I've shown this video before in this blog, but in the spirit of examining what makes an American woman, I've decided to reexamine this expository and enlightening video. Women in America are expected to conform to certain standards of beauty, as are men. Being a woman in America is very different from what women in America are expected to look like. One day in seventh grade, I went with my friends to CVS, and bought a panoply of women's magazines. I bought a few teen based ones, Teen People and Cosmogirl, and then I bought Instyle, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, People, US Weekly, and Glamour. I got home, broke, my last 30 dollars spent on the purchase. I was ecstatic though, and I spent the three hours from 4 to 7, when my parents got home, first reading the magazines and then putting pictures of models and celebrities all over my wall. Literally, all over, the four walls of my room were covered ceiling to floor with magazines. When my parents got home they laughed at my project, joking about how I always found some way to have fun, usually one that involved scratching my walls and peeling paint off with tape. Before these pictures, my wall was covered with greeting cards from my entire childhood, which I unceremoniously ripped off in my haste to cover the wall with magazines pictures. My parents left me alone for a while as I continued to flip through the magazines, but later they called me downstairs for one of "the talks." We had "talked" in the past about boys, about homework, about treating people with respect, all when I had run into trouble at school or camp. I had gone to montessori school for elementary school, so when they released me wild into the public school, I ran into a few obstacles. With every obstacle came a lesson, and this was another obstacle my parents saw in my path. My dad started with asking me questions about what the girls in the photos looked like, what their bodies looked like, what their faces and hair looked like. My dad and I have always been close, so I didn't feel particularly uncomfortable talking to him about how large the models decolotage was or how thin their legs were. Alright, I might have felt a little uncomfortable, but it soon subsided.
My mother sat to the side, trying to be supportive, probably wondering where this talk fit into her profession. My mom is an opthalmologist and cosmetic surgeon. She has saved the vision of countless children born with droopy lids or hurt by dog bites or tree branches, things that often confront children's faces, but she had also fixed a lot of women's wrinkly foreheads. My mom isn't a plastic surgeon, she doesn't give liposuction or perform facelifts or breast augmentations, but the lines get a little blurred when you're trying to tell your daughter not to try to look like models yet dealing with old women trying to look younger. Most of the women I see at her practice are actually really young, within their late twenties and thirties, and still getting cosmetic surgery. My father focused on trying to have me identify how unrealistic the images were. They were photoshopped and airbrushed. He quoted my wonderfully feminist aunt saying, "women have pores. These women are abnormal for not having pores." I pointed out how one of the women had her arms above her head but had not a tiny shadow of underarm hair. It was completely smooth, and the color blended right into the rest of her skin, yet her hair was dark. I remember rolling my eyes a few times, wondering why I was being subjected to this, but I was still excited to participate in an adult conversation with my parents. In the years since then the importance of this conversation has become very clear to me.
I've tried to resist pressure to look a certain way in high school. In middle school, I went with the flow, which tended to lead my friends and I toward trying new beauty decisions, often using magazines as a guide for achieving further beauty. I plucked my eyebrows to the point of near extinction, I tried every face product available on the market to try to make my skin better, I wore mascara and eyeliner and eyeshadow. I didn't do anything extreme, but I definitely tried to change how I looked. Midway through freshman year I had a bout of homesickness that lasted about a week, during which I thought about all the things my parents hoped I'd get out of Andover. I didn't want to miss them, to be sad, so I tried to live up to how they hoped I'd live my life, not so that I'd do what they wanted, but so that I'd be happy. I knew they'd be sad to see the five pounds of makeup I had added to my face since eighth grade, which I toned down over break. I knew they'd be unhappy to know that I woke up a half an hour early in order to straighten my hair. I decided to stop it all. I stopped wearing makeup, cold turkey. I didn't turn my straightener on again for the rest of the year, and haven't turned it on since. I stopped it all. For better or for worse, I've cared less and less about my appearance as time has gone on. I shower every day, and make sure my eyebrows don't get too terribly bushy, but besides for a tiny bit of makeup every once in a while, I try not to worry. I have loved the extra hour of sleep I've received, now I use it for breakfast at Commons. Sometimes my friends comment on how often I don't shave my legs or how long it gets in between shaving, but I laugh it off. Sometimes they call me their earth child or dirty hippie, but I'm okay with it.
I watch this Dove video pretty often, whenever I find myself surfing youtube. The girl that enters the beautification process is ordinary looking. She looks like a normal person, not particularly striking, but perfectly nice looking. By the end of the video she's a whole new person. This new person not only doesn't resemble the old, but is entirely unique. Looking at a billboard and seeing an image of the model, I might think, wow she has nice hair, but there is no girl behind that face. It's all fake, and without Dove I would never have known how fake it all really is. My parents tried to explain it to me, I've listened to my aunt discuss it countless times, ranting and raving about her daughters exposure to photo shopped images such as this one. I never imagined it all went so far, to the point where her eyebrows are being lifted, her lips stretched. It's unreal how fake the girl on the billboard is, and I hope that this video continues to circulate because it shows teenage girls, and boys, that it's important not to try to conform to a standard set by a billboard. Sometimes I wonder why our society demands models to look this way, but I realize often that it's because we want to look at beautiful things. Advertisements tend not to be brown and gray, they're usually bright and colorful. We respond to attractive things, but ugly or just plain ordinary things don't capture our attention as easily or they might even turn us off from buying a product. There is a standard of beauty that is appealing to our eyes and brain processing. Proportions of the nose to the mouth to the neck and so forth matter when our eye glimpses a person. Our brains assesse naturally the way a face looks, and will respond to proportions. The Golden Ratio is the mathematical explanation for this standard, but I think our country has developed a standard of its own. Sure, we might think one model is more beautiful than another if the first fits this Golden Ratio, but we don't want to see a beautiful face with chopped off blue hair and piercings all over the face. We have our own standards of what makes a woman beautiful, and it includes long hair and unblemished skin. Proportions and ratios might go into it, but America has developed its own standards, which are being passed down to teens. We're expected to meet those standards if we want to be beautiful, and to look for them amongst our peers.
