It didn't come up in our class discussion, but I was distracted by Morgan Stanley's inattention to or compartmentalizing of makeup, skincare, haircare, shopping--all stuff that has presumably been arbitrarily lumped into the "beauty" or "personal care" industry. My guess is that had Morgan Stanley considered personal care at all when it came time to compile this report, would have dismissed it from consideration not only because of the market separation between the beauty/personal care industry and the entertainment industry but also because of the increasingly dated assumption that beauty is product-focused and not experience-focused.
It's a pretty shortsighted move on their part for their bottom line. The beauty industry is in fact becoming much more experience focused: beauty entertainment (largely on YouTube and Instagram) draws billions of clicks/views for advertisements in the form of tutorials, product reviews, etc. Skincare has been rebranded as a lengthy "self-care" activity. People (especially black women) spend hours and billions of dollars in the salon or styling their own hair. The list goes on and on. I'm speaking mostly from personal experience; skincare/makeup is a relaxing hobby for me, one that takes up an hour or two of my day that I would definitely describe as "leisurely," and it functions exactly like the activities Morgan Stanley is so excited about. I put TV on in the background, watch YouTube videos, consume makeup content on social media, and generally treat it like any other hobby.
I don't think that's at stake here isn't just a "gotcha!" for Morgan Stanley for being behind the times. Certainly it is interesting/somewhat disturbing to see yet another way that entertainment and advertisement are inexorably sliding together, so that our purchase/consumption of objects and purchase/consumption of content are becoming ever more inseparable. But I think also the exclusion of these activities from the category of "leisure" makes me think about this time that I spend on beauty--time that has historically been non-optional.
Personal care certainly floats somewhere in between leisure and obligation. Any person feels somewhat obligated by social pressure to do some amount of personal care. Both cis women and trans femmes especially face measurable negative outcomes for failing to comply with the soft obligation to have "good" skin and hair, wear makeup. So makeup is, maybe, leisure under threat. Something sold to us as pleasure but with the weight of obligatory labor behind it. In that way the time spent by femme people on their faces, hair, and bodies, really does feel like lost time. We have to do it; we have to pay to do it; we're supposed to enjoy it and count it towards leisurely "self-care." So maybe Morgan Stanley was quite correct to exclude it. I'm not sure. But I can't help but feel like hours of femme time are vanishing from every day.
Zoe - I'm really interested in the proposition you make at the end of this post about "leisure under threat" as something "sold to us as pleasure but with the weight of obligatory labor behind it." This made me wonder what other activities might fall under that rubric - other avenues that this weird report has failed to capture as 'leisure' or activities that have fallen under 'leisure' but perhaps are miscategorized or misrecognized as such. I certainly think makeup and fashion often fall under this category for femmes. I've been reading a lot of queer theory lately, and the debates around the couple form, reproductive futurity, and state regulated marriages come to mind as something that has perhaps historicall…
I love that you brought this up. Truthfully, I hadn't even thought about whether this was missing. Like you, beauty and skincare is a leisure activity for me - I spend time in the morning getting myself ready, mostly as a way to gear up for the day. If it was a question of feeling like I just had to put a bit on, I wouldn't own as much makeup and skincare as I do. I also went through a period of my life where I constantly binged beauty videos, both for leisure and as a way to learn. If we did consider makeup and skin-care as leisure, do you think it would be an active or passive form? Perhaps…
I think this is interesting and definitely an unexplored topic... I personally don’t do much skin care so I’ve never really thought about it as an obligation, but if I had more acne issues it certainly would be. Your mentioning of trans femmes and their need to constantly be on their appearance reminded me of Natalie Wynn’s (contrapoints on youtube) video about aesthetics but from my cis perspective I don’t have much to add on that... here‘s the video though https://youtu.be/z1afqR5QkDM
This is a great point—and reminds me of some of the other strange oversights that seem to be present in the Morgan Stanley report. I looked up the OECD study it cites to justify claiming t that "hours worked per year has been steadily declining since the 1970s," and it explains that it arrives at its numbers by dividing the total number of hours worked (in formal employment) in a country per year by the number of workers in formal employment in a given country in given year. This means that the "average hours worked" number tells us absolutely nothing about the overall number of hours spent working in a given year, or even about the overall number of hours…