The unwritten rules on what it means to be a woman are ever-evolving, and creating walls between us – between women and women, and women and men. The walls went up quietly at first but they are becoming more intrusive.
At the heart of the stirring is this: Which is more important? Beauty or intelligence – and should we be referring to beauty at all.
There is talk, particularly on social media, against calling girls ‘beautiful’ or any other word that refers to physical aesthetics. The argument is that to do otherwise gives beauty a position of importance and influence it doesn’t deserve.
The Issues
Two major issues contribute to the argument.
The first is connected to what ‘beautiful’ has come to mean in relation to women. Popular culture has strained the idea of what it means to be a woman to the point that it’s now heavily infused with an unrealistic and largely unattainable definition of beauty. It’s a definition worthy of rejection. But what if, rather than rejecting the word, we could rewrite its meaning?
The second issue lies in the emphasis on beauty. The acknowledgement of beauty needs to be balanced with the recognition of other qualities such as capable, resourceful, powerful, resilient, strong, kind, and hardworking.
Beauty Should Matter to All of Us
Dismissing beauty as irrelevant or unimportant undermines the capacity of women to embrace themselves as a whole. The physical self is just as important as the spiritual self, the emotional self and the mental self.
Those who actively or passively discourage physical beauty from being unashamedly embraced by young girls, teens and women are doing damage – to the solidarity of our womanhood as judgment seeps in, and to the self-concept of those they influence as their wholeness finds cracks.
They are also compromising one of the most essential and joyful parts of being human – the seeking out of beauty.
Humans are wired to seek out beauty. We seek it out in nature, music, art, architecture, photography, food – everything. Most importantly, we seek it in ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we always find what we’re looking for. Why? Because somewhere along the way the definition of beauty in relation to women has become woefully lacking.
We engage with beauty through every sense – we hear it, touch it, taste it, smell it or see it. We can also recognise that it’s imperfect – an abandoned building, a fallen tree, a bustling street, a stormy sea – not known for their perfect form, but breathtaking in their beauty. We know we are in the midst of beauty because something stirs beneath our skin and sometimes the experience is beyond measurement or words.
In relation to women however, the definition of ‘beautiful’ has been strikingly deficient. It’s become all about what we see – smooth lines, flawless skin, perfect forms, measurements and proportions.
We are the ones who are most affected but we are far from victims. Nobody has more power than we do to reconstruct what it means to be ‘beautiful’. But it won’t happen if we pretend beauty doesn’t matter. It does matter. It matters a lot. Just not in the way it has come to be defined.
To ignore it completely, leaves the way open for a relentless assault on the truth about what beauty is.
Beauty is diverse and imperfect. If we don’t acknowledge our own ideal of beauty when we see it, popular culture will proceed unchallenged to saturate our daily life with its own unrealistic photographic definition. It’s a definition that isn’t working for the overwhelming majority of us.
The Evidence
In 2004, Harvard and The London School of Economics (LSE) conducted a global study (commissioned by Dove), to explore the relationship between beauty and well-being. 3200 women aged between 18-64 were involved.
Overwhelmingly, the evidence demonstrated the importance of beauty, with half of all women reporting they felt generally worse about themselves when they felt less beautiful.
In 2010, Dove conducted further research and found that most women are oblivious to their own beauty. Although 80% of women agreed that every woman has something beautiful about her, only 4% considered themselves beautiful. Globally, 54% of women agree that they are their own harshest critic when it comes to beauty.
Beauty – A Problem of Definition (That We Can Change)
The problem isn’t beauty, but the portrayal of beauty as something unattainable, exclusive and inauthentic.
Physical beauty is fed by a number of sources. One is our DNA, but how the world sees us is also influenced by happiness and confidence.
As explained by researcher, Susie Orbach from the London School of Economics,
‘Women regard being beautiful as the result of qualities and circumstance: being loved, being engaged in activities that one wants to do, having a close relationship, being happy, being kind, having confidence, exuding dignity and humor. Women, who are like this, look beautiful. They are beautiful.’
The more we celebrate beauty in its purest, most authentic and diverse forms, the quicker a new marker of ‘beautiful’ can be established. Women want this. In the Harvard/LSE study, 75% of women wanted to see more diversity in the images used to portray beauty. We want to see women of different shapes, sizes and ages. We’re hungry for it. We deserve it. And it’s overdue.
Call Her Beautiful. Then Say It Again
A recent study demonstrated the capacity of the environment to influence self-concept. When women were shown pictures of larger bodied women and told that men considered the images attractive, the women’s own body satisfaction improved.
If this is the effect of a brief exposure to an accepting environment, repeated exposure to messages that reinforce, ‘You are beautiful’, from birth will clearly have a profound effect on self-esteem.
What we are told affects what we believe. What we believe affects who we become. Given the importance of beauty to self-concept and what we project to the world, it’s critical that we start telling ourselves and each other when we see it.
The more we can hear it from outside ourselves, the more the message will be internalised and made our own.
That doesn’t make us needy or dependent on what we hear – nothing could be further from the truth. There is strength and wisdom in the woman who can open up to the environment, take the parts that nourish her and leave the parts that don’t. We are capable of that. The challenge for us is to make a new empowering, acceptable, ample definition of ‘beautiful’ available in the environment for each of us to draw on. We are also capable of that.
The definition of beauty needs to expand so all of us can flourish under the banner. The seeking of beauty will never go away and rather than being something that limits or divides us, redefining beauty will clear the way to celebrate and relish it in all of its imperfect, diverse forms.
Don’t Use the Word ‘Smart’?
Both beauty and intelligence are important. Both inform our choices, guide our behavior and influence the women we become. However, a compelling and widely accepted area of research has demonstrated that calling girls ‘intelligent’, ‘clever’, ‘smart’ or similar can be counterproductive to the nurturing of intelligence in girls.
Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, is a leader in the field and has found that telling girls they are intelligent (‘Well done. You must be really clever!’) gnaws away at resilience and confidence and fosters the belief that intelligence is fixed and cannot be changed. Girls who hold this belief, believe they are either smart or they aren’t, and that hard work and effort will make little difference to the end result. The same results have been found for boys.
Rather than telling girls they are intelligent, what’s critical is empowering them with the belief that they can influence their intelligence – that they are capable, powerful, persistent and hardworking.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Let the beholder be us.
Popular culture would have us believe that beauty is shallow, manufactured and reserved for the genetically blessed. It’s not. It’s as varied and multidimensional as we are – but we need to claim it.
For this to happen, we need to fiercely redefine what beauty is. The definitions will be diverse, because beauty is diverse. They will celebrate the happiness, confidence and self-respect that comes with the full embrace of aged skin and faded scars or dimpled thighs and a curvy form. It will be a beauty that billows from an engagement with life, relationships and above all else, the self. It will be a beauty that will resonate with all of us.
