Staunchly, vol. 113: The One with the Curdled Mascara

9/22/19

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the premiere of Friends today, I thought I’d send out a special Sunday Staunchly with an essay I wrote about the show—specifically about an episode where Chandler won’t go on a second date with a woman because her mascara is clumpy. It’s an essay about mascara anxiety, yes, but also about learning young how the smallest mistake can make you an unlovable woman. 

Oddly enough, I’ve stopped wearing daily mascara since I first wrote this piece a year ago. 

Hope you like! See you tomorrow.

xo 

The daily process of opening my eyes to the world is long, painful and emotionally fraught. I squeeze and bend my lashes into crescent moons with a scrotum clamp that Shu Uemura markets as an eyelash curler. I apply a product whose provocative name honors the historical licentiousness of kohled eye whiskers: “Better Than Sex,” “Eyes to Kill,” “KUSH.” And I think about the time, on a season three episode of the television show Friends, when Chandler Bing wouldn’t go on a second date with a woman because her mascara was clumpy.

Friends is ubiquitous as Coke, but if you didn’t have access to the world from 1994-2004 (or Netflix today): six young adults navigate life and hook-ups in mostly Giuliani’s New York, all while inhabiting giant West Village apartments with original crown molding and endowing a whole generation with false expectations about rent control and hyper-elastic work schedules. All the classic characters are there: the ladies’ man (Joey); the spoiled one (Rachel); the sarcastic one (Chandler); the quirky one with a tragic backstory who doesn’t believe in evolution (Phoebe); the neurotic siblings (Ross and Monica).

I love Friends. I grew up with it, catching the later seasons live and bingeing the earlier seasons in high school with worn box sets I bought on eBay; am loyal to the show in ways we are loyal to anything that brought us joy and comfort during the hormonal inferno of adolescence.

But watching Friends today requires a high capacity for cringe. Though insulated by a koozie of yuppie conviviality and nineties nostalgia—a time we thought we knew everything but, it turns out, we actually knew nothing—the show has not aged well. For one, diversity is nonexistent. The complexions of its main characters reduced to a palette would read like an ice cream company’s attempt to differentiate vanillas (French, sweet cream, bean).  

Homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny are all rampant, and casual as khakis. Chandler’s transgender dad is misgendered with glee, her anatomy treated with particular viciousness by the writers, like an itch they couldn’t help but scratch. (It is never clear, in ten seasons, that the writers understood the difference between drag queens and trans women). “Fat Monica,” a character visited in flashbacks and one two-part counterfactual episode, is the butt of basically every joke in every scene she appears in—Courtney Cox’s fat suit undulating in sync with the laugh track. Body positive, this show is not.

Friends brainwashed me. Into thinking that the apex of social achievement is one’s participation in an occasionally incestuous group of exactly six people, equally divided between girls and boys. Into believing, to my militant feminist core, that a rising star in fashion should reject her dream job in Paris for a guy with major rage issues and internalized homophobia who once owned a monkey in Manhattan. And, perhaps most egregiously, into accepting that a woman’s sexual value could be diminished or destroyed instantly by a doomed clump of dried mascara—a mass of ink no bigger than a ladybug.  

Allow me to explain. In the season three episode, “The One with the Dollhouse,” Chandler goes on a date with Joanna, Rachel’s boss at Bloomingdales. Joanna, played by Allison LaPlaca, is an ambitious career woman in that particular late-20th-century way: gruff, challenging, masculine in appetite. Like Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl. Confident women who make deals, have sex, and sit on desks. Not necessarily in that order.

Joanna and Chandler meet when he escorts Rachel back to the office after their lunch in midtown (he wants to see the women’s lingerie—which, like, the idea of a dude in 1997 masturbating to overstock push-up bras is almost too quaint to be creepy). Joanna, having perhaps lowered her expectations after too many bad dates, asks Rachel to set them up. Rachel poses this to Chandler, who enthusiastically agrees: “Yeah, she seems cool, attractive, I’ll do it!”

The enthusiasm is short-lived. After they go on their date (off-screen), Joanna and Chandler each offer their version of a postmortem to Rachel in standard Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus form. 

They just “clicked,” Joanna gushes. “He’s got such a good heart.” Chandler’s take is different. Joanna, in his damning account, is a “big, dull dud.” He virtually scats the words at Rachel, the muscles in his throat bulging and splintering: the manifest destiny of a man over-confident in his own non-dullness.

Fearing her job at stake, Rachel pushes Chandler to call Joanna as he promised he would at the end of their date. 

“No, she’s really dull,” Chandler doubles down—now here, for me, is where the scars bloomed—and, “she gets this gross mascara goop thing in the corner of her eye.”

In my doughy, youthful brain, a keystone connection was forged: clumpy mascara is a dating deal-breaker, a fatal flaw. Clump your mascara and be doomed to a life of drab, essential singledom. Clump your mascara and no man will ever love you.

Of course none of this would have stuck—some throwaway line from a putz whose well-established neuroses are the show’s ninth main character (after “New York” and whiteness)—if it wasn’t reinforced by everything girls are taught about our appearance from the dawn of sentience. Namely, that there are hundreds, thousands of micro mistakes we can make on a daily basis that can—and will—render us unlovable.

The lifeblood of the beauty industry is the invented problem. The small thing that if performed wrong, curled improperly, defrizzed ineffectively, will make you an unlovable woman. Everything we are told about pores fits in this category. Everyday we learn new things to hate about ourselves. Just the other day I was introduced to a company on Instagram selling pills that purport to make your vagina taste like fruit. Your vagina is not the gum in Willy Wonka! It doesn’t need to offer your partner a full Sunday roast, with dessert. Your vagina does not exist for the promise of blueberries.

This is the message the culture sends to women: that you go through life incurring little aesthetic demerits which, if not corrected or explained away, can turn you monstrous. The disgust in Chandler’s voice when he mentions Joanna’s mascara goop. It is so final. He is repulsed, and there is no coming back from that. The idea that a man could talk about you behind your back, his voice throbbing with disdain for a flaw you didn’t even know you had, a flaw that is so insubstantial, scared me to death. More than a decade later, it’s still an anxiety I relive every morning as I comb through my eyelashes with an inky wand, hoping to avoid that dreaded nub of curdled mascara lest it disqualify me from love, sex, romance, intimacy forever.

But here’s the thing. Nothing disqualifies you from love or sex. It’s a lesson I wish I had learned earlier, for the sake of my own self-esteem. Not clumpy mascara. Not murder (ask the wives of serial killers). Not even having three nipples, as Chandler has. Of course there’s nothing wrong with three nipples but in the world of Friends, where any slight deviation from the norm is considered a flaw, it’s a demerit. In reality, it’s cheesy but it’s true: there’s a lid for every pot, a clamp for every nip. 

The coda to this is that Chandler and Joanna do end up hooking up—in season 4’s classic The One With the Cuffs, which chronicles the logistical complications of some lite workplace bondage. Six episodes later, Joanna dies. She’s hit by a bus in The One Where They’re Going to Party. (She doesn’t even get an episode title).

If this is not the neatest summation of the heterosexual woman’s experience with the opposite sex, I don’t know what is: First they dismiss you. Then they engage you in some unspecific, erotic power play. Then you die.