A war against beauty and truth

Being much addicted to asking Grok useless questions, and seeing that Dylan Mulvaney—a young man devoted to the idea that he can be a woman, or, according to the trans community, a “doll”—had finagled a trip to Morocco to ride a camel while holding a bottle of Jean Paul Gaultier’s perfume, Divine, I wanted to know why. I typed in, “Why did Jean Paul Gaultier choose Dylan Mulvaney to promote the perfume, Divine?” Grok spewed forth a torrent of prose about a celebration of diversity and inclusivity. It also observed that the fragrance is a “celebration of femininity,” which “transcends traditional gender boundaries.” It offered me 15 websites if I wanted to know more. I do want to know more, but AI, thus far, doesn’t seem to be the place to find it.

Jean Paul Gaultier began his career in 1970 and steadily worked to ascend the heights of couture fashion. In 1990, he designed the costumes for Madonna’s world tour. She sported two stiff points affixed over her bust, which the critics said was “daring.” After that, the unnatural, and frankly indecent cones became Gaultier’s signature silhouette. When he got into perfumes, they became the iconic shape of every bottle.

In 1985, Gaultier developed a collection called “And God Created Man,” in which he “introduced androgynous fashion, challenging rigid gender norms.” His runway show that year featured men in skirts. Looking back at them, the skirts were ugly and didn’t become a trend until, well, until the time was right for Dylan Mulvaney to begin his “100 Days of Girlhood” during the pandemic. Even then Mulvaney went more in the direction of Kate Spade than Gaultier.

The “girlhood” effort culminated in the Bud Light fiasco. Bud Light still hasn’t recovered its market share from so tragically misjudging the ideological proclivities of its consumer base. Mulvaney published a book in March called Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer. Glennon Doyle, endorsing it, confessed that “Dylan makes me laugh and makes me brave.” “I love this woman,” she said. Mulvaney, on his part, had face “feminization” surgery to make him look more like the girl he aspires to be.

Ted Gioia, recently lamented the “medicalization of beauty.” “When I was younger,” he wrote on his Substack, 

I would have mocked anyone who believed Keats’s strident claim that ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ It seems so outrageous and unfounded. But I don’t feel that way anymore. I now accept with total confidence that beauty and truth converge—almost as if their mutual attraction is woven into the building blocks of the universe. I would even add to Keats’s equation—insisting that Beauty=Truth=Good. And if you doubt this, I will simply respond: It would be a strange universe if goodness and truth were not beautiful. I refuse to live in that sort of world. You shouldn’t either. 

He concludes, “But in the beauty businesses of today, truth and nature are the enemy. You go to war against the natural—and your goal is the artificial.”

That simple observation, for me, distills the low-grade anger I feel every time I see Dylan Mulvaney. I am a woman. There are no caveats to that statement. When I first scrolled through Mulvaney’s TikTok, I felt disrespected and mocked to the core of my being. It has always bothered me that so many clothes for women are made by men who aren’t physically attracted to them. Women, for the fashion industry, are supposed to be malleable, mute objects whose purpose is to walk in a straight line, strike a pose, and then disappear behind the curtain. What about the true shape of the average woman who has to stuff herself into a pair of jeans on the regular, even after bringing another life into the world? The true, astonishing beauty of the female, not just some tortured form, is not something Mulvaney would ever aspire to, let alone notice.

God created us male and female not so that we could switch back and forth, or try to be both at the same time, but so that, face to face, we would gain knowledge of the goodness that is woven, as Gioia says, into the universe. When we look frankly and truthfully at each other without mockery, without the drive to consume and exploit, we get a glimpse, if not the aroma, of the Divine, of God’s overflowing love to beautify His creation.