Hey Beautiful!

There’s a common saying that goes, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and although I find the concept of everyone having a different understanding of beauty a lovely idea, I don’t think it is accurate or that simple.  Rather, I think there are dominant notions of beauty that most people internalize in a specific place during a specific time in history.  Take, for example, the idea that skinny women are beautiful. This idea is dominant right now in the U.S., but was not so at earlier points in history. I read somewhere that Marilyn Monroe, a famous actor, singer, and sex symbol of the 1940’s and 50’s wore a size 14, while the “most beautiful” actresses today look like they wear a size 2 or smaller.  The media plays a huge role in maintaining this concept of beauty and most of us have likely heard about its connection to eating disorders.

I have never been diagnosed with an eating disorder. However, like many women I know, in high school and into college I experimenting with dieting.  My adult self wonders now how I could have ever thought of myself as fat. In high school I was about 5ft. 6in. tall and weighed 125 pounds. I wasn’t obsessed with losing weight, but thought I could stand to lose some of the “fat” off my thighs. One of my diets was a soup diet that coincided with the middle of my softball season (my favorite sport).  This was not the smartest of plans - I ended up feeling dizzy and weak while practicing in the hot summer sun.

I could go on and on about the detrimental impact of seeing skinny as beautiful, but what I really want to focus on in this blog is the fact that society places a high level of importance or value on women’s beauty.  Assigning women value and worth based on physical beauty is one way that our patriarchal society keeps women down.  In whose eyes are women beautiful or not beautiful?  If women’s value is in their beauty, then who are they to become or not become?

I saw a documentary called Miss Representation on YouTube a few weeks ago that addresses how women are portrayed in the media and the way in which that representation both mimics and reproduces the way society values women.  You can view the trailer here  - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFh5F8cFb3g&sns=fb and find the entire movie on YouTube.  It’s worth the watch.

In my life, I have received many messages about how beauty equals women’s value and worth, but the most obvious to me was when I went from “ugly, dork” to “beautiful, kid with friends” in the 8^th grade.  As most of you know, junior high or middle school is an awful time for a lot of kids.  When I was 12, I started getting zits and became a super self-conscious pre-teen.   I had worn glasses since I was in first grade and the ones that I had when I was 12 had large, pink frames.

When I moved from elementary school to the junior high for 7^th grade, I seemed to lose my elementary school friends, as they met new people, while I sat by watching and hoping to make some new friends myself.  I remember trying to get to know new people, sitting next to them in the lunchroom or trying to talk to them between classes, but I was so self-conscious that my attempts were small.  Instead of being accepted by my peers, I kept getting the feeling that I wasn’t wanted.

This was when I started praying to god to make me beautiful (now an obvious sign that I had already internalized the message that beauty equaled value).  I felt like my prayers were answered in the eighth grade when I got contact lenses as a birthday present from my parents.  I have really light blue eyes, which were considered a beautiful feature at that time and place, and with my contact lenses you could clearly see my eyes. Suddenly, with this small change, the junior high boys started to take an interest in me.  And once that happened, the girls started to befriend me too.  My ‘new’ physical beauty made me suddenly likeable.  It seemed like I was now considered worthy of knowing and hanging around.

In the time since I got my first pair of contacts, I’ve done quite a bit of experimenting with this concept.  Through these experiments, I realized that if I wanted to get noticed, I should wear my contacts.  If I wanted to be ignored, I should wear my glasses.

The valuing of physical beauty goes along with the devaluing of other attributes, like book smarts.  Although I got good grades throughout high school and even better grades in college, I could never convince myself that I was as smart as other people – particularly men.  No matter how much I had read about a certain subject or had a particular experience, I never trusted that my knowledge was enough to counter what a man had to say.  To this day, as I work on a second Master’s degree (and hopefully next year a PhD), I struggle to feel completely confident in my knowledge.  I struggle to feel smart. 

The one thing that has helped in this regard over the last couple of years has been recognizing that, in general, women in the U.S. are socialized to concentrate on their own physical features instead of intellectual pursuits.  We are socialized to believe that we are not as smart as men, while men are socialized to believe that they should have all the answers.  Once I realized this, I started noticing how many times men spoke up in conversations with conviction and how often women held back or said something in a way that recognized the doubt they felt about the subject.  I started realizing that men aren’t smarter than me, they’ve just been taught to pretend like they know things for sure, while I have been taught to second guess all my answers. 

This knowledge made me angry and now, whenever I start having severe self-doubts about my ability to do graduate-level work, I remember that patriarchy wants me to doubt myself so that women remain in subordinate positions.  In order to change this system, I need to recognize that I am intelligent and capable of great things.  I also need to reject the notion that my the way my physical body looks, particularly when I’m wearing my contacts, gives me value. I am not interested in living in that lie anymore.  I am worthy, valuable, and loveable because I am a human being.  I know the beauty that is inside me (soul, heart, spirit, mind, etc.) and I am working to change patriarchy by embracing that beauty instead.