I am not an attractive man. Never in my life has anyone complimented me as a 'pretty boy', a 'fine brother', or even 'hot'. Angel, no doubt, would disagree with this assessment, and while I always appreciate her attempts at ego-stroking when the subject of my physical attractiveness arises, I realize she's humoring me, on some level. She loves me. But Orlando Bloom, Dean Cain, and Hayden Christensen will always do more for her primal on-sight sexual urges than I ever will. This does not bother me, mind you. I know I am not an attractive man.

Given this, for me the eternal American quest for beauty strikes me as a puzzle wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma, for want of a better metaphor outside of Oliver Stone classics. For this writer, the human body should only be maintained at peak performance, mentally and physically. Manipulation of the human form for personal interests is for me, wrong. Many people over the years have asked why I don't smoke, drink alcohol, or use drugs, and the answer has always been the same - I don't believe in personal alteration of the human biochemical form for personal interest purposes, recreational or otherwise, outside of basic health and wellness. Take a pill to fight diabetes? Cool. Take a pill to lose inhibitions at a rave? Not cool. But don't worry, my later-day Shields Anti-Scientologists! I don't proselytize.

I do wonder though, why the quest for beauty in this county enraptures women with higher frequency than men. I mean, I always thought of myself as 'not attractive'. That doesn't mean 'ugly'; rather, I realized early on that some people with certain features were considered by all concerned 'beautiful', and my wavy black hair, broad brown nose, thick lips, and predatory brow were not considered 'beautiful'. Little children are mean, spiteful creatures, but even during the worst of the teasing - when I could not stand any more open taunts on my Bubblicious lips, or my Hoover vacuum nostrils, or the barnyard qualities of my last name - I never wanted to change myself. I was me. The entire concept of physical alteration to please others (who never have any incentive to like you no matter how many answers on math tests you let them steal) never made sense to me, and never will.

No one in modern American history better personifies the dangers inherent in changing yourself to please the masses than the greatest entertainer alive, Michael Jackson. From humble, modest rhythm and blues child prodigy to harried, reviled infamous pop laughingstock, Jackson engenders all types of angry, acidic commentary from African Americans insulted by his surgical manipulation of his African features into the acquitted Euro-terrestrial he presents today, but one wonders how universal Jackson's detractors would be had the entertainer settled on a particular look early on, and never went under the knife again. For example, if Michael Jackson today looked the spitting image of Michael Jackson on the cover of the Bad album, circa 1987, I truly doubt many Black folk would have much of a problem with him, which would mean that his singing career (dependent on mainstream appropriation of African American pop cultural tastes) would be in a much healthier state. The point? When people become enraged on a racial level about individual ethnic minorities who choose to pursue beauty through plastic surgery, designed by Western medicine to promote Western attitudes of beauty to all consumers (read: universal Whiteness by popular demand) they often ignore the more fundamental point - in a human environment based upon free choice, manipulation of the physical form to affect personal perceptions of beauty is as wrong as manipulation of chemical substances to affect personal perceptions of bliss. Botox is America's newest crack.

Today, after reading a new article on Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's abandonment of the extreme Left (registration required) for centrist Democratic electability, I read in the Los Angeles Times an article about Asian American women who use skin whitening techniques and treatments to preserve and promote lighter, whiter skin. First, I was afraid. Then I was petrified. "Beauty and the Bleach", by Jia-Rui Chong, describes the quest of some Asian American women to "preserve or enhance their pale complexions with expensive creams, masks, gloves, professional face scrubs and medical procedures". For me, this manner of body manipulation is far past repugnant, way beyond disgusting. It's rather inhuman.

From the article:

For many Southern Californians, summer is the season for beaches, chaise longues and the quest for the perfect tan.

Not for Margaret Qiu. She and thousands of other Asian American women are going to great lengths to avoid the sun - fighting to preserve or enhance their pale complexions with expensive creams, masks, gloves, professional face scrubs and medical procedures.

