Abstract
Psychologist Renee Engeln’s Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women addresses the roots of this phenomenon and the consequences of living in a culture that objectifies women. As I began reading, examples of beauty sickness became apparent all around me—from “fat talk” during an interaction at a doctor’s office, to appearance monitoring of girls at an elementary school event, to the now-ubiquitous “skinny arm pose” that Engeln identifies on social media. Engeln studies this pervasive and pernicious emphasis on beauty for girls and women in order to push back against it and ultimately to enable women and girls to, in her words, “turn away from the mirror and toward the world” (p. 329).
Beauty Sick is separated into five main sections: (1) defining and discussing beauty sickness, (2) looking at what beauty sickness does to girls and women, (3) exploring how the media feeds this sickness, (4) highlighting how the current methods of fighting beauty sickness are unsuccessful, and (5) outlining effective ways to fight beauty sickness. Citing a variety of sources, including findings from her own research lab and other scholars’ work, in-depth interviews that she conducted with 21 girls and women (ranging in age from 7 to 58), examples from the media, and anecdotes from her own life and teaching experiences, Engeln defines beauty sickness as “what happens when women’s emotional energy gets so bound up with what they see in the mirror that it becomes harder for them to see other aspects of their lives” (p. 7).
The stories of one or two interviewees are highlighted in each chapter and frame Engeln’s arguments throughout the book. We meet women like Gabrielle, who were taught from a young age that beauty is a key to their “power” (though Engeln questions whether passively being judged by others can be seen as real power), and women like Sofia, who were catcalled repeatedly by strangers and faced negative emotional consequences as a result. We meet high school and college students as well as adult women who say that body shaming and being objectified by others eventually leads to self-objectification and spending a great deal of time and money on these beauty practices that reflect and promote beauty sickness. Engeln discusses the influence of a range of media (from advertising and television to Instagram and websites that offer “fitspiration” and “thinspiration”). The sheer cumulative impact of this accounting of beauty sickness is powerful. It paints a stark picture of the gendered dynamics of this cultural phenomenon.
Since Engeln documents how efforts to fight beauty sickness (such as media literacy and advertising campaigns like Unilever’s Dove Campaign for “Real Beauty”) have come up short, I suspect that undergraduate readers of Beauty Sick will appreciate that the final third of the book is dedicated to solutions. The ideas are wide-ranging and rooted in extensive research, particularly, psychological surveys and laboratory studies. Some of the solutions that Engeln describes include being “gentle with yourself,” limiting exposure to beauty-focused images, and focusing on what one’s body can do rather than what it looks like. While these strategies are meant to “turn the volume down” on beauty so that attention can shift to other concerns, sociology faculty and students will recognize that these are primarily individual-level solutions. Ideas like practicing self-compassion and avoiding body talk may lead to lower levels of self-objectification and higher body satisfaction among women and girls (as Engeln finds), but it leaves the cultural dynamics and systematic oppression of women in place. This could lead to some engaging discussions with students about the feasibility and efficacy of these solutions and could be used to push students to think about how cultural change happens and to explore the dialectical relationship between structure and agency.
Engeln is up front about the book’s limitations, stating that she interviewed only cisgender women, most of whom were college educated. Beauty Sick would also benefit from a more nuanced analysis of the intersections of beauty, race-ethnicity, and sexuality. There are passages in which Engeln begins to delve into how beauty sickness can affect women of color and white women in different ways. One example is when she discusses double-eyelid surgeries with Jaimie, who is Korean American. Another is when she shares the experiences of Sasha, a black woman who was adopted by white parents and grew up in a predominantly white community, where ballet teachers picked on her and she felt like her hair was the problem rather than her parents’ lack of knowledge about how to style it. Pairing Beauty Sick with texts such as former American Sociological Association president Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s (2009) edited volume Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters or studies that specifically survey women of color (Capodilupo 2015) would expand these conversations by addressing the complexities of race and gendered beauty ideals and how women of color negotiate conflicting beauty ideals. Engeln’s interviews also do not include any women who identify as non-heterosexual as far as we are told, and some of the lab studies she cites are predicated on heterosexist assumptions (e.g., a study in which Engeln hired only undergraduate men to give women subjects a compliment and then track how these compliments affected their self-objectification). Other studies that have looked at how living in a heterosexist context affects queer women’s body image could be assigned to expand dialogue about beauty sickness (Watson 2015).
Beauty Sick takes on a topic that is relevant to introductory and upper-level undergraduate sociology courses, especially ones focused on culture, media, social psychology, and gender inequalities. One of the strengths of this book is that it lends itself to engaging classroom discussions and activities. Engeln herself intersperses ideas for classroom exercises and resources that sociology faculty could utilize in their own courses. For example, while addressing marketing and the multi-billion-dollar makeup and beauty product industries, she outlines an exercise in which she asks students to calculate how much they spend on beauty products yearly. Her students consistently discover that the women spend three times more on average than the men do (pp. 120–21). Later, in a discussion of the mainstream media, Engeln cites Jean Kilbourne’s Still Killing Us Softly, the third installment in a film series that is so popular that it has been updated to a fourth installment and is widely used in undergraduate sociology classrooms. The film would complement the book since it provides visual examples of how advertising promotes beauty sickness (Jhally and Kilbourne 2010). In addition, Engeln’s extended discussion of evolutionary versus cultural factors that generate beauty ideals could be used as the basis of a classroom debate in which students are tasked with evaluating the evolutionary arguments and contrasting them with Engeln’s statement, “There is nothing ‘natural’ about the current beauty climate. Human evolution does not provide an excuse for this culture” (p. 242). Finally, the book could be added to a syllabus for an upper-level seminar in cultural or gender sociology (see, for example, Mieras 2010), and complementary classroom activities could explore topics related to consumerism, social class, and beauty (Medley-Rath 2013; Rosen and Synder 2013).
Beauty Sick offers an opportunity to teach undergraduate sociology students to “see the strange in the familiar” and to analyze the causes and consequences of a cultural phenomenon that sustains gender, class, and racial inequalities.