There’s a strange feminine bonding ritual I was determined not to pass on to my daughter. It is the supposed camaraderie of women criticising their bodies to one another while exchanging diet tips. I made a rule for myself never to expose my children to conversations like these. I’m not immune to moments of discomfort with my body as it ages but I process those thoughts alone and, in the course of following my rule I’ve actually found my own body image has improved.
Then there’s another kind of young adult literature, heavily marketed at adolescent girls. Much of this is extremely popular and widely enjoyed. I’m not disputing that.
I’m talking about a subcategory of indulgent proto-chick-lit, whose main characters are pseudo-kickass girls, but who pedal several scary ideas about Beauty:
Rule 1. Heroines are Beautiful
Ugliness in a woman is a mortal sin. If you’re beautiful, you turn heads for your beauty. If you’re ugly, you turn heads for your ugliness.
For a definition of Beauty, I am not talking about the kind of beauty which is common to young, healthy people. I mean the capitalised “Beauty” found inside speech marks: the Naomi Wolf sense of the word — that which is held up as a platonic ideal in Western culture, and which only a small number of women can ever achieve.
A modern young adult heroine is indeed allowed to look ‘average’, but her lack of Beauty is so often not the case. So often, the character undergoes a makeover. The implicit message of a makeover plot: It’s not okay to remain your original ugly self.
The Makeover Trope and Attempts at Subversion
There is immense, deep-seated appeal for the makeover fantasy. There must be, because a lot of really old fairy tales are based around the makeover plot. Cinderella is the standout example. The Ugly Duckling is the ur-story of that, written by Hans Christian Andersen. There are many lesser known tales about beautiful princesses hiding out as ordinary folk. Take the princess of “All Fur”, who covers her beauty with soot, is taken into the woods, captured and required to labour hard as a kitchen hand until one night there is a ball at the castle, she washes the soot off and reveals her shining, glowing self. She marries the prince and lives happily ever after.
The Emma Watson remake of Beauty and the Beast attempts to subvert all kinds of problematic tropes but ends up face-planting:
[T]he trope of transformation – girl in rags trussed up in finery by supernatural cupboards or birds or whatnot – is subverted, as Belle finds herself encased in silks, only to liberate herself immediately after a defiant: “I’m not a princess.” However, for the climactic ballroom scene, she is transformed with a pretty dress. So it smacks of that tinny, 1990s inconsistency: rebelliously rejecting frilly conformity one minute, wallowing in it the next. I did, however, like the accent on her bravery, even if her only weapon of any efficacy was a kiss.
Makeovers are hardly limited to young adult stories. The basic plot of All Fur was utilised by Julian Fellowes in Downton Abbey, when the riches to rags cousin comes to live at the Abbey and disguises herself as a kitchen hand. When she attracts the interest of someone outside her station, this causes problems. Why did she attract such attention so quickly? Because she’s beautiful, like a princess.
Take Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games, a tomboyish, muscular, kick-ass girl. Yet when she gets her makeover scene – right before the hunger games, it turns out she was a Beautiful girl after all, hidden under ordinary garb: a variation on the trope of the mask. (And in stories, masks must always come off.)
Glasses don’t make a Beautiful girl any less Beautiful. But in fiction, take off the glasses and reveal a girl’s beauty. Glasses are the fairy tale equivalent of soot on the face. The glasses reveal is satirisedby Natalie Tran at her youtube Community Channel.
Perhaps more damaging, especially for Beautiful girls, is the idea that beauty is the one real thing you have, and that ‘being’ is more important than ‘doing’. Caitlin Moran summarises her own teenaged self succinctly when she writes:
As it turned out, almost every notion I had on my 13th birthday about my future turned out to be a total waste of my time. When I thought of myself as an adult, all I could imagine was someone thin, and smooth, and calm, to whom things… happened. Some kind of souped-up princess, with a credit card. I didn’t have any notion about self-development, or following my interests, or learning life’s big lessons, or, most importantly, finding out what I was good at, and trying to earn a living from it. I presumed that these were all things that some grown-ups would come along and basically tell me what to do at some point, and that I shouldn’t really worry about them. I didn’t worry about what I was going to do.
