Escaping the Beauty Myth

… and why we should feel bad for the hot girls

Pretty privilege, the idea that attractive people, and especially attractive women, receive a wide range of unmerited social and economic benefits is now widely taken for granted. Discussions on the downsides of beauty tend to focus either on the problem of getting too much male sexual interest: street heckling, unwanted attention at bars, difficulty forming platonic relationships with men, or, especially for younger women, difficulty being taken seriously: “you don’t look like a programmer”. But even when acknowledging these downsides it’s generally assumed that, on net, the beautiful are getting a great deal. However, this seemingly great deal may come along with an increased propensity to identify with one’s beauty and elevate its importance. The consistent stream of societal affirmation that women who fit the relevant beauty standard receive for their beauty encourages a heightened internalization of beauty’s value, potentially foreclosing on their ability to cultivate more fulfilling sources of self-worth. In Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, she argues that as women gained legal and economic equality and the homemaker-focused “Feminine Mystique” lost its sway, women found themselves faced with a new imperative: that they satisfy an exacting and unrelenting beauty ideal. The reality of pretty privilege reflects the inordinate and asymmetric value society places on female beauty – an asymmetry betrayed by the term itself given the feminine connotations of 'pretty'. But, could it be that those privileged by beauty are paradoxically the most entangled in our society's fixation on it?

Riffing on the concept of the "second shift", which refers to the unequal burden of domestic work and childcare that many working women bear, Wolf terms the physically and mentally demanding beauty work that women perform the "third shift". The exact shape of the beauty ideal shifts over time and across classes and subcultures, but the failure to measure up to it, and the quest to approximate  it, occupies (to various degrees) women rich and poor, working and at home, fat and thin. Reflecting on the time, money and psychic energy that goes into this beauty work for some women: the skin care, hair care, aesthetically-focused fitness regimens, constant dieting or shame from not constantly dieting, nail appointments, waxing appointments, painful shoes, expensive and restrictive underwear (that you wear for yourself!!), not to mention the growing use of various invasive and/or expensive cosmetic procedures, I find the "third shift" an apt description. As an aside, for any of you who (like me) occasionally indulge in watching the trash heap that is Selling Sunset the women on that show perform a perfect caricature of this idea in practice. For some women this beauty work represents a heavy burden, the weight of which is difficult to estimate. And it’s difficult to estimate in part because the obsession with beauty has been so fully internalized that many women see “indulging” in beauty work as self care. If you really love yourself, we’re told, you’ll put in the effort (and money) to get as close to the ideal as possible because “when you look good, you feel good” and “beauty is pain”. While I’m generally reluctant to argue on the basis of false consciousness, women insisting that they perform beauty work “just for themselves” is hard to take at face value, in some ways paralleling women who claim a legitimate preference for mandatory veiling in the most repressive societies. It’s not that no woman can freely choose to be veiled but that such a free choice is highly unlikely in a context where social and religious forces are beyond coercive. I draw this comparison not to imply that the plight of western women is similar in nature or scale to that of women in Saudi Arabia, but to demonstrate that we should be curious, if not skeptical, when our individual choice happens to converge with centuries of messaging asking us to place aesthetics on a pedestal. The way women often refer to beauty work, as something they need to do (as in “I need to get my roots touched up” or “I need to get my nails done” or “I need a wax”) strikes me as instructive.

Girls begin to receive positive feedback on the basis of their looks early on. I once witnessed a family member exclaim over her 7 year old great-niece’s beauty and then say “you know what, if I were going to get a nose job I’d get one just like yours!”. I’m not sure her great-nephew will ever have to discuss his nose with anyone. These sorts of experiences inform a girl’s world view, cutting grooves which deepen over time as the message that her beauty makes her valuable is repeatedly reinforced. Once she has internalized the value of her beauty she’s primed to seek out means to improve it. Popular culture mechanisms such as women's magazines historically and TikTok and Instagram influencers now provide her with the latest instructions on what sorts of beauty work she’s expected to perform. Wolf argues that the beauty myth serves two purposes: to waste women's time and energy by distracting and exhausting them with endless beauty work, and to delegitimize them, either for failing to attain any approximation of the current ideal in which case their ugliness is evidence of their incompetence, or for conforming to it too well in which case their beauty is distracting and a counter indicator of intelligence and seriousness. The framing of the beauty myth as having a purpose, suggesting it was crafted to favor men at the detriment of women, instead of merely emerging as a byproduct of market forces is difficult to make a rigorous case for. But regardless of intentionality, the myth has consequences.

