The Unintended Consequences of Pursuing Flawless Beauty

Last fall, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City held a special contest :  play casino to win.  But not to win money, to win cosmetic surgery processes ! Yes, in the “Nip, Tuck and Lift Sweepstakes”, the lucky winner would gain $25,000 for plastic surgery.

Not surprising considering our society’s focus on beauty (even though the lucky winner chose the cash prize instead of the surgery).  Just consider the many shows like “Extreme Makeover”, “The Swan”, or “I Want a Famous Face” in which the contestant’s unattractiveness is brandished and then exorcised by an extreme makeover.  The principle is clear: it’s decided she must look like someone else rather than herself for any hope to seduce or even have a regular life that is no longer so unhappy or full of rejection.

In our performance society, beauty is an arm, an asset, even a debt to be paid and without which an individual can be severely handicapped.   Professor of Economics Daniel S. Hamermesh recently published his studies in Beauty Pays in which he found that being less attractive can actually make you earn 10 – 15% less whereas remarkably thin women can earn $2,000 more each year than the average woman on the job.  For thin men, their salary averages less than $9,000 per year compared to their heftier colleagues.

Across Western society, there’s a great amount of anxiety about body image.  One 2012 study in New Zealand showed 86% of the 1500 women surveyed think about their weight daily.  In the UK, 75% of women and 80.7% men talk in ways that promote anxiety about their body image by referring to perceived flaws and imperfections, and children are increasingly younger to begin worrying about size and shape.  For example, according to the APPG Report on Body Image released this week, by the age of 14 half of girls and one third of boys have been on a diet to change their body shape (8 years old is the average age for a girl’s first diet).  Teenagers are particularly susceptible, pushing 70% of teenage girls to avoid participating in certain activities - including going to school - because of body image anxiety.

We’ve known about this for some time and benefitted particularly from Naomi Wolf’s great work exposing the “Beauty Myth” back in 1991… but Western mentality continues to be stunned by it and duped into servility. 

And because our performance society is exponentially growing with the media age, most everyone is getting cornered into building their projected identity, a kind of still-life identity they package and market… but which causes people to suffer all the more out of either fear or frustration of not having a body that’s adequate and/or in phase with whom they want to be (project to be) and how they want to be accepted.  With current technology and science, we’re able to resolve some of the issues to give us our best chances for feeling good about ourselves and for succeeding in what we choose to do.  After all, when a product isn’t selling, we change the packaging to help it hook more consumers.  It’s all fair play in our practice of “marketing me”.

That’s why so many speak with admiration of these kinds of procedures as Self Empowerment.  “She did it for herself,” they say.  “She was no longer embarrassed about herself.”  “She really gained in self confidence.”  And others comment, “all the power to her!”

And all of this is so pervasive that instead of liberating women from the beauty myth, we’re simply turning to men as a relay, “call it victor’s secret”.  Alan White, a professor of men's health at Leeds Metropolitan University, said: "These findings are worrying but not surprising. There's been a big increase in the numbers of British men having cosmetic procedures such as a nose job or removal of breast tissue; that's gone from almost nothing to quite a significant industry over the last 10 years. All this fuels the idea of the body beautiful and encourages a quick fix.

But is this really a story of Self Empowerment?  Or is this actually emptying us out of more qualitative possibilities?  And what are the unintended consequences?

1^st problem:  beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.  This leaves us beholden to others’ tastes and expectations rather than our own.   Furthermore, this acceptance (or ostracism) is unpredictable for, as David Riesman pointed out already back in the 1960s, the “other” can just as easily change his/her mind.  As a consequence, the fluctuations of subjectivity (or even just cattiness) end up making the quest for beauty actually disempowering.  It is never one’s to own.   

Relooking “coaches” and “consultants” say that changing one’s appearance is only cosmetic and doesn’t change “who you are” (still the same person) it seems clear that deciding to look like not oneself must come at a great emotional cost – even if the person enjoys the new attention, its seems probable that the relationships built post-relooking are tainted by the fact that without this look (disowning of one’s former appearance), the relationship would never have began.  That seems like a lot of unnecessary baggage to carry.  This strategy is stated to help people feel in greater phase with their true selves.  But it really amounts to picking oneself apart to look more like what we believe to be a gold standard to beauty.

2^nd problem:  beauty is ephemeral.  As ever evolving beings, our morphology and physical aspects continue to modify, leaving punctual beauty a tale of constant maintenance.  Be it cosmetic surgery or medicines, each have a “shelf life” and require regular renewal – and, of course, a renewed budget.   Furthermore, Vivian Diller, psychologist specialized in beauty and self-image, has found it’s a slippery slope: one surgery generally leads to more.  Getting eyelids done can highlight the need for neck surgery, etc.   A thirst for perfection is rarely quenched.   As a consequence, we become caught in a cycle of preservation and conservation… and, above all, a cycle of dissatisfaction and perfectionism… rather than nourishing our own interior beauty, growth, development.

3^rd problem:  current quests for beauty fragment the body.  If you look at the cover of almost any women’s magazine, you’ll see suggestions and promotions on how to change your buttocks or your thighs or your double chin or your breasts.  There’s a new product out that’s working wonders called Cellulaze,  a laser technology which can help you “zero in” on cellulite in order to banish it.  Here’s the sell:  Perfecting bits and pieces of our bodies, one piece at a time.  What a tayloristic idea of the body!  Studies have shown that people report increased satisfaction with the body part on which they had surgery but results are mixed on whether plastic surgery boosts their self-esteem, quality of life, self-confidence and interpersonal relationships in the long term.   

