beauty standard

Last summer, in some kind of identity crisis, I bought this pink sequined dress from Ganni because it was deeply discounted. It was probably somewhere around $100 at the time - I can’t remember exactly. When it arrived, I put it on for a while and tried to understand the kind of woman it could make me. I didn’t own anything sequined for one thing. I didn’t really even own anything pink. I liked the dress but I couldn’t imagine wearing it anywhere. It’s not very versatile. I returned it and a few months later bought a black nylon version of the same dress secondhand somewhere.

When I went to see the Barbie movie a few weeks ago, still half asleep at a matinee and surrounded by women in every shade of pink fast fashion you can imagine, I kind of regretted returning the Ganni dress. I was wearing a pleated black skirt with a safety pin in it and a white crop top and giant platforms - like I had escaped from a Hot Topic ad. No one said “hi Barbie!” to me.

The movie wasn’t that pink anyway, at least not in the way the sequined dress was or in the way that Legally Blonde or Bad Bunny’s “Yo Perreo Sola” video or even in the way that Pepto Bismol is. It left me with a hazy impression of rose-colored plastic decor, similar to the Glossier store or the T-Mobile store, which I guess makes sense for a movie about a doll with very bland aesthetics. The pink wasn’t costume-y or even particularly camp. A lot of the outfits were sourced from Chanel but look broadly identical to the Barbie x Zara collection. Chanel was probably mostly a logistical choice but there is a lot they could have been trying to convey by dressing Barbie in Chanel. Barbie is rich, Barbie is a businesswoman, Barbie wears gingham and tweed, Barbie does “quiet luxury,” Barbie is classy, Barbie is a fascist.

The final accusation is lobbed at Barbie in the film and I’d like to think is the real underlying reason for the brand choice. Chanel is ugly in the same way that Barbie is ugly: corporate, uninteresting, uptight, camp only in a limited way that feels soulless. Coco Chanel was an active Nazi collaborator and her most significant heir, Karl Lagerfeld, an incredibly ghoulish man with what Rachel Tashijan recently called “Polyannaish”sensibilities, was a Nazi in spirit. If this Chanel-wearing Barbie is a fascist, it’s less because she’s blonde and more because she’s so deeply disinterested in how people actually move through the world. It’s also because Mattel is so committed to proving that Barbie is a person (and unproblematic) and not a doll that it also dispenses with all the mystique and pleasure that surround consumption and beauty.

This is basically true of Chanel too. In their pursuit of luxury, timelessness, class (“French woman beauty”, “little black dress”, Jackie O’ and so on), their collections are remarkably uninterested not only in beauty but also in erotics. The erotic is all about deforming the body, about the moment when it is sublimated to desire and becomes indistinguishable from it as an animating force. The much repeated formula that men look and that women get looked at—or that women look at themselves through the prism of a man’s gaze—subjugates erotics to a narrow kind of sexuality, but the pleasure of looking can just as easily be narcissistic. Reducing it to something stereotypical is also to inhibit it, to subject it to a repressive social hierarchy.

Why, you might reasonably ask, should a film about a children’s toy consider erotics at all? But Barbie diverges from other women (and from Margot Robbie) to the extent that her proportions are anatomically impossible and suggest some kind of extreme body modification, a pursuit of beauty that might otherwise be considered grotesque. (Her unlikely measurements were derived from the German doll she was inspired by — a grown-up doll marketed to adult men and created by a toy company known for their Nazi toy soldiers and Hitler action figures.) There is no plastic surgery Barbie, and reducing her to an average blonde woman is in some ways to try to defang and normalize the beauty standard she embodies. Beauty, the film seems to suggest, is mostly about loving yourself.

It made me think of a short story Andrés Barba published in Granta in 2010 about a woman named Mónica who is obsessed with sculpting her body into something new, unrecognizable, almost inhuman. The many operations she has had have compromised her health and her finances. In the street, people look her up and down “disgusted” and “shocked.” Her desire to be looked at, to be noticed, to be seen as different is all-consuming. For a while, each operation feels satisfying and then it isn’t enough. Other peoples’ “eyes tinkle like little bells jingling from her flesh and that brings back her smile; for days now there’s been something new in the world: her body bathed in their looks, but, like acid, something has coursed through her and eaten away the sweetness.”

