One continuing source of frustration for me is the fact that in every single “debate” (I use the term loosely) about shaving, makeup, and other (American, white) cultural beauty standards, everyone seems to miss the real point. When I post about it, of course I get the obligatory male response telling me how I need to alter myself to properly fit cultural norms in order to “look my best”. Hell, even other feminists have occasionally posted comments which amount to “well, if women sometimes want to wear heels/whatever to feel pretty…”

The point here is not about high heels. Not about bras. Not about makeup. Not about shaving. Not one of those individual things is at the heart of the matter of what I or other people critical of these beauty norms have really been struggling to say. You know what it’s about?

Bodily integrity. It’s about wanting my body to be seen and respected as a normal human body. It’s about wanting to be accepted as good enough on my own merits.

The female body is not seen as normal. Not good enough as it is, naturally. Our bodies are seen as flawed, so that in order to be acceptable we must alter them. Do you realize how many women feel they can’t leave the house unless they’ve applied makeup because they think they’re ugly without it? That is the problem. That in order to “look our best” we have to go above and beyond hygiene and basic self-care. And, in fact, I’d argue that rather than “looking our best” being dependant, as it probably should, on being healthy as possible, the standards we are expected to attain are specifically detrimental to our health on several levels. Physically: starvation, uncomfortable clothing, cosmetics containing toxic chemicals, abrasive skin-damaging methods of hair removal.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with decorating oneself in order to feel a little sexier than normal, in order to show you’ve gone to extra care for yourself that day, or anything like that. When I want to dress up, I wear nicer clothes than normal and tons of jewelry. Jewelry is my way of decorating myself, because it’s easy to remove once I’m sick of it and it doesn’t physically harm me or do nasty things to my sensitive skin or hurt my back.

The problem is when those things we do to adorn ourselves to feel “special” become things we are culturally conditioned to feel we must do in order to be acceptable. Instead of being a little something extra we add to improve our body above and beyond the normal, it’s something we must do in order to achieve normal feminine beauty. Without it, we’re considered flawed, incomplete. If a woman needs to wear makeup to feel pretty, there is a problem. The makeup should add something to a woman who already feels confident and attractive. This is clearly not the case with most women who use it.

Men do not have to physically alter, disguise, or cover their bodies in order to be accepted as normal. There’s some feeling now, especially among younger men around my age, that they need to shave in order to be acceptable, too, and I think it’s terrible this attitude is spreading. (For one, it’s a big waste of time, energy, and money which could be directed elsewhere.) But that’s still considered exceptional. It’s not “normal” for a guy to shave his entire body, and some prefer that, but it’s seen as a step taken above and beyond the normal minimum standards of grooming, whereas women shaving is not.

It’s not considered an undue burden for heels, skirts, or makeup to be part of a woman’s workplace dress code. No one would dream of requiring all men to wear makeup, and they’d rightfully make a huge fuss about it, because it’s a completely unreasonable expectation. Our bodies as they are should be good enough. It’s what we’re stuck with, after all, we have to make do.

You know what else disturbs me? That we’ve gotten to the point where not only is a body in its natural state filthy, disgusting, “unnatural”, unhygienic, and ugly — it’s a fetish. Liking girls who aren’t completely devoid of hair is considered a fetish. Women as hairless, not just legs, but arms, pubic hair, everywhere…is considered normal. Any woman naturally hairless would be genetically defective, hardly normal.

And I see this all, and I think…this has simply got to stop. We can’t go much farther than this. We’ve become so jaded to altered bodies, the expectation that we must alter ourselves, that we accept our own bodies as abnormal when they are not. This is directly harmful to women physically, financially, emotionally.

And, really, I know I keep emphasizing physical harm, because people don’t seem to realize it is a problem, but I shouldn’t need to use that as an excuse to condemn all this. It should be enough, on its own, that I refuse to accept my body as ugly or wrong. I shouldn’t have to excuse myself with, “shaving hurts my skin and makes it break out and gives me ingrown hairs — hardly attractive”. No. That’s not even really the reason anymore. Now, I’m just being stubborn. Now, I’m just refusing to let anyone tell me what to do. Because I’m sick of hearing it, over and over. My body is not dirty. I am not disgusting. I am human, and a mammal, and I have dark hair because I’m Latina. Good enough for me, since it’s what I have to work with. I can look good without needing to change myself. I can even look my best, because my best is me.

This is not a discussion of individual women’s choices or personal preferences. This is not a judgement about women who choose to engage in certain beauty rituals for whatever reason. This is about the harmful systemic attitudes towards women’s bodies in American culture, which are unfortunately being propagated throughout the world thanks to the American media. And that attitude is that female bodies are inherently flawed, incomplete, inferior as they naturally occur (as if we have any choice in the matter when we’re born). That is in no way acceptable.

That’s the point. That’s why it matters.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 4th, 2006 at 10:15 am and is filed under Body and Beauty Standards, Gender and Sex, Sexuality, Theory.