The following is a Toni Morrison quotation provided by the commenter truthpoet in response to a post about interracial dating at Racialicious. I hope I am not inappropriately co-opting the quotation, but it also hit me right between the eyes as regards FA.
The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the western world, and we should have nothing to do with it.
I personally think our tendency to equate beauty with virtue is getting worse and worse rather than better. In this age of technology, it’s becoming all too easy to insist that someone (usually a woman) “should” “fix” any perceived deficiency in her appearance.
Acne? “Just” use ProActiv or something to get rid of it. (Note: although this suggested solution really isn’t that big a deal, I know I’m not the only adult acne sufferer who is indulging in a bitter mental chuckle at the idea that people with clear skin have any concept of exactly how easily irritated and unresponsive to treatment acne-prone skin can be.) “Ugly” shoes? “Just” ruin your feet and posture by wearing prettier ones. You owe it to all the random men who have to see you walking around, after all. Yellowed teeth? “Just” get expensive and possibly damaging tooth whitening treatments. Wrinkles, sagging skin, too-small or too-large breasts, cellulite? “Just” get plastic surgery and put yourself at risk of complications including death. And of course, “too” fat (by the ever-changing, constantly narrowing current definition)? “Just” go on a diet and lose some weight.
There’s no excuse not to. After all, the women in the magazines have no trouble achieving the type of perfection the critic is asking you to strive for–with the help of routine Photoshopping (see “Portfolio” section within link; h/t Sweet Machine) that everyone knows about but still does not constitute an excuse for you not to be perfect or die trying, of course. The tone of the discussion definitely carries a judgmental, narrow-minded moral overtone that appears to be based on the idea that any given woman can and should change any minor or major detail of her appearance solely to make her more aesthetically pleasing to others.
Frankly, even if the fixes described above really were as quick and easy as today’s pundits make them sound, I would not consider it a very good idea to give in to these pressures, because it just feeds into the idea that we really do have a moral responsibility to be attractive at all times. And given that losing weight in particular ranges from difficult to impossible for most fat people (I’m not even going to get into how unhealthy diets are at this point, because that would just encourage the usual conflation of “How dare you not be sexually attractive to me” and “but I’m really just concerned about your health!”)? No way.
(ETA: Reading this back, I realize I got rather far afield of the original intent of the quotation, which is to say that it is pernicious and destructive that we seem to view beautiful people as inherently morally superior. That definitely struck a strong chord with me, and to bring it back around, I meant that it’s easier than ever to equate beauty with virtue because supposedly anyone can and should control every detail of their appearance to please the masses.
[And sure, people are going to make fun of you for trying, like pick on you for how much makeup you're wearing to cover your acne or how you still have cellulite even though you're thin or point out how fake your facelift or boob job look, so you're still not as "good" as a "naturally" beautiful person, but just like fat people are only seen as acceptable when they're doing penance for their bodies by dieting, it's your moral responsibility to tirelessly strive to "improve" at all times.]
So anyway, if you’re not beautiful–or on a strikingly parallel topic, as Godless Heathen pointed out in the comments, healthy–it can only be your own moral failing that makes you so. This just reinforces the belief that beauty=virtue IMO.)
September 4, 2008 at 9:51 am
There’s also the tendency, even in acceptance spaces, to highlight and privilege beauty. While it’s certainly helpful to see ourselves in a light different than the mainstream usually casts us, it also perpetuates the emphasis on beauty before all else. Projects like Adipositivity and the various fatshion collectives may serve a useful purpose, but they also highlight and privilege physical beauty without contributing a much needed critical deconstruction of the already privileged status of beauty. Conversations about fat acceptance need to move past emphasizing “expanded” ideals of beauty and strike closer, and more often, at the heart of the problem; everyone is deserving of human dignity and respect, even if they aren’t attractive.
Beauty, like health, has an undeserved moral context. You have to attack the moral underpinnings of these institutions, or you end up recreating the second-class status, this time for ugly (and unhealthy!) marginalized people.
September 4, 2008 at 11:32 am
Godless Heathen–ITA. I remember a discussion years ago in an Overcoming Overeating group where one of the participants was trying to assert that she was coming to terms with the idea that she was not pretty, and that that was OK. This person was taking a very measured tone and was clearly not fishing for compliments–this really seemed to be something she wanted to work on and come to terms with. The first instinct of the group was to say, that’s not true, you’re beautiful (I think most meant this in terms of inner beauty since we were online and couldn’t see each other anyway), don’t get down on yourself, etc. But perhaps the more helpful thing would have been to reinforce that yes, it is OK to be physically unattractive.
