I have a pretty face.
Or so I am told.
It may or may not be true. Sometimes that's just what folks say to fat women to throw us a bone. "It's too bad you have allowed your body to become so hideously misshapen, but at least you have a pretty face. So I will still grant you some value in this world where, for women, beautiful is the only compliment that matters."
It's an act of courage just to walk around in this body every day. Over these many exhausting years of treading water in my struggle with food addiction, I have trained myself to let the fat shaming comments go in one ear and out the other. And not all of them are as innocuous as the backhanded compliment about having a pretty face.
My landlord told me, out of nowhere one day, "You need to lose some weight". Well thankye, ma'am! I don't know how I would have been aware of that unless you told me! I didn't say that to her, of course. I did not want to respond to her rudeness with rudeness of my own.
A parishioner at a previous church once took me aside and in a furtive whisper said something vague about my "health". "If you are about to say that I am fat," I answer calmly, "I am already aware of that." Shocked and stunned at my matter-of-fact response, she sputters something about just wanting to state her concern and ended the conversation quickly.
A teen boy screamed "why don't you go to Weight Watchers" out of the window of a car while I waited at the bus stop, then he and his friends had a good laugh at his "courage" as the light turned green and the driver sped away.
This was supposed to make me collapse in a pool of tears, and that would have been entertaining for them. So I could see the confusion in his eyes as he looked back at me and saw that I did not react at all. Little did they know I was thinking, "boys, strangers in cars have been yelling stuff like that at me since before you were born. I am waaay past reacting to it with tears or shock or even surprise. It's just something that happens every now and then, and then I just go on my way."
Rare is the man whose spirits can soar for an entire day or longer by having someone tell him he is beautiful or handsome, or whose mood can be ruined by hearing the opposite. They have a lot of other ways to value themselves and so should we.
However, there are many many women for whom an encounter like that would ruin their entire day. How is it that women who actually ARE beautiful can be rocked to the core by some stranger yelling from a car that they look fat, even when they are not?
The first and most powerful insult thrown at a woman who is misbehaving or standing up for herself or otherwise not doing what some man wants is to disparage her appearance. And all too often the arrow hits its mark. Why does that particular attack hold so much power? How did things get to the point where some total stranger can label you beautiful/not beautiful and give that statement the power to define you?
"You are so beautiful" is a song that drives me completely around the twist. I know it is considered by millions of people to be one of the great love songs. I've heard it sung at weddings and anniversaries. But the very first time I heard it, I had a bad reaction. Joe Cocker's raspy growl floating out of the speakers:
You.
Arrrrre.
SOHHHHH
Beautiful
(He could have stopped there.)
"To me."
Aaugh!
To me? Really? You're not beautiful to everyone, you're beautiful just to me?
Actually you look terrible to everyone else, but to me you are beautiful—aren't you relieved to hear that? Aren't you grateful that at least one someone is willing to call you beautiful even though you aren't? Wouldn't it be awful if I weren't here to tell you you're beautiful, cause if I weren't here, no one else would say it!
Does anyone else react to that song that way?
Then there was that girl power hit a few years ago beginning with a whispered don't look at me and ending by defiantly saying I am beautiful no matter what "they" say. Sounds great, unless you question why being beautiful is such an important signifier. Why does it matter if "they" say I am not beautiful? Paradoxically that song still means being beautiful is the most important thing to be, and I must tell myself I am beautiful over and over again so that those other words about my not being beautiful can't bring me down. But why is being beautiful the most important thing about me, above all else, so that I must affirm it even if no one else does?
Is there a song anywhere that says—I'm just ordinary looking and I can live with that because there are other wonderful things about me?
"It's not easy being green" comes close. It's the theme song of my life. I am big like an ocean. Important like a mountain. Tall like a tree.
Hetero women are expected to look for more than physical beauty in a man. The whole culture demands that we see that as normal. Think of every sitcom or romcom pairing you have ever seen where the dorky husband has a beautiful wife. It has come to us from the oldest folk tales. In Beauty and the Beast we know which one is the beauty.
The reverse is kind of a joke. If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife. This 1963 number one hit suggested that you get an ugly girl to marry you so you won't have to worry about someone else wanting her. That artist's next song recommended getting a little rough with women. They'll give you more if you treat them tough: If she says you can't go out with the boys, lock her in the closet so she'll know who's boss. Ugh.
In my entire life I can think of only one non-ironic non-comical suggestion from the culture that a man might be happy with a woman who is not a beauty:
Is this just the way of the world since the dawn of time? Is it basic human nature? Was there ever a time or place in all of human existence when women were valued for anything other than beauty?
There are many excellent reasons to want to be pretty. Some are very practical. The world certainly rewards beautiful women, and not just in terms of romance.
For a lot of jobs that a woman can get, she will be paid more if she is pretty. And there are some jobs you cannot get at all unless you are pretty. And I don't just mean supermodel or movie/television actress. You can't work at the cosmetics counter unless the women passing by want to look like you. Everyone knows the pretty waitress/bartender gets the most tips. In office work, "front of the house" jobs require a certain beauty standard. The pretty receptionist/greeter sits at the door and is "the face" of a large company. Or you can be a hostess and greet people with a smile at the door of a restaurant. A plain/ugly/extra large woman with minimal job skills does not have these options for finding work.
