f-word

What's Your Beauty Reality?

Fresh out of college and at the height of my righteous activist phase, I went out to lunch with an older mentor friend who unabashedly told me that she was contemplating plastic surgery. She was approaching fifty and felt badly about herself; though her real motivation was that all of her friends were doing it. I was aghast that a friend of mine was even considering plastic surgery, which from a young feminist perspective seemed the antithesis of self-empowerment. This woman was on the boards of Planned Parenthood and Girls, Inc., didn’t she know better? Though I did give her credit for her honesty. Weren’t we supposed to do it and pretend it was natural? I left our conversation confident that I would never make such a decision, nor would any of my selfconfident, ambitious friends.

As I moved through my twenties I often reflected back on that conversation. For one, most of my friends got blonder and blonder and I felt a great need to “out” them as real brunettes, as I was. Then came the eyebrow plucking and the waxing of various body parts and again, I was offering: “that’s not natural.” Also, I was lecturing on college campuses (a consequence of writing about feminism and creating an organization for young feminists) and many students talked to me about their concern that the images presented in fashion magazines were negatively impacting these young women, forcing them to starve and alter their bodies. Yet I saw that the students measured themselves more against their peers than against a highly edited photo. They chose their lunch based on what their friends chose—salad, no brownie—and upon hearing that a friend spent one hour on the Stairmaster, another friend would rush off to do twenty minutes longer. Certainly these young women envied Kate Moss’s waiflike figure, but they could more easily dismiss her precisely because she was a model and airbrushed. Our friends stood next to us, the competition was palpable.

I was also learning that eating disorders were a mental disorder and thus, grew frustrated with employing the feminist mantra: “It’s what’s inside that matters.” Actually what’s inside (our insecurities) caused these problems in the fi rst place. True to feminism’s core, I, too, wanted women to love themselves for who they are, but I’ve now learned that sometimes that means altering who they are. For example, one friend had a breast enlargement and another friend a tummy tuck; both no longer hide behind baggy shirts, and the friend mentioned above, did get a few tucks and now feels comfortable being photographed––as a consequence she recently ran for political office. It’s hard to argue against this first hand evidence, though I can simultaneously think these procedures are elitist and take us further from a realistic measure for women.

Women today are partially saved because they can escape more traditional plastic surgery, which we presume “other” women do. Instead, we have Lasik surgery so we don’t have to wear glasses, Invisalign to correct our crooked teeth, teeth bleaching, face vacuuming, collagen and Botox injections, personal trainers and creams to help the cellulite disappear, hair coloring, vagina tucks, and even scheduled c-sections to justify a tummy tuck. Those options are seemingly more digestible, some are relatively harmless and some could even be justified, but collectively they add up to same thing, paying to make ourselves look better.

And of course, this means I’ve had to revisit my earlier assumption that my friends and I surely wouldn’t dare do such things. Theorizing about unfair beauty standards, competition among women, and the high costs and classism inherent in beauty regimens is easy. It’s harder to not participate when it feels like the right thing to do —and it makes you feel better. As I started to take note of how good some of my friends looked, I also started to learn why. Based on these mental notes, I started taking informal bets among my friends on who would get plastic surgery. Everyone presumed they wouldn’t, but with a more expansive definition, we all realized it was a matter of when not if.

As for me, my hair was starting to gray and highlights didn’t seem that bad. Then my eyebrows looked bushy and plucking seemed easy enough. Though I have yet to remedy this problem, I am increasingly frustrated by wearing contacts. And I’m on my last installment of Invisalign. And now that my teeth are straight, shouldn’t they also be sparkly white?

Amy Richards is the author of the recently released Opting In: Having A Child Without Losing Yourself (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008) and the co-author of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism & the Future (FSG, 2000). She is also the co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation and co-creator of Soapbox: Speakers Who Speak Out, Inc.

~Amy Richards