The Mirror of Truth
By: Chiara Bruzzi
* This is an essay I had to write for school about hegemonic beauty standards. I thought I would share my opinion about this topic with you all!
When you look in a mirror, what do you see? Does the mirror represent who you are, or does it highlight all of your flaws? For most of us, it is safe to say that any time we look in the mirror, we notice something is inherently ‘wrong’ with the way we look. Whether that is the size of our waist, the fat under our armpits, or the minuscule imperfection in our skin, we notice it. We study it. We let it take on a personality of its own. We quickly start thinking of remedies on how to remove the imperfection, the outlier, and we don’t stop to think about the possibility of embracing it instead. In today’s society, flaws, or any indication of our bodies’ naturalistic component, are simply not an option. To be anything less than perfect is to be ugly, lesser, and unhealthy.
Hegemonic beauty standards are the perfection which all of our imperfections inhibit us from reaching. They represent everything that real women don’t have. Rather than standards, they are ideals that have been normalized to the point where, as Senali Bowen explains in an article by the New York Times, “natural seems to be reserved for bodies that uphold existing norms and ideals.” Beauty standards are oppressive because they dictate what women should look like despite their unattainable and idealistic nature. Throughout history, beauty standards have changed, but they have always been present in some form or another. Dating back to the Classical world, the Greeks used to reach perfection through mathematical equations, and they thought that perfect proportions were the key to beauty. During the medieval period, corsets literally shaped women’s bodies to have a skinny waist, big boobs, and big butt. While today we don’t use old school corsets to shape our bodies (I say old school because shapewear can be considered a modernized corset), these beauty standards are still present in our society. Today the notion is that white, tall, skinny, and straight hair is beautiful. People who aren’t born with those characteristics are always trying to chase the ideal, using plastic surgery or unhealthy eating habits to achieve perfection. That is for white women, since Asian and BIPOC women will never be able to fit the beauty standard that tells them that white is beautiful. No matter how hard they try, they will never escape those characteristics that have always identified who they are, those characteristics that are used as a tool of oppression. Mikki Kendall, a Black author, activist, and culture critic, writes in a New York Times article that black women have always been told that their “bodies are all wrong […] that the way [they] look is unwelcome”. These beauty standards reinforce this idea as they cause women to be ashamed of their bodies and identities. To feel as if their skin color makes them imperfect or, as Sesali Bowen writes in an article, “less valuable than others.” For this group of women, hegemonic beauty standards are not just oppressive, but they are unattainable realities that over the years will continue to affect the way these women think of themselves and their worth.
The female body is not representative of the feminist movement. Our bodies are a part of who we are, but they shouldn’t define us nor market us. Banks suggests in this article that the female body should be at the center of the feminist movement in the 21st century not so that we can market our bodies, but so we can change the way we look at beauty standards. The way we normalize toxic relationships with food, so that young girls grow up thinking that skinny is good and fat is shameful, that those two words have different connotations in the first place. I agree with what Banks entails; these beauty standards need to be discussed and challenged. If the feminist movement wants to progress, putting hegemonic beauty standards at the forefront of the movement is necessary. Change is often uncomfortable, and when it comes to breaking social norms that have been there for centuries, it is hard to think that anyone wants to take that difficult step. However, if we don’t break free of these beauty standards, we might never learn to love our differences and come together as one. With these physical constraints rooted in our society, we will never stop judging the girl who put on some weight because of stress in the workplace or the Black woman that wore her natural hair to a job interview. For that reason, we need to address these beauty standards so that all women can come to own their bodies and the diversities which make us all so unique.
In the mainstream media, I often see signs about the importance of individual empowerment for women. The idea that you should love yourself not despite your imperfections but because of them. That you should embrace who you are so that no one can tell you what you should look like or who you should be. While these are positive messages which should be shared, I can’t stop to wonder if they are enough. If beauty standards that have been present for centuries are going to magically disappear with an Instagram post. My opinion on the matter is that we need to do more. With so many women experiencing eating disorders and insecurities about their bodies, teaching women to love themselves is simply not enough. We need to start protecting women from these beauty standards from an early age, so that little girls don’t grow up thinking that Princess Elsa’s body and face are attainable. If we want to see progress in the workplace and the roles women play, then we need to, as Sesali Bowen said, “embrac[e] autonomy and a variety of body aesthetics.” We need to create the change that we have been waiting for so that no woman is ridiculed, judged, or identified based on her appearance.
Beauty standards have nothing to do with a woman’s personality or inner self; they only address physicalities and superficial appearance. They are represented in the media by women that are one in a million, a star in the night. Unique and noticeable, yet unable to represent the whole sky. They are the Victoria’s Secret angels that real women praise; and, even if some of these models are Black or Asian, their bodies still come to represent a fake reality. These models tend to have unusual features, and their bodies are often very skinny and tall. In an academic journal, Debra L. Gimlin writes that “the body has come to stand as a primary symbol of identity,” as long as that is true, any beauty standard will be oppressive to women. That is because it is simply impossible to expect for one body to represent all women; and, telling women that they need to change their appearances automatically challenges their identities.