What I did worry about, and thought I should work hard at, was what I should be, instead. I thought all my efforts should be concentrated on being fabulous, rather than doing fabulous things. I thought my big tasks were discovering my ‘Love Style’ via questionnaires in Cosmopolitan, assembling a capsule wardrobe, learning how to go from day to night with the application of heels and lipstick, finding a signature perfume, planning when to have a baby, and learning how to be mesmerically sexually proficient – but without getting a reputation as a total slag.
Catilin Moran, How To Be A Woman
Rule 2. Heroines obsess over physical insecurities
Heroines are far more likely to worry about their Beauty than about their brains. The more beautiful a heroine, the more insecurities she must harbour. This echoes real life.
We might call this the One Direction brand of beauty. You’re only beautiful when you don’t know you’re beautiful. Knowing it automatically disqualifies one from the category.
Ugliness is as much about appearance as it is about behaviors that depart from the social norms acceptable in and to capitalist patriarchy… The desire to be “not ugly” is “at the most basic level, the desire to live outside of the the stigma of ugliness” [Laine Talley].
Rule 3. Other characters will respond positively to a heroine’s physical beauty
…even if the heroine doesn’t realise she’s Beautiful. Especially if she doesn’t realise she’s Beautiful. So many heroines don’t think they are attractive to others, even when the reactions of others — namely boys — show that others obviously don’t think so.
This is an especially dangerous interplay, because on the surface it doesn’t seem wrong. An optimist might say of such storylines, ‘Well, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It’s entirely possible that a heroine does not fit the Western Beauty Ideal, and that other characters are responding to her inner beauty instead.’
I’m no optimist, because I don’t think that’s how it’s interpreted by adolescent girls. You see, in their lives, they know damn well it’s the Beautiful girls who do get the positive attention, and you can’t easily change their minds about this, especially when they go to watch the movie adaptations of stories about ‘average’ looking girls in books.
It’s significant that the movie adaptations of ‘average’ looking characters such as Mia, from The Princess Diaries, are portrayed on the big screen by the Ann Hathaways of this world, and the Hermiones by the Emma Watsons.
Beauty is as much infrastructure as are highways and bridges.
Michael Taussig, Australian anthropologist
CASE STUDIES
This sampling is by no means broad, but I did pick it off a shelf sort of at random — based on the fact that I’d heard of these books before.
NANCY DREW
First, the opening of the All New Nancy Drew, #9 of a series. It is called Secret of the Spa. This is a New York Times Best Selling Series, according to its cover, and was published 2005. I would like to draw your attention to the amount of airspace devoted to Beauty. (Bold, mine.)
“Nancy? Nancy? Earth to Nancy Drew!”
I blinked, snapping out of a daydream as I picked at some lint in my bedroom carpet. “Sorry, Bess,” I said, swallowing a yawn. “What were you saying?”
Bess Marvin, one of my best friends, dipped her nail polish wand into the bottle of pink liquid on the desk in front of her and studied me. She propped one bare foot on the edge of my desk.
“Weren’t you listening to what I just said, Nancy?” she demanded.
My other best friend, George Fayne, smirked and rolled over on my bed. “Poor Nancy had probably passed out from the nail polish fumes.” George waved one hand in front of her face and wrinkled her nose.
Bess rolled her eyes. Even though she and George are cousins, they couldn’t be more different. If Bess is everyone’s idea of the perfect girl, with her blond hair and pretty, feminine dresses, George defines the word tomboy. She keeps her dark hair cropped short — wash-‘n-wear hair, as she calls it — and lives in jeans and sneakers.
I fall somewhere in the middle of the two of them. I’m nowhere near as interested in clothes and makeup as Bess — I’m lucky if I remember to dab on a little lip gloss most days. And I occasionally might even forget to comb my hair before leaving the house. On the other hand I don’t mind doing a little shopping now and then, or putting on a pretty skirt and some makeup for a special date with my boyfriend, Ned.
Somehow, though, despite all our differences, our three-way friendship works. George and I do our best to tolerate Bess’s incurable love of clothes, Bess and I try to look interested when George starts rambling on about the latest computer gadget she wants to buy, and the two of them are always ready to help out with my own favourite hobby — solving mysteries.
