Answer: Lots of things! I made a list.
1. They reinforce the artificial gender binary.*
The vast majority of bodily modifications demanded of women by our beauty standards – for instance, plucked eyebrows, painted lips, shaved legs, and exaggerated eyelashes – exist to accentuate the differences between men and women. Fashionable clothes for men and women are vastly different, with most women’s fashions being tailored to highlight and emphasize “feminine” shapes.
Huge thanks to DDP guest editor Nadia Morris for bringing these awesome portraits to my attention. All credit to photographer, Leland Bobbé.
Not only is this dichotomy unfair (the burden of highlighting gender differences, in time and resources, falls disproportionately on women), it’s outright harmful to trans* and intersex people. When our beauty standard pushes people to the outside edges of the gender spectrum, it renders those who live in the middle invisible and tells anyone who doesn’t comply with rigid gender roles that they are “ugly.” That’s a major problem.
2. They are racist.
Let’s think about where we get these beauty ideals for a minute. We get them first from our toys – baby dolls and Barbie dolls, the default for both of which is still “white.” It’s far easier to find a diversity of dolls today than it was ten years ago, but the distribution in no way matches actual population percentages.** Then we grow up and look in magazines, on television, in movies. And again, the representation there is overwhelmingly white (and thin, and impeccably groomed, and usually retouched).
Women of color are included in media now, but they always seem to have lighter skin, and straight or wavy hair. Those beauty ideals get passed on to the women watching, and at a high cost – monetarily, psychologically, and physically. I highly recommend reading this article by Madame Noire to get a perspective on the impact the straight hair beauty standard, in particular, has had on the African American community. (Also, if you’ve got time, watch Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair.)
Toxic skin-lightening creams abound, and are linked to health problems from eczema to kidney failure. A woman in Nigeria, where 8 out of 10 women regularly use skin lighteners, described her reasoning as: “I’m not seeking to be totally white, I just want to be beautiful.” Watch the video here, and then try and tell me that skin bleaching as a beauty ideal isn’t racist. Just try it, I dare you.
Also, vaginal bleaching! WHAT. A MILLION TIMES WHAT.
This article over at Racialicious does a far better job than I can of analyzing the ways in which our beauty standards have shifted slightly but remained oppressive. It breaks down things like this photoset from Allure, which ostensibly celebrates diversity but really just “swap[s] an old, exclusive beauty standard for a new one.”
3. They are contradictory and impossible to satisfy.
I have written before about how having a larger body was intensely painful for me as a young person. Advertisements promise us that being thin will solve all our problems, or at the very least release us from the painful shame of our inadequate bodies. But women who naturally inhabit thin bodies experience a different kind of pressure – a pressure to look more “womanly,” to have wider hips and bigger boobs and more of a butt. This can be just as great a source of pain, although it’s one that frequently goes unrecognized or even rejected.
There all so many ways for women to have the “wrong” body! Endless ways. Muscular women are attacked for being “bulky” or “masculine” – while at the same time, every magazine contains articles on how to “get toned” and “eliminate flab.” Women with small breasts are given padded bras, while women with larger breasts are told to minimize and cover up lest they be perceived as “slutty.” You know, for having breasts. I could go on, but I won’t, because I’m getting really angry at how utterly ridiculous this shit is.
Even the celebrities who are held up as our ideals fall short of the standard in some ways – although those “failures” are always corrected by Photoshop before they are presented to us in magazines. (Unless it’s a gossip magazine like People, taking vicious delight in body-shaming anyone famous who dares to have cellulite*** in candid photos).
Really, my hero Tina Fey summed it up the best in her book Bossypants:
“Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits.”Having a standard that is literally impossible to achieve is pretty warped. But it’s also pretty profitable, if you’re the beauty industry.
4. They cost enormous amounts of money to maintain.
Women in the United States spend over seven billion dollars a year on makeup alone. That’s an average of $100 per month, per woman.
African American women spend even more money (because our beauty ideals are racist and require non-white people to put in more money and effort in order to meet them). African Americans spend $507 billion dollars a year on hair care and personal grooming. For an individual woman, commercial hair placement can cost between $4,000 and $80,000 a year.
