Translator: Ellen Maloney Reviewer: Helena Bedalli
Hello, my name is Tracey Spicer and I am a vain fool.
Let me take you through my schedule before appearing here today.
Six am: Get up, look in mirror, see old lady looking back,
wonder, "How the hell did she get in there?"
Put on running gear designed to suck in wobbly bits.
Run, even though no-one is chasing me with an axe,
but run to maintain professionally acceptable size ten.
Get home, do 20 wide leg squats in futile bid to get inner-thigh gap.
(Laughter)
Add 20 tricep dips to get rid of nasty bingo flaps.
Go to bathroom, scour skin with exfoliate to get rid of those dreadful dead cells.
Hop in shower, lather hair with sodium lauryl sulphate, rinse out.
Dollop on conditioner containing placental extract,
wait until it sinks in, and wait, and wait, and wait.
(Whistles)
Rinse out.
Soap up, wash off, get out of shower, dry body,
lather body in petroleum byproduct, otherwise known as "body moisturizer,"
and wait till that sinks in.
And wait, and wait, and wait.
Cleanse face, add toner containing alcohol -
wish it was a G and T and I could drink the bloody thing instead!
(Laughter)
Apply serum carefully and wait till that sinks in.
And wait, and wait.
Increase the paraben load by dabbing eye cream.
Dab, don't wipe- don't want to damage the delicate skin, do we?
(Laughter)
By this stage, I'm feeling like the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill,
but I can't stop.
Cover the rest of the body in bronzing cream,
and wait till that soaks in.
And wait
Put straightening gel in hair,
section off, and apply searing heat until styled into shape.
Burn finger on tongs, ow!
Almost do back in, lifting up make-up kit.
Foundation power, concealer, blusher, eye-shadow, eyeliner, eyelash curler,
mascara, eyebrow liner, eyebrow color, lip liner, lipstick, lip gloss.
Put on Shapewear to suck in "mummy gut" after two children.
(Laughter)
Pop on dress, perfectly pressed by a dry-cleaner, using known carcinogens.
Add liquid to nails, containing phthalates which are linked to breast cancer.
But wait! There's more!
Yesterday, visit the "House of Pain,"
no, not the one with the whips and the fishnets,
the one with the hot wax which they drip above my lip and below my eyebrows
before large hairs are torn out of my face,
as I lie there and solemnly chant, "Beauty is pain, beauty is pain."
Today I ask the question; Why do we do this to ourselves, why?
Why?
Because it's bullshit.
(Laughter)
(Cheering) (Applause)
Today I'd like us to reassess the amount of time we spend on our grooming,
and the effect it has on our productivity.
Imagine what we could achieve
if we weren't beholden to society's unreasonable expectations
about how we should look?
Imagine our increased levels of productivity in the workplace,
and in the home, in our lives more broadly?
And imagine how much happier and healthier we would be
by not adhering to society and advertising's
unreasonable and unrealistic image of how a woman should look.
A survey by Marks and Spencer
found women take an average of 27 minutes to get ready for work.
Over a year, that is ten full working days.
That's an awful lot of productivity lost.
A second survey expanded that; they compared men and women,
they looked at, not just grooming for work but for personal life as well,
and they extrapolated that over a lifetime.
Over our lives on average, women will take
3,276 hours in grooming.
For men, it's 1,092.
(Laughter)
That's Homer Simpson being groomed; "He's grooming me!"
That's about a third.
Do you know what we could do over those 3,276 hours?
We could complete a pre-MBA course at Oxford Business School,
become proficient at a musical instrument, or learn another language.
But for me, this is the killer statistic:
The American Time Use survey looked over four years at the effect
of grooming time on earnings.
And what they found was this:
For women, excess grooming time actually signals
a negative worker attribute rather than a positive worker attribute,
and guess what?
It decreases earnings.
If a woman doubles her grooming time,
her earnings are decreased, on average, by 3.4 per cent.
Why?
Because it's a non-market activity.
You know the other big non-market activity?
Housework, which we already do the bulk of.
It's an absurdity that we get caught up in all of this.
So, what can we do about it?
This is the difficult thing: how do we move forward from this?
I'm not a wowser:
I love the "Girl Power" movement, I love getting dressed up from time to time.
But that doesn't mean that we should stop asking questions.
And the questions I would like to ask are these:
Why does society expect this of us?
Will this make me happier and healthier, and is there a better way of doing it?
The reason why I chose this as the topic to speak about today
is because I've got a seven-year-old daughter.
Every time I get ready for my TV appearances,
she stands next to me in the bathroom and she always asks the same question:
"Mommy, why do women wear make-up and men don't?"
And for months, I struggled about how to answer her.
I thought, I can't say, "Because honey, it makes me look better,"
because that implies that women don't like the way they look naturally.
I can't say, "It makes me feel better,"
because that points to pathologically low self-esteem.
What I do say to her is, "Darling, I don't like it, it's not right.
But it's what society expects of women, and I'm doing whatever I can
in my very small way to try to change that.
Hopefully by the time you're a young woman,
you won't have to go through this."
I remember when I was a young woman at my first job in journalism,
at a metropolitan radio station, I was breakfast news editor.
I'd come in at 3:30 in the morning,
no make-up, wet hair, straight out of the shower.
Sometimes I'd come in in my pajamas because it was so early.
I still got the job done, you know?
The boss came in one day and he said,
"Tracey, I need to talk to you about your attitude."
I said, "Oh yeah? What's this all about?"
And he said, "You need to tidy up your act.
You're not looking professional."
