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.
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.
Looking forward to your treatment of this subject, Eliza. I could swear I was in attendance at the sleepover you describe.
I first became aware of the beauty burden at around 7 years old, watching both my parents get ready for work. My mom was a lawyer who around the house wore no makeup and comfortable clothing; she hated waking up early and hated spending money on herself. My dad worked in development; he was a vain man who loved shopping, and he was a morning person.
Nonetheless, on weekdays mom woke up at least an hour earlier than dad to put on a full face of makeup and squeeze into a stiff dress or skirt suit with heels. She would be miserable and sleepy throughout. Dad put on pants and a shirt, ran a comb through his hair, and was out the door. Dad at work looked exactly the same as dad at home - mom looked like two different people.
I remember telling my mother that when I grew up I wanted a job more like dad’s, so I wouldn’t have to dress up or wear makeup. She laughed and explained that the difference wasn’t their jobs - women simply had to look pretty at work. That’s when I started noticing how the female teachers at school looked compared to the men. I dreaded the day I would have to think about my appearance this way.
Over the years my two sisters and female friends made me feel like I had to take an interest in these matters, but it always felt awkward and unfair. I felt foolish with makeup and hair done, but hideous without. I had no aptitude for beauty rituals and was mercilessly teased for my efforts, but totally ignored by other girls if I skipped making the effort at all. It felt like an unwinnable game very early on. Perhaps being a lesbian had something to do with my discomfort - my lack of interest in boys made the whole endeavour feel more pointless - but every girl I knew suffered from the same debilitating self-consciousness and self-disgust. Obsessing over beauty offered some short-term relief and a modicum of control, but no one ever felt like they were doing it right.
My first run-ins with beauty standards had to do with self-consciousness over my teeth and my breasts, and merciless mocking of both by boys, starting in early adolescence. I had tetracycline staining followed by a bike accident and poorly done crowns. I was wearing an F-cup bra by the age of 14 in spite of a normal BMI, which I tried to hide by hunching under mens' clothes, earning me the moniker "Droopy" (teenagers are such delightful creatures, aren't they). Thanks to modern dentistry, my teeth are in pretty decent shape these days. The boobs, well, they are what they are. But the dream of gleaming white Hollywood Chiclet teeth and smaller, perkier breasts, and the notion that I'd somehow be happier if I had both, persists to this day even though I'm well into my 40s.
My younger sister, who is in her 70s, opted for breast reduction surgery a couple of years ago. Pain from bra straps, aching shoulders, etc. led to the decision. She is happy to have done it. My oldest daughter had a school friend who was probably a C-cup by 4th grade. I really felt for her. We moved schools and lost track of her, so don't know how her teen years worked out.
The first thing my parents ever commented on about any female of any age or relationship to them was their looks. "Oh, she's pretty." "Oh, she's thin." "Oh, she's ugly." "Oh, she's fat." Matter of fact and conveying that appearance was the most important attribute. After years of conflict with my father because of his poor treatment of my mother, he invited me out to lunch when I was almost 18 to "finally tell you my side of the story." Which was, "Your mother was a beautiful model when we met. Turned heads everywhere we went. Then she got fat." Silence. That was honestly it. On my way to Yale with high ambitions, I was outwardly rejecting of such superficiality and misogyny, but of course prey to it as well. I've worked hard to rise above it, to not overvalue my own looks and over mourn their fading as I age, and more deeply, to raise both my children, but especially my daughter, without this obsession with appearance. But, maybe I went too far, not reveling in her beauty enough without needing to place exaggerated focus on it or denigrate others' looks. Or maybe the focus on the female body in our society is still too strong a force for a mother to keep her daughter from falling prey to feeling inadequate. Because she fell victim to the cult of ROGD and the lie that being a woman is something she should and can flee from. Because she seems to feel that being a man is to be free from these impossible standards of beauty and superficial appraisal of value.
At the age of 17, I was discharged from the hospital in a body which was weakened and disfigured by skin grafts and amputation. I needed my mother to help me take a bath. It was the first time, after my injuries, that my mother saw me naked.
“You used to be so beautiful”, she sobbed as she hurried out the bathroom door.
The first thing I thought, as sat there in the tub, was Why didn’t you ever tell me I was beautiful before? You never told me I was beautiful, so what are you talking about I used to be beautiful? You’re full of shit, lady.
But then I realized in that moment, Wow that’s her fear. That’s her shit. She gets to deal with that.
I don’t have to deal with that anymore.
I had been fortified by the authorities in the hospital telling me “You’re doing so good.” I felt recognized as a strong, powerful presence. I much preferred that over my mother’s assessment of me.
In that moment, I became individuated from my mother. Permanently.
