I’ve been wanting to write about women and girls’ first (or early) run-ins with beauty standards—in part because feeling disconnected from the performative nature of femininity is such a huge part of trans narratives—when I suspect that’s an experience that is more common than not!—but also because it’s interesting on its own terms.
So I think the question is:
Whatever your grown-up relationship to beauty standards may be,* there was the moment those standards first surfaced in your life. What happened? What did you think and feel and do in response?
For example, I remember the first time a friend decided I needed a “makeover,” a term I’d never heard before. We were sixth graders. The evening had started with prank calls to pizzerias (sorry, Pizza Hut!) and ended with burnt hair (mine). I remember my features disappearing beneath the makeup my friend applied and how uncanny my reflection in the mirror was. It felt like—was—a mask that sat on my face and itched. My hair felt stiff and lifeless. I remember hating the process and the result, but especially the process. I thought beauty is pain was supposed to be a formula, but it turned out that you could have one without the other.
I remember another sleepover where we were children playing at being grownups: that we tried to conjure Bloody Mary (half-doubting, half-believing) and pretended to flirt like grown women and swore and tortured Barbie dolls (what did that strange rite mean to us?). At one point, the girl whose house it was produced a bathroom scale and weighed everyone and it turned out you could be too fat but also too skinny. I remember becoming aware of my flaws, which emerged one after the other out of my vast untroubled ignorance. I had blonde hair (+) and clear skin (+) and a slim figure (+), although really I was somewhat too skinny (-), with an unlovely mouth (-) and a too-long nose (-) and mismatched ears (-). And so it went. I didn’t so much want to be beautiful (I wasn't) as I wanted to go back to being invisible.
If you’re interested in being part of this story, you can respond here or email me at elizamondegreen@gmail.com. You can give yourself a pseudonym if you’d like or you can use your first name—just let me know which.
*Feel free to include this—I’m interested!
I was the first girl at my school to break with the uniform and insist on wearing trousers instead of a skirt, which blew up into a long and public battle with staff, so my peers seemed to grasp that my overall lack of feminity was a deliberate choice on my part, at least, so I didn't get much stick. I felt kind of "spared" from beauty in a way my friends often weren't.
It got weird when I was around sixteen and participating in the weird beauty rituals and affirmations became a major activity for my friend group. I remember listening them lie to each other about how no-one can see your foundation etc and feeling pretty uncomfortable about it.
My true Bad Beauty Moment came when my mum spotted my friends and I leaving my next-door neighbour's house for a night out, honestly. It upset her to see everyone else dolled up while I was "just me" (in a dress, though, fgs; I'd made an effort to conform, just hadn't painted my face).
The next time I was going out, she forced a makeover on me. Full everything. I think that's the only time I've actually cried over makeup; I watched it take over my face in the mirror and I grew more and more miserable with each step. My mum, in return, got more and more aggressive about it. When we reached the final stage, I started to cry, and she objected angrily that she just wanted me to look "right" like everyone else. The whole experience made me twenty times more stubborn because it crystallised the reality that beauty regimes were demeaning, but it also wrecked my self-esteem and turned the whole thing into a battle, whereas previously I'd felt sure and certain and less combative with other women.
When I was 11, I was a nerdy, brainy child and quite happy with life, with three sisters aged 7, 14 and 16. It was very obvious to me that adolescence was a lot more complicated than childhood and I wanted nothing more than to be frozen in time in grade six. My older sisters were no longer invisible and I wanted nothing to do with that.
I knew, even then, that I was the least “pretty” of the sisters and that it was going to start to matter a lot more if I had to grow up and go to high school. I’m 54 now and have indeed wrestled since then with not feeling pretty enough. And it’s always been a recipe for a vicious cycle of self loathing. If I hate myself for not being pretty, I feel terrible about being such a vain and self centred person. And when I feel terrible, I feel worse about my looks, and on it goes. We sisters now range from 50 to 59, and we have often talked of the invisibility that has come with age. For one sister it has been freeing, for another there is sadness in the loss of the male gaze. I thought that at least I would gracefully accept aging as the male gaze was never focused on me anyway. But alas, age has me more panicked about my looks than ever. I am not proud of this.
I think it’s naive to think that beauty is irrelevant or unimportant because as humans we are drawn to it. So I think girls will never fully escape this struggle. But I do think it’s possible to put less stock in it than we often do. Whether invisible or not, the women I know who don’t measure their value based on their beauty or lack thereof are the ones I would like to emulate. This is of course easier said than done, but I will keep trying.