“Feminist” all too often conjures up images of “ugly”, hairy legged, makeup hating, flannel loving, short-haired, boyish women. Namely, women who embody the rejection of the patriarchal beauty standard and all of the trappings that go with it. There are, obviously, feminists who fit into some, or all, of those categories. Of course, there are also conventionally attractive, shaven-legged, makeup wearing, short skirt loving, long-haired, feminine feminists as well (and not all of them are women). The claim that women have to reject shaving, wearing makeup, and other beauty regimens to be a feminist (or a “good” feminist) is a myth that obscures the actual ideological issues that feminists have with beauty standards.
According to feminist thought, a woman shouldn’t be judged by her attractiveness, and this myth of the “ugly, hairy-legged feminist” does just that — both as a cautionary tale to would-be feminists, as well as a strawfeminist argument that many feminists often feel the need to debunk by citing how attractive they are — all of which just proves how pervasive the beauty myth is.
Thinking about it in another way:
Not all feminists reject femininity, but most reject the notion that it should be a prison and many of us have complex and self-reflexive relationships with our own femininity or lack of it.
What it comes down to is this: dismantling the beauty myth and challenging women’s status as the sex class is a rallying issue for many feminists. However, this is an ideological issue that doesn’t preclude an individual’s choice regarding what to do with her body. This is an important distinction because it intersects with the idea of bodily autonomy, which is a cornerstone of feminist thought. Because, really, feminists don’t care if a woman is feminine or not, but they do care when her supposed attractiveness is used to judge her worth.
Related Reading:
Introductory:
Clarifying Concepts:
- A personal anecdote on the question “to shave or not to shave?”:
The hardest thing for me was taking the step from secretly growing my hair to publicly doing so. Like kristy, I was terrified of being seen and called “gross” — after all, hadn’t I heard that same rhetoric from my father? Hadn’t I heard my friends and family say the same things about other women who didn’t conform properly to the beauty standard? Hadn’t I, myself, once both said and believed the same things?
I was terrified. I was defensive about it. But I did it. I made my point. Right there in Miami, one of the most image-conscious cities in the USA, I put on my short skirt — in the full heat of summer, I was not going to stick to jeans, let me tell you! — leaving my legs in all their hairy glory for all to see, and marched right out of my house.
I had to go to the supermarket. I was with my best friend at the time and, believe me, I was paranoid. “Everybody’s staring at me! They’re judging me! I know what they’re saying, ‘Gawd, look at her. Doesn’t she care enough about herself to try and look good?’ I just want to die!”
But, then, because my feminism had given me the vocabulary to deal with and understand my situation, I told that part of me, “Why is it that going out as your natural self makes you want to die of embarrassment? Why is it that being proud of what you look like by nature must mean that you aren’t taking proper care of yourself? Men are allowed to grow any part of their hair that they please without these comments. That’s holding women to an unfair beauty standard. That’s inequality in action, and it’s your duty to fight it. This is why you’re a feminist. Because women aren’t allowed to feel comfortable with ourselves just the way we are.”
And so the next day, without shaving, I put on another short skirt. And the next day. And the next. I had to have it out with my father a couple of times. I was defensive to my friends and family if they asked about it. But I did it. Every day it got a little bit easier, I got a little bit less defensive, and my family started to accept it as just another quirk from the one in the family who has always marched to her own drummer.
Is there any day where I slap on my skirt in my hairy-legged glory that I don’t feel any anxiety, or any shame? No. I will most likely live and die with those feelings, thanks to the way we are socialized from young girls to feel that our natural bodies aren’t good enough. But I can’t let shame or fear run my life. I won’t let it.
- Differentiating personal choice from “empowerment”:
I still shave, and will occasionally wear makeup if I feel the situation warrants it. But there is absolutely no part of me that feels that this is something I do “for me,” because I have seen the other side of things. This is why I don’t give women a hard time for making themselves pretty — because the alternative is a very difficult road to walk. What I do get upset at is that we should as feminists, celebrate women who capitulate and start making themselves appealing to patriarchal beauty standards. We don’t need to celebrate them–the patriarchy celebrates them well enough.
