AND VENUS WAS HER NAME

In a 2012 Times Magazine profile of Venus and Serena Williams, acclaimed essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote this about meeting Venus for the first time: “it’s easy to find yourself unprepared for her sheer prettiness." Reading that made me want to scream. Grown men have never been shy about admiring the looks of female tennis professionals. Virtually all of the women on the WTA tour acquire sex symbol status, and for some it even eclipses their game. So why the surprise that Venus is pretty? Is it her ferocious, unfeminine sportsmanship? Our narrow ideals of beauty? Or that she’s rarely photographed with the intention of making her pretty?

Right now Venus is on the cover of ESPN Magazine’s Body Issue, naked, perched tastefully and somewhat ridiculously against chalky white hills and a cloudy blue sky. The photos show off her enviable, classical proportions; she’s long and lean, almost like a Botticelli figure. Her body is lithe, curvy and muscular all at once. She’s smiling easily, entirely comfortable in herself. Typically when we see her she’s sporting a warrior-like grimace, on court, or extravagant hair and makeup, at public appearances. Here she’s flat-out pretty.

Photograph by Williams+Hirakawa, courtesy of ESPN.

July 11, 2014 by Nalina Moses

There was a controversy when it was announced that actress Zoe Saldana would portray legendary songstress Nina Simone in a movie biography, and then another when photos of Saldana in costume as Simone, with pancake makeup and a prosthetic nose, were leaked. Simone’s daughter, Simone Kelly, responded obliquely, and others launched a petition to recast the role. Some of the fuss was because Saldana isn’t a singer, but the fiercest of it was because she doesn’t look like Simone; she’s lighter-skinned and slimmer-nosed than Simone is. Why not, some have asked, simply cast an actress who looks like Simone?

The controversy might have less to do with principles of open casting than with notions of what we collectively find beautiful in women – including light skin and slim noses – and our reluctance to acknowledge how persistent, and persuasive, these notions are. In Argo Ben Afflek plays real-life CIA agent Tony Mendez, a gentleman far less conventionally attractive than himself, and no one seems bothered by the incongruity. Affleck doesn’t wear prosthetics to look more like Mendez or crouch to diminish his stature. He doesn’t look like Mendez but the story comes out right. Yet Saldana is remaking her complexion and bone structure to play Simone. For women appearances are considered, still, today, somehow, essential; they define who are and fix our place in the world. In all the discussion about Saldana’s casting, it’s Simone’s skin and nose, rather than her voice and vision, that are considered essential to who she is. It’s as if her appearance, which is singular, was a hindrance, something she needed to overcome before she became an artist, and something that only another woman who looks like her can understand.

Portrait by Charles “Teenie” Harris, 1965.

January 28, 2013 by Nalina Moses