I do think there is room for the belief that life experience or being a good person “makes” someone beautiful in the sense that maybe your grandmother’s wrinkled, imperfect face is beautiful to you because of who she is. Some people say they find a conventionally unattractive but compassionate and interesting person more attractive than a beautiful uninteresting person, and I believe them.
I also believe that there is generally “someone for everyone”–even if someone is unattractive to the vast majority of the population, there is always going to be someone who finds them attractive; in that sense, I think it is a good thing to question the narrowness of beauty standards, because we are getting way too complacent in the idea that there is one true standard of beauty and everything else is unacceptable, and of course real life is much more messy and unpredictable than that, and I think it benefits all of us to remember that. But I agree with you that it is much more important to keep in mind that people deserve some baseline of respect and consideration regardless. Sort of like FA–you can get into debates about HAES and fashion and so on, but the bottom line is that everyone deserves basic human rights regardless of their health or attractiveness.
The “you should change yourself to be beautiful” concept is also part of this IMO. So often people say things (though often worded more tactfully than this) like “she could be so beautiful if she would just take care of herself.” Well, as much as I sort of enjoy the show What Not to Wear because the makeover-ees (usually) seem so happy and confident when it’s all over with, I don’t think that there is any moral imperative for anyone to start dressing to “flatter their figure,” or get a more up-to-date haircut, or anything like that. I think people who choose out-of-the-mainstream aesthetics understand that they are taking a risk and possibly limiting the number of people who will find them attractive, but that’s not or should not be the same thing as forfeiting their expectation for a baseline level of human respect and assumption of inherent dignity in their interactions.
September 4, 2008 at 4:58 pm
I love that you’re talking about this. I have tried to bring this topic up with friends repeatedly and always get the…”oh, you’re beautiful” line. Which frustrates me because that is NOT what I’m talking about. I’m not fishing for compliments. I am questioning the subjectivity of beauty and ugliness,and trying to explain my hatred of the affirmation of beauty being some sort of emotional sop from friends and some sort of compliment/pick-up line from strangers.
September 4, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Bekbek–that is a really interesting point about how compliments on beauty function in our society both on the part of people we know well and those we don’t. I also totally hear you on the “subjectivity of beauty and ugliness.” To hear most people bash, say, celebrities online, you’d think that 95% of us conform to a 20-lb. weight range with perfect skin, fashion sense, hair, teeth, etc. Not only is this obviously not true, but most people’s standards for attractiveness are nowhere near this narrow in real life either. Attractiveness/acceptability as a human being based on looks being both objective and stringent is like a giant social myth that we all agree to buy into regardless of what happens in the real world.
September 5, 2008 at 4:11 am
I love this post, what a great idea to bring up. The idea of beauty and virtue do seem to go hand in hand to alot, with rewarding those who fit the standard mold of pretty with things like self-control, purity, self-discipline, and many other virtues regardless of what the actual truth may be. While someone who doesn’t fit that mold will be labeled as lazy, mean, bitchy, greedy, etc without ever proving those to be true for certain. That can also be reversed, for instance I just got into a discussion with a friend of mine who was involved in a drama with some girl from his school who had decided to start a fight with one of his friends. Now this girl was not being nice to them at all and he told me about how he had responded to her bitchy comment with a comment about how fat and ugly she is. I told him that “that makes no sense… what does her looks have to do with anything, you are mad at her actions why bring looks into it? Honestly that seems like a pretty weak insult and quite completely unrelated.”
His response? “Well she is a bitch”
To which I said “then call her on it, her looks and her attitude really have no correlation with each other.”
That whole argument, which escalated into him spouting smears about fat people and and the wonderful stereotypes there in, and ended with me realizing that he is not a friend I want to deal with in my life, I apologized for mistaking him for someone I could befriend and if that was the way he viewed fat people that I was sure he wouldn’t miss me from his life and I walked out and have subsequently deleted him from everything.
This really got me thinking about this topic though and so reading your post it hit a chord with me.
I also like your emphasis on the “Just”, how people think and act like things are so easy which then puts a load of guilt on those who don’t find it easy .. or who’s body won’t co-operate with what should “just” work easily. This makes me think of the comments on the article The Rotund wrote a week or so ago, half of them were just the dull mimic of “It all comes down to eat less and move more.. it is that easy”
Thank you for this post.. very enlightening, and thanks for letting me share my thoughts
September 5, 2008 at 9:44 am
Thanks, CordyQ! And you’re so right that this “beauty as virtue” thing really comes out when someone is angry with someone’s (usually a woman’s) actions and the first thing they go for is how fat or ugly she is. This can be subtle, but when people speak in anger it seems to come right out into the open.
Plus, you called your friend out really eloquently and said exactly the right thing, which I admire a lot because I probably would have just let him spew his nasty illogical arguments and wouldn’t have had the courage to say anything about it.