Women Appear: The Price of Beauty
We are all guilty of slipping into different skins in different situations. My telephone voice is a fantastic thing to behold, as is my waitressing smile. I don’t think this is a uniquely feminine experience, but I do wonder if women have less opportunities and moments when they are simply themselves.
Self-love is not fashionable and it’s not widely practised. Our commercial society literally profits of female self-hatred; the makeup industry would collapse if we encouraged confidence in women. I know women who get up before their partners to put make up on. I know women who never dive into the ocean because they hate getting their hair wet.
It’s easy to view this obsession with looks as superficial. And of course, it is to a certain extent; it’s literally a preoccupation with the surfaces of people rather than their depths. But, strangely, it’s the women themselves who are seen as superficial, rather than the culture which expects them to behave in this way. It blows people’s minds that women can be both beautiful and smart, as if the chemicals in our makeup sinks under our skin, damaging our brains.
Women (and men) are not presented with representations of actual women. Almost all modern films fail the Bechdel test, which requires two female characters to have a conversation that isn’t about men. What does that teach people? That all women talk about is men because our little lives are meaningless and unworthy of comment. Women do, of course, talk about men. We also talk about lots of other things. Women are capable of caring about sex, Brexit and Topshop’s sale because we’re actual people, we’re not characters in a poorly written porno.
Society requires and expects women to be insecure. Confidence in women, whether it’s academic confidence, professional confidence or sexual confidence is seen as negative. You’re not a leader, you’re bossy. You’re not a player, you’re a slut. Self expression in any arena other than the aesthetic is discouraged and demonised. In the patriarchy, it’s not who you are, it’s what you look like and we are setting women up for failure by asking them to achieve the unachievable.
It’s threatening when women refuse to be compartmentalised and flat-packed and I’ve met men who are genuinely terrified of ambitious, kind, beautiful women because they contradict everything they’ve ever been taught about femininity. The women in my life are incredibly multifaceted people. I can dance on a bar with them, argue about the economy and run a business with them. The fact that I’m writing that thinking it might be a revelation to some people is telling and depressing.
Wanting to feel beautiful is not an inherently negative thing. I love looking nice, we all do. But we need to teach women to be comfortable looking like themselves and we need to teach women that their entire selfhood doesn’t rest on narrow precipices of their cheekbones.