She valued attachment to what a woman looked like on the outside only, ignoring the essence, the true, everlasting beauty that makes a person attractive.
My mother passed away eighteen months ago. Before that, she struggled with the sadness and vulnerability of dementia, but was gentler on herself and me.
“You’re so beautiful!” She declared, when for the first time in years, she greeted me at her front door.
Beauty standards in Puerto Rico when I was a kid (I'm 48) were much more relaxed and "inclusive" than they were elsewhere, and perhaps than they are today?, but perhaps that was just my experience, in a multi-class environment. My dad was upper middle class, grew up in the capital, went to the posh Jesuit private boys' school; my mom was lower middle class, her family was rural, and when she was a teen they moved to the Puerto Rican version of "the projects", but a "good" project, in a small town with low crime rates and a nice community feel to it. Poorer folk have broad "beauty standards"--I don't know why or how, but they are more accepting of body types and attraction is both more personal (xboy likes ygirl) and universal (since boys like girls, boys can like any girls; and viceversa)... I grew up in my mom's town and with my mom's family--my dad was there, but he moved to her world, not the other way around. Visiting my dad's family was like visiting a foreign country... my private school had "standards" that my tens of cousins didn't share. So I was freer than most girls in my school, but more hemmed in by "appropriateness" than most of the girls in my family...
I have no memory of moments of realizing I was imperfect, flawed, that I didn't look the way a beautiful girl should look, but I know that it was not with or through my friends, but my family. There were many women in my family--or, I guess, the women in my family hung out together and my family is quite large. I had tons of cousins and 6 aunts.
What I remember internalizing pretty young was that being too thin and too white was definitely not a good thing, and I was both. My cousins made fun of me for my paleness and my long, skinny legs. I got braces and eyeglasses at age 9. I was awkward and flat-chested. My sister made fun of my thick lips. My mom called me "ojipelá", and said that her dad called her the same thing when she was a kid--it meant, shorn eyes, our eyelashes were too thin and too short. I was too tall, taller than most boys and definitely taller than all the women in my family, regardless of their age, by the time I was 13. My relatives often asked me "if it was raining up there!?". My feet were too big, my relatives said I wore boats instead of shoes.
But I knew, when I looked in the mirror at 17, that I was not ugly. Before then, I definitely thought I was unattractive, but it didn't bother me too much, not really. I was too shy and awkward, but also very friendly and well-liked, I was friends with most boys and most girls in my class and the teachers loved me and everybody's parents loved me. The point is that, when it would've begun to bother me, my unattractiveness, I was suddenly attractive. Being tall and thin and having long legs was no longer bad--my teeth were fine and I wore contact lenses or cool glasses, and my acne wasn't so bad, and I had a nice, round butt that compensated for my flat chest. Being white was still an issue, but not for me, I didn't really care about that. So I always thought that I was quite lucky to NOT be attractive between the ages of 12 and 17, and that I was attractive after that, because my cloak of physical invisibility gave me space to have friends and care about other things and not have to deal with boys. And my discovering that I was attractive gave me confidence, as much as I had, which wasn't much, but there it was. I didn't use make-up until I was 18, for prom and graduation. Before that, I only used it to look like Cindy Lauper, who was my hero, along with Punky Brewster...
Anyway, I have not had a hard time with my physical appearance, but I still would never leave the house without some makeup. I would be mortified if I had to show my face without makeup to anybody other than my closest family members. I feel naked and definitely ugly without makeup.
This is all so very interesting. I'm looking forward to reading whatever insights might be shared here.
It just so happens that my sister is a Hollywood make-up artist and was, in fact, the make-up artist for the Megan Draper character in Mad Men. She is the youngest of us siblings, the rest of us being boys. After our parents divorced when we were all pretty young, we all continued to live with our dad in the family home. I remember my sister (she must have been in junior high) going to John Robert Powers School of Modeling to learn about make-up and hair and style and such. I don't know whose idea it was for her attend these once-a-week classes which culminated after several weeks in a runway walk, but I can recall that it was understood that my sister lacked the requisite teachers of these things in her life. And I can also recall pondering ever so briefly this idea that if you don't have a mom to teach you how to be lady, well, there's a school for that.
I couldn't have been more than 4 or 5. My father introduced me to a man who may have been a coworker. He looked at me and pronounced, "Everything about your face is beautiful, except your nose." But, I already knew this. I had already heard my maternal aunt suggest that my parents use a clothespin to reshape my nose.
In middle school, there was a choir performance parents attended. The next day, Paul announced excitedly to our friend group of 3 girls and 2 boys, "You'll never believe who my parents thought was pretty!!" I knew the answer was going to be me, but the sting that it would elicit such disbelief...
My mother was beautiful. Her sister as well. My grandmother turned heads walking down the street. Me, that came with caveats. I look in the mirror and smile at myself. But, I am well aware not everyone will.
