#215: Do you think of yourself as beautiful?
Morning everyone,
Welcome back to Dear Baby. Before I tell you about the questions, a quick review of this past week: 1. I announced that my prices are going up on the 31st (tomorrow), so today is your last chance to sneak in on the $5 price! Great timing because it will unlock my whole column today. And 2. My podcast this past week explored my evolving thinking on “disordered eating,” inspired by something that happened to me recently and also the book I’m reading by Emmeline Clein. Thank you for your great comments!
Today I’ll be answering a question about my relationship with makeup and other beauty practices and whether my position on them is impacted by the way I look; a question about whether to put down roots in a place where your loved ones live versus flee in pursuit of more abstract dreams; and a question about having a kid when you or your partner works unconventional hours (and how that’s worked out for me and Avi). So much to say about all of these!
1. On makeup and beauty culture
“I’m curious about your relationship with beauty. I know you have a minimal skincare routine and generally abstain from makeup, but I’m curious how much of your choice to abstain from beauty culture is rooted in the effortlessness with which you maintain a certain standard anyway. Do you ever think about being pretty? How are you so resistant to the pull it has on you, if not? Is there another adjective (maybe cool) regarding physical appearance that you’re more compelled by? I know you don’t really wear traditionally sexy clothing, so I’m curious to know your thinking around this. Do you think of yourself as beautiful or notice if you feel pretty some days or are you totally detached from caring about that stuff?”
I must immediately confess to editing this question because the original included a bunch of flattery regarding my appearance that I was too embarrassed to publish. What if people reading didn’t agree—or thought I agreed? Would they hear whatever I said next? These anxieties reminded me of what Naomi Wolf once called “the typical beauty myth double bind.” Here’s how she described it: “No matter what a woman’s appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize—as her personal problem—observations she makes about aspects of the beauty myth in society.” That is, you’re either too ugly or too pretty for your thoughts on “beauty” to be taken seriously. To be clear, I don’t sense that antipathy in your kindly worded question. But I want to explore some of the ideology baked into this line of thinking.
I first experienced the beauty myth double bind in 2018, when I wrote about what happened when I stopped wearing makeup in a piece called, “What If Makeup Didn’t Have to Be a Tentpole of Womanhood?” for Man Repeller (no longer online). The essay was imperfect and amateurish, but I stand by its thrust: my choice to stop wearing makeup felt subversive. I didn’t mean to suggest that, as a result, I looked ugly—just that it went against my socialization to abstain from trying to look “better,” which revealed something to me about modern womanhood. A debate broke out in the comments about whether I was unattractive enough for this choice to be deemed meaningful. Most memorably, I recall a dismissive comment from a famous film director’s wife: “Talk to me when you’re 40.” That last comment is funny to me now (so unnecessarily rude), but at the time I was mortified by all of it.
As I get older, I understand where the director’s wife was coming from. For the first time in my life, in photos or the mirror, I see flashes of a face that’s older than the one in my head, and it’s as trippy as everyone told me it would be. The subtle shifts have been more surprising to me than the appearance of a new wrinkle, like the fact that, in some light, due to my age, I just look a little hungover all the time. This has led to a couple tweaks in my behavior (for instance, I’ve started using retinol, and these days I’m less likely to show up to a dressy event without a little color on my cheeks and lips, although I also just think that’s fun). Overall though, I’ve seen it as an invitation to reject as often as I can the idea that I must spend an increasing amount of time and money on improving or obscuring the way I look. That hasn’t changed since I wrote the essay, so I guess I’m taking that woman’s comment as a challenge. I’ve got 4.5 years until I’m allowed to talk to her!
Double bind aside, I understand the idea that “a principle isn’t a principle until it costs you something.” Like the commenter said, it’s easier for me to abstain from beauty practices than someone who falls further outside conventional norms, or faces more material backlash for doing so, which diminishes the potency of my “boycott.” But if the point of beauty culture is to make every woman believe she isn’t beautiful regardless of how she looks—to keep her spending money and to censor her intellectual space—then my choice is still meaningful. This is the root of Wolf’s theory. “The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance,” she wrote in 1990, meaning it’s less about how close a woman hews to the beauty standards than the fact that she believes she’s never close enough, and acts accordingly. “Competition between women has been made part of the myth so that women will be divided from one another.”
If Wolf is right that beauty culture aims to colonize our thoughts and behaviors more than our bodies, we have more power to resist it than we think. How exactly we ought to do that is something I’ve softened on with age. “The real issue,” Wolf wrote, “has nothing to do with whether women wear makeup or don’t, gain weight or lose it, have surgery or shun it, dress up or down, make our clothing and faces and bodies into works of art or ignore adornment altogether. The real problem is our lack of choice.” As long as we believe we need these things to be valued in society, or by ourselves, they’re not really “choices” in good faith. Reshaping my relationship with beauty has been, for me, an attempt to claw my choices back. I’m not ascetic; I just try to resist when my participation feels coerced, unconsciously or otherwise. The ghouls and systems that codify and justify patriarchy are the real enemy.
You asked if I think about being pretty, and the truth is I still think about it fairly often—whether I am or not, whether I look better or worse than I did yesterday, whether that matters. When you called me beautiful I immediately felt embarrassed, because I believed you were wrong. I’m haunted by the beauty myth too. But you’re right that I’ve tried to shape my goals and values in a different direction, by giving “cool” and “beautiful” definitions that don’t involve body parts but an attitude and way of living, things in my control. This has enabled me to face aging and “feeling ugly” with a sturdier constitution. It’s not foolproof and it’s still evolving, but it’s already saved me a lot of time and heartache, and that’s been transformative enough.
2. On rooting down or fleeing
“Dear Baby!
I have been in a state of turmoil over the direction of my life for a minute. I’ve lived in Vancouver for 13 years now, in my current beloved apartment for eight. [I have] a great and shockingly lucrative restaurant management gig at a place I believe in and I’m surrounded by great friends. The problem is that I find this city insufferably boring, lacking in style and culture, and I worry if I stay here I may never find a partner who inspires me or reach my loftier and more abstract goals. I would kill to live in Los Angeles, for obvious reasons, and have done a lot of solo travel over the last eight years or so trying to find other cities I connect with on that level and have sort of been unable to come up with anything. Unfortunately, obtaining a working visa in the US in my industry appears to be impossible (please god if any of your subscribers have advice!), so my dream just kind of hurts. I’m 33, so I have a couple more years if I want to explore youth mobility visas in Europe, but uprooting my life to take a chance on a city so far away, where I haven’t done any work in establishing connections, seems a bit reckless considering the life I have at home.
I feel like I’ve put down some extreme roots in a city I’ve never loved and despite trying to find different scenes to engage with here, I’m straight up unfulfilled at the end of the day. Should I pack it in and head to Europe? Become an illegal alien in America? What would you do? …What would Danny do?
Thank you!”