We all grow up in a world where, quite early on, we learn what is important and what our value is based on. For someone born into a competitive, sporty family, value is placed on physical strength and aptitude. Perhaps your family placed a high value on money and having lots of it. So getting rich is something, by consequence, you feel is very important and your ability to do so (or not) has a large effect on how you feel about yourself. Now, imagine you’re a woman. You grow up in a world where society deems it appropriate to stress the value and importance of one thing above all others – beauty.
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Now although beauty is objective, there is a general understanding that some standards of beauty are irrefutable. The women who usually represent these standards, of course, are supermodels. Their images are everywhere – plastered over billboards, in magazine editorials, on YouTube commercials and on Tumblr blogs. They’re the benchmark of beauty everywhere, and are damn hard to avoid. And often, when I come into contact with one of these images, my mind. does. this:
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“God, that women is beautiful. I wonder how much more beautiful she is than me? I wonder how much taller she is than me? I wonder how much it would cost to get breast enlargement surgery to get boobs that look as good as that? I wonder how much food I’d need to stop eating and how many hours at the gym I’d need to spend to get my body looking like that? I want gelato! You fat bitch. You can’t eat gelato if you want to look like that. My nose is a lot uglier than her nose, I wonder if I got a nose job how much more beautiful I would be? Even with a nose job, I wonder if I’d need to get lip injections too?”…and on and on and on.
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Before you tell me how ridiculous that all is and start telling me to “love myself”, explaining that supermodels represent an unrealistic standard of beauty and that comparison is the root of all evil, let’s go back to when we were growing up and learning what’s supposedly important and valuable, and then how that was quantified. If you were sporty, then it was being able to run faster than the other runners, or score more goals than the other team. If it was money, it’s how much more expensive is your neighbours house than your house, or how much more money do you make than the guy in the office next door?
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I went to a highly academic school, and was constantly judging myself on how well or badly I did in the latest exam compared to all the other girls in my class. And the last two years of high school were spent slaving away in order to try and do better than all the kids in all the other schools. Comparison, we learn from quite early on, is how we measure just how good or bad we are. And while we usually only bother to compare ourselves in regards to those things we consider important (I don’t compare my plumbing abilities with those of a certified plumber because quite honestly, idgaf about plumbing), it’s only natural that, with the importance placed on beauty by society, our first recourse to witnessing a beautiful woman is comparison and self judgement.
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It’s exhausting. But I doubt it’s particularly unusual. And what makes it even worse is that we’re told by modern self help gurus and encouraging web articles how poisonous comparison is and how beauty isn’t everything, but, we’re hardly just going to drop decades of subconscious conditioning because Oprah tells us to. So there’s the initial struggle of these thoughts and then the added guilt for thinking them in the first place. THANKS FOR NOTHING, SOCIETY.
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This is why I love art, and it’s unique and varied representations of women. Unlike the models in Dolce & Gabbana ads and female pop stars in music videos and wilting heroines in blockbuster movies, women in art are strange and unique and interesting. Each art work redefines the meaning of beauty, and makes the comparison of one’s beauty with the woman depicted seem futile as the image is merely a representation of a woman and not an actual woman. Not to mention that beauty is not even always the goal of an artist depicting a female in art. Instead we’re encouraged to think, not ‘how much more beautiful/less beautiful is she than me’ but rather ‘I wonder what she is thinking? I wonder what she’s been through? What she dreams of? Where she came from?’ Human stuff. ‘Cause womens are humans too. And we’ve got lots more to offer than just being the girl who’s more or less beautiful than the blonde chick in the perfume commercial.
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