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Every day, we ignore the Ugliness that beauty relies on in our culture to exist. Beautiful faces hide the Eurocentric beauty standards that allow them to be celebrated as such. Beautiful features hide the cultural appropriation of the Black people who are denigrated for having those same features. Beautiful clothes and make up hide the exploitation of the global south women and people that permeates the fashion and beauty supply chains, as well as the destruction of our planet. Beautiful compliments hide their cruelty in plain site: “You’re not fat! You’re beautiful!” Indeed, every day, we ignore the ugly truth: that beauty as we know it today would not exist without the massive pain, exclusion, exploitation, and harm that brings it into being. When will we learn to look past the illusion of beauty? When will we learn to recognize the Ugliness of Beauty?
When we define beauty as a privilege operating at an individual level, we miss the structural ways it shapes our society, values, and norms. In the words of Da’Shaun L. Harrison in their phenomenal book, Belly of the Beast, as they reflect on the conceptual shallowness of so-called “pretty privilege”: “Privilege insinuates that there is a possibility that you can opt out, and that if you don’t feel pretty, then you can’t possibly benefit from Prettiness or suffer the violences of Ugliness. Desire/ability politics and Desire Capital, however, suggest that one does not need to feel pretty to be Pretty; one does not need to feel beautiful to be Beautiful; one does not need to feel ugly to be Ugly. How one benefits or suffers from the subjugation of particular people is not determined by their feelings; it is determined by the identities they embody.”
Beauty is a prism of meaning. Its ubiquity in our language makes its impact difficult to discern. But what I am most interested in interrogating is Beauty as a social heirarchy, a form of capital, and in particular, as a social paradigm that we use to make judgments of ourselves and of each other that insidiously ensures that we stay ideologically rooted in belief systems that uphold white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism. So long as each of us feels on some deep level that we are not beautiful enough, that we could always be more beautiful, and that being beautiful is a goal that someone - not just us but more importantly, all the workers involved in the products whose marketing materials we beg to be included in - should suffer for, we will always be caught within capitalist and consumerist modes of thinking that alienate us from our innate value as human beings.
Reimagining who is beautiful is important and has benefited many of our abilities to feel represented. However, expanding who is let in does nothing to challenge the consequences of being shut out of the definition of beauty. Beauty functions as a social hierarchy that affords power and privilege to those who have it, and disposability and disregard to those who don’t. Beauty, as a social construct, is fundamentally heirarchical, and we cannot diversify and include our way out of that reality. It shapes our thoughts and values in insidious ways: we applaud Beautiful people for things normal people do all the time: being kind, generous, thoughtful, funny. We mourn the death of Beautiful people in specific ways (“such a shame she died. she was so Beautiful). We are deeply fascinated by the lives, thoughts, and actions of Beautiful people.
While the problem thus far has been defined as an exclusive, white supremacist beauty standard, I argue that that is only part of the problem (yes, a big part!). Beauty has seeped deep into the psyche of public consciousness even within marginalized communities — who we admire, adore, believe, hire, and in turn who we find repulsive, disgusting, unworthy, and unlovable is too often intimately connected with who we do and don’t find beautiful. This is dehumanizing: it strips “un-beautiful” human beings of their inherent humanity as human beings, and it elevates “beautiful” human beings to god-like figures in our culture.
While we do the important work of deconstructing eurocentric beauty standards, I feel it is equally important to deconstruct the extreme consequences of beauty in our society. Why do people need to be beautiful? While it is important to learn to see the beauty in everyone, it is equally important to question why we need to see people as physically beautiful at all. Why do we need a person to be beautiful in order to view them as worthy of love, respect, adoration, and in our society, jobs, money, fame?
Two things can be true at once: as we work towards inclusion and representation we should push for more radical inclusion that goes beyond those with Desire capital, and we should do the important spiritual, philosophical, and socio-cultural work of de-emphasizing the need to be beautiful to be valued in society.
How is this process of inclusion going, really? Who has actual power in fashion today? In film? In media? The process of inclusion has favored those who are most palatable to the beauty standard this inclusion pretends to be undoing. We say shallow words like “inclusive beauty” and proceed to only include marginalized people who fit very specific standards of beauty that are just as exclusive. When Black women are included in pop culture, we are either sidelined as sidekicks or only allowed to fit a specific mold of acceptable Black womanhood. Colorism, fatphobia, transphobia, homophobia, and ablism strangle Black women’s hopes of the radical inclusion we deserve. Black non-binary and queer people are sidelined. What’s more, representation is no stand-in for true access to our needs, and in some ways society’s hyper-focus on the optics of things has distracted many people from their reality.
What happens when marginalized people are included? If they’re Black or Brown, colorism limits how dark they can be. If they’re queer, they’re white. If they’re trans, they’re white and thin. If they’re fat, they’re not very fat. And they’re almost always young and able-bodied (and probably the child of someone wealthy). The terms and conditions for being included among the Beautiful point towards a more sinister truth: that we cannot reform our way out of the need to create a much more radical world where how you look is one of many aspects of your Being and certainly not the most relevant. What this comes down to is a simple yet unrealized truth: People should not have to be beautiful. To be trusted, to be valued, to be seen as interesting or important, to be loved and adored, to have access to love and opportunities and fame. It will always, always leave people out to assume they should.
Beauty is inherently exclusive. The public discourse on beauty often fails to acknowledge this uncomfortable fact. The global beauty industry is the furthest thing from inclusive, and there is a lot more we should demand that it be. While the project of abolishing eurocentric beauty standards is important, it should not erase the more radical call to abolish beauty as a) a global industry run by white western men profiting off of the exploited labor of poor Black, Brown, and Asian women, and b) a gatekeeper of worth and livelihood.
I love you sunshine! You are precious.
I loved this, Ayanda! I've been reflecting a lot on this idea as well. Why does it feel wrong to not actively try to be beautiful? Why are we always attempting to see the beauty in ourselves and in others, as if "ugliness" is somehow a moral failing. And why do we feel shame or judgement of ourselves or others for not feeling beautiful? Like...why do I RUSH to affirm that someone else's beauty is apparent, or let others rush to assure me of mine on a day I don't "feel" beautiful... what if we could sit with "ugliness" and let it be? I think you have some great ideas here. I would love to read more of your thoughts on this--there's so much to explore and extrapolate.
thank you ayanda!!! so so many gems here and a much-needed reminder to myself to continue working toward rejecting beauty culture.