What are girl readers to think, when the most important thing about Nancy Drew and her friends is the way they look and dress? I’ve quoted from the opening passage, which is significant, because the underlying message is clear: Nancy Drew may be an intelligent, shrewd detective, an improbable role-model with many talents, but the most important thing you must know — before you know ANYTHING else, is that Nancy Drew is sort of interested in clothes but not enough to make her one of THOSE girls, all beauty an no brains, but not tomboyish enough to make her a proto-Lesbian called George — strangely reminiscent of a character in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series.
On my own bookshelf, I also have one of the 1970s wave of Nancy Drew mysteries. Here is the opening to The Mystery of the Fire Dragon (1973):
“What else does Ned say, Nancy?” Mr Drew asked. He was listening intently to a letter his daughter was reading.
“Ned likes being a college exchange student in Hong Kong, and he has actually learned to speak some Cantonese, Dad!”
“Excellent. That, together with his study of Chinese culture, should make him very valuable in a number of fields,” Mr Drew commented.
Nancy nodded. “He’d like to go into the United States Intelligence Service.” Suddenly her serious mood changed. “Dad, listen to this.” She read, ” ‘Nancy, can’t you find a mystery to solve in this far-off colony, so I might show you around?’”
Mr Drew’s eyes twinkled. “Mystery or no mystery, Nancy, you just might get to Hong Kong sooner than you think!”
“What!” the attractive blue-eyed girl exclaimed. “You mean—?”
Before Nancy could finish the question, the telephone rang and she went to answer it.
“Aunt Eloise!” Nancy cried out. “How super to hear from you! Are you in New York?”
“Yes, right in my apartment. I want you to rush here. A most peculiar thing has happened. A real mystery for you to solve.”
The young blonde detective was intrigued and could hardly wait to get the details from her aunt.
As you can see, it was important in 1973 that Nancy Drew was ‘attractive’. We can’t have a YA heroine who isn’t attractive — not in 1973 and not now.
In 1973, it was also significant that Nancy Drew’s hair was blonde and that she had blue eyes, and I do believe race relations have improved since then. (A bit. Thanks to Oprah et al.)
But has feminism done its job? I don’t think so. In the 1973 version, the book opens at least with a functional conversation between Nancy and her father. The reader is plunged straight into the action of the story, which suggests the story itself — what Nancy does, rather than what she looks like — will be the most important thing about her.
In the 2005 version, Nancy’s main concern is how she looks for her boyfriend: “I don’t mind doing a little shopping now and then, or putting on a pretty skirt and some makeup for a special date with my boyfriend, Ned.’
I find that sentence pretty offensive, myself, especially in a best selling story published 2005. I prefer that the 1970s version opens with a conversation between Nancy and her father. Perhaps more girls had great relationships with their fathers back in the 1970s. I do wonder.
Just in case I picked an especially bad example from the All New Nancy Drew Series, I picked another at random. This one is called Mardi Gras Masquerade, published 2008, and it opens like this:
“Ow!” I shrieked. “You’re killing me!”
“Chill out, Nancy.” My friend Bess Marvin tugged at the zipper on the back of my dress. “Now, hold your breath.”
I sucked in my stomach. Bess gave one last yank, and the zipper slid up without pinching any more skin.
Exhaling a sigh of relief, I turned toward the full-length mirror in the corner of my bedroom.
“Okay,” I said, surveying my reflection. “That was worth it. This dress is totally amazing.”
Bess came over and stood beside me. “We could both pass for Mardi Gras queens,” she said with a smile.
Blech. The not-so-sub subtext reads: It doesn’t matter how brilliant a girl is at solving mysteries, women must suffer to look good. Even if she exudes the natural beauty of youth, she must suck in her stomach and put on a pretty dress. Only then may she look in the mirror and be pleased with what she sees.
And what about that last line? Is that a wink-wink to any adult readers, hinting at some sort of lesbian relationship between Nancy and her friend? Is the ghost writer of this series a man, by any chance? I’m seeing a flamboyant gay queen, myself, who fancies he identifies with adolescent girls.