[Mighty Ponygirl (Feminist Gamers): Feminism Friday: Don’t you wish you feminists were hot like me.] - Taking the wind out of the myth’s sails:
The claim not to be a feminist because feminists are physically unattractive and hairy certainly proves rather than denies the need for feminism. Anyone, but especially a young woman, expressing such a disgustingly misogynist view is in serious need of feminist inoculation. Again I wouldn’t bother arguing that not all feminists are unattractive (some are quite pretty), because this would subscribe to the idea that not conforming to the brutal standards of femininity is very bad. In any case, this statement is really about the fear of questioning the beauty myth and of women who refuse to meet the norms of conventional femininity. Ask him or her why they think resistance to this norm is a source of such revulsion? Feminism can’t stop you doing anything to your appearance, but yes it will encourage you to question the socially constructed rules which invade so much of women’s everyday lives. It will make you feel less comfortable. I suspect that many anti-feminist statements are rooted in a fear of questioning the status quo because it’s perfectly true that feminism won’t make your life easier in this respect. We still live in a world in which western women are, as Mary Wollstonecraft put it in the eighteenth-century, “Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” Not all feminists reject femininity, but most reject the notion that it should be a prison and many of us have complex and self-reflexive relationships with our own femininity or lack of it.
Filed under: FAQ, debunking myths, spot the strawfeminist | Tagged: beauty myth, feminist urban legends
And as for ‘chaos’, there are many who might use that very word to describe the state the US is in now.
Word.
Considering that the “majority” vote in the last Presidential was only a slim margin in most individual states (52-48 in the state of my birth and the state of my residence that year), it seems that we’ve already had leaders who don’t represent the needs or interests of nearly half of all voters.
(That’s not even taking the non-voters or the blocked-from-voting into consideration.)
And yeah… what I’d call chaos ensued.
Tigtog
‘Moderator note: duplicate text deleted – your first two attempts ended up in the spaminator, Marian, and I only just saw them. Sorry about that. ~tigtog April 18th’
That’s OK, Tigtog.
I had 3 goes altogether! The first, April 15th, 9:06 pm, actually appears before your message to me; and the third one, April 18th, 10:53 am, appears after your message.
The duplication doesn’t worry me. However, if you prefer to minimise any confusion, feel free to delete the first post, i.e. April 15th, 9:06 pm.
Done, Marian. Thanks for being patient and understanding!
The basic problem is that culture is constructed to judge harshly women who don’t want to have anything to do with the male controlled fashion industry.
The minute women challenge dress codes impossed on them by employers or patriarchy, this is construed to mean that these women are the police.
Actually, I often call heterosexual women and their overly made up faces the gender police. The women who want to fit in with patriarchy are naturally very uncomfortable about alternatives.
To see so many people conforming to the patriarchal dress codes laid out for women should be an early warning sign that “choice” is a pretty fake idea out there.
[sorry for delayed publication - your comment ended up in the spaminator somehow ~ moderator]
As a graduate of fashion school, this last comment about “patriarchal fashion” rings as something of a buzzword.
Take Yves St-Laurent, for instance. Dubbed the master of modern elegance, the man pioneered every single outrageous and boundary-breaking fashion item for women in the 20th century. He had a deep respect of women and their struggles, and always was a gentleman to them in every way.
Between the facts that a fair majority of men designers are homosexuals, and that they “exploit” women’s fashion in every way possible, going whichever way they feel like, the concept of an all-encompassing “patriarchal dress codes” becomes somewhat ludicrous.
Fashion goes three ways: you follow the trends, you break the trends, or you forgo the trends. If you want to blame fashion of being counter-feminism, blame whoever selects the runway models. Those have a greater effect on public perception of women than individual clothing designers.
Unless their name is St-Laurent.
Really, Fetternity? You insist that homosexuals live in a vacuum untouched by the patriarchy? Not only that, but that everyday fashion is created entirely by couture fashion designers rather than television, pop stars, mall clothing stores, advertising, and so forth? To the point that anyone who says differently is being “ludicrous”?
[...] for managing triggers that are not theirs. You are also defining trans women by their appearance, as if what a woman looks like somehow reflects on her womanhood, as if it’s something she can [...]
i’m a young teenager as well, and i do shave my legs and wear short skirts and makeup, although i bobbed my hair. I’m really new to the feminist outlook, but i’m a strong supporter. I come from a long line of small breasted women, so i stopped wearing a bra to show my “pride.” whenever someone asks me why i don’t wear a bra, i tell them that i’m more than my body parts and that a women isn’t meant to be a sexual object.