For these women, a porcelain-like white face is the feminine ideal, reflecting a long-held belief that pale skin represents a comfortable life. They also believe it can hide physical imperfections.

"There's a saying, 'If you have white skin, you can cover 1,000 uglinesses,' " said Qiu, a 36-year-old Chinese immigrant who lives in Alhambra.

Qiu goes through a regimen of skin-whitening products twice a day. She is one of many customers who have turned Asian whitening creams and lotions into a multimillion-dollar industry in the United States.

But that's just the beginning.

Take a daylight drive through Asian immigrant enclaves like Monterey Park and Irvine, and you'll see women trying to shield themselves with umbrellas - even for the short dash from a parking lot into a supermarket. While driving, many wear special "UV gloves" - which look like the long gloves worn with ball gowns - to protect their forearms, and don wraparound visors that resemble welder's masks.

At beauty salons, women huddle around cosmetics counters asking about the latest cleansers and lotions that claim to control melanin production in skin cells, often dropping more than $100 for a set. Beauticians do a brisk business with $65 whitening therapies. Women dab faces with fruit acid, which is supposed to remove the old skin cells that dull the skin, and glop on masks with pearl powder or other ingredients that they believe lighten the skin.

There are doctors who, for about $1,000, will use an electrical field to deliver vitamins, moisturizers and bleaching agents to a woman's face in a procedure known as a "mesofacial."

Whitening products have been a mainstay in Asia for decades, but cosmetics industry officials said they have emerged as a hot seller in the United States only in the last four years. Whitening products now rack up $10 million in sales a year, according to the market research firm Euromonitor.

But their popularity has sparked a debate in the Asian American community about the politics of whitening. Qui and others say the quest for white skin is an Asian tradition. But others - younger, American-born Asians - question whether the obsession with an ivory complexion has more to do with blending into white American culture, or even a subtle prejudice against those with darker skin.

The market research firm says cosmetics companies have taken note of the sensitivity, saying their Asian skin products in America are intended not for "whitening" but for "brightening."

"It's not a politically correct term because it seems to imply that looking Caucasian via a white complexion is the desired beauty goal," said Virginia Lee, a Euromonitor analyst.

The money alone freaks me out. To spend so much just to turn one's skin a certain color is for me, ridiculous. But outside of the monetary concern, the moral question must be raised: is changing your skin tone to possess the intangible concept of 'beauty' ever positive? Must a pursuit of the good life include the social benefit of Whiteness in American society? In the post-politically correct Bush Administration, can a nation that promotes pale, white complexions as more desirable than other epidermal tones simultaneously promote individual self-worth as an ideal of the good citizen? The answers are not obvious. Margaret Qiu contributes to an American industry based upon the exultation of Eurocentric physical forms as the epitome of beauty; to consider her actions justifiable, one would have to argue either that the pursuit of any beauty ideal is in itself not harmful, or that skin-whitening products, surgeries, and techniques do not desecrate personal self-worth or the physical form in any way. I do not believe that a person can reasonably argue such perspectives.

When Nicole Kidman is placed upon the hegemonic Western world as a pinnacle of female beauty, we tell every woman in our diverse civilization that if you don't look like her, you are not attractive. Then we let Cosmopolitan and other publications convince women that they are truly ugly. Either they are too fat, too wrinkled, too dark, too short, too tall, too wide, or too weird. Their hair doesn't have that special stringy neo-Neanderthal straightness, or their posteriors are too prominent. Their teeth are too crooked or their feet are too big. Their breasts sag too naturally, or they have breasts larger than a nine-year-old Jesus juice-oholic. Their skin is too blemished, or their skin is too dark.