I could say so much on this subject. The first time I really felt ugly was in 2nd grade. I had just gotten new glasses (I wore glasses since I was two) - that I did not pick out - and I put on one of my favorite dresses. The combination of those glasses and that dress looked horrible to me. I stopped wearing dresses.
Next up, in the middle of 4th grade, we were viewing a film in class so it was a bit dark, but light enough to be able to see. I noticed for the first time that when my thighs were pressed flat against my chair in my shorts, they looked fat. I still wore shorts for another year or two, but then rarely after that.
In 5th grade, there was a talent show. One girl, seriously not thinking she was being mean, commented something like "you can't be in the show because, while your body is fine, you just don't have a pretty face."
One funny story here: After 5th grade, I went to summer camp. One evening, we went on an overnight hike with a group of boys up a mountain. I left my glasses in the bunk because we were going to be sleeping outside on rocks. We played spin the bottle. While playing, one boy asked where the other girl in our group was, describing her as "the ugly one with glasses." I told him I was right there, and he was surprised. He asked me if I wanted to go out with him. I declined.
In sixth grade, I bought a pair of boots and was so excited to wear them to school. Then someone asked me where I bought them, if I bought them at the cheap store (I did), and made me feel a lot less excited about those boots. That's more about standards for fashion and money, but I think it relates. I also finally got rid of the glasses from 2nd grade (those things were like steel - I literally still have them in a box, unbroken, today). The day I came to school wearing them, as I was walking and met up with my friend, she asked to see them, dropped them on the sidewalk, and they were scratched up. Now I had to wear glasses with a scratch in them, but I still thought they looked better than those other glasses!
In 7th grade, I thought designer jeans would save me. I finally got a pair of off-brand jeans, but I still didn't feel pretty. Oh well.
In high school, I didn't want to wear make-up other than eyeliner. My mother found that disappointing, and noted that I wasn't pretty enough to forego make-up. She was also disappointed that I didn't want to get a perm and instead had "flat" hair, or wear dresses or the tight pants of the era. I just wanted to wear Levis - but at least felt good in them.
My mother made several, shall we say, uncomplimentary comments about my looks over the years - until I was at least 35. After that, she started to be much more complimentary. I can give many reasons for that, including that she had matured and was less consumed by shallow beauty standards.
I have had a very complicated relationship with my own image over the years, and it doesn't get much easier, even in my 50s!
One thing I always vowed was to make sure to be fully supportive of my own daughter if I ever had one, making sure she would know how beautiful she is. I was lucky enough to have a daughter. I never concentrated on beauty standards with her (but she was obsessed herself), but I always made sure she knew she was good looking and there was nothing wrong with any part of her body.
If I were religious, I would now have to say God has a sense of humor, because my 17-year-old daughter, at age 12.5, fully rejected her female body, wanting to transform it into a male-appearing, if much less healthy, body instead. She can't wait until she can chop off her breasts, chemically alter her delicate hormonal balance, and opt out of any of those nasty beauty standards forevermore. I guess my plan to protect her from feeling ugly, like I had my whole life, didn't work too well.
Thank you so much. I have the support of my husband, son, sister and brother and a couple of good friends. I mostly blame society for this, with its very insane, false messaging, bombarding our youth every minute of every day, in schools and colleges, doctor's offices, politician's speeches, mainstream and social media, neighbors' houses, etc., particularly because there are so very many of us, and our children tend to have other vulnerabilities, indicating that they succumbed to these many falsehoods. Still, there is a lingering guilt of "what could I have done differently to protect her from this?"
I was aware in grammar school of how little girls were supposed to look pretty. My mother often said, “pretty is as pretty does”, but the message I got was usually “but pretty is very important”. I’ve loved getting older and becoming more invisible. I’ve never enjoyed the male gaze and having men feeling free to comment on my appearance, even when the comments were “flattering”. It felt dehumanizing, as I knew that half the population never looks below the surface. As I’ve grown older I’ve often been inspired by women like Georgia O’Keeffe and Tasha Tudor, who seemed unaffected by society’s enforced beauty standards and went makeup free.
I’m not a woman, but it doesn’t take a huge feat of imagination to see the problems the female beauty game can create.
If I get any of this wrong, then I apologise. My intention is to imagine rather than to mansplain.
Beauty, for obvious reasons, is a status symbol for women, and to be thrust into such a competition at a young age must be quite damaging for some. This could easily be exacerbated by the correlation between beauty and the rather dangerous impacts of sexual desirability.
As a man who has deliberately opted out of the status games of wealth and power as much as possible, I can see why girls would want to opt out of the beauty game.
