theses against preconceived ideas
In truth, this alleged subjectivity of beauty is not really a subjectivity: the evaluation of our physicality is far from being sheltered from the relations of domination, and notably those of class.
Can we discuss beauty? And first of all: when we talk about beauty, what are we talking about?
In this article, it is not a question of reducing beauty to a simple physical characteristic. We are embodied, subtle and above all social beings. Therefore, many other factors than the physical in the strict sense of the term enter into the perception of the aesthetics of others. This is at least what is implied by the expression “inner beauty”, often used to claim that physical beauty is not important.
“The beauty of the soul prevails over the physical beauty”, said George Sand. But are we really capable of ignoring the body of others?
Ask yourself: have you ever thought someone was not your taste and then realized as you got to know them how charming they were?
Aline1Name, 21 years old woman testifies: “We have a tendency, in spite of ourselves and unconsciously, to define someone’s personality at first sight on the basis of their physical appearance. The cliché being that someone ugly would be stupid and mean when in fact it has nothing to do with it! And it’s often by getting to know a person that we realize that beauty goes beyond a simple physique, or face… a person that I find physically very beautiful, but who is egotistical, superficial: there is a lot of chance that I will find her less beautiful with time. “
This testimony shows how we can change our opinion of a person based on their “inner beauty”. Does true beauty go beyond mere appearance? And above all, what are the elements that matter in our opinion of another person? Here is the answer of Tobi2Name, a 27 year old man, when I ask him about his definition of beauty:
Already for me beauty is something subjective. Each person will have his notion of beauty. Let’s not lie: when you see someone you like physically, it’s a factor. But it’s not only that: you have to be able to interact, to talk, to laugh, to have a sense of humor. It goes beyond the physical. The beauty can be in the values of the person, in what he transmits to you on the spiritual, intellectual level. But it’s true that sometimes it’s even difficult to define: sometimes you see a person and you say to yourself that there is something in him that you find beautiful, that you like.
Sometimes, we recognize ourselves in values, in a conception of the world. We share ideas, morals, a lifestyle. We will therefore tend to surround ourselves with people who resemble us, reproducing and reinforcing our place in the social hierarchy. Bourdieu would surely link this to the concept of “habitus”:
Bourdieu explains these regularities by the concept of habitus. Product of our education (and thus variable according to the social classes), the habitus is the whole of the principles incorporated by the individual: way of being, of thinking and of acting… which guide in a non conscious way our choices and make that all our practices have a “family look”, that they form precisely a “style of life”. The habitus is also what makes that we manage to read the practices of the others as signs of their social position.
Recension de The distinction (livre de Pierre Bourdieu) publiée sur Humanities.
“Subjective beauty” is therefore a myth, because beauty is understood according to our place in society. Behind the impression to know the other, we recognize ourselves in fact. The regularities of which Bourdieu speaks, it is this tendency to always go towards the things which one knows and thus to reproduce the social order in place. Our social position has taught us what is beautiful, what is ugly, and the other becomes the reflection of what we have internalized. We will tend to go towards a person who has the same lifestyle as us. This could explain why we seem to believe that looks are not everything. In fact, this so-called subjectivity of beauty is not really a subjectivity: it is simply the intuition that the physical aspect alone is not enough, because it is accompanied by a social appreciation of the other.
But who decides what is beautiful or ugly?
Bourdieu shows […] that lifestyles are a mode of symbolic domination, because they are hierarchical. The members of the dominant class are bearers of the “legitimate taste”: they succeeded in making of their own lifestyle the standard to which the practices of the other social groups can be related. The lifestyle of the popular classes, as for him, is only a repulsor. The “beautiful” and the “ugly”, the “vulgar” and the “refined” are thus social judgments, which refer to practices, ways of making or being unequally legitimate.
Recension de The distinction (livre de Pierre Bourdieu) publiée sur Humanities.
This extract shows us that the physical cannot be detached from everything else, including the social and political sphere. In reality, deciding what is beautiful or ugly is a major issue: it is the dominant ones who decide the standards of beauty, to which the dominated ones will try to conform. This choice is not conscious, of course. The upper classes only set up certain standards for themselves, which are then taken up by the rest of the population as a sign of belonging to these same wealthy classes. In short, an imitation effect. These choices of norms are also often dictated by the economic profits generated: for example, dental bleaching, which has become a norm in the upper classes and which has gradually spread as a sign of wealth. Analyzed through this prism, the rise of cosmetic surgery, gym memberships, fast fashion, make-up and beauty products of all kinds is no longer mysterious: these products are indeed lucrative and flourishing markets, which play on a conception of beauty defined according to the economic profits that result from it. If an individual from a middle-class background will have no problem conforming to this, it quickly becomes problematic for a middle-class or even disadvantaged worker.