This time I give excerpts, all from the first few pages:
Page 1 I’m practically the biggest freak in the entire school. I mean let’s face it: I’m five foot nine, flat-chested and a freshman. How much more of a freak could I be?
P3 The truth is, when he’s away from Lana and all his jock friends, Josh is a totally different person. The kind of person who doesn’t care if a girl is flat-chested or wears size eight shoes.
[Here we have the first mention of our protagonist’s major insecurities. Ok. Fine. I accept that this is to help ordinary teenage girls identify with Mia. After all, every girl has to have something physically wrong with her. It’s a Western Beauty rule.]
P4 [on a to-do list] Number ten: measure chest
P5 …then Lana Weinberger made that sound she always makes and leaned over to me so that all her blonde hair swished onto my desk. I got hit by this giant wave of perfume and then Lana hissed in this really mean voice… I don’t understand what Josh Richter sees in her. I mean yeah, she’s pretty. But she’s so mean. Doesn’t she notice?
[Here we go, is this the set-up of the classic beautiful but nasty character? Please, please tell me it’s not. Because beautiful girls who KNOW they’re beautiful have to be nasty, right? That’s another rule about Beautiful girls in YA chick lit. If they’re too Beautiful — and know it — then they are mean.]
Still on p5: Today I noticed that Mr Gianini’s nostrils stick out. A LOT. Why would you want to go out with a guy whose nostrils stick out so much?
[Of course, when girls are encouraged to spend so much time obsessing over their own looks, they’re not going to turn off their criticism when judging other people, including their teachers and mothers’ boyfriends.]
Okay, I haven’t read on. I find this a little painful, to be honest but to give this hugely popular series the benefit of the doubt, I assume some sort of character arc takes place throughout this novel, and that by the end of it, the Princess is feeling far more secure about her own looks. So I skip to the next book in the series and open it up.
Here’s what I find:
THE PRINCESS DIARIES TAKE TWO
P1 [The very first paragraph includes a beauty judgment:] OK. So I was just in the kitchen, eating cereal – you know, the usual Monday morning routine – when my mom comes out of the bathroom with this funny look on her face. I mean she was all pale and her hair was sticking out and she had on her terry cloth robe instead of her kimono which usually means she’s premenstrual.
So I was all, ‘Mom, you want some aspirin? Because no offence but you look like you could use some.’
[While I have had a bit to do with teenage girls and recognise the sarcastic voice, I am tiring of it a little. In general. Hell, no wonder our girls are so proficient at it! It’s already a bad idea, the way our society is set up, to stick a whole lot of teenagers of the same age together in a year group and have them spend all day in each other’s company, making each other more homogeneous. It is surely a truism that when you’re surrounded by a certain culture all day, you tend to absorb the ideas purported by that culture. When adolescent girls are constantly bombarded with Beauty talk, is it any wonder that neurosis over their looks is taken as a universal given during the teenage years? It is not for YA authors to write didactic sap and get preachy. Yet I wonder, where exactly does author responsibility begin and end? I’m talking here about the responsibility to send affirming messages, rather than simply milking the widespread insecurities of readers, as a cheap — and very effective — means of creating instant reader identification.]
P2: [Another list, this time of her biggest problems:] I am the tallest girl in the freshman class. I am also the least endowed in the chest area. (Number seven is: I don’t have a boyfriend.)
[I’m sorry, but in the scheme of things these are not big problems. While I can see, from my adult perspective, the white middle-class irony of this, I’m not altogether convinced it’s HELPFUL, including such things in a list of massive problems. On the other hand, Beauty is so important in our culture (Western culture, and every country affected by the West) that for girls with small breasts, indeed, this insecurity is felt keenly.]
P4: I can’t help staring at Mr G and wondering what my new baby brother or sister is going to look like. My mom is totally hot, like Carmen Sandiego, only without the trenchcoat – further proof that I am a biological anomaly, since I inherited neither my mother’s thick curly black hair nor her C-cup. So there’s nothing to worry about there.