Globally speaking, the top 100 beauty companies made a total of $195.36 billion in sales last year.(By the way – L’Oreal, the top-grossing beauty company that owns way more brands than you think it does, was convicted of discrimination against women of color in France).
I looked for studies documenting how much women spend on clothing, but the only one I could find had been done by The Daily Mail, so it’s guaranteed to be both unscientific and woman-shaming, and I’m not even going to bother linking to it. However, the United States “womenswear” market earned $161.7 billion in 2009, which averages out to slightly over $1,000 per woman per year. And that’s not even counting shoes.
Let’s not forget plastic surgery: In 2007 (the most recent numbers I could find) 11.7 million women underwent elective plastic surgery, at $3,000 to $5,000 a procedure.
These numbers make it obvious that a whole lot of players have a whole lot invested in making sure women continue to chase a shifting and impossible beauty standard. Which brings me to our final point.
5. They are mandatory.
As an adult, with an education in feminism and media criticism, I can break down the elements of a beauty standard that I disagree with and choose not to conform to them. I also have the luxury of living in a liberal environment where deviations from the norm will be greeted with enthusiasm, or at least neutrality. I am in the minority of adults who are that lucky. Virtually no children in our country are that lucky.
Growing up, the overwhelming message I received was that achieving the beauty ideal was mandatory. The extent to which I fulfilled that ideal was the extent of my value; the extent to which I failed, the extent of my worthlessness. My parents never told me anything of the sort, and did their best to shield me from negative messages – but my peers were not at all hesitant to inform me of all the ways I fell short. And besides, I was no dummy. I knew I looked nothing like my dolls, nothing like the characters on TV, nothing like the characters in my books. It was obvious to me that attractiveness – determined by a very narrow set of parameters – was the entry fee for participating in public life. It was the key to deserving a chance to be heard. It was, most importantly, the key to deserving love.
Like I said, I got lucky. I learned to un-believe those lies. But a huge percentage of women haven’t had the chance to unlearn these lies, and they perpetuate them to themselves and to their daughters and to each other. For women in these environments, opting out of the beauty standards can have an enormous or even prohibitive social cost. For many women, choosing to conform to oppressive beauty standards is no kind of a choice at all.
. . .
Your turn – what else is wrong with our beauty standards? Is there anything positive about them? How can we change them and/or relate to them in healthier ways?
*What do I mean by “artificial?” For starters, the Intersex Society of North America estimates that 1 in 100 people are born with bodies differing from the “standard male or female.”
**For a great article on the importance – and difficulty – of finding toys that reflect a child’s ethnicity, check out this one, again at Racialicious.
*** Cellulite, like halitosis, is a made-up problem designed to make you buy shit and feel bad about yourself. Surprise!
Disrupting Dinner Parties 
I agree with all of this!
Except, I would like people with bad breath not to have bad breath on me, regardless of whether Listerine popularized the phrase “chronic halitosis” or not. Having danced with some unfortunate bearers of foul exhalations… Am I a bad person for not wanting to smell that? 😦 Mind you, I’m not going to force any bad breath remedies on someone, I just want them to exist so people can choose to use such for themselves.
Paul, I’m not a big fan of bad breath either – especially in dances! – but in the vast majority of cases it can be handled with a toothbrush and toothpaste. Or you know, a mint. Listerine became a household staple by convincing 90% of the population that they had a problem, when really only 5% of people could benefit from mouthwash as part of their routine.
Ohhhhhhh. Yeah, that’s not cool, Listerine.
And the biggest problem with beauty standards, which you imply but don’t say– all of those issues you identified, except maybe #1, are problems that the patriarchy forces almost exclusively on women.
Beauty standards for men are racist as well, but you’re right, the majority of what I focus on in this piece is the way these standards affect women. I would love to do another piece on how they affect men, because they DO. I wanted to write about a lot of things that I ended up leaving out of this piece because it was getting unwieldy. It’s a huge subject, and one I could write about pretty much forever.
I wasn’t making a “WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ” comment. I merely meant to point out that the burden of beauty standards falls disproportionately on women. SocImages had a post about a year ago that I’m now unable to locate in two minutes of Googling about #4 in particular, and how much it costs a woman to keep up with beauty expectations in any given year versus how much it costs men. It was staggering, both in the sheer cost and the disparity.
