Abstract
Perfect Me takes up a topic that has been the focus of feminist scholarship for more than three decades: the demands of the contemporary beauty ideal and the harms that many beauty practices entail. Since women have historically been the main objects of these ideals and practices, it is not surprising that feminists have explored the connections between beauty and gender exploitation and other forms of inequality. Heather Widdows takes up this discussion once again, arguing that philosophers have been missing from the debate and that what is needed at this particular moment in time is an ethical approach to beauty. There are four reasons for this: first, beauty has become an ethical ideal through which individuals increasingly judge themselves and one another as morally good or bad; second, the current beauty ideal has become dominant, making it harder for people across the globe to resist or reject it; third, the beauty ideal is powerful because it is part of how people construct their identities and, in particular, imagine how they would like to be; and fourth, the beauty ideal has become so coercive that non-conformity is not an option. The outcome is that more is required in order to be ‘normal’ and, indeed, the new normal is perfection.
Widdows takes issue with what she calls ‘traditional accounts’ of beauty practices that privilege gender and blame men for women’s involvement in harmful practices. She argues that since men have increasingly become vulnerable to beauty norms, arguments of gender exploitation through beauty practices have been undermined. And, finally, these earlier feminist accounts have not done justice to the pleasures of beauty and why it matters so much to individuals. Widdows would like to see solutions for the very real harms of some beauty practices, yet she prefers solutions that are ‘positive, life-enhancing, celebratory, and communal; not divisive, critical, victim-blaming, or individual’ (p. 10).
To this end, she adopts an approach which is, in her words, both philosophical and ‘scattergun’ (p. 14). She draws upon a wide range of sources, from moral philosophy to psychology, sociology and cultural studies as well as many examples taken from the media. She uses this empirical material in an illustrative rather than scientific way in order to focus on trends and general patterns.
The book is devoted to exploring how the new beauty ideal differs from earlier ideals. The beauty ideal has become global and, for this reason, homogeneous. Thinness, firmness, smoothness and youth are required of women around the world. This beauty ideal has not only become more uniform and widespread, however. It is also more demanding and requires more effort to attain.
In the first half of her book, Widdows brings together a wide range of empirical examples to justify these claims. More and more women are under the sway of the beauty ideal. Older women not only have to monitor their appearance well into their eighties and nineties, but they have to be careful not to overdo it. (‘You should not be “mutton dressed as lamb” ’, p. 64). The availability of Botox for smoothing out wrinkles and cosmetic surgery for lifting sagging breasts only increases the pressures on women to keep working on their bodies. These trends not only affect women in the so-called Western world, but have become globally ubiquitous. Widdows does not subscribe to the view that cultures have their own beauty ideals (as, for example, some have argued, citing the preference for fuller women’s bodies in Africa or the absence of anorexia nervosa among US women of colour). She argues instead that beauty trends are ‘converging’ with all women across the globe wanting to look more or less alike. While she acknowledges that this ‘sameness’ has many of the ingredients of a white Western look, she rejects analyses which see Westernization and compliance to racialized Western or imperial norms as the culprit (see, for example, Holliday et al., 2015). She sees the global beauty ideal as ‘a mixed ideal’, a kind of ‘global mean’, towards which beauty trends are converging’ (p. 94). ‘This ideal is one that no racial group can embody without some ‘help’. White women are just as unable to attain the beauty ideal without intervention as Asian and black women are’ (p. 93). In addition to affecting more and more people worldwide, beauty practices have become more intensive. What was formerly ‘good enough’ in terms of appearance has now become a problem requiring attention and procedures, often surgical, which would have been considered exceptional and not worth the risk just a few decades ago.
In the second half of the book, Widdows adopts a more philosophical stance and this is where she is at her best. I especially liked her exploration of how the beauty ideal affects our conception of self, whereby we approach our bodies imaginatively, as vehicles for the transformation of self and the realization of desire. This is very helpful for understanding why beauty practices can be pleasurable and desirable, even when they are harmful and dangerous. They help us imagine the kind of person we would like to be. I agree with her conclusion that a ‘just say no’ approach to beauty that ignores its attractions can only lead to ‘false theories and bad policy and practice’ (p. 10).
While Perfect Me has much to recommend it in terms of clarity and accessibility, I also have some reservations.
First, Widdow’s claim to have provided a novel, philosophical take on beauty is a bit of a stretch. Perhaps I have been around too long, but, as I recall, the early critiques of the beauty system were often written by feminist philosophers (Bartky, Bordo, and Young, just to name a few). While the beauty system has, indeed, become even more widespread and pernicious than many of them feared, their arguments were not essentially different than Widdows’. Moreover, many feminist critics, myself included, have argued against a victim-blaming stance when it comes to beauty (Davis, Gimlin, Pitts-Taylor, and many others since). It would not have detracted from the book to build on this work rather than to claim to be doing something completely different.
Second, Widdows’ conviction that because men are using beauty practices, gender is no longer relevant seems misplaced. Gender has never only applied to women. Men’s involvement with beauty ideals and practices, insofar as they are implicated in their identity projects, will presumably also have gender dimensions. This will, therefore, necessitate a critical analysis of how men’s body ideals and practices are gendered. Moreover, even though men may be ‘catching up’ when it comes to involvement in beauty practices, this does not mean that beauty ideals and practices have the same consequences for men and women and do not need to be analysed in terms of gender and other power relations based on, for example, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and national belonging.
Third, while I would agree with Widdows’ critique of oversimplified explanations of the ‘cultural imperialism’ variety when it comes to the globalization of beauty, I was not convinced by the ‘trend analysis’ she puts forward. For me, this smacks too much of marketing or social psychological approaches to the beauty culture which, almost by definition, flatten out contradictions and differences. Moreover, her focus on trends precludes looking at the local contexts in which people actually do beauty and how they negotiate embodied differences and contradictory practices. In this respect, I think her analysis would have been strengthened by more reliance on sociology and anthropology for her empirical examples rather than psychology and marketing research.
Despite these reservations, Perfect Me is well-worth reading for anyone who is concerned about the importance of beauty in modern life and the imperative to develop critical perspectives for thinking about it. It sets out the questions that we need to be thinking about and does so in a way that makes it clear what is at stake in our search for ever-more-perfect bodies.