[Still rambling on about looks. Have you noticed we’re still on page four? This book has wide margins, by the way, and the sheer amount of space spent on criticising looks – both her own and those of others – is worrisome. And typical of YA fiction aimed solely at girls.]
But Mr G, I just don’t know. Not that Mr G isn’t good looking. I guess. I mean, he’s tall and has all his hair (score one for Mr G, since my dad’s bald as a parking meter). But what is with his nostrils? I totally can’t figure it out. They are just so… big.
I sincerely hope the kid gets my mom’s nostrils and Mr G’s ability to divide fractions in his head.’
[Finally, the scrutiny of looks comes to a temporary end. Next chapter.]
P7 [Description of self.] Sex: Haven’t had it yet. Ha ha, just kidding Mrs Spears! Ostensibly female but lack of breast size lends disturbing androgyny. Description: Five foot nine. Short mouse brown hair. (new blonde highlights) grey eyes, size eight shoe.
[‘ostensibly female’… There is nothing in here to reassure any small-breasted girl reading this book that actually, owning small mammaries does not make her any less of a woman. Can someone who has read this entire series kindly let me know if there is EVER any clarification of this point? I believe the male equivalent is worrying about penis size? Yet I don’t see endless rambling in YA fiction about that sort of insecurity. Boys, unlike girls, are not having it shoved in their faces when they pick up a popular YA novel. For boys, novels — as opposed to the screen — are one welcome respite from the world where Beauty is all. What about our girls?]
So should I read on? Princess Mia is hardly an example of a strong female character, though I have heard her described as such. She is positively neurotic about two things – her lack of breasts and her height. At what point should this character stop reflecting the real-life neuroses of teenage girls, because all this emphasis on looks is actually INFLUENCING the young female audience? I remember this time in my life. I know how obsessed girls get over their looks, and how scathing they can be of other people’s.
If this is what they’re reading, then no wonder.
THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS BY ANN BRASHARES
Carmen got the jeans at a thrift shop. They didn’t look all that great: they were worn, dirty, and speckled with bleach. On the night before she and her friends part for the summer, Carmen decides to toss them.
But Tibby says they’re great. She’d love to have them. Lena and Bridget also think they’re fabulous. Lena decides that they should all try them on. Whoever they fit best will get them.
Nobody knows why, but the pants fit everyone perfectly. Even Carmen (who never thinks she looks good in anything) thinks she looks good in the pants. Over a few bags of cheese puffs, they decide to form a sisterhood and take the vow of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants . . . the next morning, they say good-bye.
And then the journey of the pants — and the most memorable summer of their lives — begins.
(How much did Levis pay for that product placement?)
The first chapter consists entirely of a group of teenage girls trying on jeans, obsessing about the size of their backsides and being magically transformed by a pair of pants.
Here are some excerpts:
Carmen glanced at the structured canvas bag splayed wantonly in the middle of her bed. Suddenly she wished she had all-new underwear. Her best satin pair was sprouting tiny ropes of elastic from the waistband.
[How terrible for her.]
“Don’t you think you should try [the jeans] on?” Lena asked practically. “If they fit Carmen, they aren’t going to fit you.”
Carmen and Tibby both glared at Lena, not sure who should take more offence.
[Does this sort of interaction in books reflect real life cattiness, or does it encourage it? I think it’s a matter of balance, and I believe the balance in this particular YA fiction goes too far. Do teenage girls themselves not tire of this constant bitchiness in books?]
Tibby had narrow hips and long legs for her small frame. The pants fell below her waist, hugging her hips intimately. They revealed a white strip of flat stomach, a nice inny belly button.
[We get a run-down of the ‘physical highlights’ of each character in this first chapter, in the same way pay-TV makeover programs such as What Not To Wear’ go out of their way to highlight ‘positive’ features and ‘minimise’ negative ones. The message here is that ‘All bodies are beautiful.’ But what’s the other message? That the cut of the jeans performs some sort of magic trick, all in aid of making the girls look more like that one Western Beauty Standard. Can anyone else not see the irony in this message? Note how the phrase ‘a nice inny belly button’ is not simply a reflection of this character’s attributes – the author may as well say ‘inny belly buttons are more beautiful than outty ones’, thereby influencing the Beauty ethos in Western culture. Why not just stay out of it?]
