The Awakening of Paulina Porizkova

The former supermodel turned writer brings lessons for us all about authenticity, indoctrination, and growing up under Russian control.

At 56, former supermodel Paulina Porizkova may no longer be the most beautiful woman in the world, but she is certainly one of the most interesting. It is not merely the loss of her famous “young” face that makes her so. It’s what she has chosen to make of that loss. Paulina has reinvented herself as a writer. And she has important insights about exploitation, what it’s like growing up in a Soviet-controlled country, and what her experience suggests about a Ukraine under Russian domination.

For context: In 1988 — when Paulina turned heads all over the world — Ronald Reagan ordered the destruction of the US embassy in Moscow because the Soviets had planted listening devices in the building’s structure. 1988 was also the year South Korea hosted the Summer Olympics. In 1988 future NBA superstars Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant were born.

This year, Curry and Durant will celebrate their 34th birthdays. But when they were born, Paulina Porizkova was a 23-year-old supermodel. And she was everywhere.

She was the face of Estée Lauder

On the cover of Elle, Vogue, and Harpers’ Bazaar, to name but a few. Four years earlier, at age 19, she was the first Central European model on the cover of the Sports IllustratedSwimsuit edition. With her six million-dollar contract for Estée Lauder, Paulina was the highest paid supermodel of her day. By 1989, she was married to rock-and-roller Ric Ocasek, front man for The Cars. In subsequent years, she became a judge on America’s Top Model, appeared on Dancing with the Stars, and even picked up a few movie roles.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course. And there were certainly many Hollywood contenders for the superlative — Michelle Pfeiffer, Kim Basinger, and Natassia Kinski, for instance.

But in the 1980s, Madison Avenue meant for us to think of Paulina Porizkova as the it-girl of the era. They could use her to sell things. Beauty products and magazines. But also an idea. A concept. She was what filmmaker Luis Buñuel called That Obscure Object of Desire, a film that uses two women to play the same role. One representing the way the leading female character looks in reality, the other showing what the leading male character sees when he looks at her.

If you don’t believe me about Paulina as a concept, look at Steve Martin’s 1986 Christmas wish-list on Saturday Night Live, in which Paulina features in his fantasy of an extended 31-day orgasm.

When Estée Lauder came out with a fragrance for men, it was Paulina with her eyes closed, sniffing at the collar of a toothy square-jawed male, looking as if she too might be on the verge of climax. Scent matters — was the ad campaign’s tag line. But the subtext pushed a more provocative message: This is the kind of woman you get when you use Lauder for Men.

Paulina was not a porn star

But James Joyce probably would have classified her as one. “Art that moves us to desire things, I call pornography,” he wrote in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And to the extent that her face and body were used to do just that, Paulina became by Joycean standards an instrument of a genre she did not consciously intend to represent. After all, she started modeling at 13. Who is conscious of anything besides acne at 13?

In October of this year, Paulina Porizkova, who has 735 thousand followers on Instagram, will publish a book. If her Instagram posts are any indication, she will undoubtedly explode the myths and false standards associated with airbrushed beauty in which she participated but was also exploited. As a former supermodel, she’s in a position to know. And I’m looking forward to reading it.

Censorship

Recently, Instagram removed one of her posts for alleged “hate speech.” The post featured a picture of the way she looks today at 56, wrinkles and all, next to an airbrushed photo from her it-girl days. REALITY vs PROPAGANDA reads one post. FILTER vs. TRUTH reads another.

In the follow-up posts that were allowed to remain, she describes how she was indoctrinated as a child to believe the Soviets were her best friends, come to free Czechoslovakia from oppression. It was never explained, she says, just what that oppression was. But Czechs who failed to display a Russian flag in their windows on International Worker’s Day, ran the risk of losing their jobs.

We can all hear an echo of that earlier “Soviet friendship” in the fake news of Vladimir Putin today. His state-controlled media tells the Russian people their army has entered Ukraine in order to free it from Nazification. Anyone who dares to say otherwise is subject to 15 years in prison. If history is prophecy, what Paulina experienced as a child in Czechoslovakia is what Ukraine can expect should the Russians succeed against their heroic freedom fighters and the economic sanctions of the West.

But there is an irony here

Although she was indoctrinated by the Soviets as a little girl, Paulina grew up to become part of a similar but more subtle indoctrination machine in the West. As the representative of media-driven beauty propaganda, she unwittingly assisted that machinery in its ongoing exploitation of others.

Little girls everywhere think the super-skinny-supermodel look is the thing to be. They suffer from eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia. They experience anxiety and depression because they don’t match the images they see on social media.

We think Russia is evil because it controls what its population is allowed to think, but how do we feel that Facebook had data suggesting that it knew Instagram’s algorithms negatively impacted teenaged girls? Or that money-generating algorithms determine what gets seen on other social-media platforms? And how about new laws in several states regulating what schools can say about race and sexual orientation, and even what books are allowed to be on the shelves of school libraries?

Here is another irony

For someone who was considered highly desirable back in the day, Paulina Porizkova has been “dumped” more than once. She was fired from America’s Top Model. Voted offDancing with the Stars. And famously left out of her former rock-star husband’s will, a decision she had to fight in court and eventually managed to overturn. All this dumping reveals a truth. The myth of desirability does not translate into the actual experience of being loved, accepted, and wanted for who you are.

