by Mara Altman
“What keeps you going?” I asked, when we went outside to get a little air. “You’re not making money, and most people despise the product.”
“The biggest thing is the idea of making a difference,” John said. “Most people don’t want their lives to be meaningless—they want to do something that matters, and this matters in spades.” He said that the mirror could change lives. He recounted, “After seeing it, I had a woman say to me, ‘Oh, that’s why people like me.’”
“Can you believe that?” he continued. “She’s going around, this gorgeous and generous human, and she doesn’t understand why people like her.” He told me that another woman, upon seeing her true reflection, said, “Oh my God, I am beautiful!”
I like to think I have an evolved bullshit alarm as well as a highly acute cornball siren, and while I knew a lot of this was the stuff of a cloying after-school special, I was smitten by the idea: a mirror that lets you see yourself how your friends see you—to see that they want to hang out with you not because of your perfectly aquiline nose, but because when you’re happy, you infect them with your joy.
* * *
I had to catch a bus back to the city, so after forty minutes of talking under a tree, John and I walked back to his workshop so that I could see my true self.
From the back of his studio, he grabbed a yellow-framed mirror and placed it on top of a filing cabinet near the only window.
“How do you prep me?” I asked, before taking a peek. This felt like a pivotal moment; I wanted to be sure I was ready.
“There’s nothing you’re supposed to do—just enjoy it.”
John must have been too excited because as soon as I stepped in front of the mirror, he couldn’t help narrating my experience. “I can tell that’s not a real smile,” he said. “You have to be yourself to see yourself.”
I couldn’t smile yet; I had to get used to the fact that the real me wasn’t Gisele Bündchen. I didn’t want to mention it earlier, but I’d reserved a small sliver of hope that I was actually a supermodel. So I wasn’t Gisele. But I wasn’t Matza Ball Breaker, either. I was a person with an exceptionally crooked and miniature beady right eye.
Why didn’t anyone tell me? That little obscenity might qualify me for a government check.
John stood behind me, witnessing my rapid nosedive. “But do you see how vibrant your eyes are?” he said, trying to pull up on the wheel. “This is how you talk to the world. Your face works this way.”
I was in hell another couple of minutes before things shifted. I’m not sure whether I saw it at that point or if I wanted to feel special by being part of the 10 to 20 percent who got it, but I turned that ship around—ogre eye be damned—and began beaming.
“There, now that’s a real smile,” he said. He told me I was “sparkling” and that I was in a feedback loop with myself, just as I would be with someone I was having a conversation with over dinner.
“You get to see yourself in flow,” he said. “That’s your energy that you’ve been missing out on.”
I was reminded of something the psychologist Robert Langan had mentioned back when I was in his office. “You’re moving all the time,” he had said. “Therefore there isn’t one truth—you can never look in the mirror and say, ‘Now, I’m finally myself.’”
John was trying to show me that—that I was a dynamic and continuously changing person.
“If all you’re trying to be is beautiful,” Langan had said, “then you’re killing yourself. You’re getting stuck; it limits you.”
I continued to peer into the True Mirror.
“I still think I look weird, but the smiling feels good,” I conceded.
“And see how your smile keeps growing,” John said.
And when he said that, it happened: My smile grew.
I went full-out. I started making faces at myself. I caught sight of goofy me, the one who makes my husband roll his eyes (out of love and devotion, of course) and the juvenile me who searches for a face to share a giggle with when someone inadvertently farts in yoga class.
John was guiding me so much, though, that I thought maybe I was having a placebo effect.
“You might be biasing me with all this priming,” I said.
“I’ve primed plenty of people who have hated it anyway,” he said, laughing.
It was a sad laugh, the laugh of the chronically underappreciated.
* * *
John drove me back to the bus stop. Maybe I saw something in the True Mirror and maybe I didn’t, but either way, John helped shift my perspective. Trying to figure out what I look like by my image alone is like trying to figure out what a truffle tastes like by holding it in my hand. There’s more in my face—in everyone’s—than solely the superficial.
Faces are made real—unique and beautiful—not by what they look like, but by who animates them. No wonder the frozen frame of a photograph and hardened glances in the mirror—a place I hope to see beauty where I’m mostly searching for flaws—left me bewildered and inconclusive.
I stood in the parking lot, waiting for the bus to come and take me back home. Unlike in the city, there wasn’t a constant barrage of reflective surfaces. There, at every turn, you are peering at, catching peripheral glimpses of, and judging yourself. In Rosendale, you are reflected by nature—the wind hitting against your skin, skimming and informing your curves, not trying to size them up or pin them down. A fly buzzed by my ear. A strand of hair tickled my nose. The sun warmed my cheeks. I was reminded, in those surroundings, of what it feels like to be inside a body, instead of what it feels like to look at one.
Mirror Face
When I look into a mirror, I contort my face—widened eyes, pursed lips, eyebrows arching upward into the nosebleed section of my forehead. I didn’t realize I did this until I was with a friend, assessing myself before we went out to dinner. She said, “What the hell is going on with your face?”