But to take such a decision when so immature is likely to be fraught with problems, as I think we’re seeing with the trans issue.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I think talking about the problem may take us closer to it.
When I was young we would have a "midnight snack" but that snack was a head of iceberg lettuce cus we didn't want "too many calories too late at night". She had a trampoline and a treadmill in the basement and we would go down and work out however we could, even though we didn't know what we were doing, just to get rid of our so called "baby fat" (we were 8 therefore not babies and needed to be rid of it).
We would also explore our queerness through truth or daring to kiss each other, and we had something called "sssc" which literally meant super secret stripper club, in which we would use the basement pole that holds up the house to literally strip for each other. We wouldn't go past underwear, but we were cosplaying what we perceived to be sexy women.
Oh that's an interesting one. I still haven't figured out what my relationship to it all is - I was always very distracted by mirrors and I was conscious it made me look vain, but it was more like I needed to know how I looked. I have poor proprioception and used to 'lose' my arms and legs when I laid down at night and I feel like I had the mirror version of this too, like I forgot how I looked the moment I couldn't see myself. I really love old photos of myself (I thought I was fat and wrongly shaped, truly believed it, and it's a revelation to me that my eyes deceived me - I really thought it was true, and people were just nice to me and lied, maybe they were, who knows what we believed in the 90s, it feels like another world...). My only real revelation from being alive nearly 40 years is that what's in my brain isn't the same as what's in the world. As for role models/beauty, I often found myself searching. I loved beauty, makeup, was painting nailvarnish on old books from the age of 3, sorry mum - and I always wanted to know what everything did. Remember playing with a Girls World v young at someone's house and not knowing what went where and wanting the power that the knowledge of these potions would give me. But I was like that with a lot of stuff, crafts and building things... I think it was all just tools when I was tiny. All a mystery. And everything was disappointing when I was told how to do things the right way. I expected magic. Advertising was maybe the cause? Who knows. I'm really struggling with this question. I've always struggled with the idea that magazines were the root of all evil... They always seemed like the route of all disappointment and boredom to me. They had no substance. But I definitely developed some body hatred at some point - not puberty, I kind of joked about that a lot. But I hated how men looked at me. I wanted to be like, I dunno - everything extra. I wanted gold and silver lipstick and rainbow lipstick, I was big into costumification when I was like, 6? but I didn't dress like that outside, I'd have been mocked. And I didn't have anything like that. But there was a lot of imagination and creation in it, and frustration that my own ideas weren't big enough for what I wanted. If I'd seen ShapeShifter as a kid I'd have been in instant love. I look like Baba Yaga today as I'm typing this (wooly hat, big black skirt, cardigan) but there's some like... Leigh Bowery in me too. And some very big hoodies and skater jeans type ideas too. I don't think this helps does it? Does it? Ha. Having a kid was the turning point for me. My body was interesting. It literally exploded my narrow body shape standards from my teens and 20s. Something happened when I left school and went to uni that really messed up my ideas about myself, in a lot of ways, I think.
I've also never decided whether I like sleeping beauty's pink dress or blue dress better. The blue goes better with the blonde but pink is PINK! I watched that a lot as a child. I wonder whether Disney is responsible for lots of little girls wanting to sing.
I was a pretty much perfect little girl right through my childhood: didn't get into trouble, studied hard, good at sports, and fulfilling all society's stereotypical gender roles. Then came puberty and I started growing body hair. Like a lot of body hair. Under the armpits and from the waist down, I have more than quite a lot of men, and I'm very dark-haired as well.
I became paranoid about this and ashamed of my body. I shaved it all off to the bikini line, but it kept growing back faster and seemingly thicker. By the time I was 18 even though I was shaving every day, I would still have 5'oclock shadow by the end of the day. People commented on it and even if they weren't being mean I still took it to heart. Some people were deliberately mean as well.
After a couple of years of this I snapped. My mental health was suffering for it and it was affecting my work. I had to make a radical change to my life and I had started reading about Stoicism. According to this philosophy, you cannot change reality, but you can control how you respond to it. So I stopped fighting, stopped shaving, and embraced myself as I am.
I live in a warm climate and often wear shorts, and I'm still pretty sporty so I'm out and about. People notice my hairy legs and my hairy belly and the jungles under my arms, and they can be shocked to start with, but after a while people just started accepting that that was what I was like, and that it was normal, for me. I'm sure at least in part because I'm not hiding it or trying to present myself as something I'm not.
People have asked me if I think it's feminine not to shave, and I say it must be feminine because I'm a woman and this is how I am naturally, it's not a disorder. And I do get complimented on my looks, so clearly it doesn't completely destroy my beauty.
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.
This last scene sounds almost like something out of a novel or a play -- it makes everything so literal. And very upsetting.
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.