I wonder if the lives of these characters are going to change because the pants make them look better. Nothing can make me read on.
Then I picked up Knocked Out By My Nunga-Nungas, where we’re on to page two before the first application of mascara and dissing of an ‘unattractive’ (lesbian) PE teacher.
Etcetera, etcetera.
UGLY BETTY
Bodies that more successfully perform beauty norms and reject “ugly” behaviors and presentations are more likely to secure or retain elevated socioeconomic status. For example, Rivero discussed how Ugly Betty relied on the protagonist climbing the social ladder and finding heterosexual coupledom through a process of beautification and rejection of her assigned ugliness. Ugliness, like beauty, in this way is a class-based attribute.
I can hardly talk about influential YA heroines without a passing mention of Isabella Swan.
These days it’s hardly worth making a distinction between a ‘character as portrayed in a popular novel’ and the ‘actress who plays her on the screen’. However, I won’t make any comments about Kristin Stewart, apart from to say that she is obviously inoffensive to the eye.
In the books, Stephanie Meyer goes out of her way to stress that Bella does not consider herself attractive. Of course she doesn’t. There’s no better way to create reader identification with teenage girls than by creating a main character who is insecure about her looks. Girls are cultured into finding something wrong with our bodies. It’s a rule. The more closely a girl fits society’s image of Beauty, the more effort she must go to in order to deny it. Say it often enough, and beautiful girls — in real life, as well as in Twilight — actually don’t see the Beauty that they do have.
This is a great shame.
Is it possible for a young adult heroine to be at least ambivalent about her own appearance, by not really mentioning it at all?
Is it possible to write a young adult heroine in which other characters respond to her brains, her wit, kindness or cunning, in the same way that other characters respond to Harry Potter; to the boy characters portrayed in Paul Jennings, Andy Griffiths and Morris Gleitzman’s books, and any number of mystery/detective novels aimed at young adult boys, in which little to no mention is made of their looks?
Then we’ve got another subcategory of young adult novels which do, indeed, follow the lives of teens who are not even close to the Western model of Beauty. In this case, the hero(ine) is not a beautiful character, but there’s hardly any question why: The theme requires it. The message in the best of these is that you can lead a full and rewarding life, including boyfriends and girlfriends, no matter what you look like.
I’m talking about:
Cookie by Jacqueline Wilson, in which the heroine is overweight. The main story is about how how Cookie and her mother might escape her father, but weight is hardly a non-issue, as it might be in an ideal world where YA Beauty were less important.
The DUFF by Kody Keplinger (in which DUFF stands for ‘Designated Ugly Fat Friend’)
Ugliesby Scott Westerfield
Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Crutcher
Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green & David Levithan, discussed very intelligently (as ever) on Radio New Zealand by the wonderful Kate de Goldi.
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
I would love my daughter to be reading books in which Beauty is a non-issue, but unless there is a shift in YA publishing in the next ten years, I’ll be steering her towards books such as above. (For a closer look at fat politics in YA literature, I collected some thoughts elsewhere.)
I have met parents who would have been happy if their daughters were reading anything at all, including Dolly and Girlfriend magazines. I’ve met girls who read nothing but this kind of thing, and novelised versions of it, and I do think YA literature is influential in forming girls’ self-image, along with the combined influence of peers, parents, teachers, advertisements, TV series, movies, magazines and everything else that makes up this thing called Culture.
I do think adults need to look carefully at the books being marketed to the YA girls in our lives. It would be easy to gift an All New Nancy Drew and assume a strong, if old-fashioned, role model.
I don’t think that YA proto-chick-lit is quite the same as chick-lit aimed at 20-something women. Grown women are able to see the spoofy nature of female insecurities in a way that adolescent girls cannot. I’m not having a go at chick lit here. There are plenty of others who’ll do that.
It’s not just proto-chicklit fiction which does this, anyway. Take a horror story – sort of Twilight, but from when I was at school:
She had bought a new bathing suit for the party. To compete with Clair, however, she should have purchased breast implants.
[This may be thought in jest, but unfortunately it goes unchallenged.]