I was genuinely perplexed.
I said, "What do you mean?"
He said, "Well, you could at least put on make-up once in a while!"
I said, "How does that make me more professional?"
He said, "Look, it's just what society expects of the ladies."
Then he stormed out and slammed the door.
He couldn't explain it, couldn't articulate it; it makes no sense.
I've been accused of a lot of things over my time in television and radio.
"Porking up" when I was a size 12,
being "too long in the tooth" when I was 37,
and having "limited intellect" because I'm a blonde.
I know that women on television and in the media more broadly
are a microcosm of what is experienced by women in society more broadly.
But the message is the same:
You are valued for how you look,
not for what is in your heart or in your head.
Well I'd like to start a movement to change that.
Like any big movement, it starts with small steps,
and the first step is to deconstruct the problem.
I'm quite literal, I take things quite literally, okay?
So I'm going to physically deconstruct the problem.
I don't like wearing three inches of make-up.
It makes me feel...
(Cheers) (Applause)
Thank you.
(Laughter)
Thank you, sounds like I've struck a chord there,
sounds like it drives you guys nuts too.
It makes me feel like I'm wearing a mask, like I can't really be who I am.
And yet every time I go out without make-up, the comments are always the same.
And I try to not wear make-up when I'm not doing TV appearances
or making speeches, and these are comments from friends,
they are well-meaning, they don't mean it in a belittling or insulting way,
but they're just comparing the way I look
when I see them without make-up with the way I am on television.
And they always say things like, "You look a bit pale, are you not feeling well?"
(Laughter)
"Are you a bit iron deficient? Here, I'll get you a steak!"
(Laughter)
"Oh, you look a bit washed out, are you coming down with the flu?"
God, that feels better.
See how long that took? I literally do have three inches of make-up on.
Oh, thank God.
Alright, what can I deconstruct next? This is fun.
(Laughter)
This is like pulling a Barbie doll apart.
(Laughter)
Now the hair is more difficult,
because this is what my hair looks like usually.
(Laughter)
An electrocuted Poodle,
or "a blonde Afro" as it was known at university.
Now any woman knows that getting caught in the rain
is the best way of getting frizzy hair,
so let's hope this works and doesn't short-out the microphone,
(Laughter)
or in some way electrocute myself
because then the cameramen down there and the news journalists
will have a really great story.
(Laughter)
(Sigh) That's better!
Alright! That should undoubtedly take effect in a few minutes,
I'm telling you.
Alright, I love this dress.
(Laughter)
See how emotional we are when it comes to clothing?
I fricking love this dress!
But we shouldn't love pieces of fabric, we should be loving people.
This dress becomes constricting after a couple of hours.
I can't think properly, I feel like I can't breathe,
so it's coming off.
(Cheers) (Applause)
Now I know what it feels like to be a stripper. This is awesome!
(Laughter)
That's okay.
(Cheers) (Applause)
Now we get to high heels.
I could do a whole speech on high heels, frankly.
We all know they're the tools of the patriarchy,
but we get caught up in how they make our legs look longer and more shapely.
But they are bloody uncomfortable.
We also get caught up in the narrative that we are expressing our individuality,
our economic power, and our strength through them.
Well that's bullshit too.
Remember "Sex and The City"?
That's gone, there we go.
I grew up in Queensland so I'm extremely comfortable in thongs or bare feet.
(Applause)
So this is me.
The real Tracey Spicer without my armor.
Because that's what it is.
There's a reason why a woman's bouffant is called her "helmet of hair."
We do this to physically protect ourselves.
I have a friend who was diagnosed with breast cancer recently,
and she had chemotherapy.
Believe it or not, she said the worst thing was her hair falling out,
that she always felt like a lion with this mane of hair,
and that she felt like the biblical Samson without that power.
It's sad, isn't it?
Quite obviously, I couldn't go to work looking like this.
(Laughter)
Most of us couldn't.
I love the idea of binning our bras and not shaving out legs.
I did that when I was at university, it was marvelously liberating.
But I think with this fourth wave of feminism, we need a new way.
So I've devised three easy steps.
(Laughter)
If they'll come up.
One easy step is I should learn my technology better.
Step one: Take note of the number of minutes
your personal grooming takes over a day, week, month, year, and lifetime.
You'll be shocked by how much time we spend on this stuff.
Step two: Think about the other things you could be doing;
writing a book, meditating, learning how to surf,
learning how to sing, doing a masters, doing a PhD.
Whatever it is, think about what you wanted to do as a kid.
We only have one life, we don't know when it's going to end.
You might as well think about things you wanted to do as a kid,
and think, "Right, I can do that now!"
Step three: Decide what you can reduce or live without.
This is the difficult thing and it's different for every woman,
and I don't want to be prescriptive about it.
As an example for me: it'll be simplifying my hair-do -
45 minutes a day on one's hair is ridiculous -
minimizing the make-up on television and continuing to not wear it off-camera,
stopping painting my nails and, I mean,
who said that women's nails need to be shiny and colorful and men's don't?
It is an absurdity!
And getting rid of the fake tan.
I mean it is expensive, and it is full of nasty chemicals.
Like any change, this will take some time to remove
society's layers of expectations about how a woman should look.
And there will be backlash, there always is.
But I hope that everyone here in this room goes home today
and at least has a think about this time spent
and it's effect on productivity,
and reassesses that mathematical equation.
Because if we do this, I assure you, we will be happier, we will be healthier,
and we will be more productive.
My name is Tracey Spicer and I'm no longer a vain fool.
(Applause) (Cheers)