I frequently wonder how much body shame and indoctrination I skipped by not playing with dolls like, ever. Or girl toys much at all. Or with girls.
Or maybe I was just an oblivious child.
I have actually noticed that my friends who identified as “tomboys” or were otherwise more interested in running around than in playing with dolls seem to have fewer body issues. Not a scientific observation by a long shot, but it’s interesting to me all the same.
Not to discount that trend, but as a personal example, I never played with dolls (I preferred stuffed animals) and have a few body issues.
Thanks for sharing a counter-example! Playing with dolls is obviously not the only or the most powerful factor in shaping body image for girls.
I played with dolls AND was a tomboy, and I have serious body issues and always have. I’m also queer, and have known I was into girls since I was ten, so you’d think I would have been exempted from a lot of the pressure to be girly, since I wasn’t interested in attracting male attention. Nope.
I was almost exclusively socialized with girls as a child and I have had so many body issues throughout my life. Though admittedly, I’m still working on processing if there was any correlation between the two at all.
While women are disproportionately the targets for beauty standards, I think men are equally held to equivalent standards relating to status and other stuff like that, so I think you are wrong to dismiss this so quickly. I think there’s a kind of parallel between the two here. It’s quite common that men feel shamed relating to their status in life, like there employment and or their ability to get laid or whatever. It would be quite interesting to explore that.
In your last paragraph you observe that women perpetuate these beauty standards in a continuous cycle — and they cannot break it because of the social repercussions of that. What then, is the solution, if any? Also, I’m not sure I buy the idea that without the social repercussions to women who didn’t participate in these beauty things, wouldn’t be hurt by beauty standards anymore. Do we imagine that women would stop participating in beauty rituals if there was no judgement about it? If not, then the fact that the majority of women do beauty rituals would in itself reinforce the beauty standard, whether there was judgement on those who didn’t or not.
That would be interesting to explore, Chloe, although I’m not willing to concede equivalency without some serious research on things like the economic resources expended per month by the average man on pursuing things like career success and “getting laid,” and the psychological damage/feelings of worthlessness accompanying failure to meet those benchmarks.
My solution to the cycle of women being trapped into the cycle of perpetuating harmful beauty standards would be for those of us with the freedom to step out of it to speak out about it whenever possible. Also, lobbying media to be more inclusive in their representations so that the ideal is less exclusionary.
There are many reasons to participate in beauty rituals, and I don’t doubt that even if judgment and loss of social status were removed from the picture, many women would still choose to participate. For instance, I am not judged by my peers for not shaving my legs, but I still do it occasionally because I like the way it feels sometimes. But consciously choosing to engage in a ritual is not nearly as harmful as engaging in a ritual or attempting to conform to a standard because you feel it is the only way to be accepted.
I don’t view exploring gender inequality faced by men to be “conceding” anything — it’s not a zero sum game.
The media show representations of women that people want to see. It would be unprofitable for them to do otherwise; this is pure supply and demand. So we should be lobbying the media to make themselves less profitable? Or should we be lobbying consumers to change what their brains are wired to find attractive?
Also you say “consciously choosing to engage in a ritual is not nearly as harmful as engaging in a ritual or attempting to conform to a standard because you feel it is the only way to be accepted”. You seem to make our here that attempting to conform to a standard because it is the only way to feel accepted is somehow not a valid, conscious choice. Why is it not valid? If I conform to the standard, I will be more accepted, and I will therefore feel happier. It’s quite rational.
Everything we do as humans (and women especially) centres around being more accepted and therefore feeling happier about ourselves. This is what (heterosexual) female sexuality / beauty rituals are all about — women making themselves pleasing to the male eye, and this is why it makes us feel good. Telling women that their sexuality is bad is not something I am interested in doing.
Why do you feel the need to equate sexuality with expectations around femininity? You’re essentially saying that the reason women exist is to satisfy the sexuality of men and therefor the greatest goal of a woman should be to seek the attention of men through socially contrived standards of beauty and femininity.
That’s not essentially what I’m saying. I’m saying that women do a lot of the things they do to please and attract men. Men do the same for women. That’s just how heterosexual sexuality works.
What doesn’t follow from there, and what I never implied, was that women SHOULD hold attracting men as their greatest goal. Just because something is natural doesn’t imply that it is morally good (haven’t we already had this conversation?) But because it is natural, it means women will generally get pleasure from performing beauty rituals that please men, and won’t feel so good if they don’t.