Recently, I engaged in an online dick-waving contest with renowned armchair feminist Fromaway over the role of modern feminism in a diverse, multiracial female population. One would think that the feminist implications of skin-whitening creams used by Asian American women would be obvious for feminist groups; Reappropriate.com has an amazing post on this very article that examines some of these issues. Still, I don't believe that many prominent feminists would take up a cause like this. Writers like Catherine MacKinnon are helpful public intellectuals when attacking the role of pornography in the lives of Americans, or fighting to cement rape as a crime against humanity in international law, but when people of color enter the room, American feminists must grapple with both the exclusionary racist past of the women's suffrage and feminist movements, as well as modern mainstream American indifference (especially on the Left) to an Eurocentric beauty ideal that places White women (again!) at the center of the debate. Call it the 'Cosmo complex'; the omnipresent, omni-suggestive deluge of skinny, airbrushed, Caucasoid video vixens found in all facets of media production, from the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, to Maxim-esque lad mags, to local weathergirls on the evening news, to Las Vegas showgirls, to Nicole Kidman and Angelina Jolie, to Hugh Hefner's Playboy, to the Bush twins, to Ann Coulter, to Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, to Laguna Beach, to the Real World, to practically every issue of People or Time or Newsweek, or any rap video you've ever seen, to any porno flick you've ever watched, to any popular chick from high school or college you've ever hated, dated, needed to murder or wanted to befriend or needed to become.

Think about it: all American women and men are constantly exposed to the White female beauty ideal. This damages all of us, certainly all women, but I would contend that all of us are not assaulted identically. Men pursue sexually who they think they will be successful with, but a majority of men (regardless of race, unfortunately) attempt White females because of the longtime social programming we all endure. The oft-used Waiting to Exhale contention that successful Black men validate their professional and financial success by dating and marrying White women (any White women, no matter how not attractive) to African American women's exclusion in a perverse status symbol conflux of racist, sexist, and classist attitudes is a reasonable and fact-based contention. Women of color, suffering under this Cosmo complex, are constantly told not that they are just 'not attractive' but rather that they are ugly, unwanted, and condemned to be either alone or subjected to the misogynistic whims of minority men given license by society to engage whatever sexist practices they devise. Domestic violence, extra-marital promiscuity, economic control, forced domesticity, sexual retardation - whatever men of color do, however repulsive, is permissible on some level beyond the usual Wilt Chamberlain, R. Kelly, Sean Michaels hypersexual natural porn star stereotypes because freedom of choice in sexual coupling is in a very real sense denied to women of color by the Cosmo complex. When most men look towards Ashley Judd or Kirsten Dunst as attractive, the chick walking by looking like Jill Scott or India Arie really doesn't have a chance in the dating pool. D.L. Hugley once joked in his amazing 1999 stand-up comedy special Goin Home that he couldn't move to Africa under any circumstances. "I need a woman with a perm, fuck that!" Indeed.

Given this backdrop, Asian American and Latin American women (and lighter-skinned African American women, in my opinion) are placed in unique and interesting circumstances, similar but not identical to the social phenomena of racial passing. They absorb all Cosmo complex programming like the rest of us, but given equalizing factors like language proficiency, education level, and mainstream social immersion, a certain transracialization may occur whereby the Latina or Asian American woman may choose to assimilate to the point where the Cosmo complex works for her, rather than impedes her sexual chances. Still, in street-level race relations, so much personal choice surrenders to commonplace racist and sexist attack from misogynist men of all shades that most women never meaningfully choose their relation to the Cosmo complex. The point? Whatever internal cultural reasons that may preference lighter skin in some Asian American cultures, the physical adherence to those cultural mores has a mainstream political impact in our domestic American sphere, one that not only reinforces and justifies a generally oppressive social phenomena, but also provides chances for upward mobility through a possible cultural synchronicity that many conservative Republican proponents of 'model minority' stereotypes of Asian Americans and Latino assimilation into Republican Party religious conservativism may exploit. In essence, skin-whitening emerges as a reverse blackface flattery White America can't help but support.

