the way it looks?) Wolf wrote that a woman had to believe three things in order to accept the beauty myth. First, she had to think about beauty as a “legitimate and necessary qualification for a woman’s rise in power.” Second, she had to ignore the beauty standard’s reliance on chance and discrimination, and instead imagine beauty as a matter of hard work and entrepreneurship, the American Dream. Third, she had to believe that the beauty requirement would increase as she herself gained power. Personal advancement wouldn’t free her from needing to be beautiful. In fact, success would handcuff her to her looks, to “physical self-consciousness and sacrifice,” even more.
In her 2018 book, Perfect Me, the philosopher Heather Widdows argues persuasively that the beauty ideal has more recently taken on an ethical dimension. Where beauty has historically functioned as a symbol for female worth and morality—in fairy tales, evil women are ugly and beautiful princesses are good—beauty is now framed, Widdows writes, as female worth and morality itself. “That we must continually strive for beauty is part of the logic of beauty as an ethical ideal—as it is for other successful ethical ideals,” she writes. “That perfection remains always beyond, something we have to strive for and can never attain, does not diminish the power of the ideal; indeed it may even strengthen it.” Under this ethical ideal, women attribute implicit moral value to the day-to-day efforts of improving their looks, and failing to meet the beauty standard is framed as “not a local or partial failure, but a failure of the self.”
Feminism has faithfully adhered to this idea of beauty as goodness, if often in very convoluted ways. Part of what brought Jezebel into the center of online feminist discourse was its outcry against Photoshop use in ads and on magazine covers, which on the one hand instantly exposed the artificiality and dishonesty of the contemporary beauty standard, and on the other showed enough of a powerful, lingering desire for “real” beauty that it cleared space for ever-heightened expectations. Today, as demonstrated by the cult success of the makeup and skin-care brand Glossier, we idealize beauty that appears to require almost no intervention—women who look poreless and radiant even when bare-faced in front of an iPhone camera, women who are beautiful in almost punishingly natural ways.
Mainstream feminism has also driven the movement toward what’s called “body acceptance,” which is the practice of valuing women’s beauty at every size and in every iteration, as well as the movement to diversify the beauty ideal. These changes are overdue and positive, but they’re also double-edged. A more expansive idea of beauty is a good thing—I have appreciated it personally—and yet it depends on the precept, formalized by a culture where ordinary faces are routinely photographed for quantified approval, that beauty is still of paramount importance. The default assumption tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone can become, and feel, increasingly beautiful. We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite—de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter less.
But, then again, nothing today ever de-escalates. And feminism has also repeatedly attempted to render certain aspects of the discussion off-limits for criticism. It has put such a premium on individual success, so much emphasis on individual choice, that it is seen as unfeminist to criticize anything that a woman chooses to make herself more successful—even in situations like this, in which women’s choices are constrained and dictated both by social expectations and by the arbitrary dividends of beauty work, which is more rewarding if one is young and rich and conventionally attractive to begin with. In any case, Widdows argues, the fact of choice does not “make an unjust or exploitative practice or act, somehow, magically, just or non-exploitative.” The timidity in mainstream feminism to admit that women’s choices—not just our problems—are, in the end, political has led to a vision of “women’s empowerment” that often feels brutally disempowering in the end.
The root of this trouble is the fact that mainstream feminism has had to conform to patriarchy and capitalism to become mainstream in the first place. Old requirements, instead of being overthrown, are rebranded. Beauty work is labeled “self-care” to make it sound progressive. In 2017, Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote a story for The New York Times Magazine about the new vocabulary of weight loss, noting the way