I again urge you from the deepest part of me to please choose your words carefully. When you say “That’s just how X works.” or “It’s just the way it is.” or “X is just natural.” You will automatically not be taken seriously – in this environment or in any other intelligent, inclusive conversation. And I desperately want to take you seriously! But you’re making it very difficult.
1. I didn’t mean conceding as in somehow giving some of “our” inequality to men, I meant “conceding your point,” or accepting its validity.
2. Peoples’ brains are not “wired” to find only thin, adolescent blonde women attractive. I GUARANTEE IT. Consumers would not abandon media in droves if that media widened its’ scope of what it presents as attractive.
Here’s an idea to consider: where do, say, magazines get the most revenue? It’s not from people buying them – it’s from companies who pay to have their ads in the magazines. In the case of most womens’ magazines, those companies are overwhelmingly selling beauty products. Therefore the companies – and the magazines they support – have a vested interest in maintaining an impossible beauty standard so that women have to spend hundreds of dollars a month on trying to conform. It’s not about “showing people what they want to see.” It’s about showing people what the BEAUTY INDUSTRY wants them to see.
Look at these vintage advertisements and tell me that our ideals around beauty are “hard wired”.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to prove with those advertisements. The women in those ads are all very pretty and would still be considered so today. They would also be considered slim or normal weight. So, I don’t think that shows that beauty standards have changed since then.
The attractiveness of the models is not important. What is important (and what I might have left unclear, my apologies) is that the societal expectations around beauty and femininity are in many ways (as bridieflynn has described) controlled by the beauty industry. These expectations are a continuous moving target deliberately designed to keep women seeking an unattainable standard of beauty. You would never see an advertisement today saying “Don’t be skinny! Look better by adding desired pounds this easy way…”. I also in no way believe that the beauty and fashion industry sits down with a panel of straight male participants at the beginning of each year asking “what do you really find attractive this year?” In many ways these industries and more tell is what is cool and what is attractive and we either believe them or we don’t. And sometimes, as has been said, in order to be socially accepted the price is belief and conformity.
3. Conforming to a standard in order to feel accepted is a valid choice, because acceptance feels good to humans. However, that choice can come with severe consequences for women where “conforming” involves starving themselves or bleaching their skin with mercury, or even just spending hundreds of dollars per month. It is not a choice women should have to make. Also, since not conforming can in some cases result in harassment or social isolation, that makes it much less of a real choice.
4. Why “women especially?” Why is acceptance not a universally human craving?
5. I completely disagree that everything humans do centers around seeking acceptance, or that acceptance always equals happiness. That is not a fact and cannot be stated as one. Acceptance and validation are powerful motivators, especially in high school, but they are far from the only ones. And denying one’s true identity in order to gain acceptance most certainly will not lead to happiness.
6. Sexuality and beauty rituals are not at all the same thing, and they are only sometimes related. Sexuality and gender are not the same thing, and they are only sometimes related.
Also, who first told you to shave your legs, or to wear makeup, or to pluck your eyebrows, or [insert beauty ritual here]? I bet it wasn’t a guy. It was a sister, or a friend, or your mom. If you were ever made fun of for not conforming to a standard, it was probably your female peers. If women perform beauty rituals only to be pleasing in men, why do they police conformity so much in each other? Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to want their peers to not conform, so as to minimize “competition?”
3. I agree in general, but I don’t think that women conforming is necessarily so bad as you make out. I think with some make up and being at an average weight is enough for most women to conform. Yes, ideally they shouldn’t have to, but I don’t know. I mean do we say mrn shouldn’t have to wear suits to job interviews, they should be allowed to not conform?
4. I think women desire acceptance and fitting in more than men. Men are much more comfortable (although not completely comfortable) being more individualistic or being loners or whatever. A lot of the genius type men fit into that category. Women on the other hand need friends and family and support more.
5. Agreed. But it also feels very bad not to be accepted. There has to be a happy medium between being accepted and fitting in, and respecting your own individual identity.