In the story, she is consumed with wanting a horn implanted on her forehead. She finds an underground clinic that agrees to do it and does sex work to come up with the money. Sick, disassociated, and unhappy, she believes the horn will restore to her body, help her understand how to live in it, make it whole, imbue it with power and desirability. She worries also that it will make her less human somehow. She finds a picture of a man on the internet who has had five silicone balls implanted underneath his face and is fascinated by it. She looks closely at the men she has sex with, “sees each hair follicle, and how each hair plunges its root into their skin and how at the base of each hair the skin sinks down suddenly and their hair enters it like a tiny extraction needle.”

The horn cleanses Mónica, brings her closer to godliness as it were. It is hard to inhabit the body, hard to elude it. A refusal to comply with the regulatory framework of normative beauty standards, to exaggerate it, to subvert it, is also a refusal to participate in a normative framework of looking and being looked at. Extreme body modification is ostensibly an “unnatural” desire but that also suggests that there are natural forms of dysmorphia. That wishing, say, to be blonde when you have no genetic tendency towards it or to have fairer skin or symmetrical features or fuller lips is a normative and understandable desire, subject to an innate and stable idea of what it means to be beautiful. It is what Danielle Carr calls “a virtuosic augmented performance of the natural [….] women should not spend a lot of time or money looking hot — or if they must, they should be discreet about it, because making your complicity in your own oppression obvious is in bad taste. Camp is dead, or at least kind of gross.”

Nature is an oppressive framework. Right wing wellness influencers hawk detoxes from the artificiality of modern life, its denaturing. No GMOs, no seed oils, no 5G, no gender ideology, no vaccines, no denying the power of genetics. But our bodies are slippery things, hard to contain. They develop abnormalities, mutate beyond our control. Stories are full of hybridized people, part animal, part deity, part cyborg, part dead/undead.Their bodies have different rules, defy biology, are impossibly beautiful, impossibly horrifying, impossibly resilient.

In a short story by Ariadna Castellarnau, republished in English in The Dial, a young boy resents and envies his older brother, who has a fish tail for a lower body and a flawlessly beautiful upper body that resembles a “young Elvis Presley.” Girls chase him shamelessly, are reduced to hysterics. The younger brother waits on him hand and foot, bringing ice to cool him off and algae for him to eat. One day he rebels and gets his brother on a diet of human food which deforms his fish body beyond recognition. He then seduces his brother’s very beautiful girlfriend. But even that doesn’t take him where he wants to be. His craving for perfection, to be an object of desire, looked upon, acted upon, is still elusive. He cannot escape subjectivity.

I have never had any form of cosmetic surgery. My body has been roughly the same my whole adult life. Like most people, I have a complex and variable relationship to being looked at and to beauty. Contrary to the pop feminist ethics of self love, the moments when I feel most beautiful are usually when the force of someone else’s desire seems to bring my body into focus, to ground it here and now. This hasn’t stopped me from pursuing other forms of beautification, many of them costly and counterproductive. I have accumulated debt to get chemical polish put on my nails, hardened under a carcinogenic UV lamp. I have spent thousands of dollars on haircuts, on impractical clothing, on exercise classes, on fancy beauty products. None of it has made me particularly beautiful but at times it has made me feel stabilized in my body, made it seem like a thing that is not just decorative, but concretely worthy. Although I generally am open about money, I am ashamed of and secretive about the money I spend on beautifying myself, both because it seems deeply frivolous but also because, as in the Carr piece above, it seems unvirtuous to care so much.

Recently, I bought a pair of fancy platform sandals with thin bow straps. They immediately gave me blisters but the only way to break shoes in is wear them so I did. I wore them a whole day in sweltering heat, running late to my doctor’s appointment after the F train broke down, running back uptown to work. Later, I limped to a party in Gowanus, wandered between rooms, limped home. The next day, my friend saw the bleeding wounds on my feet and told me they looked like stigmata. I was purified, more beautiful, closer to God.