Looking forward to your treatment of this subject, Eliza. I could swear I was in attendance at the sleepover you describe.
I first became aware of the beauty burden at around 7 years old, watching both my parents get ready for work. My mom was a lawyer who around the house wore no makeup and comfortable clothing; she hated waking up early and hated spending money on herself. My dad worked in development; he was a vain man who loved shopping, and he was a morning person.
Nonetheless, on weekdays mom woke up at least an hour earlier than dad to put on a full face of makeup and squeeze into a stiff dress or skirt suit with heels. She would be miserable and sleepy throughout. Dad put on pants and a shirt, ran a comb through his hair, and was out the door. Dad at work looked exactly the same as dad at home - mom looked like two different people.
I remember telling my mother that when I grew up I wanted a job more like dad’s, so I wouldn’t have to dress up or wear makeup. She laughed and explained that the difference wasn’t their jobs - women simply had to look pretty at work. That’s when I started noticing how the female teachers at school looked compared to the men. I dreaded the day I would have to think about my appearance this way.
Over the years my two sisters and female friends made me feel like I had to take an interest in these matters, but it always felt awkward and unfair. I felt foolish with makeup and hair done, but hideous without. I had no aptitude for beauty rituals and was mercilessly teased for my efforts, but totally ignored by other girls if I skipped making the effort at all. It felt like an unwinnable game very early on. Perhaps being a lesbian had something to do with my discomfort - my lack of interest in boys made the whole endeavour feel more pointless - but every girl I knew suffered from the same debilitating self-consciousness and self-disgust. Obsessing over beauty offered some short-term relief and a modicum of control, but no one ever felt like they were doing it right.
My first run-ins with beauty standards had to do with self-consciousness over my teeth and my breasts, and merciless mocking of both by boys, starting in early adolescence. I had tetracycline staining followed by a bike accident and poorly done crowns. I was wearing an F-cup bra by the age of 14 in spite of a normal BMI, which I tried to hide by hunching under mens' clothes, earning me the moniker "Droopy" (teenagers are such delightful creatures, aren't they). Thanks to modern dentistry, my teeth are in pretty decent shape these days. The boobs, well, they are what they are. But the dream of gleaming white Hollywood Chiclet teeth and smaller, perkier breasts, and the notion that I'd somehow be happier if I had both, persists to this day even though I'm well into my 40s.
My younger sister, who is in her 70s, opted for breast reduction surgery a couple of years ago. Pain from bra straps, aching shoulders, etc. led to the decision. She is happy to have done it. My oldest daughter had a school friend who was probably a C-cup by 4th grade. I really felt for her. We moved schools and lost track of her, so don't know how her teen years worked out.
The first thing my parents ever commented on about any female of any age or relationship to them was their looks. "Oh, she's pretty." "Oh, she's thin." "Oh, she's ugly." "Oh, she's fat." Matter of fact and conveying that appearance was the most important attribute. After years of conflict with my father because of his poor treatment of my mother, he invited me out to lunch when I was almost 18 to "finally tell you my side of the story." Which was, "Your mother was a beautiful model when we met. Turned heads everywhere we went. Then she got fat." Silence. That was honestly it. On my way to Yale with high ambitions, I was outwardly rejecting of such superficiality and misogyny, but of course prey to it as well. I've worked hard to rise above it, to not overvalue my own looks and over mourn their fading as I age, and more deeply, to raise both my children, but especially my daughter, without this obsession with appearance. But, maybe I went too far, not reveling in her beauty enough without needing to place exaggerated focus on it or denigrate others' looks. Or maybe the focus on the female body in our society is still too strong a force for a mother to keep her daughter from falling prey to feeling inadequate. Because she fell victim to the cult of ROGD and the lie that being a woman is something she should and can flee from. Because she seems to feel that being a man is to be free from these impossible standards of beauty and superficial appraisal of value.
At the age of 17, I was discharged from the hospital in a body which was weakened and disfigured by skin grafts and amputation. I needed my mother to help me take a bath. It was the first time, after my injuries, that my mother saw me naked.
“You used to be so beautiful”, she sobbed as she hurried out the bathroom door.
The first thing I thought, as sat there in the tub, was Why didn’t you ever tell me I was beautiful before? You never told me I was beautiful, so what are you talking about I used to be beautiful? You’re full of shit, lady.
But then I realized in that moment, Wow that’s her fear. That’s her shit. She gets to deal with that.
I don’t have to deal with that anymore.
I had been fortified by the authorities in the hospital telling me “You’re doing so good.” I felt recognized as a strong, powerful presence. I much preferred that over my mother’s assessment of me.
In that moment, I became individuated from my mother. Permanently.
She valued attachment to what a woman looked like on the outside only, ignoring the essence, the true, everlasting beauty that makes a person attractive.
