How Our Use of Language Hurts the Conversation Around Beauty and Desirability

    The conversation around beauty and desirability is frustrating to say the least. I find engaging with it impossible, mostly because I don’t have a platform and there’s nowhere for me to really engage… Anyhow, I feel the conversation is unproductive because we frame it within the confines of our current social environment, rather than questioning the structures of it and the assumptions we’re making that we aren’t recognizing. I’m not necessarily here to discuss whether beauty is objective or subjective, but how we aren’t helping ourselves in the process of coming to any sorts of conclusions — definite or theoretical — by the lack of specificity in the way we speak.

    This will mostly cover cis women, but there are some aspects that apply to men and other genders.

White Supremacy

    White Supremacy is one of the things this conversation often rests on. The other things being patriarchy and capitalism. The white supremacist roots of the United States are obvious. It’s in the Birth of the Nation. But when we lay the ‘White Supremacy’ blanket over all of our beauty standards, I find it to be thought terminating and a way to feel like we’ve come to the right conclusion without putting in any real mental effort to think about the issue.

    We should consider the issue with nuance. If beauty is defined by how adjacent to whiteness one is, how is a white person ever unattractive? If non-white features on non-white people are always undesirable, what are white features, and what are non-white features? It’s intuitively illogical for the literal definition of “white features” to be the beauty standard when we’ve had white people, especially women getting cosmetic procedures and other augmentations (or trying very dangerous things for the sake of beauty) as long as beauty standards have existed. If a white woman gets a nose job, is she trying to become more white than she already is? Arguably, she is trying to distance herself from non-whiteness, or we could also consider that the beauty standard isn’t purely based on her inherent whiteness.

    But back to the question of what is a white feature and what is a non-white feature. Some people choose to be more specific when it’s relevant. East Asian, South Asian, West African, etc. But these generalizations quantify whiteness as one pure category and every other racial and ethic group into other (somewhat) pure categories. When race is not only a social construct, but commonly thought to not be genetically significant. But truthfully, we quantify whiteness as this specific thing: thinness, small noses, large eyes, light skin, light eyes, light hair. We operate under the assumption that this is the standard. But we fail to fully engage when we fail to acknowledge that this is not the entirety of whiteness. That white people themselves do not reach this standard, and individuals and large groups within a variety of racial/ethnic backgrounds have elements of this standard. (We also still must engage with the averages, but I’ll get to that.) I’ve seen black women with *gasp* small noses. Asian women are more petite on average than white women. I’ve seen white women with larger noses. Thin black women (not to mention categorizing certain weights to certain races is just not fully correct, and the fat black woman stereotype has more to do with our white supremacist history than fatness being an inherent feature of black femininity in my opinion). We say the beauty standard is one’s proximity to whiteness, when I find the descriptor of distance from non-whiteness to be much more accurate for what it is we are actually describing.

    “On Average”

    But of course, maybe on average a white woman is considered more attractive than a black woman. I can believe that, and it seems to be the most commonly accepted sentiment. This is an important social reality. But then can we honestly believe that this reality fully excludes women of color from being included in the beauty standard? I can’t. But this delves more into the realm of opinion. I find all races of women to be equally attractive, but we can’t deny the potential immeasurable impact of cosmetic procedures, filters, etc. That is to say that my perception of beauty is not fully reliant on race.

    But my own bias comes in when I disregard the opinions of regressive people. The people who say things like, “I’m not attracted to people of X race.” I’m inclined to favor my own perception. By assuming that because I find beauty in people of all races, other people must feel the same. And I guess that’s where I reach an impasse. How our environment shapes our view of attractiveness for the average person is still undeniable.

Fatness

    I believe our perception around the word ‘fat’ also hurts us more than it helps us. Our perception of ‘fat’ as in insult, or as a sign of disrespect. In the realm of beauty standards, fat is one of the worst things you can be. But in our deconstruction of beauty standards, it should not be. When we view “fat” as negative in any context, we give power to the beauty standards we are rallying against. When we avoid “fat” altogether, we cover our eyes and ears and scream “lalalalaalala” to the problem rather than facing it head on and thus being able to move forward. How ‘fat’ is defined is extremely cultural, and so is how the word is interpreted. Rather than it being negative or positive, I suggest we completely neutralize it. Fatness, thinness, averageness are adjectives as neutral as having black hair.

— Or we could delete fatness from our lexicon, but the principle would still stand in the greater scheme of devaluing the size and appearance of our bodies a detaching negative value judgements from the term —

    By rejecting the term ‘fat’ as we do now, we give significance to the size of someone’s body. Whether it means we think they’re ugly, or lazy, or disgusting. By rejecting the term, we are accepting that it and the connotations that come with it are things that are undesirable (although I do think we should disconnect “disgusting” from fatness because that’s a value judgement). That it’s bad to be ugly or lazy and that somehow makes you less valuable. It’s a fact that there are some people that some people find less pleasant to look at, and rather than pretending this isn’t the case, maybe we should consider that beauty is incidental, but not significant in any real sense, and should be treated as such. At this stage, suggesting that the concept is non-existent, may be true, but treating it as such doesn’t do us any favors when it’s pervasive in many spheres outside of our discourse, and socially it feels very real. When we jump to, “beauty does not exist.” on the jump, we immediately clash with those who insist that it does. And on average, a person may side with their intuition, or what seems to align with their life experience, whether that would be to agree that beauty is purely subjective, or that there are universal standards that all other standards defer from, or any other doctrine.