I knew other women did “mirror face”—I’d seen it and thought it looked ridiculous—but I never thought I did, so I got defensive and said, “I don’t know, what the hell is going on with your face?”
Then she playfully mocked me by doing Zoolander’s Blue Steel model pose. I tried to laugh it off while wishing for the trillionth time since I was born that life had a rewind button.
Ultimately, my friend had a good point. Seriously, what the hell was going on with my face? How is it that a mirror compels me and countless other females to unconsciously vogue at ourselves?
For this, I spoke to Jennifer Davis, a sociology professor at James Madison University and a leading expert on the duck face, which often appears in selfies and is mirror face’s closest pucker-lipped relative.
“Oh yes, mirror face,” she said, like it was an old friend she’d recently gossiped with. She told me that when we do mirror face, we are contorting our features as close as possible to societal beauty standards. “You’re creating a caricature of femininity,” she said. “You are making your face more slender, your lips bigger, your cheekbones higher, and your wrinkles smaller.”
I was impressed that I somehow knew how to do all of that. I don’t even brush my hair.
“It’s not calculated,” she said. “Culture writes itself onto our bodies.”
Davis suggested that mirror face has probably changed shape depending on the era, because it would align with what people considered attractive at that time. “Maybe women in the 1920s were seductively holding up cigarettes to their lips,” she said.
The reason we do this bizarre behavior for ourselves—alone and in front of a mirror—is to rehearse what we want to look like to the outside world, as well as to create a sense of self that feels attractive and desirable. “You are saying, ‘Okay, I want to look good,’” Davis explained. “‘I want to control my face and body in ways that are flattering.’”
“But if we think we look hot like that, then why does it feel so embarrassing and shitty when someone calls us out?” I asked.
“Yeah, totally,�
�� she said. She explained that we devalue vanity in our society even though we necessitate it because of the value we place on beauty. “So it feels really vain, and that’s part of the embarrassment factor,” she said, “it suddenly feels really inauthentic.”
In other words, our secret is exposed. We’re ashamed because we’ve been caught performing being beautiful, when the world just expects us to be beautiful.
Davis had one last point. She explained that mirror face actually has a lot in common with duck face. When women are caught duck-facing, they may look attractive, yet they are often punished and mocked for putting too much effort into what we believe should be effortless. Instead of blaming the root causes—patriarchy, sexism, and misogyny—for creating this specific ideal of femininity, we blame the woman for showcasing it. “It’s a catch-22,” she said.
I had no idea that these facial contortions had such pernicious roots. I decided to end the patriarchy’s influence over me, at least in this facet. Therein would lie liberation and self-acceptance. So the next time I gazed at my reflection, I stopped doing mirror face. Once you know you do it, it’s easy to stop. All it took was consciously letting my facial muscles go slack.
Barely three seconds in, I could confirm that I wasn’t into this type of liberation. My brows, once majestic and lifted, now looked like furry eye awnings. My lips were a thin and somewhat downward arching line. I no longer had cheekbones.
It was a conflicting sensation; I immediately wanted to let the patriarchy back into my life. Dammit. Mirror face was my jam. I tightened my muscles back up, breathed a sigh of relief, and went on with my day.
4
The Earth Moved. Trust Me.
The first time I had sex, everything surprised me, but two things in particular: One was that condoms, if opened quickly, can shoot at your face like a taut rubber band, and the other was that those erotic moany sounds that I assumed came out of all women’s mouths during sex were, for some reason, not coming out of mine.
I was sure that moany sex meant better sex; to me, the women who used those sounds while they humped were the poster children of the sexually free. I suspected that they were having the coitus of champions, which meant, of course, that there was something I was missing out on.
I hypothesized that as I became more and more comfortable with genital relations, rapturous orgasmic sounds would likewise develop. I fantasized that one sweet day, people would pass beneath my bedroom window, look at each other in both admiration and fear, unsure if the extraordinary din they heard from my humping was a result of ecstatic release or someone being stabbed multiple times.
So the second time I had sex, I was ready to get arrested for being a gloriously loud sex monster. We did all the same wonderful things and this time it was even more fun, yet when we finished, I was perplexed. I had once again gone full-on mime.
I knew that people faked, but that felt like cheating. I wanted to earn my sounds. I expected them, when ripe, to come out naturally. The way I envisioned it, I wouldn’t even be able to stop them; they’d be as instinctive as it is for a dog to bark at an intruder (yet hopefully involve less saliva).
As the years went on, I had other boyfriends, but my decibel level remained disappointingly similar. By the time I was with Dave, my sonic landscape was still most closely matched with a library. Even though we’ve discussed it and he said he doesn’t need me to be vocally porny, I can’t help wondering if he’s looking at me during sex and thinking, “Is this thing on mute?”
So now here I am, a seasoned screwer, yet still as tight-lipped as I was in my awkward collegiate days. I’ve waited and waited, but these sexy sounds have refused to show up. To come to terms with my natural pull toward inaudible intercourse, I wanted to take a closer look at what I might be missing out on.
