long time when she and I (about the same age) were growing up finally first grew from unacceptable to acceptable in our youth; she is seriously and beautifully African-American, of a tone only recently considered "presentable" in discussions of beauty.
Now -- are Obama's advisors making a mistake in not Photoshopping Michelle some lighter skin? Of course not. She is who and what she is and the world had better make way for her if they don't already like it.
So, then, why are we so ready to concede that while Michelle Obama's historically reviled skin tone is not "gross," John McCain's having yellowish teeth is "gross." Not just "I don't like it," but that it is so objectively distasteful that including it in an ad constitutes a bona fide gaffe by his media advisors?
I find it repulsive to see people judged this way. I find it elitist, given the economics of the cosmetics industry and the unavailability of such treatments in many other countries. Worse, I find it Republican. This is the sort of thing one would expect to come out of the mouth of a P.J. O'Rourke, flashing his own no-doubt milk-colored incisors, as he argues that women have an obligation to do what they can to meet some ideal of beauty. Boob jobs. Liposuction. Corsets, for all I know. Whatever makes the likes of P.J. happy. As with many other industries, there is money to be made on people's unhappiness and self-hatred, and Republicans know that that is the most derirable of all ends.
I can't, or won't try to, make the argument against the class-based elitism of kowtowing to the cosmetics industry than Naomi Wold did years ago in The Beauty Myth:
Wolf argues that women in Western culture are damaged by the pressure to conform to an idealized concept of female beauty—the Iron Maiden throughout modern society, from Victorian Times to today. She argues that the beauty myth is political, a way of maintaining the patriarchal system. It allows women to enter the labour force, but under controlled conditions. She also claims that this system keeps women under control by the weight of their own insecurities. The beauty myth is sometimes viewed as succeeding The Feminine Mystique, which relegated women to the position of housewife, as the social guard over women. In this sense, Wolf claims that public interest in a woman's virginity has been replaced by public interest in the shape of her body.
And now, for women and men -- at least of a certain class and aspiration -- the beauty myth extends to the color of their teeth as well. If you don't satisfy popular taste, for God's sake don't part your lips. We'd hate to see you smile.
Well, I say, to hell with it. So John McCain's people let him be seen with teeth the color of mine, or of my wife's, or of (I'll bet) most of the people reading this, or of by far most of the people in the world, the average income in many countries would not itself pay for what should evidently be considered mandatory teeth-whitening by some people with tooth-color issues here. Good. Let us judge him not by the color of his teeth, but by the content of his character. And let's think twice before cavalierly informing people that some aspect of their bodies -- not just what they wear, but their own bodies -- is "gross" and needs, at great expense, to be "fixed."
The only upside of today's escapables is that the site may now be able to attract banner ads from Crest and Ultra-brite. If they need a "before" photo, I'll be happy to oblige -- and to do so again in ten, twenty, thirty years.