Why is beauty a taboo subject?
“Let your adornment not be an outward adornment – braided hair, gold ornaments, or elegant clothing – but rather the inward and hidden adornment of the heart, the incorruptible purity of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great value before God,” we read in the Bible31 Peter 3:3-44. The great religious texts are full of this kind of affirmation. Morally, the body is always linked to original sin. To assume the importance of the body in our social exchanges is to assume the insulting social label of “superficiality”.
We see it very well in our popular adages. Don’t we say that “love makes you blind”? Or that “you can only see well with your heart”? It is rare that people assume the importance of physical appearance, and the few who do are immediately called to order by value judgments.
But can we reasonably blame them? Is physicality really erased by “inner beauty”? What issues underlie this taboo?
We can easily show that beauty has an important social weight. In particular, it is decisive for social integration: for example, it is said that “the first impression is the right one”. Thus, “discrimination based on beauty is probably more difficult to detect than discrimination based on race or gender, because most people are not aware of it. This type of discrimination can thus occur in public places and even in front of millions of people without anyone finding fault with it.”
Socially then, it is clear that our physical appearance influences our integration in society. Even our socio-professional status is impacted by these beauty standards: “The effects of physical appearance on access to employment and salaries are massive and pervasive, especially in sectors requiring frequent interaction with customers. Biases in favor of tall, beautiful, and thin are so ingrained in us that it’s often difficult to fight first impressions.”
The aesthetic standard is a major stake in the life in society, we have shown it. This proves to us that to be aware of it is important in order to have all the cards in hand: it is according to our capacity to correspond to it that a great part of our social life will be decided. But one question remains: how to define beauty?
What does it mean to be beautiful?
Beauty is not surprisingly linked to physical appearance, but it is also accompanied by certain social practices. However, it remains difficult to delimit because it is little discussed, except when it is a question of moralizing it. To try to anchor beauty in a more concrete framework, let us quote Ghigi Rossela :
Beauty care can be defined as a specific set of techniques of the body, as body practices, apparently simple, that aim to improve its appearance, according to the norms of a culture or a community. They are acts that contribute to the social and cultural marking of the body through the subtraction, the addition or the modification of some of its parts: “Even our contemporary Western cultures, behind the cult of the completeness of the body, do not cease to change it by dressing it with muscles, tanning or blush, by dyeing its hair or by pulling out its hairs. [Under no tropic persists the integral nudity offered by birth” […]. The techniques of beauty vary according to the parts of the body concerned, the methods used, the possibility of access to them for the different layers of the population and the meaning attributed to them. Generally, they are addressed to the daily maintenance of the body appearance and, unlike the more radical modifications, are not verbalized in terms of “choice” or “project” of the individual.
Ghigi Rossella, “Beauty”, in: Juliette Rennes ed, Encyclopédie critique du genre. Paris, La Découverte, “Hors collection Sciences Humaines,” 2016, pp. 77-86.
Beauty does not only depend on the appearance acquired at birth. It is also a social indicator because it is accompanied by practices aiming to modify certain parts of the body. Beauty, or at least the practices that lead us to be considered as beautiful, are more or less imposed on us. We see here the stake of the taboo around the beauty: not to discuss it, it is to avoid that we can question it – and it is thus to present as obvious a practice which did not always exist. It is to naturalize, to normalize our relation to the body whereas it is the product of a history and of social and ideological struggles. To take again the Bourdieusian conception: “An unequal relation appears as such only for the one who does not consider it as going without saying. In other words, to make it accepted by the one who undergoes it and who considers it as natural, there is no need to resort to violence, symbolic or not. It is enough for the individual to believe in the dominant values, for him to adhere to them and for him to participate in the reproduction of the social order that dominates him without him being conscious of this domination.”
Where does our relationship to beauty come from?
In the article entitled “Beauty” by the sociologist Ghigi Rossella, we learn that the relationship to these practices is very much linked to the advent of industry and – consequently – to the appearance of the “middle class”. It is in particular at the time of industrialization that beauty passes from an innate attribute to an attribute that one acquires and that one maintains, by means in particular of the purchase of certain products of beauty or practices, like the make-up, the perfume, the hairstyle, etc. A new aesthetic norm emerges, dictated by the laws of the market, emerges in the XXth century:
The manufacturing of beauty products and the development of professional body care services have democratized beauty techniques. From the first decades of the twentieth century, from [a simple gift] of “nature”, beauty became an issue within everyone’s reach: “There are no ugly women, there are only lazy women” was the motto of the cosmetics industrialist Helena Rubinstein. The purchase of manufactured beauty products – powders and then blush, lipstick and eyebrow pencil – was then fundamental for the middle classes who wanted to be modern and respectable and thus embraced commercialized femininity with the conviction that individuality was a purchasable “style”.
