What Women Keep Getting Wrong About Beauty and Power
What if everything you were told about being beautiful was a lie?
If there was a defining characteristic of my youth, it was insecurity. I lived in a constant state of angst. But the insecurity wasn’t about my career or my opportunities or my writing. It was about my looks.
When you’re young, unformed, and uninformed, you are constantly gathering data about who you are, how you stack up, where you rank on a scale of 1 to 10. Am I pretty? Am I fat (in my generation, fat was the worst thing you could be—it made you a pariah, untouchable, especially in a place like Texas where you were either cheerleader/pageant-princess-pretty or you didn’t have a right to exist). And most importantly—because, after all, the opinion of men is the only thing a woman is taught to value—am I desirable?
The young feverishly study mirrors, still water, plate glass windows to find a perfect reflection of themselves. They take endless selfies. We see it as vanity, but it isn’t. It’s near-crippling anxiety. A woman fine-tunes her instincts by studying a man’s eyes when he looks at her. Not necessarily because she has any interest in sleeping with him, but because his covert desire means that, whew, thank goodness, she actually looks okay.
Women are conditioned to exist within the male gaze. In every TV show we see, magazine article we read, history lesson we learn, ad we sit through, blockbuster movie we watch, the message is clear: if you aren’t pretty, no one will love you. Hollywood doesn’t do ugly. Not in women, at least. That’s the first thing you learn about being female.
There was a Pew study done a few years ago confirming this belief. The study asked 4,573 adults what they thought society valued in each gender. For men, it was what you might expect it to be: honesty, morality, strength of character, ambition, physical strength, and professional success. But for women, the picture was much different. More than a third—35%—said that physical attractiveness is what society most values in women, followed by empathy, nurturing, and kindness. Only 22% thought intelligence was actually prized in women.
But I don’t need a Pew study to confirm what I already see. Despite #MeToo, gender fluidity, more women in the House, the Senate, and the corporate boardroom than ever before, nothing has changed on that front. In fact, I think it’s worse. Imagemakers like Kim Kardashian—she of the hundred vigorously denied cosmetic surgeries, and the veritable Noah’s Ark of Instagram influencers who look just like her—have all warped young women’s expectations of what they are supposed to look like.
Here is the impossible-to-achieve aesthetic best described by Tiny Fey in her 2011 book, Bossypants.
“I think the first real change in women’s body image came when JLo [singer Jennifer Lopez] turned it butt-style. That was the first time that having a large-scale situation in the back was part of mainstream American beauty. Girls wanted butts now. Men were free to admit that they had always enjoyed them. And then, what felt like moments later, boom—Beyoncé brought the leg meat. A back porch and thick muscular legs were now widely admired. And from that day forward, women embraced their diversity and realized that all shapes and sizes are beautiful. Ah ha ha. No. I’m totally messing with you. All Beyonce and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.”
Oh, how good it feels to speak of these things with such dispassion now that I have zero skin in the game. What a victory after a bloody, protracted war against myself. For I, a human female, have committed that most shocking of heresies: I no longer care. I don’t need anyone to find me beautiful. In fact, I would prefer it if they didn’t. I do shamelessly little to beguile anybody these days, except John.
But in this, as in many things, I am the outlier. Through no fault of their own, women continue to torture themselves, attempting to hold on to the vestiges of a youth they are taught to value above all else, including personal happiness. They are, of course, despised for it. A woman making too obvious an effort to look good past a certain age is seen as “desperate.” If she makes no effort or too little of one, she’s “given up.” Other women are often her biggest detractors. The pressure to stay in one’s lane, to conform, to not offend, is enormous. Knowing this, I made every effort (once upon a time) to take other people’s expectations of me, wrap them up into a tight little ball, and shove them down their throats.
Even in the younger generations, acronyms are rife with judgments about women: THOT (That Ho Over There), Pick Me Girl (type of girl who claims she’s nothing like other girls in order to get approval from guys), IG Thirst Trap (an Instagrammer who posts overly alluring selfies). The list goes on. Porn aesthetic drives it, too. Beauty standards for women are an ever-shifting Maginot Line, one that no one can live up to. Women hate themselves for their inadequacy. I know I did, and given how much money I made on my looks when I was younger, you might have thought I’d felt otherwise.
It isn’t just the social pressure to look good that drives us. For some very real biological reasons having to do with perpetuation of the species, women go to a lot trouble to max out their beauty potential. Beautiful people of either sex have their pick of partners, and a pick of partners means more and better opportunities to mate. It’s simple Darwinism. So, I can’t blame this propensity to value one’s looks above all else exclusively on society.
But the lie we tell women is this: beauty is power. It certainly feels that way. If men run the world, and you have power over men, then you have all the power, right?