She couldn’t wait to see the rest of that hard body. She was already investigating types of contraceptives…But there was still that big question – when Bill asked her out. When was that going to be?
Christopher Pike, The Party (1988)
[This girl is one of the ‘tough’ characters in the story, who’s not afraid to snub her nose at authority. She knows she wants sex, and will even organise contraception, but she still has to wait for the boy to ask her out.]
Girls are particularly vulnerable to the idea that Beauty is All, which is pedalled, sometimes overtly, more often covertly, in much of the literature milking their dollar, in the same way those Dolly magazines milk them, exploiting their insecurities, stroking their egos with one hand and slapping them down with the other.
“Slovenly Betsy” from Slovenly Peter, or, Cheerful stories and funny pictures for good little folks illustrated by Hoffman Heinrich. Girls in stories (as in real life) are expected to be pretty, but not too pretty. “Phoebe Ann, The Proud Girl”, also from Slovenly Peter, or, Cheerful stories and funny pictures for good little folks illustrated by Hoffman Heinrich, following hot on the heels of the girl who is too dirty.Bird Biographies A Guide-Book for Beginners by Alice Eliza Ball (1867-1948) Illustrated by Robert Bruce Horsfall (1869-1948) New York Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc., 1923. The vain girl in the story above is called Phoebe. There is a bird called the phoebe. This is it. (If we’re going to admire beauty, let’s admire the beauty of birds?)
Subversion of Beauty Messages
Tally is about to turn sixteen, and she can’t wait. In just a few weeks she’ll have the operation that will turn her from a repellent ugly into a stunning pretty. And as a pretty, she’ll be catapulted into a high-tech paradise where her only job is to have fun.
But Tally’s new friend Shay isn’t sure she wants to become a pretty. When Shay runs away, Tally learns about a whole new side of the pretty world—and it isn’t very pretty. The authorities offer Tally a choice: find her friend and turn her in, or never turn pretty at all. Tally’s choice will change her world forever….
Here in Australia, eating disorders are at an all time high. 2 % of the population will have an eating disorder at some point. 90% are women. Also in Canada, apparently. Even in India, among girls from wealthy families.
Aerie, the lingerie brand of American Eagle, increased its sales by 26 percent in the last quarter of 2015 primarily on the strength of its“#AerieReal” campaign, which eschews Photoshop and employs models of a slightly larger size — and is described as “empowering” as if by legal mandate. Dove, the Patient Zero of empowerment marketing, has lifted its sales to the tune of $1.5 billion with its “#RealBeauty” campaign, cooked up by executives who noticed that few women like to call themselves beautiful and saw in that tragic modesty a great opportunity to raise the profile of the Dove brand.
How Empowerment Became Something For Women To Buy
Here is the general rule about beauty: If you’re lucky enough to be beautiful, good for you. You’re probably a good person as well, unless you’re masquerading as a hag. But if you actively seek beauty, this is a surefire way to die.
[T]here are rarely ugly heroes or handsome villains in illustrated versions of fairytales—assuming, of course, our usual societal values about what constitutes beauty and ugliness.
Indeed, picture books help to teach us such values; when an illustration shows us that the princess whom the text calls beautiful is slender and blond and has a small nose and large eyes, we are being given information about the nature of beauty. Traditionally, the young characters in picture-book illustrations have almost always represented that sort of idea of beauty; many adults were so used to the conventionally blond, perfectly proportioned angels of previous picture books that, when Sendak began to produce his books in the fifties, they found his large-headed, fat-bellied, dark-haired gnomes repulsive. Yet Barbara Bader quotes Ursula Nordstrom’s comment that, by the early seventies, all real children had come to look like Sendak’s depictions of children.
Perry Nodelman, Words About Pictures
Goblins by Maurice Sendak
FOR DISCUSSION
The girls who were unanimously beautiful often rested on their beauty alone. I felt I had to do things, to be intelligent and develop a personality in order to seem as attractive. By the time I realized maybe I wasn’t plain and might even possibly be pretty, I had already trained myself to be a little more interesting and informed.
