Both Lena Dunham and Vogue had a controversial year, no less so when they joined forces: After Lena was featured on the cover of the magazine and for a spread inside, Jezebel offered $10,000 for unretouched photos from the shoot, which they got their hands on and shared two hours later. Lena, for one, was not pleased. As she said in an interview with Grantland’s Bill Simmons: “They made such a monumental error in their approach to feminism … It felt gross,” adding that “It was the most minimal retouching. I felt completely respected by Vogue.”
Mindy Kaling on Elle
In a similar controversy, a February Elle magazine cover featuring Mindy Kaling sparked a debate about body image after detractors pointed out that the three alternate covers (featuring Zooey Deschanel, Amy Poehler and Allison Williams) showed the women’s full bodies and were in color, while Mindy’s showed just her face and was in black-and-white. Elle has levied criticisms in the past about obscuring larger women’s bodies, like with Melissa McCarthy’s Elle cover from the previous year, in which she was pictured in an oversize coat, and Gabourey Sidibe’s, in which she was featured in tight close-up. (Elle was also accused of lightening her skin, which it vehemently denied.)
On “Letterman,” Kaling expressed displeasure with the backlash, saying, “I didn’t expect this reaction. There was a weird reaction, which was, ‘Does Elle magazine think Mindy’s not skinny enough to show her whole body, standing up from head to toe?…The implication was, ‘What, Elle, you can’t put her big, fat body on the magazine?’ Why? ‘Cause she’s just fat and gruesome? Why can’t we look at her beautiful fat body?’”
Laverne Cox on Time
But it wasn’t all horrible and depressing! “Orange Is the New Black” star and transgender activist Laverne Cox was on the cover of Time, marking the first time a transgender person appeared on the cover of the storied magazine. This week, Cox and other women transgender activists were also featured on the cover of Candy magazine, the “first transversal style magazine.”2014 may not have ended up being the year of diversity that some of us hoped it would be, but if there is one particular way in which it introduced texture and variety to the pop cultural landscape, it’s in the realm of hair. This year has seen attention drawn to natural hair on black women across television, from “How To Get Away With Murder” to “Black-ish.” It’s brought attention to the economy behind artificial hair via jokes on “Selfie” and storylines on “The Comeback.” It’s seen the films “Beyond The Lights” and “Dear White People,” both of which feature characters coming to terms with their ever-shifting racial identities through the canvas of their hair. After 2014, Noni’s mother wouldn’t have much of an excuse for not knowing what to do with her daughter’s hair—she would have had the chance to see its reality on-screen over and over again.
Without a doubt, the defining moment for natural hair this year was Viola Davis’ character Annalise Keating taking off her wig in “How To Get Away With Murder.” “Beyond The Lights” went for similar themes, but the film is going for quiet transformation. Davis is going for high drama—in the style of all of Shonda Rhimes’ shows, she’s going for operatic heights of emotion. And in “Let’s Get To Scooping,” she lands it: slowly stripping off not just her wig but her false eyelashes, her makeup, and the eyeliner that makes her look more “presentable.”
That moment deals with much of the same underlying themes as Justin Simien’s “Dear White People,” an independent film about black students at an Ivy League school in the weeks leading up to a blackface-themed party on campus. Simien’s film features not just one person going through a hair-related crisis of identity, though, but at least four: Lionel, a social loner with a very large afro that white people won’t stop touching; Coco, a black woman with a small collection of sleek, elegant wigs; Sam, a biracial woman whose hair is stubbornly neither white “enough” or black “enough”; and Troy, a black man trying to fit in with his white fellow students who happens to cut hair on the side. The film is partly about the black characters coming to terms with the white characters, and partly about the black characters coming to terms with each other—with the many different possible ways to identify as black. The characters’ hair becomes a stand-in for their relationship to their identity. As the story unfolds, each character chooses to transform their hair in some way—except for Troy, who tellingly chooses to not change his hair at all.
Even when pop culture didn’t actively engage with hair, it was possible to find African, natural hair in many different stories: “Black-ish” made hair a storyline in a recent episode; “Scandal” finally showed off Olivia’s natural hair in the fourth-season premiere; and the updated production of “Annie,” which, in engaging with both star Quvenzhané Wallis’ hair and the original, all-white production, opens up all kinds of implications, potentially fascinating and problematic. “Seeing a white woman comfortable with—and enjoying—making an African-American girl’s hair look good is significant,” reports NPR. “The story of African-American hair is a story about belonging and not belonging.”
This could have been written about a major storyline in this season of “Orange Is The New Black,” which explored the underpinnings of character Suzanne’s pathology, starting from her tumultuous upbringing as a black girl in a white family. Suzanne has always been a volatile side character in the show, but this season, she took center stage as the target of manipulation. And the tool through which she is controlled is her hair. The crime boss Vee, when she comes to Litchfield, senses Suzanne’s insecurity about her unruly, non-white hair and uses it to her advantage—showing her such tenderness and expertise that Suzanne becomes her unstable attack dog.
2014 has been a banner year for conversation around racial fissures in America. Real-world deaths have led to an important conversation about what it means to be black in this country. In that perspective, it seems irrelevant to draw into the discussion of how hair is portrayed in pop culture. But the superficiality of appearance is directly connected to our deepest notions of identity. Olivia Pope from “Scandal” has walked in and out of the White House for every episode of the show without ever revealing to its interior what her hair really looks like. Suzanne’s parents in “Orange Is The New Black” adopted a black girl without considering that it might be important to learn how to do her hair properly. Coco, in “Dear White People,” convinced herself that she looked better in a blonde wig than in her own hair. There is a language of discrimination in just these acts. If there is such a thing as follicular injustice, 2014 makes it harder to be blind to it.The Paleo Diet
This diet continued to have legs—strong, swift CrossFitted legs—this year because it promises that you can think like a lady (get that bikini body!) and eat like a caveman (all of the lard!). Paleo eaters get to eliminate dairy along with a lot of unnamed toxins and nebulously harmful contaminants (found in, I guess, beans?) while sounding virile, not fussy—all thanks to “evolutionary biology.” The Paleo Diet claims to be a lifestyle diet that works with our genetics, not against them. “Paleo looks to ancestral wisdom—whether from cave-dwelling Paleolithic ancestors or remote native populations untouched by Western disease—for guidance on what to eat and how to live,” says a basics article in Paleo Magazine. It’s food spirituality for the recreational Krav Maga set, a way to give up gluten without taking up meditation.
Gluten-Free Diet