That feeling is an illusion. Beauty isn’t real power. Beauty is fleeting. At best, it makes you power adjacent. In order for it to be real power, you wouldn’t need the approval or the desire or even the love of a man in order to possess it.
In my comfortable middle age, I have more real power than I ever did at twenty. I never expected it to be this way. But I know something now that I didn’t know then: real power comes from within. It isn’t given to you. Real power comes from knowing exactly who you are. Sadly, no young person knows who he or she is.
We waste all that time worrying about measuring up and whether anyone will love us. We are forever looking out and rarely in. Our time would have been much better spent figuring out who we are before getting caught up in trying to be what other people want us to be.
Never again will I look the way I did when I was twenty, thirty, even forty. None of us will, no matter how well preserved, no matter how many facials, Botox, face lifts, or procedures we undergo. Admitting that I am not as beautiful as I once was feels like an act of defiance. That’s how strong the pressure is to maintain the fiction of perpetual youth. I will not participate in the kind of nonsense we see online—photos of Christie Brinkley looking “just like she did forty years ago,” or Elizabeth Hurley posing in string bikinis above the caption: “Liz proves that fifty-seven is the new thirty.”
No, fifty-seven is not the new thirty. It’s fifty-seven. It’s an accomplishment to reach such an age and ought to be celebrated.
Hey, managing to stay alive is harder than it looks.
By attempting to look younger, we are disempowering ourselves. Only by being who we are without apology or embellishment do we walk in power. Yes, it requires a high degree of self-acceptance, but that’s the job. The goal should always be self-acceptance—real self-acceptance, not that flimsy, feel-good kind you read about in O magazine.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t try to look your best or that cosmetic surgery is wrong. It isn’t. I wouldn’t dare tell another woman how to look except to insist she be authentically herself. Even giving a woman a compliment—“You look even more beautiful without makeup,” or “All you need is your smile” is perpetuating an expectation. It’s forcing her into a box. It’s stunting her ability to grow organically into her own skin.
In my opinion, the reason feminism has stalled out is because of this regressive preoccupation with appearance. It is literally compromising a woman’s ability to focus on what really matters: her voice, her talents, her intelligence, and most importantly, her relationship with herself. Women distracted by body image are perpetually derailed from ever achieving real power. Now, if only I had known that when I was younger.
When the act of being authentically herself is the greatest rebellion a woman can raise against a society that tells her, relentlessly and without mercy, that her worth is sexual, that’s a sign. Not just that women are victimized by this insidious form of sexism, but that women themselves must break free of social expectations and assume the reins of true power.
No one can give it them. That’s the rub. We keep looking for permission.
Women must aggressively take it for themselves.
Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin
I want to hear from you on this subject! Leave your comments in the comments section below.
This utter sexist crap about appearance is one of the reasons I loved going to a women's college. At Bryn Mawr when I was there, we were much more likely to be intimidated by a classmate's intelligence than their looks, and much more likely to admire a classmate getting into one of the Ivies for grad school than someone who married a rich guy.
For example, we found out that Dr. Oz's wife is a Bryn Mawr grad, and the consensus was "Ugh, Eeeeuuuw, how could she?" It's one thing when he was a research physician at Columbia, but a quack doctor on television???? It doesn't matter how many houses--- in New Jersey, or elsewhere-- the guy might have, not to women from Bryn Mawr. There was a collective cringe.
I've gone feral during the pandemic, no make up, and mostly sweatpants. But honestly, being self-employed for the past couple of decades is the greatest luxury imaginable. Jason's software sold because it was excellent, and because I was good at writing marketing language, not because I wore the right mascara.
Thank you for writing this essay, especially since you did make money from your looks when you were younger. I bet many other women were bright green from jealousy looking at you back then.
The ancient Greeks showed they truly understood the double-edged sword which is great beauty, in the myth of Psyche.
Ah yes, the male gaze. I've fallen under it a few times in my life. Had to let the lads know that I am, alas, hetero. And in that capacity my gaze has fallen on women. A lot. I hope that I have not disturbed the women who've caught my eye. Try not to. I don't feel ashamed about it because I think it is DNA driven and I never argue with DNA and also, because my mother raised me right and I got good counseling from male mentors, I'm under pretty good self-regulation. We men are out there casting our seed where we can and to that end we respond to what attracts us. We do not, in our first encounters with the girls and women who attract us, encounter their intelligence, or lack thereof, that will come later. Inevitably the more important elements of a female's nature will engage with our own and things will either work out or not. It does not surprise me that women, driven by their own DNA, will do what they think will make them more (or less) attractive. Nor does it surprise me that these basic elements are exploited by those who would be made rich by their exploitation. As to you not caring how you look - except in relationship to John - I just think that what's good enough for John is OK with me. If you have a desire to be healthy and do what is necessary to maintain your health, it's more likely than not you're lookin' good.