COMMENTARY
By STACEY MORRIS
Published in The Post-Star newspaper 2/14/02
I gasped audibly with shock when I pulled out the arts section of Saturday's paper...I didn't even realize Greta Van Susteren had left CNN, let alone put herself under a plastic surgeon's knife.
Who was that woman?
No one I'd seen before ... though she did possess that benign-perky quality that all too many female TV journalists project.
My next clue was the headline: "On TV, the face matters."
Then my eyes scanned down to a head shot of Greta Van Susteren, in a pose I'd seen hundreds of times before. Staring squarely at the viewer with a slightly crooked (and completely unperky) smile. It was the Greta I knew from her "Burden of Proof" show on CNN: tough in her interviewing technique, unmalleable with her opinions, and yes, rather plain, eyes somewhat droopy, with limp brown hair spilling down her back well past the shoulders.
It seems that when she switched from CNN to the Fox network, Van Susteren decided to switch her appearance as well.
If I weren't going to be brutally honest with you, this would be a short column.
It would end with me being outraged by the double-standard of male appearance vs. female appearance in TV journalism.
It's not that I'm not outraged by it -- I am. Especially as I see marginally attractive men juxtaposed with Diane Sawyer's luminescent beauty and the utter gorgeousness of Jane Clayson's face.
You can also be sure that Barbara Walters, the oldest working woman in television, had better remain not only blonde, but blonde and glamorous if she wants to keep her job.
David Brinkley was nearly 80 when he retired. When Mike Wallace turned 83 last May, his age was celebrated with many a talk-show interview to discuss his venerable status in journalism.
ABC's massive professional biography of Barbara Walters won't go near the fact that she's 69 years old. In the biography's final and 16th paragraph, the closest we're given to a birthdate is the vague and polite fact that Walters is "a native of Boston."
But in my outrage, I digress.
There was much about the CNN-Greta Van Susteren that I appreciated. I loved the fact that the centerfold-dating Ted Turner took Greta as she was: awash in her intellect and experience accrued as an attorney, the even-handed class with which she made her points and her refusal to back down from a position without being unruly or arrogant.
I don't know why she had the surgery and that's not even the point.
The point is how I looked at Greta Van Susteren.
As much as I breathed a sigh of relief that here was a woman journalist sitting in front of the camera who clearly refused to jump on the beauty queen band wagon, there was also a voice within me that I wanted to ignore.
Do something with that hair ... OK, there's got to be something you can do to make your lips look fuller ... Honey, a little plucking, they're called tweezers, LOOK INTO IT!
What was I saying? Did I not care about the women's movement and how valiantly Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem put their backs into ensuring women like Greta Van Susteren would have their own show.
I care.
But the fact is, we're sent a plethora of mixed messages in our culture. If I could take my cues only from the women's movement, the width of Greta's eyebrow wouldn't even be on my radar.
Regretfully, I came of age in an era when publications like Glamour, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Cosmopolitan were peddled heavily to young, impressionable women.
I was 13 when I got hooked on Clinique ads.
Wiser words were never spoken than the ones from that graduation speech set to music two years ago:
"Do not read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel UGLY."
Yes. And worse, beauty magazines will also make you critical of other women.
Shallow and callous as it sounds, it's true. Take a 13-year-old who wants to be as beautiful as Kim Alexis and who devoutly studies monthly issues of Vogue or Harper's Bazaar or Cosmopolitan and t'will happen.
I'm my own harshest critic and sometimes, that harshness is projected onto unsuspecting female TV journalists who might have better things to do than inject their lips with collagen or spend three hours at a hair salon in exchange for Vendela-esque blonde highlights.
But what about guys? After all, isn't it for them that women shave and tweeze and diet and dye their hair?
An informal poll of male co-workers on what they thought of CNN-Greta surprised me.
The general consensus was, the fact she wasn't beautiful didn't bother them. In fact, Van Susteren's absence of conventional prettiness even seemed to bolster her solidness as a TV journalist, they said.
Rather than head to the nearest newsstand to massacre all the copies of Cosmopolitan to shreds, I took a deep breath and pondered their viewpoint.
It made sense -- when guys see Heidi Klum or Stephanie Seymour, they're not looking at someone they aspire to look like -- at least not the guys I talked to.
And while women have invested obscene amounts of money on the latest cell-regenerating eye serum or spent precious time and brain cells deciding whether it's more fashionable to have matte or glossy lips this season, it could be that we're not being as scrutinized for perfection as we thought we were -- at least not by men.
I stopped reading Cosmo and Harper's Bazaar long ago.
Twenty years after buying the advice of beauty magazines and looking none more like Kim Alexis, I woke up to the fact that it's all crap. This is how magazines are sold.
But still, the danger of the harsh critic looms.
I still read beauty magazines, just more cautiously and not nearly as often.
When I pick up an issue of Elle, I zero in on the wit of advice columnist E. Jean Carroll instead of fixating on those holograms of unreality called models. A concoction made possible with the help, and I do mean help, of hairdressers, stylists, make-up artists, lighting technicians, wardrobers ... and for that Botticelli-like cleavage, duct tape.
(That's a little-known fact the folks at Cosmo and Victoria's Secret would rather have you not know.)
The woman on page 274 with a perfectly proportioned face, hair aloft on the wind currents of an electric fan, and her mile-long legs splayed across a chaise lounge is an illusion.
And it's a mistake if I expect myself or Greta to look remotely similar.