And let's not even talk about jobs in politics! Take a close, high definition look sometime at the elected officials we see most often on television. Can you imagine that ANY of them would be taken seriously as leaders if they were women? Half the stories mentioning them would be about their hair, and their handlers would insist on major makeovers. Ditto for the pundits you see on opinion/talk shows. How many of those men would even have jobs if they were female? Would they be all constantly criticized for being too old, too wrinkled, too thick around the waist, and for not inspiring women to think "I'd hit that"?
What is the female equivalent of "I'd hit that"? There must be one.
There have been a whole lot of "I'd hit that" comments on the intertubez about Caitlyn Jenner. What better proof could there be that she is being accepted by the culture as a woman? Every other accomplishment in her life is now secondary to detailed critique of her glamorous Vanity Fair cover photo--comparing her to other "women of a certain age" and asking who looks better, Caitlyn Jenner or Jessica Lange. In the teaser clip from the "I am Cait" reality series she says she is learning about "the pressure women are under all the time about their appearance". Welcome to our world of toys, Cait!
I know nothing about what it is like to be trans, but I teared up a little when she dreamed of a someday when she could just blend into society, like "normal" and a voice off camera says "You ARE normal."
So many women want that. There is always someone trying to tell us there is something wrong with us. But we are who we are.
Years of trying to "do something" about my appearance (for health reasons rather than beauty reasons) and seeing how many others have tried and failed and starved and vomited and put suction hoses into their butts and bellies and rerouted their digestive systems around their stomachs and lost 100s of pounds and gained it back leave me feeling I'd better just learn to live with what I look like and who I am.
Many days I look in the mirror and like what I see. Even at this size. Amazing, isn't it? It's a triumph of years of intentional reprogramming. And sometimes I look in the mirror and I know I am looking less than my best, and I go out and do what I have to do anyway. I'm not beautiful and it doesn't matter what "they" say. I have more important things to do than worry about it. That feels like an even bigger victory.
Now let's please not waste each other's time with liberal truisms like fat doesn't equal ugly and oh but you ARE beautiful, TBM! There are people in my life who do think I am beautiful and I accept their compliments with joy, but I'm not writing this to fish for compliments. This essay is about more than me.
I'm dreaming of an impossible world where women could look however they want and be judged on other criteria: the same variety of criteria by which men judge their worth. A role-reversed world that would let women live their lives with space in their brains to think about how to run the world and make a difference and achieve big dreams rather than worry about whether they have the latest skin care product to reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles on that new cosmetic problem area--the neck! An economically energized world where women have space in their wallets full of the money they'd save by not paying for all the beauty treatments and other accoutrements required to chase after that ever-changing ever-retreating impossible beauty standard.
In patriarchal society, men have many currencies of value. Many signifiers that label them as worthwhile. Worth knowing. Worth loving. Worth listening to. Worth being treated with respect. They don't lose sleep (or money) over whether their necks look crepey. But the key measure of a woman's value is her beauty. Above all else, she's got to be worth looking at. "You'd be so pretty if you smiled. Why don't you smile?" Maybe because I have no reason to smile at the moment, and your need to see me smile does not constitute sufficient motivation for me?
I'm not saying that beauty is bad or makeup is bad or women shouldn't want to be beautiful. Some women show great artistry with makeup. Others are naturally beautiful with little to no effort. Obviously women can choose beauty as one part of a life that includes many attributes.
I'm asking if we have to accept beauty as the defining characteristic of womanhood, the only compliment that matters, when there is so much more to us.
Is there any way to break through that solid wall of expectation, built up brick by brick over millennia, and look at ourselves a new way?
In that spirit, sisters, here is a counterculture experiment to try:
Think of ten women you know.
The next time you see one, give her a compliment that has nothing to do with how she looks. Nothing to do with her face or body, her clothes or other adornments. Squelch the automatic "you look GREAT" and find something else about her that is praiseworthy. And say that FIRST.
This is even MORE important when you are being introduced to a young girl or being shown her picture (I'd like you to meet my daughter, here is a photo of my grandbaby, this is my friend from school, etc.). When the "well, aren't you pretty" comment springs to your lips, stop a moment and try to come up with something, ANYTHING else, to say first.
If she's pretty, you can always add that later. It's OK to acknowledge our beauty so long as our value does not begin and end there--so long as beauty is just a part of the whole package of what we are and how we are evaluated.
All women, even beautiful women, have other characteristics that define them. We could transform the world if women were described with the same range of positively defined characteristics that men have. If we want the rest of the world to do it, we have to start amongst ourselves.
I am proposing "say something else first" as a way to get women to talk about each other differently, in the hope that we will then see ourselves differently, and by changing ourselves change the culture around us.
Let's lead the way and be intentional about finding ways to value ourselves for all the things about us that are "beautiful" that have nothing to do with our appearance.
SpiritSisters
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Beautiful graphic used with permission of artist Michelle Robinson.
SpiritSisters: Writing In Women's Voices is a group of women from all walks of life who have come together to tell our stories and discuss women's issues and rights. We come from every ethnic group, from multiple sexual orientations and gender identities, from a broad spectrum of ability status, from a wide array of socioeconomic classes, and from a diversity of traditions and cultures – spiritual, religious, and secular.
Dominant culture narratives do not represent our lives; they elide, alter, and erase. We are sisters in spirit, and we are taking back our narratives. We are joining together in a circle of mutual trust and support to share our stories, our histories, our identities, our very selves, as individual women and as members of all of the diverse communities and intersections where we live — and doing so in our own voices.
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