My mother passed away eighteen months ago. Before that, she struggled with the sadness and vulnerability of dementia, but was gentler on herself and me.
“You’re so beautiful!” She declared, when for the first time in years, she greeted me at her front door.
There is a French saying that "she who has never been pretty has never been young."
Wow. Gosh, the French are the worst at vanity.
Beauty standards in Puerto Rico when I was a kid (I'm 48) were much more relaxed and "inclusive" than they were elsewhere, and perhaps than they are today?, but perhaps that was just my experience, in a multi-class environment. My dad was upper middle class, grew up in the capital, went to the posh Jesuit private boys' school; my mom was lower middle class, her family was rural, and when she was a teen they moved to the Puerto Rican version of "the projects", but a "good" project, in a small town with low crime rates and a nice community feel to it. Poorer folk have broad "beauty standards"--I don't know why or how, but they are more accepting of body types and attraction is both more personal (xboy likes ygirl) and universal (since boys like girls, boys can like any girls; and viceversa)... I grew up in my mom's town and with my mom's family--my dad was there, but he moved to her world, not the other way around. Visiting my dad's family was like visiting a foreign country... my private school had "standards" that my tens of cousins didn't share. So I was freer than most girls in my school, but more hemmed in by "appropriateness" than most of the girls in my family...
I have no memory of moments of realizing I was imperfect, flawed, that I didn't look the way a beautiful girl should look, but I know that it was not with or through my friends, but my family. There were many women in my family--or, I guess, the women in my family hung out together and my family is quite large. I had tons of cousins and 6 aunts.
What I remember internalizing pretty young was that being too thin and too white was definitely not a good thing, and I was both. My cousins made fun of me for my paleness and my long, skinny legs. I got braces and eyeglasses at age 9. I was awkward and flat-chested. My sister made fun of my thick lips. My mom called me "ojipelá", and said that her dad called her the same thing when she was a kid--it meant, shorn eyes, our eyelashes were too thin and too short. I was too tall, taller than most boys and definitely taller than all the women in my family, regardless of their age, by the time I was 13. My relatives often asked me "if it was raining up there!?". My feet were too big, my relatives said I wore boats instead of shoes.
But I knew, when I looked in the mirror at 17, that I was not ugly. Before then, I definitely thought I was unattractive, but it didn't bother me too much, not really. I was too shy and awkward, but also very friendly and well-liked, I was friends with most boys and most girls in my class and the teachers loved me and everybody's parents loved me. The point is that, when it would've begun to bother me, my unattractiveness, I was suddenly attractive. Being tall and thin and having long legs was no longer bad--my teeth were fine and I wore contact lenses or cool glasses, and my acne wasn't so bad, and I had a nice, round butt that compensated for my flat chest. Being white was still an issue, but not for me, I didn't really care about that. So I always thought that I was quite lucky to NOT be attractive between the ages of 12 and 17, and that I was attractive after that, because my cloak of physical invisibility gave me space to have friends and care about other things and not have to deal with boys. And my discovering that I was attractive gave me confidence, as much as I had, which wasn't much, but there it was. I didn't use make-up until I was 18, for prom and graduation. Before that, I only used it to look like Cindy Lauper, who was my hero, along with Punky Brewster...
Anyway, I have not had a hard time with my physical appearance, but I still would never leave the house without some makeup. I would be mortified if I had to show my face without makeup to anybody other than my closest family members. I feel naked and definitely ugly without makeup.
This is all so very interesting. I'm looking forward to reading whatever insights might be shared here.
It just so happens that my sister is a Hollywood make-up artist and was, in fact, the make-up artist for the Megan Draper character in Mad Men. She is the youngest of us siblings, the rest of us being boys. After our parents divorced when we were all pretty young, we all continued to live with our dad in the family home. I remember my sister (she must have been in junior high) going to John Robert Powers School of Modeling to learn about make-up and hair and style and such. I don't know whose idea it was for her attend these once-a-week classes which culminated after several weeks in a runway walk, but I can recall that it was understood that my sister lacked the requisite teachers of these things in her life. And I can also recall pondering ever so briefly this idea that if you don't have a mom to teach you how to be lady, well, there's a school for that.
I couldn't have been more than 4 or 5. My father introduced me to a man who may have been a coworker. He looked at me and pronounced, "Everything about your face is beautiful, except your nose." But, I already knew this. I had already heard my maternal aunt suggest that my parents use a clothespin to reshape my nose.
In middle school, there was a choir performance parents attended. The next day, Paul announced excitedly to our friend group of 3 girls and 2 boys, "You'll never believe who my parents thought was pretty!!" I knew the answer was going to be me, but the sting that it would elicit such disbelief...
