When Appearances Matter

It’s important that women fight back against beauty being used in unhealthy and minimalizing ways. It is also important that we disentangle ourselves from these influences in meaningful and effective ways. 

Beauty and appearance should not be all that matters in our lives. Ideally, it should not even be close to the top of our list of priorities. Nor should it be a step in achieiving a goal, except in rare and extreme cicrumstances which I’ll get to later.

 Realistically, however the impact of beauty will never leave our lives. Completely wiping that influence is near impossible. By the time we are old enough to examine what’s been fed to us, or read a feminist essay, most of us have already been conditioned irrevocably.

Beauty gives us rules about how almost everything works; our relationship to ourselves, our relationship with others, and how others relate to us. We don’t even have to apply the rules of beauty to ourselves to apply them to other people, or for other people to apply them to us. This is okay. We do not have to completely sanitize every aspect of our lives from the impact of beauty; It is not necessary to do so. There are cases where paying attention is important. Really what it comes down to is balancing beauty with other things. 

Firstly, there are exceptions to every rule. Models are obviously exempt from all of these rules. Their liveihood depends on preening and beauty rituals. Their job descriptions likely include that they must be under a certain weight, they must maintain their skin, and their hair must be a certain way.  Obvious exception.

When I say that beauty and appearences should not be a step in achieving a goal, I’m excepting extreme cases. Beauty, hygeine, and overall presentability do tend to be enmeshed. If someone gives absolutely no attention to how they look or smell to other people, this can lead to a hygeine emergency. It can also produce a look of general sloppiness which is off-putting to potential employers, friends, and would-be romantic partners. 

There is also another example of when intervention is sorely necessary. If someone’s views on beauty and appearance are severely misguided, it can have the same off-putting effect as if they did not pay attention at all.

Oftentimes this comes along with the previously discussed belief that our appearences bestow things upon us that appearances cannot possibly bestow. The show “How Do I Look?” produces a deluge of examples of women in this category. For instance, one woman who was trying to start a charitable organization thought that dressing like a street girl made her more more able to relate to troubled kids and gain their trust. She was told, correctly, that her bonds with troubled kids will come from her mind and her previous experiences. She does not don it from the physical clothes on her body like some super power. She was also shown with direct evidence that her manner of dress absolutely killed any chance she had of aquiring a foothold in that field. There is a reason street clothes are street clothes, and work clothes are work clothes. 

There’s also dozens of other examples on the show of women who think individuality, sexiness, outrageousness, and who knows what else come from their clothing. They think that if they dress like normal people they will become invisible and their entire persona will be crushed. While some of them may be right, it’s not for the reason they think. 

While it’s important and healthy to pay a certain level of attention to how we come off to others, how we are percieved does not constitute the substance of our character. Other people’s opinions do not make a solid identity. 

I will stress again though that how we look does impact our lives. That’s undeniable. It’s also unlikely to change for a long time. It’s not evil or hypocritical to protest the more destructive aspects of beauty in our society while indulging in beautifying ourselves.  

What’s really at the heart of this problem is that we must accept our that our gameset is what it is when it comes to beauty and appearances, while also making sure we’re not sinking unreasonable amounts of resources into pursuing mastery of our appearance. 

Our thoughts are a resource. Our time/effort is a resource. Our money is a resource. When womens circles talk about your “power” and “taking back your power” it usually comes down to these three things. What are you putting your power into?

Devoting some resources to how we look is reasonable. For instance, yeah, sure, I spend some time straightening my hair every so often. I also spend some time moisturizing. My entire life is neither about straight hair or smooth skin. I have plenty of hobbies and relationships that are completely independent of these things. Even if I had third degree burns all over my body, negating any hope for my hair or skin, I could still maintain most of the things I do in my life.  Poi, video games, drumming, volunteering, writing, working, singing, learning to craft things. All of these have little to nothing do with my hair and skin.  

Spending some money on a haircut is pretty standard. Unkept hair looks sloppy. Styled hair shows you put in effort, which usually takes products that cost money. Fine. Spending thousands of dollars for surgery to fix something you hate about your face is a gigantc waste of money with no payoff. It’s not healthy for someone to be that affected by the way they look, and they should probably find healthier ways to develop their self-esteem. If you’re one nose job away from living life at any second, you need a life. Not a nose job.

Putting on some make-up because you want to look better is fine. It’s largely come to be expected that women will wear makeup. In some cases, makeup has already won out as being the norm. This is evidenced by all the women who are not tired who get asked all the time if they are tired.  Not being able to leave the house without make-up however is to fail at living. 

Sending a message with the way you dress is fine. Well-tailored formal clothes do send a message. Even your choice in footwear sends a message. Wearing clothes to project an image or ability you do not in any other way have is missing the point of this. Attributing a trait or ability you most definitely DO have to the clothes you wear is also missing the point. 

So to close this big to-do, it really comes down to the old adage, “Everything in moderation.” I would also add that your resources are precious and its important to watch where you’re putting them. Some investments are lasting, others are not. And no, that does not mean go out and get tatoos to show how edgy you are. It means invest in things that will always be in your most valuable asset, your mind. Skills, experience, knowledge, talents, traits, actions. These are the things that are ultimately lasting. 

Beauty, Makeup, Fluff, and Taking Back Our Identity as Women and as People

I throw my gauntlet down to the relationship between women, marketing, and beauty. Many astounding works have been made on how the media uses beauty to tell a story about how women ought to be, and that story does not have a pretty ending. This is old news to anyone who has been paying attention and is not what I want to discuss today. What I want to talk about is how often we think we are fighting back when in fact we aren’t. Or a step further along, when we think we’ve successfully opted out by not buying the products when we still buy the philosophy and it’s just as much of a monkey wrench to meaningful progress as ever.

