Revolution Resolution

Naomi Wolf, in her best-selling dissection of the beauty industry 'The Beauty Myth' addresses every contradiction that women are forced to endure when chasing aesthetic appeal. A woman must not be too fat nor too thin, too tall nor too short. She must not pursue sex but must open her legs willingly when a man commands her to do so.

I have never considered myself beautiful. The women that I idolised growing up were the mid-2000s Disney Channel stars - Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez, Victoria Justice and Miranda Cosgrove. One thing you might notice about these women is that they are all thin, conventionally attractive, and pale. It took me ten years to accept myself as I am: taller than the boys I date, broader than all my girl-friends, and dreadfully unsymmetrical in the face.

I tried to tell myself that my looks didn't matter - that it was my personality that made be beautiful - but even that couldn't last forever. What is a woman to do, when the only thing about herself that is beautiful is her personality, and she occasionally lets herself down? I felt that beauty was a currency, and that I was abundant in it by virtue of my good nature, but then with every jealous twist of my gut, every enraged flush of my cheeks, every snide remark made without thinking, I lost some of that beauty. If I started this life with a hundred 'beautiful personality' points, by sixteen I had none left. My personality wasn't beautiful (and by beautiful I of course refer to the ideal nature of woman that is temperate, patient, kind, and quiet) just as my body was not beautiful, because it's not supposed to be. It's a deeply religious doctrine, I think, that tells women not to worry about their physical appearance so long as their inner beauty always shines through. It's a tool of the patriarchy, I believe, that uses women's insecurity (which itself was planted by the patriarchy - thanks 'beauty standards') to force them to comply. A woman has no physical beauty, or so she thinks, because her hips are too wide and her legs are too fat and her stomach is too pouchy and her left breast is just a little bit larger than the right - and so she has no choice but to be kind, to be funny, to be generous, and forgiving so that no one notices the flaws in her face. The woman that is created by this doctrine of 'inner beauty' is, by design, physically self-conscious, mentally demure, and sexually grateful for whatever man might deign to look her way.

It was this revelation that led me to understand that the things about myself that I and other women had tried to reclaim as beautiful - the fat and the eczema and the ruddy red spots on our cheeks - were not beautiful at all. Beauty is an inflexible standard designed by men, it has criteria that must be met, and the standard does not leave room for such imperfections as stretch marks and cellulite and scars. When we say that these things are beautiful, and that we don't care whether some man somewhere said they're not, we are still using the master's tools - we are admitting that we want to be beautiful, that we want the man's approval, we just want him to approve of different things. In the words of Audre Lorde: 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House'. This means that, in redefining the criteria of beauty, we are still upholding the oppressive idea that women are beautiful, and have to be, when what we should be doing is dismantling the idea of beauty altogether.

Fat and Eczema and Stretch Marks are not Beautiful.

I say this not to belittle or criticise the woman who has all of these things, or to assign additional worth to the woman who has none of them. I say that these things are not beautiful because beauty is a construct, defined by some overbearing man with an unearned platform and upheld by a society that cannot fathom that women might be something more than their aesthetic appeal. Ten years ago, I tried so hard to achieve the skinny legs and flat stomachs and pert tiny butts made so fashionable by Cameron Diaz and Gwyneth Paltrow - only to age into a modern society that glorifies big bums and thunder-thighs and 'beautiful' natural curves.

The more you look at the history of beauty, the more you realise that it does not exist. There is no difference in worth between a fat woman with acne and a thin woman with massive breasts and no body hair; but we are told that there is. We are told that in order to be beautiful we have to fit the status quo - those of us who don't want to fit the status quo scream back that we don't have to do anything to be beautiful; we already are. But in saying this we are merely continuing the patriarchal narrative that women have to be beautiful to have worth.

In order for women to be liberated, I think, we need not declare that fat and eczema and stretch marks are beautiful, because they are not. There are executives out there - men running fashion magazines and advertising campaigns and the god-forsaken beauty pageant - who decide what is beautiful and then force us to comply. Their definition of beautiful is one thing today, and tomorrow it will be another. We cannot say that fat and eczema and stretch marks are beautiful because these men, who define the meaning of beauty for a generation, have said that they are not.

It is my resolution to tell every woman that I see lamenting over her physical or mental beauty that what we as women need to do for our own liberation is to announce that our so-called ‘flaws’ are not beautiful, and that neither are we, because we have no reason to be. Beauty is a form of control, nothing more. It is method of forcing women to compete with one other, to hate themselves, and to ignore their intellectual capacity because they're too busy trying the newest diet, following the latest trends, and making blog-posts about wonder-woman's thighs.

It is my resolution to tell these women that the only way to break free of beauty's hold over us is to denounce it.

It is my resolution to announce that our acne, our breasts, our cellulite, and our hair is neither beautiful nor un-beautiful. It is my resolution to help women de-objectify their own female bodies and reclaim them as not an ornament of beauty and male-desire, but as an extension of their intellectual minds, as a vessel for new life, and as a tool of survival.