As far as we know, the beauty standard began as far back as the Stone Age. The ‘Venus of Willandorf’ is a statue from this era that features large breasts, hips, and stomach. Scientists figure this statue was most likely used for rituals surrounding fertility, femininity, and eroticism. Since that time, art and media have been used to express and uphold the aspirational beauty standard in each era. The standard varies greatly depending on what’s happening in the world at that time. In ancient Egypt, women were encouraged to be independent and assertive. Ancient Egyptian society promoted a sex-positive environment where premarital sex was entirely acceptable, and women could divorce their husbands without shame. This sounds like a marvellous time in history! If I could go back there, I definitely would. Ancient Egyptians have been credited with the development of cosmetics, and beauty was often regarded as a sign of Holiness. The act of applying cosmetics both when people are alive and dead alike was thought to have magical and spiritual purposes.
Next, we have ancient Greece. During this time, the male form was worshipped. It was proclaimed that women’s bodies were disfigured versions of men’s. During this era, men faced a much higher beauty standard of perfection than women. Natural beauty for women was encouraged as was chastity and purity. It was common for women to wear little makeup and jewellery, those that did were seen as being seductive and manipulative. Roman men liked their women with a light complexion, smooth skin, minimal body hair, and long eyelashes. Following on, there was the Han Dynasty in China. This is where the aspect of small feet in Chinese beauty began and has continued for hundreds of years. During this time, the Chinese culture favoured slim women with long black hair, white teeth, and red lips. Historically, Chinese people have preferred ultra-feminine women, with big eyes, tall noses, a small frame, and of course, a fair complexion. Throughout history, a small face with a pointy chin has been the hallmark of beauty for most Chinese women.
Moving on to the Italian renaissance, it was the wife’s duty to reflect her husband’s status, both in behaviour and her appearance. A full-body, light hair, and white skin were all thought of as being superior indications of beauty. The concept of a woman reflecting the values of her husband was also upheld in Victorian England. This was the age of the corset and during this period, women pitched in their waist with tight-fitting undergarments to give the perception of the desirable hourglass figure. Conversely, in the 1920s, the era of ‘flappers’, came the androgynous look. Women wore bras that flattened their chest, they wore clothing that gave them the look of not having any curves whatsoever. Women cut their hair off, which was one of the first times having short hair was looked at as being beautiful because usually in a lot of cultures, particularly European ones, long hair has long been the desirable beauty standard.
@_thepleasurecentreI shared a great post recently that was entitled ‘Why Fat isn’t a Feeling’ The word fat is an adjective. Its literal definition is a natural oily substance occurring in animal bodies, especially when deposited as a layer under the skin or around certain organs. However, we use this word to describe our feelings. We say that we feel ‘fat’ and the emotions that we’re often trying to express feelings as anxiety, shame, guilt, and frustration about our bodies. When we use this phrase, we realign ourselves back with the preoccupation of eating, shape, weight, and linking all of that to our worth. Society has a strong push for men and women, starting when they’re little boys and girls. Society pushes girls to be pretty and happy and calm and generous and attentive to the needs of others, whereas boys are pushed to be ambitious, strong, infallible, and competitive. Both of those ideas put forth a look that idolizes those values.
I’d like now to discuss some of the problems that have been caused by this aspirational beauty standard. The concept of a beauty standard invites comparison, by ourselves and others. This produces inside us a chronic low-level underlying stress. All of this comparison is our internal voices communicating we aren’t good enough, that we aren’t doing enough to meet the standard. I have some statistics that I’ve researched, and I’d like to share them with you because I found them quite startling. By age six, nearly 50% of girls are worried about being too fat and by eleven, it’s two-thirds. By the end of adolescence, nearly all girls will have engaged in some sort of weight control behaviour, and 44% practice unhealthy weight control behaviours. We think as a society we’ve moved on from some of those weight expectations from the 90s, but those statistics show us there’s still a long way to go.
I have my daughter, who, at around age seven, started noticing that she had a stomach that didn’t fit in with what she was seeing in the media. I had to sit down and explain to her that women are supposed to have fat on their stomachs, it’s there to protect their reproductive organs. It was quite heartbreaking as I’ve always made an effort to encourage body positivity, and she was still so negatively affected. Something I found in my research was interesting in terms of media and how much influence it has. In the book Burnout, which is my favourite book at the moment, there was this piece written about how in 1994 there was no TV in Fiji, it was introduced in 1995, and there were also no eating disorders in Fiji before that time. By the end of 1995, 29% of girls had developed severe eating disorder symptoms, and 13% of those developed those symptoms within one month of watching TV. Everything in the media is aimed at communicating you don’t meet the current ideal beauty standard.
More and more pressure has been put on men for the same type of issues. About one in three people struggling with an eating disorder is male, and that includes binge eating, purging, laxative abuse, and fasting for weight loss. Men are much less likely than women to seek treatment for an eating disorder due to cultural bias and the way society tells men that they have to be masculine and take control. I don’t know about you, but I see a lot more men who are obsessed with bodybuilding, being in the gym and drinking litres and litres of protein shakes as well as spending heaps of money on supplements. The messaging around weight is still an active part of our lives. We’ve all heard the old Kate Moss quote “nothing tastes as good as being skinny”, and most of us know the feeling of going out for dinner and ordering something we don’t particularly want to eat because we haven’t been “good”. We live in a culture where we ask ourselves sometimes daily, ‘have I been good enough to deserve food? Have I done the work I need to be able to eat the way I want? Am I beautiful enough to deserve love?’ What we don’t realize is that these are the basic rights of everybody. We don’t have to be good to have food and love, we deserve them naturally.
