Now that we’ve established that, on to a different reason why it matters which has been touched upon but which was tangential to the other point I was trying to make.

Beauty standards are a class issue. I can’t say it better than Winter did a while back, so just go read that post if you want in-depth analysis. It’s also a race issue, and the two are distinct but also connected enough that if I address one I must address the other. I’ll simply try to explain briefly:

American standards of femininity are constructed in a way to be accessible to members of a certain class and ethnicity because they are markers of precisely that. Women are expected to look, at the least, middle-class and As White As Possible, because that’s what has been constructed as attractive and acceptable. It’s a deeply classist and racist system.

Not everyone has the time or money to spend making themselves look acceptably “feminine” all the time. Debates about whether or not some woman is a “bad” feminist for getting a bikini wax are pointless because they ignore the fact that many women can’t afford to pay someone to rip their hair out of them on a regular basis. Good quality cosmetics are expensive. Being acceptably hairless takes time and money, and if you’re poor, that might not be something you can afford to worry about all the time, and if you’re not white, it takes even more time because you might have more hair or darker hair or you might be more prone to ingrown hairs or skin problems from hair removal.

And the problem is that these standards of middle-class, white beauty are spreading. They are expected of every woman, not just the ones who are easily able to attain them. This is deeply harmful to poor women, and women of color; these are not necessarily one and the same but tend to go together. And so, in order to keep her job, a waitress has to waste time and money on cosmetics which might be toxic because it’s not considered a legally undue burden for waitresses to be expected to be “pretty” even though as long as they are clean and pleasant, it should have no impact on their ability to perform their job. This woman might lose her jobs if she doesn’t conform, a very real and negative consequence of how beauty standards are socially enforced. And so we have African-American women frying their hair flat in an effort to avoid social rebuke, Asian women having surgery to make their eyes rounder and more white-looking, and women of color all over the world being permanently poisoned and scarred from the use of chemicals intended to bleach their skin.

This is not okay. A woman forced to choose between spending her money on actual necessities and cosmetics in order to keep her job is not okay. A woman being forced to iron her hair in order to keep her job because “ethnic” hairstyles are considered “unprofessional”, because somehow her body is unacceptable the way it naturally is, is not okay. Being forced to choose between the pursuit of an ideal which is unrealistic and based on the income and often race of a totally different group of people, therefore often unobtainable, and the ability to make a living and live a decent life is not okay.

That’s why the hell it matters.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 12th, 2006 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Body and Beauty Standards, Feminist Movement, Race, Rants and Rages, Society, Theory.