Saw a bumper sticker recently that read "Mary Kay, helping women for over 40 years," or some such nonsense. Helping us what?, I found myself wondering. Well, of course, helping us buy and sell make-up to each other. But what exactly do we have to "make up" for? Obviously we are being pressured to "make up" for something that we presumably lack.

Women have been defined by male parameters for centuries, and that definition has generally centered on exactly this principle of lack, of absence. We "lack" male qualities, those same qualities deemed valuable, whatever those might be as defined by current vogue. We "lack" male genitalia, according to this same misogynist perspective, cursed with withered appendages, or, more commonly, imagined as having none at all. I actually have students who believe that men stick out and women go in--that there's no female structures that correlate with the penis, no female genitalia save the hole. Our absence makes up our presence.

"Makes up," there it is again. Better make up girls, make up for what you lack, make up for what nature didn't give you. And then pray that it's enough to make up for your flaws. Don't ask what's in the make up, what carcinogens like paraben; don't ask who has suffered to make up this make up; don't ask what the effect to the environment is; don't ask what else you might do with that money you spend on this make up; don't wonder if the message that you need to make up for your failures corrodes your soul. Just hurry up, make up, and then as time passes, make up for lost time, make up for what nature takes away. Fill in those cracks, beg for male attention, move on to the plastic surgeon.

But don't forget, it's a losing battle, for if you play by the rules of this system and buy into the principle that you are flawed to begin with, you can never truly become that thing you are not. You cannot, by definition. As an alternative, you might imagine yourself lacking flaws that need to be made up for. If this seems unimanginable, I suggest that you imagine it all the harder. Let's make up for what sexism has done to us by rejecting the idea that we need to make up for a lack that we never had to begin with. I do. So can you. For the truth is, you're not lacking anything at all.