We’re reminded of the consequences of insufficient worship at the altar of beauty by the relentless and rigorous analysis of the appearance of female public figures, the obsessive tracking of their size and the gleeful and moralizing coverage of their weight changes and botched cosmetic procedures. In recent years, the growth of “body positivity”, “Health at every size” and other overlapping but distinct movements has complicated this picture. Now women who flaunt their large bodies, with Lizzo being the favorite example, are praised for “being brave” and quasi-compulsively referred to as beautiful. Through repetition, the statement that “Lizzo is SO gorgeous”, takes on the role of a mantra - if we all keep calling her beautiful maybe we’ll eventually believe it and then maybe we can feel beautiful too. Increased exposure to glamorized images of women who don’t fit the narrow beauty ideal due to their size, race etc. is in many ways positive. Representation matters, and in a culture that worships female beauty, which makes beauty a prerequisite for feeling confident and worthy, representation as beauties matters too. But making the definition of beauty more inclusive is a fundamentally reformist approach where a radical shift in perspective is needed. An attempt to renovate rather than dismantle the beauty myth without disrupting its aims. For one thing, expanding the definition of beauty has the consequence of creating more willing customers: you’ve never aged out, you’re never too fat to bother trying, there is always a path to salvation for the willing devotee. On top of this, the demand on women to “LOVE YOURSELF” and eschew unrealistic standards in solidarity with other women, while on the one hand liberatory, can also create another way to fail, another source of shame and personal blame. Now, you can not only hate your body but you can hate yourself for hating your body. 

However, while many women respond to the significant incentives to perform beauty work there are also many who don't perform this work, who reject the ideal, who discount the value of personal beauty and who seem to get along just fine. These women appear to have successfully escaped the beauty myth. The narrowness of the beauty ideal inherently makes it exclusionary. This is by design. No one can attain it, so constant striving towards it through beauty work is required. But for a woman to garner the motivation to strive, she must believe she can achieve or at least meaningfully progress towards the goal at which her striving is aimed. Women who, due to their physical characteristics or personal presentation choices, have found themselves sidelined by the beauty game bear the most obvious consequences of our culture's fixation on it. However, that exclusion can also lead to an early awakening. Think about the girl who has only ever been validated in chess club or on the soccer field but never for her appearance. Seeing that the gap between the beauty ideal and herself is (obviously) insurmountable she may realize sooner than most that the game is a losing one. Since her beauty is clearly not what gives her value she’s encouraged (or forced) to locate her value in other places: character traits, talents, personal achievements etc.

For women who are conventionally attractive, their good looks and attempts at improving them are the source of unrelenting positive feedback. The constancy of this reinforcement often overwhelms social rewards related to other personal attributes and betrays the level at which they’re being surveilled, encouraging the ongoing investment in and belief in the value of beauty work. They learn to see self-objectification as empowering, because on the surface it is. Their beauty yields them privileges that other women are barred from accessing and, because they’ve internalized its value, successful efforts to improve their beauty actually do cash out in greater well-being. But these apparent benefits to individual women are at the cost of a system which harms us collectively and, given that female aging is not tolerated under the beauty myth, will eventually harm them individually as well. Women lucky enough to have been born with features and a body type which already approximate the ideal tend to be even more motivated than most to invest in and preserve their beauty. Their inflated sense of identification with their beauty only intensifies their resistance to weight gain or changes to the body that come with motherhood and aging. Eventually, as they fade into middle-aged invisibility, they’re forced to face life for the first time without the relative benefit over other women that they’ve always received for being one of the beautiful ones. Maybe for some of these women it's a relief to lose the power of beauty, a power they never really wanted, or which they never saw as the locus of their self-worth, or which has been used to delegitimize their well-deserved success in unrelated areas, but many of them are eager to do the work to "maintain" and "reclaim" their beauty. Ironically, the losers of the beauty game may have a better shot at escaping  its clutches while the winners, though reaping benefits in the short term, face an elevated risk of internalizing its premises so deeply that they never escape at all.