The point here is that we should be focused on the whole of the body, with a holistic approach to the body to go beyond only the physical and momentaneous to incorporate the many facets of the person.  Consider the Japanese economist Takuro Morinaga who has proposed to tax good-looking men due to their “seduction monopoly” and therefore help more homely men find wives by giving them a financial advantage in the seduction game.  Sounds a little crazy but the debate is now open and even being considered by Daniel Hamermesh mentioned above as a means to fight workplace discrimination based on looks.

But who decrees who is ugly?  And shouldn’t these men be working on their inter-relational and interpersonal skills to help themselves find a wife or a job rather than trying to quantify an ugliness handicap?  A person is a whole, not just a morsel.  We should synergize our personal resources instead of reducing and fragmenting ourselves into isolated bits and pieces.  After all, who can really determine the reasons behind one person earning more than another?  Maybe it’s only a question of beauty… but it’s likely that poise and confidence play an even bigger role.  As long as our attention is diverted to perfecting bits and pieces, we can’t build overall confidence. 

4^th problem:  normalized beauty as a prerequisite.  As David Le Breton has pointed out:  our society gives us the impression that we are responsible for our looks / the face we show.  Going even further, sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky has remarked that there is no longer anything tabou against wanting to improve one’s image… and that, on the contrary, what is now becoming “obscene” is to appear old or ugly considering the options we have at our disposal. 

The farther we push this folly of perfection, the more locked into it we will all become.  I am a regular-bodied woman somewhere between slim and not quite so slim.   What I would call “normal”.  But I have already found myself in group conversations in which all the women were slim to skinny and “joking” about going together to Morocco for promotional liposuction.  That these particularly thin women feel compelled to pursue liposuction is already disheartening enough; but what pushes my buttons is the ideal they’re seeking would make me abnormally fat.  On another occasion, an entirely different group was conversing one day about breast enhancement surgery, listing the women (most of whom were professionals, educated, married, and mothers) who had undergone the procedure – each time with some great rationale:  she had become so embarrassed, she hadn’t felt like a woman anymore, or having small breasts made her feel handicapped, abnormal.  And everyone applauds the great self empowerment the enhancement surgery has brought her. 

But did anyone consider the causes behind such self-dissatisfaction?  How does a “self” get so caught up in breast size?  And, if everyone carries a cup C, D, or E (because bigger is again abnormal), how will any selves be able to avoid it in the future? 

Another example:  Asian women’s eye-shape surgery and leg lengthening.  There’s debate as to whether it’s for meeting Western beauty ideals or if it’s their own beauty ideal but, to me, it illustrates clearly the self-rejection for which our Beauty god is being misused. 

For please don’t misinterpret my message:  beauty is a wonderful and enchanting aspect of our human lives.  So is feeling we look attractive.   So is seduction (even if more and more scientists are unveiling that attraction is also greatly determined by auto-immune system compatibility and other biological traits).  It would be naïve and even a shame to pretend beauty doesn’t or shouldn’t play a role in our lives.  The issue here is that Beauty has become Monotheism… and that we need to re-empower diversity.   

The current Beauty Monotheism is a great cloning machine that is anti-diversity, anti-difference, anti-individuality (a great paradox as we pretend that individuals play the beauty game to fulfill their individuality!).  We may use the individuality & empowerment excuse but the fact is that it’s conformity at work.  More and more often, we see other ethnicities in movies and modeling … but somehow they all look alike.  Even the beauty pageants in India are prepared and judged according to Western (and Caucasian) characteristics. 

As far as I can see, it’s our performance society forcing us to hook more “consumers”, and which can be counterproductive for our real need for deep and enriching relationships with others.   

But must we please and seduce EVERYONE?  I’ve already written about the “Confirmation Maze” and this trouble of needing positive feedback from everyone on their projected, still-life, identities. 

And must we be only consumables?  Bit by bit?

Monotheistic Beauty doesn’t follow such rigid standards when it comes to inter-human relationships… although it could become that way if we have never doted ourselves on anything with more quality and worth than just appearances. 

Above all, these short term fix-it strategies push us into a position of dissatisfaction and a posture that is very unforgiving of ourselves and of others (who, in turn, are unforgiving of us). 

And here’s the big question:  should the mission of our societies in which each citizen is expected to contribute come down to this type of quest for not just perfection but flawlessness? 

Is that the value that can best serve us?  As a society?  As a species?

Flawless beauty is divisive, stoking competition and egocentricity, it’s a centrifugal force that is far from optimal in a polis where we come together and cooperate according to ideals (gesellschaft) rather than tribal confirmations tied only to blood lines (gemeinschaft).

How can our society move forward when a disproportionate amount of time, energy, and other resources are being hostage to flawlessness? 

I will develop this further in later blogs but suffice it say here that this Monotheistic Beauty is a false god who will necessarily betray us individually… and, more importantly, collectively.  Let us put our minds, our resources, our intelligence, our companies’ Research & Development to more constructive products and services than quick-fix, enslaving beauty.

Talk you next week, for another bite of the apple! 

- Eve