We know already that businesses profit from selling an unrealistic aspirational beauty standard. We feel that we’ve got to conform, but the products are designed to be ineffective. To achieve the ideal, we keep going back and buying more or buying something else and it creates a vicious circle. The game is rigged; we are being gaslit. We are the society, each of us contributes to the culture of the impossible aspirational beauty standard — we feel judgment towards people who don’t conform to the ideal; we feel envious and contemptuous toward people that do. Then we’re self-critical about falling short ourselves. This is why we need to take control back into our own hands.
Something else I’ve been reading about recently was quite an eye-opener for me is health and beauty and weight have been mistakenly linked. The BMI is an absolute myth. A panel of nine people developed the BMI scale and seven of those people were employed by weight-loss organizations that had an economic interest in people losing weight. People who are labelled overweight by BMI standards are actually at a lower health risk than people in any other category. The highest level of morbidity is linked to those in the category of underweight. I’ve included here a picture my friend has permitted me to share with you. You can see here in these statistics according to a BMI scale, that she’s in the obese category. Looking at her photos, nobody in their right mind would say she’s obese! The problem with the BMI scale is it doesn’t take a lot of elements into consideration, like muscle weight and bone density, and for my friend here that’s where a lot of what her weight comes from, very little of it is fat. Weight and health aren’t the same. My same friend who works as a financial planner shared with me that she was dealing with a life insurance company which offers a health sense discount based on your BMI. If it’s between 19 and 28 you qualify for an immediate discount. This doesn’t matter if you smoke, it doesn’t matter if you drink copious amounts of alcohol. As long as you fall into this category, you’ll immediately get a discount, which seems quite ridiculous.
What people find when they get older is, that they gain weight gradually, and this is pretty natural. What happens is we have what’s called a defended weight. Like people who are naturally early birds or night owls, we have a natural weight that our body tries to stick to. For people who go through crash diets and yo-yo dieting, what they find is inevitably they go back to the defended weight because this is where their body naturally wants to be.
We have come a long way. There has been a big shift in consciousness about a lot of these issues. Pinpointing the exact moment in history where women started to turn their backs on these expectations is difficult. But from where I sit, I think it started in the 70s but wasn’t heard on a cultural level until the early 2000s. The shift needs to continue and gain momentum. We need to understand now more than ever is we can control it. We have the power to control social media, which is the biggest influencer of aspirational beauty standards. Back in the old days, in the Renaissance days, it would be works of art showing us what beauty looks like. Now it’s every time we turn on the TV or look at our phones and the low-level stress of comparison is still there and it’s still growing.
This is something I’m quite passionate about and I believe we can make a difference as individuals. Naomi Wolf, the author of the Beauty Myth, said “women are being destroyed physically and being depleted psychologically. If we are to free ourselves from the dead weight is once again being made out of femaleness, it is not ballots or placards, or lobbyists that women will need first. It is a new way to see.” This is something that resonated with me. Not only do we feel like we have to comply with these beauty standards we also feel forced to judge others on them as well. My goal is for us to accept our own bodies and those of everyone else. But it doesn’t happen overnight. There are some activities I believe we can start doing now that will have an enormous impact on how we see ourselves and others:
Ask your body what it needs — when you ask your body what it needs and you listen quietly, you will hear the answers. Depriving yourself of sleep or food or love isn’t the answer.
Throw out the scales — don’t weigh yourself unless your doctor needs you to.
Count how many aspirational beauty accounts you follow on socials and unfollow — Something that sneaks up on people is the amount of beauty aspirational influences they have on their social media. Without realizing it, we can tend to follow people we want to look like we strive to be like, and they’re not giving us anything in return except for this stress and comparison.
Get comfortable with being uncomfortable — Because we are judgmental by nature and because we’ve been conditioned to be judgmental, the only way we can lose those judgments is to expose ourselves to images that make us uncomfortable. It might be people you term being overweight as something which makes you feel uncomfortable. It might be older women are something you’re scared of. What I want you to do is once you’ve removed all of those influencers who are giving you nothing by their aspirational beauty standards start adding accounts of these types of people and these types of people who are doing something.
Engage in physical activity for hormone release, for competition, to complete the stress cycle — not for losing weight.
Stop saying “I’m feeling fat” and change that word to the emotion that you’re feeling.
If you’re still with me, thanks for hanging in there. This is a huge topic and one Livestream or blog post can’t possibly cover all the elements that are important. I’d love to hear how you go with implementing some of these activities in your life. In my Authentic Self Facebook group I’ve started a hashtag; #smashthebs, and I’d love to see it gain some momentum.
References:
Beauty From Around The World: Ancient Egypt
Beauty Standards: See How Body Types Change Through History
Retrospective: Women beauty ideals in Art
Standards of Beauty in China
The Pleasure Centre
EATING DISORDERS IN MEN & BOYS
Burnout
The Beauty Myth
Want to know more about how to discover your true self, beyond the layers of what others expect you to be at home, at work, and socially? Join my Authentic Self — The personal revolution Facebook group here — share in a positive and supportive community.
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