My mother was beautiful. Her sister as well. My grandmother turned heads walking down the street. Me, that came with caveats. I look in the mirror and smile at myself. But, I am well aware not everyone will.
I could say so much on this subject. The first time I really felt ugly was in 2nd grade. I had just gotten new glasses (I wore glasses since I was two) - that I did not pick out - and I put on one of my favorite dresses. The combination of those glasses and that dress looked horrible to me. I stopped wearing dresses.
Next up, in the middle of 4th grade, we were viewing a film in class so it was a bit dark, but light enough to be able to see. I noticed for the first time that when my thighs were pressed flat against my chair in my shorts, they looked fat. I still wore shorts for another year or two, but then rarely after that.
In 5th grade, there was a talent show. One girl, seriously not thinking she was being mean, commented something like "you can't be in the show because, while your body is fine, you just don't have a pretty face."
One funny story here: After 5th grade, I went to summer camp. One evening, we went on an overnight hike with a group of boys up a mountain. I left my glasses in the bunk because we were going to be sleeping outside on rocks. We played spin the bottle. While playing, one boy asked where the other girl in our group was, describing her as "the ugly one with glasses." I told him I was right there, and he was surprised. He asked me if I wanted to go out with him. I declined.
In sixth grade, I bought a pair of boots and was so excited to wear them to school. Then someone asked me where I bought them, if I bought them at the cheap store (I did), and made me feel a lot less excited about those boots. That's more about standards for fashion and money, but I think it relates. I also finally got rid of the glasses from 2nd grade (those things were like steel - I literally still have them in a box, unbroken, today). The day I came to school wearing them, as I was walking and met up with my friend, she asked to see them, dropped them on the sidewalk, and they were scratched up. Now I had to wear glasses with a scratch in them, but I still thought they looked better than those other glasses!
In 7th grade, I thought designer jeans would save me. I finally got a pair of off-brand jeans, but I still didn't feel pretty. Oh well.
In high school, I didn't want to wear make-up other than eyeliner. My mother found that disappointing, and noted that I wasn't pretty enough to forego make-up. She was also disappointed that I didn't want to get a perm and instead had "flat" hair, or wear dresses or the tight pants of the era. I just wanted to wear Levis - but at least felt good in them.
My mother made several, shall we say, uncomplimentary comments about my looks over the years - until I was at least 35. After that, she started to be much more complimentary. I can give many reasons for that, including that she had matured and was less consumed by shallow beauty standards.
I have had a very complicated relationship with my own image over the years, and it doesn't get much easier, even in my 50s!
One thing I always vowed was to make sure to be fully supportive of my own daughter if I ever had one, making sure she would know how beautiful she is. I was lucky enough to have a daughter. I never concentrated on beauty standards with her (but she was obsessed herself), but I always made sure she knew she was good looking and there was nothing wrong with any part of her body.
If I were religious, I would now have to say God has a sense of humor, because my 17-year-old daughter, at age 12.5, fully rejected her female body, wanting to transform it into a male-appearing, if much less healthy, body instead. She can't wait until she can chop off her breasts, chemically alter her delicate hormonal balance, and opt out of any of those nasty beauty standards forevermore. I guess my plan to protect her from feeling ugly, like I had my whole life, didn't work too well.
I’m so sorry you’re going through this. I hope you don’t blame yourself, and find support to help you and your daughter.
Thank you so much. I have the support of my husband, son, sister and brother and a couple of good friends. I mostly blame society for this, with its very insane, false messaging, bombarding our youth every minute of every day, in schools and colleges, doctor's offices, politician's speeches, mainstream and social media, neighbors' houses, etc., particularly because there are so very many of us, and our children tend to have other vulnerabilities, indicating that they succumbed to these many falsehoods. Still, there is a lingering guilt of "what could I have done differently to protect her from this?"
I was aware in grammar school of how little girls were supposed to look pretty. My mother often said, “pretty is as pretty does”, but the message I got was usually “but pretty is very important”. I’ve loved getting older and becoming more invisible. I’ve never enjoyed the male gaze and having men feeling free to comment on my appearance, even when the comments were “flattering”. It felt dehumanizing, as I knew that half the population never looks below the surface. As I’ve grown older I’ve often been inspired by women like Georgia O’Keeffe and Tasha Tudor, who seemed unaffected by society’s enforced beauty standards and went makeup free.
I’m not a woman, but it doesn’t take a huge feat of imagination to see the problems the female beauty game can create.
If I get any of this wrong, then I apologise. My intention is to imagine rather than to mansplain.
Beauty, for obvious reasons, is a status symbol for women, and to be thrust into such a competition at a young age must be quite damaging for some. This could easily be exacerbated by the correlation between beauty and the rather dangerous impacts of sexual desirability.