Welcome, Rachael D. Always good to see a new feminist dropping by.
Adhering to socially acceptable “femininity” rituals is as much a survival tactic as anything else – it makes it much easier to get a job and avoid bullying from others. There’s no need to drop all femininity rituals in a rush while you’re still sorting your personal feminisms out. Do what feels comfortable for you in adopting countercultural non-conforming, don’t just drop everything out of zeal for feminist purism and then feel miserable or vulnerable.
I feel immensely free through not taking hours each day in personal grooming to make me look like a superfem version of myself. I like dressing up for special parties etc, I just can’t see the point of being expected to put that much effort into my appearance every single day. I’m clean, my clothes are clean and my hair is brushed – why should I feel any need to do more just to be considered acceptable?
Yet other women enjoy the art of personal transformation through grooming, and there is an art to it. Some take it to a degree that makes it another way of non-conforming through being avant-garde. There is no one true way.
There are a lot of older, long posts on this topic so I apologise in advance if someone’s already covered the point I wish to make.
Feminists face many issues. Unrealistic pressure from the beauty industry is one, but there are also others, such as pay inequality, violence against women, and institutionalised sexism. A woman (or man) can consider themselves to be a feminist without campaigning tirelessly on every single issue and modelling themselves as a paradigm of feminist ideology.
Furthermore, small inconsistencies (such as wearing makeup while protesting against the pervasive effects of the beauty industry on females) do not and should not detract from the wider argument. In fact, they serve to illustrate the point well. If even a feminist who is aware of the beauty myth still feels a strong pressure to conform to the standards of beauty in society, then this is further evidence of the pressures mounted upon all women.
yeah i agree with the makeup example. i consider myself a feminist, but its impossible to be on top of your game and fighting and objecting institutions at every point of every day. i don’t have that energy, props to those who do. i still shave my legs, despite that im really lazy about it, go months, and they are hairy at the moment, WHATEVER. i mean i know hairy legged angry women is the stereotype, and that sucks. but it sucks even worse when someone is judged by whether or not they want their body hair or not. some people just dont want hair. we shave our heads, we shave our legs or our pits, we shave our cunts if we like. its one more thing that you do to your own body that should not concern anyone else
On this topic, I have a consistent dilemma. I’m a guy who doesn’t find make-up at all attractive. Yet, I know that a lot of the social pressure to wear make-up comes from positive reinforcement. i.e. Men and women offering compliments to women on their make-up. I know guys who will compliment a girl’s make-up even if they don’t like it, simply because they think it’s what she wants to hear.
At the same time, if I were to tell a girl she looks nice* when she isn’t wearing make-up she assumes I’m humouring her and doesn’t take me seriously.
How do I go about providing positive reinforcement for not wearing make-up, without looking like I’m putting someone down for wearing it? After all a girl who has put effort into applying make-up isn’t going to be impressed if I tell her she looks better without it.
*Complicating this is that telling a girl she looks nice is something I would rarely do anyway. For me being attractive, looking good, and being sexy are three completely different things that may or may not overlap (the first and third rarely do) but primarily that is not on my mind when I’m socialising with women. When I am socialising with girls it’s usually because we share a common interest, and how she looks has zero impact on our enjoyment of the event, and hence isn’t something that enters my head.
This is of course fine until I begin to think that maybe my lack of positive reinforcement (with regard to presenting oneself practically rather than floridly etc.) is actually having a negative impact.
I can definitely see the dilemma, and admittedly some girls are hard to please when it comes to this topic. But if someone told me I looked really nice without makeup, I don’t think I’d automatically take that as someone trying to humour me. While a girl might respond by saying ‘yeah right’ or ‘no way – I hate the way I look without makeup’, in most cases she will still feel stoked with the compliment, and it may change the way she thinks about her makeup-free self.
And yeah, if I’d put a lot of time into my makeup and someone said to me ‘you look better without it’ I’d probably be pissed off, but only because the timing of the ‘compliment’ would be way off and lacking tact. The best bet would be to compliment a girl for a lack of makeup when it occurs rather than when it doesn’t. So, compliment a makeup-free face, but keep quiet when her face is made up if you don’t want to ‘reinforce’ the makeup wearing.
