My regular Thursday column at Healthy is the New Skinny is up: Guilt & Vanity. Excerpt:
Our culture raises girls with two totally contradictory messages.
On the one hand, young women learn very early that prettiness matters. Long before most girls hit puberty, they’ve learned that “cute” gets rewarded with attention and validation. No matter how reassuring well-meaning parents and teachers try and be with the message that “beauty is on the inside”, girls figure out that what’s on the outside really seems to count for a lot.
At the same time, girls are taught not to focus too heavily on themselves, or at least not to let it slip that they care very deeply about their looks. “She’s so vain”, or “She thinks she’s all that” are common accusations in school hallways (and, apparently, on the staircases at my college). Make it too obvious that you worry about your appearance, and someone will accuse you of being “shallow”. Sometimes, no one else needs to accuse you. When you find yourself obsessing on some aspect of your body (your hair, your weight, your skin, etc), you may beat yourself up not only for your imperfections but for caring so desperately about them….
“What, this old thing? Oh, I just threw it on this morning!”
I remember some variation of this at every family gathering I ever attended. The pressure to imply that your perfectly coiffed, perfectly made-up, appearance required no thought or effort on your part is doubly aggravating. This is one of the reasons why the women in my family can’t take compliments.
There really are such mixed messages about this for women….very much damned if you do damned if you don’t thing. You focus on things other than your personal appearance, you’re a slob, you do focus on it, you’re vain… Sad thing is, changing how it goes seems almost impossible. I mean we all say and hear “don’t judge a book by the cover”…but everyone DOES.
“She think she cute” was always the opening salvo for serious girl drama in my school, and could lead to actual violence. I was telling a friend about this recently, who rolled her eyes. “‘She think she cute’? Call Amnesty International.” Amazing how even young children act to enforce shameful social norms.
By the time I was eight, I already figured out that I had failed the ‘pretty test.’ From then on, I just did the basics (hair brushing, bathing- which is more than a lot of guys do.) Didn’t actually start using make up until my late 20s.
The whole idea of womanhood in this culture–and probably others–is a mass of contraditions that’d blow itself apart if looked at close enough, and good riddance!
Puny, yet expected to do 2/3 of the world’s work for 1/3 of the goodies (forgot what bigshot study came up with that one, but it was some moderately legit-sounding outfit).
Dim, yet expected to be the sole caretakers of the next generation in its most helpless stage.
Artistic rather than practical, yet without true artistic creativity/genius, only cutesy crafts.
More socially oriented, yet incapable of true solidarity unlike men’s teamwork.
Cute, yet uniquely dirty and slimy and needing special deodorants with no male counterpart.
And, of course, the despised yet somehow necessary decorative role described above.
The list could be expanded I’m sure–and what thinking being could contemplate living in such a template without wanting to rip the world in half?
Add “as if these didn’t take intelligence” after “cutesy crafts”.
Add “and tenderhearted” after “socially oriented”.
…Add suitable quantity of high explosives.
I should add that I find it really difficult to believe compliments about my appearance. If a guy compliments me, I roll my eyes internally and wonder what he’s up to.
The thing that has come to amuse me in a grim sort of way is feminine ritual and beauty practice is NOTHING but decoration and has NOTHING to do with natural or being a woman. Naturally, women have body hair, acne or dry skin, they sweat, have morning breath, gain or loose weight, get wrinkles and grey hair and ALL that other stuff. THAT is what goes on with a woman naturally. Beauty ritual is ALL about hiding what a woman naturally IS under a ton of stuff that makes her “feminine”…
(and this is not any judgement on those who do or do not engage in beauty stuff at all, just, well, what it really is)
This post makes me think of *My So-Called Life* and the episode with the Mother-Daughter Fashion Show and the ghastly Poll. After poor Angela negotiates her way through: a) her own zit, b) Patty’s crossing a line out of her increased concern over inching towards becoming a “Former” beauty, c) Sharon’s being voted Best Global Endowments (not that it’s a picnic for Sharon), d) her own fears about sl**-shaming over Rayanne’s being voted as having the most potential in that direction, and e) backing out of the fashion show and having Danielle take her place, she finally seems to be coming to some sort of truce at the end of the episode in the voiceover when she realizes that people are… beautiful. And then comes that chilling change of tone as she adds those dreaded last three words, “…possibly even me.” Heartbreaking, but with just that hint of hope that, even though she clearly doesn’t believe it at the time, presently, just maybe…
Another odd thing about this culture is on the one hand you’ve got “natural is good, unnatural is bad”, as if nature was the watchdog of whatever deity you subscribe to; on the other hand, pale people spend a lot of money getting tan while people that’re born tan get discriminated against. And nobody is supposed to get gray-haired or bald–while the real problems, of aging and so many other ills, remain under-addressed. Add this to what you all have described above. Hardly anyone stops to think it through about how much of all this really helps valorize all our actions and how much is set up to reinforce whatever prejudices we start out with, pausing occasionally to add new ones.
I have no love for nature in the abstract, that immemorial mass of cruelties, but I don’t feel the need to interfere with nature’s creatures, the living ones anyway, for esthetic purposes.
I’ve never been one to do a lot of things with the body I live in, and have been lucky to get away with as much of this freedom as I have. But if I did ever decide to make it over [not bloody likely, I'm busy], I’d make a button that said “Unnatural and proud of it”.
Douglas: Heh, Angie sounds like me as a teen. Link to that show please?
Would that I could, but alas I’m not tech savvy. MSCL ran only one season, 1994-5, despite very high critical acclaim and a public campaign to keep it called Life Support. I don’t know of anywhere to see the episodes or anyone airing the series, but the entire series is now going for $33.99 on Amazon.
The episdoe I referenced was the fifth in the series, informally titled “The Zit”.
The episdoe I referenced was the fifth in the series, informally titled “The Zit”.
The internet has everything, apparently:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=9A696F0961B00146