Diane von Furstenberg
Challenging social norms about who can be beautiful is vital work, and of course it is true that representations of beauty in the media are pathetically white, thin, able-bodied and hetero, and of course this should change. But somewhere along the way, the message of inclusivity went from “every kind of person can be beautiful” to “every person is beautiful.”
I’m increasingly convinced that this message isn’t only less radical than we might like to believe, but also actively harmful.
by Megan Nolan at the NYT
In stories which attempt to make readers think about beauty — or in stories which inadvertently portray beauty and its opposite in a certain light — what are the common messages? Can you think of any examples?
Consider one of the following tales and answer the following questions:
Is there any clear link between beauty and goodness?
Are there instances where danger or harm is associated with beauty or desirability?
If so, is beauty or desirability the cause?
Are there any links between beauty and jealousy?
Shrek – If you’re not beautiful you may well marry another not-beautiful creature, but you can still find happiness with that person. But know your ‘level’. I criticise the messages in this film, which is otherwise a beautifully constructed story:
Mean Girls—The most beautiful girls at school are less tolerant of individuality than the other girls and also, beauty correlates highly with vapidness and negatively with academic aptitude.
Cinderella—Kindness and beauty go together. If you’re ugly this will make you mean. Beauty can elevate a woman of low social status out of her class system and into the aristocracy.
Snow White— Mothers (including step-mothers) become jealous of their daughters, since a daughter enters her most sexually attractive years just as mothers move out of theirs.
Related
In a memoir studded with delicious lines and unforgettable set pieces, Robert Leleux describes his East Texas boyhood and coming of age under the tutelage of his eccentric, bewigged, flamboyant, and knowing mother.
Left high and dry by Daddy and living on their in-laws’ horse ranch in a white-pillared house they can’t afford, Robert and Mother find themselves chronically low on cash. Soon they are forced into more modest quarters, and as a teenaged Robert watches with hilarity and horror, Mother begins a desperate regimen of makeovers, extreme plastic surgeries, and finally hairpiece epoxies—all calculated to secure a new, wealthy husband.
Mother’s strategy takes her, with Robert in tow, from the glamorous environs of the Neiman Marcus beauty salon to questionable surgery offices and finally to a storefront clinic on the wrong side of Houston. Meanwhile, Robert begins his own journey away from Mother and through the local theater’s world of miscast hopefuls and thwarted ambitions—and into a romance that surprises absolutely no one but himself.
Written with a warmth and a wicked sense of fun that lighten even the most awful circumstances, The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy is a sparkling debut.
In The Business of Beauty: Gender and the Body in Modern London (Bloomsbury, 2020), historian Jessica Clark takes the reader on a tour through the shifting commercial and cultural landscape of London in the second half of the 19th Century and the early decades of the 20th. The business of beatification––aimed at both men and women, and conducted by both men and women––was influenced by and reflective of shifting attitudes towards women in public spaces, the influx and success of immigrants in the nation’s capital, the development of wholesale production processes and the standardization of commodities, and the cultural competition between European nations that accompanied the growing political and military competition at the fin de siècle, among other things. In other words, Jessica Clark shows us that The Business of Beauty intersects with an amazing array of historical subjects.
The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain: From the First Photographs to David Beckham
Spanning the decades from the rise of photography to the age of the selfie, The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain: From the First Photographs to David Beckham (University of Chicago Press, 2021) traces the complex visual and consumer cultures that shaped masculine beauty in Britain, examining the realms of advertising, health, p*rnography, psychology, sport, and celebrity culture. Paul R. Deslandes chronicles the shifting standards of male beauty in British culture—from the rising cult of the athlete to changing views on hairlessness—while connecting discussions of youth, fitness, and beauty to growing concerns about race, empire, and degeneracy. From earlier beauty show contestants and youth-obsessed artists, the book moves through the decades into considerations of disfigured soldiers, physique models, body-conscious gay men, and celebrities such as David Beckham and David Gandy who populate the worlds of television and social media.
Deslandes calls on historians to take beauty and gendered aesthetics seriously while recasting how we think about the place of physical appearance in historical study, the intersection of different forms of high and popular culture, and what has been at stake for men in “looking good.”