Skin-whitening creams degrade individuality and demote uniqueness to promote monotone conformity to a ruling class defined in part by racial classification and general European genetic heritage. In the African American community, skin-whitening creams have a painful, sad history, filled with chemical burns, disfigurement, and the broken promise of passing. Better writers than I have assailed the degrading shame skin-whitening creams have wrought upon Black people; better writers attacked the pathetic clamors and petty morality of those hoping to end skin-deep Blackness with daily application. Still, I find this trend among middle-aged Asian American women particularly troubling because it emerges as a photo-negative of an entrenched trend among college-educated, youthful Asian American women - tanning. The forty and fifty plus Korean mothers who avoid sunlight like the vampire Lestat from Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire exhibit no higher moral principle than their twenty-something Cornell alumni daughters who visit tanning salons regularly to preserve that special coastal burn during the unending December of Ithaca's winters with patently unhealthy ten to twenty minute bursts of ultraviolet radiation, just to compete with Sandy and Kimber and Bethany for the sweaty, impromptu, Heineken-saturated animal attentions of homoerotic Captain America-wannabe frat brethren during the wet T-shirts and forgotten phone numbers of Cancun's drunken debauchery. Both groups engage in dangerous alteration of their natural, original epidermal state to gain mainstream White approval in some respect; I never met anyone who consciously tanned their skin because they wanted to achieve an unorthodox look.

Tanning and chemical whiteface flip double consciousness past application; try as we might, African Americans can not promote the eternal reflection of DuBois' American Negro upon individuals whose conscious attempts at transracial uniformity with the dominant racial classification defy the logic of both conservativism's rugged individualism and liberalism's cosmopolitan multiculturalism. The twenty-one year old female Asian American chemical engineer can no more proclaim her uniqueness from the tanning bed's claustrophobic solar flares than her middle-management microchip manufacturer mother can boast her culturally diverse, equal opportunity Arlington, Virginia workplace as a positive arena for minority retention and achievement. But of course, neither person would proclaim anything from such positions. Hell, African Americans don't sell double consciousness to every colored American they find, even on college campuses. No one cares that much. Instead, we expect the worst from one another to feel the pain less when others prove us right. The eternal quest for racial transcendence remains more a mental war than a social conflict, as Americans always prefer to judge with smiling, silent, clenched teeth than to dialogue with sharp, contentious, honest tongues.

Chino XL once described Mariah Carey as "Black when it's convenient"; one could apply his apt commentary to a celebrity like Jennifer Lopez, who seems to rediscover her Bronx-born Puerto-Rican heritage with every new album release. The important responsibility though, is that in a world where political affiliations, personal morality, and even outward racial classification has become Industrial Light & Magic smoke and mirrors masquerade for so many, those who develop and possess defined self-identities, racial and otherwise, speak openly on themselves and their experiences, so that the distance between reality and fantasy remains meaningful enough to matter. I do not believe in any sense that all Asian American women desire Whiteness; rather, I am troubled by women of color who so desire to prove racial solidarity for whatever reasons that they embrace physical self-desecration to achieve beauty. When light-skinned African American women tan, or wear natural hairstyles to 'prove' Blackness to their peers, I am similarly nauseated. I don't inspect every Black person's African American Express card with Kanye West's egotistical visionary squint on the face.

We've entered an epoch in American race relations where semiotics may overpower common sense, and we should all remain wary of these consequence through knowledge and personal analysis. In today's Washington Post, Roban Givhan's intriguing article Warning: Killer Curves in Spandex offers a take on the racial/ sexual signifier phenomena that's worth reading. Because in a world where women try to achieve both that particular shade of facial white (sickly bone White Michael Jackson looks 'terrible' according to Margaret Qiu) and try to affect in K Street offices that particular blend of cheeky hip-thrusting, bouncing bottom, and Juggs-magazine voluptuousness, everyone needs to recall their original sociopolitical positions. The medium can define us, especially when we relinquish our creative control over our various identities to mainstream groupthink. Once the Cosmo complex exerts control, you're already more cosmetic than corporeal.

Maybe you're Maybelline.