6. When I say sexuality I am referring to all the things people do as part of their sexual behaviour and attracting the opposite sex. For heterosexual women, beauty rituals and looking good for the male gaze is a big part of that. Sexuality and gender are very closely related too. The vast majority of women are attracted to men and behave in a feminine manner. The vast majority of men are attracted to women and behave in a masculine manner. They’re very linked in most cases.
As a man I take vehement exception to #4. There is a very intense societal expectation that men stifle and not connect to their emotions. This is a source of incredible bullying for men in general and a huge reason why there is so much shame around being a gay male and a huge contributor to patriarchal domination. Because showing emotion is seen as “non-masculine” many men who DO show emotion (especially as children) are told they are “girly” or “gay” which automatically marginalizes and dehumanizes both of those groups as somehow “lesser”. Stifling emotion in men makes us so woefully unprepared to have meaningful and stable emotional relationships with other people (especially romantic ones) and makes empathizing with other people’s beliefs and feelings (what I see as a key factor in personal growth and self-awareness) incredibly difficult.
It is a fallacy that men require less emotional support than women.
“It was obvious to me that attractiveness – determined by a very narrow set of parameters – was the entry fee for participating in public life. It was the key to deserving a chance to be heard. It was, most importantly, the key to deserving love.”
This definitely resonates with me. Despite being a health weight my entire life, I can still recall incredibly regular comments about my weight from even before I hit puberty, and comments about the weight of others. It immediately sent a message that if I EVER gained any weight, it’s all people would see or care about. I also distinctly remember the first time I was shamed about having hairy legs. I was about 12, and it was from a group of girls on my swimteam (also 12). I definitely internalized the idea that conforming was mandatory if I wanted, say, friends, ever.
I grew up in an absurdly liberal family and had amazing support in just about every way, and despite this I still internalized so many of these messed up messages. This is so important to talk about. Thanks for an amazing post Bridie!
3. The average woman in America has a dress size of 12-14. Most beauty ideals presented to us are between a size 0 and a size 4. Most diet products feature women of a size 12 as the “before” picture, precisely BECAUSE that is how they can get the most women to buy their product. Clearly, being of “average’ weight is not enough to conform, even for white women (because remember, women of other races face much higher bars for conformity).
4. I also CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH how untrue that is, or how harmful it is as a belief. Men and women are PEOPLE, who crave both social support and the ability to express their true identities. Also, please, please, PLEASE tell me that you are not implying that only men are geniuses. Because that is more or less what that sentence sounded like.
First of all, I really liked this article and highly appreciated the Bossypants reference.
But Chloe, echoing what has already been said by Skylar and birdieflynn, I would really like you to rethink what you just said in #4. As a man, I can say that it is categorically untrue of me and the men I love. That comment was nothing more than regurgitating a regressive and hurtful stereotype.
Also, you just argued at length in another thread that stereotypical expressions of heterosexual sexuality are hegemonic and unquestionably “natural,” and that trying to get people to act in ways contrary to this “natural” sexuality would cause them huge emotional and psychological harm. Now you’re here asserting that it is reasonable for women to groom and reshape their bodies to conform to a social norm. Why is challenging your idea of “natural” sexuality dangerous and will hurt people, but telling women that if they want to be happy they should be ready to drastically change their bodies from their (and here I’ll actually use the word without parens) natural form if they aren’t lucky enough just by freak accident be born looking the way society wants them to? You don’t think that will cause harm? People cause themselves literal, physical harm trying to make their bodies look the way they think they should (and I’d be happy to admit men suffer in this regard too; some American teenage boys do horrifying things to themselves with steroids and “natural” supplements in pursuit of the perfect muscles). Where is the robust defense of the “natural” now?
Pingback: Gender equality and economic justice: 5 reasons why “profit over people” is a feminist issue | Disrupting Dinner Parties
Love the article but just wanted to say, as a dental student: halitosis is NOT a made-up problem. ‘Bad breath’ might be, as a subjective symptom, but halitosis occurs due to an excess of volatile sulfur compounds (which can be measured) in the oral cavity and may be a clinical sign of anything from excess bacterial overgrowth to liver failure.
Pingback: Shaving Standards, Level: Ermagherd, teh menz! | Disrupting Dinner Parties
Pingback: Sexism in News Anchors | Beginning Journalism
Pingback: Lovely Literature - An Outside Perspective
They are ableist, too!