Mecano popularized a song like Maquillaje in the eighties that today would not pass the politically correct cut, where a girl does not let her partner look at her until she has put on all the essential creams. It starts with the “shadow here and shadow there” and ends with a stanza that says “look now, look now, you can look / that I’ve put makeup on / and if you see my image you will be amazed / And you will want to kiss me”. It wasn’t exactly a feminist theme, but it was sung by an entire generation, at a time when political correctness was of little concern. It’s also true that, in forty years, men have filled our bathroom cupboards with as many anti-glasses, anti-blemish and anti-aging creams as our partners. And a make-up artist from TV3 even told me that fewer and fewer men ask for make-up remover wipes when they leave the set because they look better.
Well, make-up entered the campaign when Alberto Núñez Feijóo accused Yolanda Díaz of manipulating employment data: “Seeing the minister in charge of employment, there is no doubt that she knows a lot about make-up”. Since metaphors are loaded by the devil and Twitter is the closest thing to Dante’s inferno, after five minutes smoke was coming out of the social network, where the PP candidate was called sexist – and worse things -.
The big parties are running out of arguments to attack each other. Ayuso, who loves messing around, went so far as to ridicule the leader of Sumar after she showed that she irons to relax. The president of Madrid finds it disturbing that, living in a 400-meter house paid for by everyone, she irons. I don’t know where the contradiction is, but the noise in the networks went up.
Returning to the sexist use of make-up as an electoral weapon, I remember reading Nora Ephron in The Neck Doesn’t Lie that her bathroom was overrun with bottles of potions for the skin, hands, body or feet. To conclude: “Remember when we were young? There was only Nivea and life was much simpler.” And politics was also much cleaner, like a freshly washed face.