Let’s trace how women began to fight against cookie-cutter magazine beauties. The first reaction seems to have been to pull in the opposite direction. This is where we see the emergence of “real” women. Real women must look absolutely nothing like the women in the magazines. No makeup on their face. They must be at least a size 10, otherwise they look suspiciously fake until they put on some more weight. They were still using physical traits to measure an internal trait that ought to be evidenced with action and merits (pay attention to this, it’s gonna be important later). They substituted the word “beauty” with “realness” and continued on with business as usual acting like they had somehow won the war on beauty though in fact they had just moved the bar. Dove responded to this new niche of consumers with their “Real Beauty” campaign. This “Real Beauty” was just as fake, polished, and packaged as ever, but the consumers eagerly bought into it as a sign of progress. And with it they bought into a new set of products that prepare the “au naturel” look behind closed curtains – loofas, creams, nail buffers, shampoos, brushes, hair dryers, etc.

Then it was our turn again. We realized our boo-boo in that we were acting like beauty is some blanket that’s too small for all of us, and only one particular group of women can have it at a time. So we turned around with a very Opera-like flourish, and we said “You’re beautiful, and you’re beautiful, and you over there in the ugly corner, get over here, you can be beautiful too!! Everyone gets to be beautiful!!” A few examples of this would be the plethora of photographers for hire who would love to do your makeup/hair and do a burlesque/pin-up photo shoot with you. No matter what size you are. Because borrowing pornagraphic imagery from 60 years ago is somehow classier, and you can be sexy too no matter what anyone says. Another example is how much of the support given to breast cancer patients stresses how they can still be beautiful with jewelry, make-up, nails, and an attitude to match (Barbara Ehnrich’s “Bright Sided” goes into this in depth).  This “everyone is beautiful” attitude led to a lot of thumbs up our asses wondering what to do now. Why? Because it still didn’t solve the root problem that we equate beauty with everything anyone could want in life – happiness, romance, success, friends, fun, energy, confidence, opportunity, health. Well, we’re all beautiful now, and none of us ultimately feel much different than we did before, and women were still facing the same issues. So what were we missing here?

What happened was that we made the mistake of attaching so much baggage to beauty. Beauty itself was not the enemy, but the significance and the culture attached to it. We allowed ourselves to be convinced that our life does not truly start until we are beautiful. And this could happen at any time even if we weren’t born beautiful. Endless movies, sitcoms, infomercials and makeover shows have driven at the same message; One day the magic of make-up and salon products will turn us frumpy chicks into graceful swans, giving us a second shot at beauty and thus being someone that actually matters. Keep working on that degree now, but when we’re 40 we’ll start dressing well, blowing our hair out, get fantastic dye jobs, and live our lives the way we should have when we were 20. This is all that matters.

The media fixation on beauty is basically in response to one huge human need – to matter. All of us have that question burned into our brains – “What makes me matter?” or a slightly different version “What makes me special?” In more extreme cases this can summarized as “LOOK AT ME, DAMMIT!!!” When you can convince someone that they need to buy a product to fulfill this need, especially in such a way that they’re pursuing it like its life or death, you can make a lot of money off of them. But again, this has been dissected many times before. It’s become obvious to anyone paying attention. What needs attention now is the impact that mass marketed beauty leaves on our psyches, even after we stop buying into it financially.

First up is the obstacle of separating beauty from all the other qualities we had paired with it – happiness, success, personality, confidence, romance, etc. Pairing these qualities with physical attractiveness instilled in us a sense of vapid narcissism. We thought having confidence only meant looking the part. The road to success meant buying expensive, fashionable clothes. Likewise, individuality meant having a unique dye job, striking make-up, and an edgy wardrobe. Basically, if you take the messages popular media sends us at face value, it says that for women life is a never-ending game of dress-up and make-believe. This is infantilizing and has some very serious impacts on women’s capability to make an impact on the outside world. I’ll touch on this again in a future writing.

But for now, how does one change the internal landscape? What happens when your life stops being about standing around looking pretty? What do you replace it with? Well, what we find out when we start being real people is that actions with actual consequences are more powerful than words or visuals. Confidence is not based on looking confident. You will only feel a satisfactory sense of confidence when you actually accomplish things that matter to you. Confidence can only spring from knowing, objectively and not just speculatively, that you can do something. Likewise, lasting pride can only come from irrevocable accomplishments that you are proud of. You may be proud of your flawless skin until you are old and wrinkly. You may be proud of your figure until your metabolism slows down. Your one-of-a-kind painted-on “personality” might fade away when you stop looking good in certain clothes, or your hair doesn’t do the things it used to. Whereas if you actually accomplish meaningful and lasting things, nothing can take that away from you. If you volunteered somewhere for 5 years, those experiences will last. A degree might lose its impact in the job market, but the actual work that went into it will always be there. Learning a new skill or language will always be valuable to you, and will broaden your horizons. These are all real life experiences with impact that have lasting value. They will enrich your life in ways beyond anything beauty can do. It’s what we DO that makes us who we are, not what we look like at a glance.

So, one thing to make perfectly clear is that it is incredibly unlikely for any woman in particular to completely liberate herself from ALL the things the media has told her about beauty, which other people have also echoed back to her.  It’s unlikely we will ever purge every last notion about the relationship between beauty and ourselves, other women, the opposite sex, and the way people respond to us in general. That’s perfectly okay. Certainly, it’s important to work on mitigating any beliefs about beauty that are counter-productive to relationships or cause misery in everyday life. But we do not have to give up the beauty game completely to start improving our lives in meaningful ways. The sooner the better.