Ghigi Rossella, “Beauty”, in: Juliette Rennes ed, Encyclopédie critique du genre. Paris, La Découverte, “Hors collection Sciences Humaines,” 2016, pp. 77-86.
Beauty is then perceived as a product that can be purchased: in other words, beauty becomes a choice. The idea emerges that being beautiful depends only on oneself, that beauty reflects our inner state and that being ugly is being lazy. To rephrase it in another way: to say that beauty is a choice, it is to justify the discrimination on the physique. Because finally we do not discriminate only a body, but an attitude: laziness. And let’s remember that laziness is very badly perceived by monotheistic religions, and especially by the Bible. To associate beauty with work, and ugliness with laziness, is to anchor beauty in a moral framework: to be beautiful is to be good, godly, and hard-working. Beauty shows our mental strength, and therefore our value.
When we think about it, we quickly realize that the “purchasable style” that Ghigi Rossella talks about has never been so palpable as today.
Aline4Name. confirms that the relationship between beauty and care practices is very deep-rooted: “I don’t think there is really any difference between beauty for a man or for a woman, I think it’s about taking care of your face, your skin, your body…”. We see that the practices related to the perception of beauty have been imposed, naturalized. We are no longer in an innate beauty, but in a beauty that we must strive to actively create: buying and using beauty products is today not even debatable, otherwise it is choosing to be ugly.
If at the beginning the main public of this marketing of beauty was mainly women, some men are today targeted by the beauty market although, according to Rossella, they are less affected. Indeed, men can suffer some discriminations because of their physical appearance: the size, for example, is an important factor in their professional insertion. Nevertheless, no cosmetic product can correct this situation: the size does not require them to invest in beauty products. It seems therefore that the problem of cosmetics is mainly reserved for women.
Ghigi Rossella also talks about another widening of the public of this commercial beauty: the seniors, the very young, the working class are added to the list of victims. But what are the consequences of this? The new generation is, especially through social networks, bombarded with images of unrealistic bodies and advertisements for products that are supposed to make them beautiful. We learn to see ourselves as a problem to be solved.
Nina5Name, 20 years old, tells us about her relationship with cosmetics, which started at a very young age: “I started buying cosmetics when I was 11 years old. It was facial skin care (Claire’s masks, creams, etc.) because I had acne. There were also products for my legs. I was criticized a lot because of my hair, so I was looking for ways to remove it (like depilatory creams), but since I was doing it badly and secretly, it was causing a lot of reactions on my legs. I would then go and buy products to moisturize my skin in department stores, which were not adapted to my needs. I didn’t dare go to a pharmacy to ask for help. The choice came from me, I was the one who wanted to cure all these ″problems″.”
Conclusion
Throughout the article, we have shown the origin of the myth of the “inner beauty”: the appreciation of the latter would be in fact the manifestation of our social class pushing us to like what resembles us, and thus to appreciate people of our social environment, pushing us to reproduce the established social order. We also showed the impact of the moral taboo which prevents the individual from questioning the practices which one associates with the beauty. What is beautiful is so only because a certain privileged fringe of the population has decided so, and that the rest of the population does not question these practices of beauty which are harmless for a bourgeois, but expensive for the popular class. Wanting to correspond to them ends up becoming a burden in terms of time or money, even though this domination is not conscious by the bourgeois. Reflecting on this allows us to have some perspective on certain practices that are booming, such as the fashion for dental whitening or false eyelashes, to name just two tiny parts of a flourishing and ever more diversified market. We can first question the impact of these products on the health of the users, as shown by the testimony of Nina who had skin problems because of the products used. Without forgetting the long term health impact of such practices! We can also question the economic effect on the users, with more and more expensive and invasive techniques, generating consequently more and more profits for the industrialists and a greater and greater expense for the working and/or middle classes in order to conform to the new rules of the game. Finally, there is still the question of the individual’s responsibility. By saying that it is “enough” to buy and apply beauty products and techniques, we tell the individual that he is guilty of his physique, and that he should conform because he can only blame himself if he does not correspond to the current standard. Looks become our calling card saying, “I’m mentally strong, I’m rich, I’m hardworking.” And to refuse the straitjacket of beauty is to be discriminated against in one’s social and professional life. But to take this individualistic point of view is to forget who creates the norms: the industrialists and the bourgeois – even if, once again, they do not do it with a conscious aim of domination. It is also forgetting that by discriminating against ugliness in the job market, we are in fact discriminating against the working class who cannot afford to conform to these norms. It is to democratize a modification always greater of its physique, with a vision of this one as being an external projection of our social value, and of our moral value.