Oops; nails thing was a mistake; soz.
A BBC article that included a claim that a trend for bare nails was linked to “white supremacist standards of beauty” has been permanently removed from its website, after editors concluded it did not meet the corporation’s editorial standards.
Why didn’t the editors spot the problem before publication? Said problem seems pretty obvious to me.
The article, which first ran on the BBC’s website on 27 September, examined an apparent “viral craze” for bare rather than decorated nails.
See that’s what alerted me to the problem, and I bet I’m far from the only one. The absurdity of it! A viral craze for not doing something? When that something is decorating the tips of one’s fingers? How can decorating the tips of one’s fingers be the default while not doing so is a “craze”?
Most people don’t decorate their fingertips. It was expected of at least middle class women for a few decades in the 20th century, in the same way lipstick was, but that stopped being the case when all hell broke lose in the 60s. It was never expected of everyone, or of all women. Not decorating one’s finger-ends is the default, so it can’t also be a viral craze.
[T]he BBC has since confirmed that the article had been permanently removed. Bosses concluded there was no challenge in the piece to the quotes linking bare nails to white supremacy, or any context that such opinions would be seen as extreme.
A Wall Street Journal piece stated the BBC article was “embarrassingly retrograde – displaying outdated intellectual fashion – in its attempt to locate offences against social justice in the decisions of individual women whether or not to paint their nails”.
It stated: “When you see someone dressed for a costume party, you notice how conspicuous that person is. So it is with the BBC’s attempt to gin up outrage over the semiotics of nail polish.”
The Guardian includes a photo of two (brown, female) hands with elaborate artwork on the nails along with a couple of rings and a painted-on decoration. The artwork is interesting and of course decorative, but on the other hand, it looks massively inhibiting. You wouldn’t want to do ordinary everyday things with those fingers, because the decorations would get messed up. It’s a bit like the lotus foot that way – it was supposed to be pretty for women to have little hooves where their feet should have been, but of course it was also crippling and inhibiting.
I like decoration. I have quite vulgar taste in decoration in fact; I don’t like beige and grey everywhere, I love color and pattern, the more the better. But one can wear a pleasingly gaudy shirt instead of making one’s hands all but useless.
H/t Ian Hargreaves
Leave a Reply