The Feminist Debate: Can Aspiring to Magnificence Ever Be Empowering?

In Feminist Debates, we pit feminist arguments about energy, intercourse, work, and love in opposition to one another — and unpack the gray areas. 

Final month, a London-based plastic surgeon named Julian De Siva launched his annual listing of probably the most stunning ladies on the planet — in response to “science,” allegedly. His method consists of mapping 12 factors on the face, and utilizing the Greek Golden Ratio of Magnificence, ‘Phi’ to attain them. It’s based mostly on the Greek concept that the human kind ought to conform to a divine mathematical ratio that’s excellent. An inventory of predictable names made the reduce: Zendaya, Bella Hadid, Deepika Padukone, Kim Kardashian, Ariana Grande, amongst others. However the winner, supposedly, was Jodie Comer — who apparently has a proportional face, and unseated Amber Heard from the place.

That magnificence continues to justified this fashion is dangerous science. However feminists proceed to grapple with it, nonetheless. Cosmetic surgery, beauty procedures, filters, make-up, and skincare are all large industries which might be solely getting greater. And so they’re all based mostly on a basic, shared premise: there may be one approach to be stunning, and it’s potential to change oneself to attain it. Going by way of any of those processes, then, is reframed as empowering — it’s a approach for girls, particularly, to take management of their very own self-image and have company over their our bodies.

Inevitably, nonetheless, the perfect that we aspire to converges right into a model of the ladies on De Silva’s listing. And within the pursuit to really feel assured in a world designed to undermine it, ladies typically find yourself circling again to the identical oppressive requirements that precipitated the issue, within the first place. Is magnificence itself, then, unfeminist? Or can it ever be reclaimed?

There’s nobody definition of magnificence — it’s what we would like it to be.

Magnificence was once a privilege. However over time, it grew to become democratized — with “magnificence parlors” and low cost beauty merchandise, everybody may management their very own look in ways in which they weren’t capable of earlier. Because of this magnificence norms are always evolving — and inclusive. Furthermore, many feminists have begun to embrace magnificence as a talented female pursuit, and an “evolutionary drive.” Because of this magnificence isn’t a really perfect, however a talent — the place the “proper to be stunning” is for everybody. In different phrases, feminism is now post-beauty, the place traits as soon as omitted of magnificence — like fatness, darkness — are reclaimed as stunning.

The flipside: the world nonetheless shares an exclusionary understanding of magnificence, which impacts how we’re handled.

Magnificence continues to be white supremacist and colonialist. Sandra Lee Bartky and Susan Bordo argue that as a result of some ladies select female magnificence independently, it doesn’t contradict its position in perpetuating sexist inequality. Furthermore, the exclusionary concept of magnificence results in a phenomenon known as fairly privilege, whereby some persons are afforded extra legitimacy and entry simply by advantage of their seems to be. And with magnificence remaining racialized and exclusionary, it’s the traditionally privileged which might be afforded the entry.

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There’s nothing inherently fallacious with wanting to boost our look — it provides us extra management and confidence.

The feminist scholar Kathy Davis, in her treatise on beauty surgical procedure, famous what number of ladies who bear painful procedures, nonetheless, achieve this as “embodied subjects” — with company and intention. And so they come out of it feeling extra in management and assured.

Furthermore, some feminists have additionally argued that magnificence, and the expertise of womanhood itself, tends to be centered on ache. Magnificence, as a shared expertise, permits the chance to seek out pleasure within the commonalities as an alternative. Some even argue that it presents house for feminist solidarities and sisterhood — based mostly on the shared expertise of taking part in magnificence collectively.

The flipside: “improve” inevitably means adhering to a problematic best.

Who “considers” us stunning? More and more, social media mediates our understanding of magnificence — and it’s homogenizing. Tradition critic Jia Tolentino notes how we’re within the age of “Instagram Face” — which is a post-racial amalgamation borrowed from many alternative cultures. But it surely inevitably advantages whiteness on the expense of different cultures. The identical options that marginalized ladies had been demonized for — plump lips in black ladies, thick eyebrows in South Asian ladies, and so forth — are aestheticized and celebrated on white faces. This ambiguous period of magnificence, then, is inevitably nonetheless eurocentric.

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Magnificence requirements have modified now — make-up can be utilized subversively.

Marginalized individuals have been stored out of magnificence for generations — whereas it was nonetheless outlined by the privileged. However that’s now not the case: magnificence is consistently within the technique of reclamation by the very individuals it as soon as excluded. “For me, the expertise of ugliness was certainly one of self-inflicted ache, self-inflicted punishment, and nugatory… In any case that, it seems the individuals which might be the richest with magnificence are individuals who as soon as felt like me,” noted Tom Rasmussen in Dazed. Actually, all the things we now deem stunning, we owe to drag culture. Magnificence, then, is queer, subversive, and playful — and insisting on defining it within the conventional approach solely reinforces an oppressive normal moderately than liberates us from it.

The flipside: typically, we’re coerced to put on make-up to exist on the planet.

Magnificence is a assemble created to extract revenue out of ladies’s insecurities, and within the course of, additionally creates the insecurities, as feminist Naomi Wolf argued in The Beauty Myth. Consequently, magnificence stays an imposed expectation for girls to occupy house. This, in flip, obliges ladies to navigate magnificence by way of consumerism — virtually making a magnificence “tax” to be deemed skilled, credible, and fascinating all of sudden. It’s the final word adherence to the established order — and subsequently, to patriarchy itself.