As a man who has deliberately opted out of the status games of wealth and power as much as possible, I can see why girls would want to opt out of the beauty game.
But to take such a decision when so immature is likely to be fraught with problems, as I think we’re seeing with the trans issue.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I think talking about the problem may take us closer to it.
When I was young we would have a "midnight snack" but that snack was a head of iceberg lettuce cus we didn't want "too many calories too late at night". She had a trampoline and a treadmill in the basement and we would go down and work out however we could, even though we didn't know what we were doing, just to get rid of our so called "baby fat" (we were 8 therefore not babies and needed to be rid of it).
We would also explore our queerness through truth or daring to kiss each other, and we had something called "sssc" which literally meant super secret stripper club, in which we would use the basement pole that holds up the house to literally strip for each other. We wouldn't go past underwear, but we were cosplaying what we perceived to be sexy women.
Oh that's an interesting one. I still haven't figured out what my relationship to it all is - I was always very distracted by mirrors and I was conscious it made me look vain, but it was more like I needed to know how I looked. I have poor proprioception and used to 'lose' my arms and legs when I laid down at night and I feel like I had the mirror version of this too, like I forgot how I looked the moment I couldn't see myself. I really love old photos of myself (I thought I was fat and wrongly shaped, truly believed it, and it's a revelation to me that my eyes deceived me - I really thought it was true, and people were just nice to me and lied, maybe they were, who knows what we believed in the 90s, it feels like another world...). My only real revelation from being alive nearly 40 years is that what's in my brain isn't the same as what's in the world. As for role models/beauty, I often found myself searching. I loved beauty, makeup, was painting nailvarnish on old books from the age of 3, sorry mum - and I always wanted to know what everything did. Remember playing with a Girls World v young at someone's house and not knowing what went where and wanting the power that the knowledge of these potions would give me. But I was like that with a lot of stuff, crafts and building things... I think it was all just tools when I was tiny. All a mystery. And everything was disappointing when I was told how to do things the right way. I expected magic. Advertising was maybe the cause? Who knows. I'm really struggling with this question. I've always struggled with the idea that magazines were the root of all evil... They always seemed like the route of all disappointment and boredom to me. They had no substance. But I definitely developed some body hatred at some point - not puberty, I kind of joked about that a lot. But I hated how men looked at me. I wanted to be like, I dunno - everything extra. I wanted gold and silver lipstick and rainbow lipstick, I was big into costumification when I was like, 6? but I didn't dress like that outside, I'd have been mocked. And I didn't have anything like that. But there was a lot of imagination and creation in it, and frustration that my own ideas weren't big enough for what I wanted. If I'd seen ShapeShifter as a kid I'd have been in instant love. I look like Baba Yaga today as I'm typing this (wooly hat, big black skirt, cardigan) but there's some like... Leigh Bowery in me too. And some very big hoodies and skater jeans type ideas too. I don't think this helps does it? Does it? Ha. Having a kid was the turning point for me. My body was interesting. It literally exploded my narrow body shape standards from my teens and 20s. Something happened when I left school and went to uni that really messed up my ideas about myself, in a lot of ways, I think.
I've also never decided whether I like sleeping beauty's pink dress or blue dress better. The blue goes better with the blonde but pink is PINK! I watched that a lot as a child. I wonder whether Disney is responsible for lots of little girls wanting to sing.
I was a pretty much perfect little girl right through my childhood: didn't get into trouble, studied hard, good at sports, and fulfilling all society's stereotypical gender roles. Then came puberty and I started growing body hair. Like a lot of body hair. Under the armpits and from the waist down, I have more than quite a lot of men, and I'm very dark-haired as well.
I became paranoid about this and ashamed of my body. I shaved it all off to the bikini line, but it kept growing back faster and seemingly thicker. By the time I was 18 even though I was shaving every day, I would still have 5'oclock shadow by the end of the day. People commented on it and even if they weren't being mean I still took it to heart. Some people were deliberately mean as well.
After a couple of years of this I snapped. My mental health was suffering for it and it was affecting my work. I had to make a radical change to my life and I had started reading about Stoicism. According to this philosophy, you cannot change reality, but you can control how you respond to it. So I stopped fighting, stopped shaving, and embraced myself as I am.
I live in a warm climate and often wear shorts, and I'm still pretty sporty so I'm out and about. People notice my hairy legs and my hairy belly and the jungles under my arms, and they can be shocked to start with, but after a while people just started accepting that that was what I was like, and that it was normal, for me. I'm sure at least in part because I'm not hiding it or trying to present myself as something I'm not.
People have asked me if I think it's feminine not to shave, and I say it must be feminine because I'm a woman and this is how I am naturally, it's not a disorder. And I do get complimented on my looks, so clearly it doesn't completely destroy my beauty.