But Paulina’s losses have also been the instrument of her enlightenment. When her book comes out this fall, it will undoubtedly reckon with how wrong it is that a woman becomes invisible when she reaches a certain age. But I hope it doesn’t deteriorate into a woe-is-me lamentation of how difficult it is to find a suitable mate after 50.

Her Instagram has important things to say about being true to yourself, no matter what. She’s not afraid to let her hair down and cry without makeup online. But accomplishing that in print may not be so easy.

I suspect any book by an author with nearly a million followers will do well in the marketplace But I doubt such a book will manage to reverse implicit biases about beauty, which have existed since Cleopatra and Helen of Troy.

Dr. Phil’s beauty panel

On the eve of this month’s International Women’s Day, Dr. Phil — I know, I know — hosted a discussion with several women about the changing standards of beauty — and how those women dealt with those standards in their own lives. He showed a series of large photographs that covered the gamut from the curvy images of Marie Antoinette to flapper girls of the 1920s, the coke-bottle figure of Marilyn Monroe, and the waif-like look of Twiggy in the 1960s and beyond.

His panel included women of different shapes, sizes, and ethnic groups, who talked about body-shaming and self-acceptance. It even made room for a 20-year-old toothpick-thin man who’s received so many Botox injections he can no longer move his face or feel his lips. Considered fat in high school, he feels he’s living his true life now.

But for me, the most heartbreaking comparison occurred when Dr. Phil brought in a formerly dark-skinned Nigerian woman who now looks a couple of shades lighter than Halle Berry or Beyonce. In order to keep from getting dark again, she has to continue the skin-lightening treatments on a regular basis. She does this because she believes light-skinned women are considered more attractive.

A dark-skinned Black woman from the United States with close-cropped natural hair appeared on the same program. When Dr. Phil asked what she thought of the Nigerian, she said: “This hurts my heart so much.”

And you know what? It hurts mine too.

Beauty bias

If you think these false standards don’t matter much, consider the tangible impact of “beauty bias,” a concept Paulina unwittingly fed into. According to Forbes, beauty bias is the “edge” some people receive when they’re considered more attractive, regardless of whether this happens consciously or unconsciously. But it is also a form of racism.

So-called attractive people are more likely to be employed. They tend to work more productively and profitably, receive more substantial pay, better promotions, obtain loan approvals, negotiate loans with better terms, and even have more attractive and highly educated spouses. If Black isn’t really beautiful in the eyes of those who value and implement this edge, then racism rears its ugly head.

What worries me is that Black women are often judged by a European idea of beauty. The very thing Paulina Porizkova represented for so many years. And although that is changing with the presence of accomplished Black actors like Lupita Nyong’o and Danai Gurira, and iconic Black models like Iman, Eurocentric notions of beauty continue to negatively impact Black women in the workplace.

Especially around hair. I’ve personally known highly capable Black women in management positions who worry that wearing their natural hair at work will classify them as militant and limit their chances for promotion.

In the words of the old joke: “If your hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed. If your hair is nappy, white people are not happy.”

Mirror, mirror on the wall

As with all unconscious predispositions, freeing ourselves from beauty bias requires that we look within. To give ourselves a reality check. To be honest with ourselves about why we do the things we do. If we’re lucky, we have friends willing to hold up a mirror so we can see ourselves more clearly.

Although I wish Paulina Porizkova had been able to hold up her own mirror while she was still considered hot, I’m glad she’s doing it now. What is not clear to me is whether she understands that she is actually more interesting today than during the time when she was Madison Avenue’s ad-driven object of desire.

As Coco Chanel once said: “A woman can be gorgeous at thirty, charming at forty, and irresistible for the rest of her life.”

But psychologist Erich Fromm said something even wiser:

We try to make ourselves beautiful because we want to be loved — instead of thinking about how to become more loving.

Years before the birth of the Internet, Fromm’s book The Art of Loving unpacked the dangers of today’s rush to become social-media influencers.

“Modern man,” he says, “has transformed himself into a commodity…His main aim is the profitable exchange of his…‘personality package’ with others…Life has no goal…no satisfaction except the one to consume.”

The Art of Loving was first published in 1956, the same year playwright Arthur Miller was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee because it considered his play The Crucible to be suspicious. When he appeared before the committee, Miller’s beautiful new wife Marilyn Monroe was at his side. Her presence that day came at considerable risk to her own reputation and career. But she went with him anyway.

Whatever she may have appeared to be on the outside, Marilyn Monroe was, in that instance at least, a woman of courage. That’s a virtue you cannot see on the outside. It’s like honor, trust, compassion, and love. Things we used to refer to as character.

When Paulina Porzikova’s book is published later this year, I hope its pages will show how it feels to be a recovering commodity. I hope it tells us what she’s learned in her 56 years about the kind of beauty the eye cannot see. The beauty that comes from within. We can’t all grow up to be supermodels. But that’s a lesson we can all benefit from.

©2022 Andrew Jazprose Hill

Thanks for reading.

Originally published at https://andrewjazprosehill.substack.com on March 10, 2022.