That’s my advice, anyway.
Thanks for that double, that’s useful. I have another question related to this topic.
A high-heel shoe is a garment that restricts movement and causes injury (http://www.ynhh.org/healthlink/womens/womens_6_01.html) in favour of a stylised ’sexy’ look. It seems to me it’s the epitome of everything feminists fight against.
Yet I’ve had a feminist tell me that for her wearing a high heel is just as much a statement of power as her friend choosing not to wear them. She says that’s what she wears to say “I’m a girl and I’m awesome.”
I mean I agree that she should have the freedom to wear whatever she wants, and that that’s a basic tenant of feminism, but I guess I’m confused as to why she would choose that particular item as one representative of feminine power.
This one I don’t really have an answer for. I don’t see how wearing high heels could possibly be a statement of power. They are far less comfortable than ordinary shoes. Most girls that I know who wear high heels do it because they think they are sexy, or because they make their legs look longer. Neither of these reasons are particularly empowering. Perhaps the only power-enhancing factor is that they make you taller, so you command more attention.
I think, if anything, the idea that powerful women wear high heels is a stereotype from the corporate world. It’s a myth. I struggle to view high heels as a representation of female power.
Kandela – If you agree that she has the freedom to wear whatever she wants, then why do you need to understand why she finds high heels powerful? Maybe she associates them with the corporate businesswoman look. Maybe she associates them with King Louis XIV and other powerful rulers who wore high heels. Maybe she just likes the way her legs feels in them. There is no way to know but to ask, but it frankly isn’t your business.
It’s important not to confuse the practice of thinking critically about patterns of fashion and cosmetics and what they say about our culture, and the practice of thinking critically about individual people’s choices of fashion and cosmetics and what they say about an individual person. The former is crucial to understanding how gender codes are perpetuated; the latter is not your responsibility, although you are welcome to think critically about your own choices.
tanglethis – Well, I want to understand for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, I introduced the topic in a feminist context. I was trying to make a point about how culture perpetuates gender schemas and the influence this has on the male:female ratio in traditionally male jobs (in particular physics and engineering). I didn’t criticise her choice in wearing heels (she doesn’t always wear them and this conversation was carried out electronically at a distance of about 15,000 km so I had no idea what she was wearing at the time) but said that the proliferation of an image that wearing shoes that restrict movement and cause injury was undesirable. Basically my argument was that the disproportionate marketing of impractical garments at women reinforced the stereotype that women weren’t practically inclined, and that this had an influence on male:female ratio in practical fields. The result was that I was accused of telling women what they couldn’t do and was accused of being sexist.
Secondly, perhaps I have it wrong. Perhaps I’m not correct in my assumptions about the reasons for certain patterns in fashion. If so the only way to really determine this is by talking to individuals and determining their individual motives. The girl in question is actually quite short, maybe this is the reason she likes heels. Women are on average shorter than men, so it follows that perhaps all women view heels as equalling the height playing field. I doubt this is the case but I may be wrong. (And in any case I would argue that there is nothing wrong with being short, and that pride in being short is a better remedy than high heels.) If the assumptions of society about why women wear heels are incorrect then the first step in educating people of the actual reasons is to determine what the reasons actually are.
Patterns are made up of a collection of individual choices. Often the same decisions are made for different reasons. As time passes the majority reason for a decision may change, if we just look at the result of the decision it’s easy to miss that the reasons have altered. If we fail to examine those individual choices then we are in danger of not only lumping everyone in together but worse, misperceiving the entire trend.
I think the whole feminists are “ugly” thing is just another way to silence our cries for change. Sexism DOES exist and it isn’t going away if we don’t recognize and do anything about it. There is nothing wrong with wanting to feel beautiful without the make up. Having cut my hair back a couple months ago. I cut it super short, and was told I looked like a boy. I kept getting many comments from [male] peers about how they liked longer hair better. Its just what the media has placed in their heads. The sexy vixen with silky long hair, with big boobs in lingerie and high heels. I guess overall I’m just outraged that adopting so called ” male attributes” makes a woman ugly? If we’re ugly with hairy legs, then what are they? Do they know how much pressure women go through in terms of looking as the ” ideal woman”? Plastic surgery, make up, fashion, you name it! They spew it!