On Worshipping Beauty

I was on holiday with a friend of mine two weeks ago and we had come back home after early dinner. We were too tired to socialise but not tired enough to go to bed. So Insta-scrolling felt only fitting. We sat in our own rooms and shared profiles of beautiful girls with each other. The occasional DM, accompanied by a cry across the living room: ‘Look at her boobs! OMG her hair!’ It felt masochistic, addictive, and toxic, and yet I couldn’t really tell why. It wasn’t only because I could feel how, with each subsequent girl that I discovered who looked better than I do, the gap between my imperfections and self-acceptance widened, and the distance between myself and my aspired looks increased. It wasn’t the оverload of stimuli and additional screen time, making my brain neurons even more inconveniently neurotic pre-bed time. It wasn’t the sudden desire to do squats or drink a kale smoothie, either. So, I sat there wondering, why? Why did worshiping a woman’s beautiful face, hourglass shape, and radiant skin feel wrong?

I was reading an essay by Jia Tolentino weeks later when I realised: it was because somehow beauty has become a virtue in and of itself. A long time ago, Tolentino reminds us, in stories and fables, beauty used to be a quality attributed to those who performed good deeds and taken away from those who did harm. The evil women were often ugly; the good princesses were beautiful. Famously, in de Villeneuve’s tale, Beauty and the Beast, the arrogant Robby Benson is turned into a hideous beast until he learns to love and be loved, and when he does, he’s transformed into a charming prince. Nowadays, beauty has not only turned into morality in and of itself, weighing more than other virtues such as kindness and humility, but it has also become a goal, something to strive towards even if you’re not born with it.

Suddenly, I could explain to myself why I sometimes felt sick watching the Met Gala or red carpet events. There were a bunch of individuals who got the world’s attention, admiration and love, mostly because they had won the genetic lottery. But I couldn’t understand why they deserved it more than a woman who has spent her whole life in utter dedication and loyalty to her family, serving her community, and raising good children. 

I was reminded of the image that went viral which portrayed Kendall Jenner in a bikini next to Alyssa Carson, the 19-year-old astronaut who became the youngest person in history to overcome all of NASA’s aerospace tests (see below). It displayed so well the disproportionate value that society gives to beauty. One was well known, the other not; one was admired, the other maybe respected; one filled teenage girls with dedication and ambition, the other not as much.

 

We women are used to working two jobs. One is our everyday professional occupation and the other is our side hustle of constantly trying to look good, to move closer to the idealised versions of ourselves. We spend countless hours in beauty salons, in gyms, in downward-facing dogs; getting manicures, haircuts, lasers. Trying to iron out the natural creases that make us less than perfect. Not only that, but a lot of that effort is supposed to be hidden. Because that isn’t the beauty ideal du jour. Society doesn’t approve of women who try hard to look good; it favours women who were naturally born this way, who “woke up like this”, who would look just as good if they accidentally took a close-up selfie with their iPhone camera.

There have been some social media and mainstream feminism “body acceptance” movements trying to teach us to love our stretch marks and big pores, showcasing different body types in a bid to prove that everyone is beautiful. But rather than trying to convince everyone of their beauty, why not reduce the importance of beauty altogether? How much different the world would look if it valued internal beauty as much as external. 

This seems like an impossible and overwhelming project, but I know that there are small things that I can do that perhaps, if done by everyone, might amount to big change: not browsing through endless Instagram feeds of models with starry eyes and an empty stomach; refusing to validate their importance or add to the tsunami of likes on another disproportional, airbrushed photo, which teaches the 14-year-olds of this world that that’s the goal to strive towards, that it’s looking this way that makes you a worthy woman. 

 To Reality
With Love,
N.