I am not conventionally attractive. I am OK with it, but I used to not be. At some point (hopefully) you learn there's room for success and love in your life whether you're physically "beautiful" or not. Wow, what a concept! Yet, it can be difficult to break with the prevailing culture's ideas on beauty, whether you agree with them or not.
1. they're everywhere (we do really need models selling hamburgers to us, really we do)
2. your fellow humans internalize them and formulate expectations for real life through them (ahem, all that porn is really letting you down, amirite?).
Seriously though, people who are revered for their beauty, just like the famous (and those often go hand in hand), get pigeonholed into being some thing for the rest of their lives. The world around them reduces them to a one-dimensional being. "Oh you're so beautiful! You look so gorgeous in this picture!" And then what? Are they nothing else? What happens when that praise runs out because they're older? Or they change their hairstyle? Or they gain weight? Oh gasp.
We see it with movie stars all the time - especially women. Actresses are ticking time bombs toward self-mutilation. It is only a matter of time before their face becomes a parody of itself. Holding each former feature in line with scalpel slices and stitches.The superficiality of American culture takes hold, so that women who are aging out of their young vamp stage are grasping to maintain a foot in the game. Or are drugging themselves into oblivion to forget that they're old hat. Or doing both. And we can malign Lindsay Lohan for being a psycho, but we actually helped create Lindsay and the people who are just like her. She was everyone's spank bank material for years, and then what? Some younger, newer piece came along. As everyone's attention flocked to the novelty, what is the old news supposed to do? How is she supposed to feel? Not that she shouldn't be blamed for ruining her own life, career and face, but her options might have been limited to very narrow and risky roads if she wanted to maintain even a modicum of her old life.
Returning to the average woman's experience, the pressures to conform to particular standards of beauty are evident. Men can also face similar pressures, though these seem to be more localized (dependent on the circles in which he rolls). The limitations on free will in these cases are due to external standards that have been digested and internalized by the choice maker. So should we feel sorry for the beautiful and famous? Not exactly. Should we stop paying homage to someone because they're gorgeous? Probably. Think about being well-liked for only one asset of your being. Seems like it would get boring after a while; an unfulfilling experience.
It's actually similar to what Betty Friedan was pointing out in The Feminine Mystique. To sum up her argument, she's questioning her existence as a college educated young woman sitting in a house folding her children's clothing all day. Yeah, I'd question that too, because it relegates my womb-ness to my indelible, all trumping asset. And that's fine, because some women want to have children. But some women don't (and shouldn't). Just because you have a waffle maker doesn't mean you have to make waffles every day, you know what I'm saying?
So just like women don't want to be just housewives and mothers, the beautiful or not beautiful don't want to be known as just "the hot one" or "the ugly one." Labels are convenient and helpful, but there is also a risk of really limiting someone's existence to some ready-made form. A friend of mine had a husband who labeled all young women today as :"sluts." His inability to understand that someone having agency over their own body (thanks feminism) allowed them to be OK with their own sexuality so much so that they could reject his ass. That hurt him because his concept of women was as a sexual object, and when that was visualized but not physicalized through his experience, well, it was just too confusing for his little brain to handle. Women gaining agency over their own existence is a dangerous concept in many parts of the world, including our own. Grown men would rather shoot a child in the head than have her learn to read.
The funny end to this story is that patriarchy reins in men as much as it reins in women. Men who push for control over their wives and daughters, over their employee's ability to procure birth control are just as scarred by this system as the women they're lording over. Sure, there is a big gap between being in power and being subordinate. But in both cases, the depotentialization is the same. If you're supposed to be a big, bad man but you're a 98 pound weakling or even worse, an emotional man, there has to be some stress eating you up inside. But breathe deeply because no one is perfect and everyone should be let off the hook at least a little bit for their uniqueness. Our idiosyncrasies represent what makes us attractive as friends and lovers. They are also what helps us realize that the labels we've been using are limited and silly.
And from Malala:
"The extremists are afraid of books and pens. The power of education frightens them. They are afraid of women. The power of the voice of women frightens them. This is why they killed 14 innocent students in the recent attack in Quetta. And that is why they kill female teachers. That is why they are blasting schools every day because they were and they are afraid of change and equality that we will bring to our society.”
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