Are humans actually predisposed to being screamers, and if so, what is the purpose of all the noise?
* * *
I knew it was possible that my ideal of a groany woman wasn’t even rooted in reality, but rather due to the highly vocal women found in pornography. So before I went too gonzo, I wanted to know if sex noises were a new development or if they were an innate characteristic of Homo sapiens. Did our caveman ancestors set the mammoths stampeding when they bedded down?
To find out, I called Justin Garcia, an evolutionary biologist at the Kinsey Institute.
First, Garcia adjusted my terminology. “Sex noises” doesn’t fly in academia. “Copulatory vocalizations,” he corrected congenially. He then explained that for millions of years, humans have sexed it up in tight quarters—likely with other family members, children, and the threat of predators nearby. “So this idea that people, in the throes of passion, engaged in these really loud screams and uncontainable noises and vocalizations, it’s probably not the case,” he said. “Those vocalizations are probably part of the performative aspect of sex and less so about a natural reflex to sexual activity.”
For a moment, I felt vindicated.
Clearly I am quiet because I have the lingering threat of a lion ripping my tits off mid-thrust imprinted into my DNA.
It is likely, Garcia continued, that porn has added a higher decibel level to our bedroom affairs. He explained that because we are a social species, we absorb the information around us and integrate it into our lives. “People observe shouting and moaning as the pinnacle of ecstasy and think, ‘Here is a behavior that others are engaging in that they find arousing. I’m going to make it part of my sexual repertoire and I’m going to find it arousing.’ That’s part of the complexity of human behavior.”
I suspected the same reason was behind why we shave our armpits, attach sparkly rocks to our fingers, and thought perms were a good idea.
Overall, I interpreted this as awesome news—for the first time in my life, my silence was making me feel like a radical nonconformist rather than uptight and repressed.
Before we hung up, though, Garcia warned me that there is a different school of thought, which posits that our sex sounds evolved for a specific purpose. He didn’t want to go into detail because he didn’t agree with the theory, but he told me that it had to do with hollering monkeys.
* * *
Before looking into the monkeys, I let myself revel in my quietness—or shall I say, in my deeply ingrained survival mechanisms. While all the loud chicks in my village would be panther food, I’d be quietly making babies near the fire pit.
When I was done gloating, I went to the library. I wanted to find out what Garcia was talking about.
My librarian deserves an award for not flinching when I asked, “Can you help me find this journal article—it’s about the copulatory vocalizations of chacma baboons?”
I brought several studies home and read them while sitting at my kitchen table. It was basically very dryly written monkey erotica. Female baboons, it seems, make loud rhythmic sounds, which differ in length and volume depending on the ranking of the male the female is having sex with at that moment. These sounds, according to the dedicated researchers who watched the baboons hump for months near a swamp in Botswana, are used to advertise their sexual availability and ultimately, to attract males. This helps achieve the female baboon’s admirable goal, which is to have sex with as many males as possible. By doing this, she will get a crack at making a baby with the best sperm out of the bunch as well as lessen the likelihood of a male killing her baby, because each of them will be duped into thinking they are the dad. This was interesting, but distant from New York City apartment bedrooms and the Homo sapiens having intercourse within them.
To interpret these findings and what they might mean for us, I got ahold of Christopher Ryan, the author of Sex at Dawn, a book that looks at the origins of human sexuality. He believes that, like baboons, humans are naturally promiscuous mammals and therefore would have developed moany, groany sex for similar purposes.
“So, are you saying that when a woman moans, she’s doing it in the hopes of other dudes overhearing?” I asked.
“
I wouldn’t say that a woman who is making a lot of sound is consciously thinking, ‘Hey, I want the guys in the street to get to hear this!’” Ryan explained, “but the origins of that behavior very likely involved attracting attention from other males.”
Maybe that’s why my husband has never complained about my lack of audible enthusiasm. Deep down, in a place he’s not even aware of, he’s pleased that I’m not attempting to incite our next door neighbor to come over and impregnate me.
“But what about the threat of predators?” I asked. I told him about Garcia’s theory—that all these screamers would be dismembered mid-embrace by grizzly bears.
“In that case,” he said, “why do we find female copulatory vocalizations in so many species of primates who are also dealing with predators?”
I didn’t know what to say. Obviously, baboons have made it—they are alive and well despite their reckless yodeling.
This Christopher Ryan guy had a point. I didn’t like that he had a point—he was taking away my newfound silent swagger—but I had to admit that he did have a point.
This was all fascinating, but even if it were the case, it didn’t seem like the whole story. It was hard to imagine that all this screaming and hollering evolved solely for the attention of those outside the bedroom.
Even though Ryan wasn’t very validating to my kind, I had an affinity toward him. As we chatted more, I mentioned another study I’d read with a small detail in it that had really tickled me. The study was about the sex sounds of yellow baboons. Researchers discovered that yellow baboons make the same loud hollers during copulation as they do when they are defecating—but really, the same exact ones.
