This summer, The duty takes you on the side roads of university life. A proposal that is both scholarly and intimate, to be picked up like a postcard. Today, Chiara Piazzesi reflects on the power of constraint and surveillance exercised by beauty criteria on women.
in mid-April on Instagram, Véronique Cloutier shared her frustration at two types of comments about her appearance received within hours of each other. In the first salvo, he was criticized for wearing too casual an outfit, with jeans and a so-called shirt. oversized. This outfit, she was told, did not suit a woman of her age (“this style does not suit everyone…”); she should have dared to wear sexier clothes. In the second salvo, she was criticized for a tighter, more elegant, let’s even say sexy, outfit. This outfit, it was explained to her, did not quite suit a woman of her age. How should Véro therefore dress to correspond to all the criteria that she is told to apply to her aesthetic choices?
If you think there is no solution to this puzzle, you are right. Ask any woman you know: there’s a good chance she’s found herself in the same bind, even after thinking long and hard about her outfit. Worse, it is likely that she finds herself, on a daily basis, faced with heartbreaking doubts about her appearance. What superficial problems, you will say, in the face of war and climate change! Certainly.
But here is a first paradox. Our community still teaches girls, and women, that beauty is at the center of their dignity and social value, that it is what makes each one stand out and validate (“how pretty you look today!” , “what a beautiful little dress!”). This beauty is even a “power” that it can mobilize for its own ends. The problem is that when women are interested in it, invest in it or care about it, they are declared superficial, egocentric, selfish, “narcissistic”. They are said to be insensitive to “real” business.
These paradoxical constraints are more evident when they target women “of a certain age” (a threshold as formidable as it is indeterminate, moreover) because the latter are often in a position to denounce them. But they also apply to younger people. Take the phenomenon of the so-called “hypersexualization” of young women on social media. For many decades, advertising and cultural productions have encouraged young women to expose themselves to the gaze, to be proud of their bodies, to appropriate their sexuality and their power of seduction, to get rid of the morality of ” double standard” that berates women for “masculine” sexual behavior.
However, when young women respond to this encouragement, show themselves and enjoy doing it, nothing goes right. Their desire to flaunt a sexy body that matches the models offered to them since childhood (all it takes is a few minutes a day on TikTok, with or without supervision, for a child to have an exact idea) is then considered. as stemming from a pathological need for attention, a narcissistic personality, a lack of self-confidence. How do we develop confidence in our appearance when the community clearly tells us that we can never do well? Where is the threshold of the “pathological” need for attention on platforms such as social networks where attracting the attention of others (“Like!”) is at the very heart of the matter?
The trap of the injunction to “authenticity”
(Young) women should return to a more “authentic” appearance, you might say. Beauty, after all, radiates from within, it is an internal balance, a spiritual and bodily well-being. Once again, this advice, which comes from common sense, has paradoxical consequences: where do we place the threshold of the authentic, the natural? No cosmetic surgery, no make-up, no hair removal, no haircut…? Does natural beauty allow you to proudly show off a wrinkled face, or does it condemn you to keeping perfect skin at fifty? Isn’t it here, at home, that a politician was ridiculed in the public space because she didn’t wax her mustache?
Think of a paradoxical expression like “natural makeup”, which doesn’t seem to offend us too much on the pages of magazines or in online tutorials. Any search on the Web will easily tell you about the very high number of steps, and especially of cosmetic products, required to achieve this artificial naturalness, or this artificiality with an authentic appearance. What we call “natural beauty” has, alas, nothing “natural”: it is an ideal that rather requires women to make an ephemeral, even impossible compromise between “not doing enough” and “doing too much”. », two concepts, once again, as formidable as they are indeterminate.
Women’s participation in the culture of beauty is organized by a series of contradictory normative constraints, which expose women’s choices to inevitable social sanction, as was the case for Véronique Cloutier. Collective approval is subject to compliance with paradoxical criteria, which require women to embody one thing (a version of femininity) and its opposite. It’s not Vero’s outfit that’s inappropriate. The problem lies rather in the criteria that mean that she – like the majority of women – will never be able to aim correctly in terms of appearance and femininity.
Summer is made for thinking, but it’s also a great time to develop new reflexes. Let’s start by changing those who make us criticize women around us and in public space based on their appearance. This summer, when you’re about to validate or judge a woman on her physical presentation, bite your tongue and talk about the weather, cooking recipes or keep quiet.
Criticize her on “real business” if appropriate (we can take criticism, test us), rather than on supposed moral qualities you would attribute based on her body aesthetics. Because that’s the crux of the problem, you see? We allow ourselves to judge a woman’s morality and capacity for judgment when we tell her that her dress is not appropriate. In doing so, it’s her person that we call into question: that’s why it hurts, and, above all, that’s why beauty is never a question of surface for women.
This summer, build your feminist muscles: train yourself to remove from appearance the power of constraint, surveillance and humiliation that it can have on women.