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Content creators are getting candid about how a patriarchal society views beauty as directly correlated to one’s social currency.
On May 19, Portland, Ore.-based creator Brown (@brown19170) spoke about a recent conversation she had with her “classically beautiful” friend in which they discussed the privilege of being conventionally attractive.
“I’ve always noticed this about her and I’ve never been able to tell her just like, ‘Oh, I just wanted you to know I think you’re really beautiful,’” Brown says. “And she was like, ‘Oh, that’s so funny because I used to be really nerdy, like, I used to work in a lab and have these big glasses, and I’ve really changed my aesthetic over the last couple of years.’”
‘As we age and as we look different we lose our power. We lose the kind treatment of others that’s based on our aesthetic.’
Brown’s friend revealed how differently she’s treated now by men on the street. If before, for example, she’d forgotten to load money onto her bus card, she’d be told she couldn’t ride the bus. Now, however, with her “improved” aesthetic, which includes long hair and lipstick, she can ride the bus for free.
“And this is why it becomes so important to women to live up to the beauty standard of the society. It’s not that we don’t like how we look. It’s not that we have a problem with aging,” Brown says. “It’s that as we age and as we look different we lose our power. We lose the kind treatment of others that’s based on our aesthetic. We lose being listened to and some people would do anything to maintain that.”
For women, the process of aging results in feeling as if we are slowly becoming less and less relevant to the world around us. A woman’s relevance, Brown argues, has always been “upheld and maintained by patriarchy.” Women should be empowered for what they know and who they are rather than just how they look.
“And what sucks is that women uphold the system just as much as men do,” she admits. “But they only do it because that’s the only way that they really know how to get power.”
For women to get ahead, they must continue to perpetuate this harmful emphasis on living up to a recognized level of beauty. Often only then are they considered worthy of attention in both social and career-related settings.
Leaat Ramati-Ziber, Nurit Shnabel and Peter Glick, whose research on why women focus so heavily on maintaining beauty regimens was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found a direct link between beauty and opportunity.
“Although beauty norms reinforce gender inequality at the societal level, individual women who attain beauty reap real rewards — such as attracting mates with greater resources or creating a favorable impression in the workplace,” they wrote.
If increased beauty is linked to increased opportunity, how does aging factor into this equation? To put it simply, aging decreases a woman’s currency. Any edge she may have had due to her looks progressively grows duller as she grows older.
With almost 566,000 views and more than 75,000 likes, Brown’s video has clearly resonated with TikTok users.
“I notice this when my weight fluctuates. I was shook the first time someone held a door for me. Bizarre,” @xtrafrosting wrote.
“we lose pretty privilege… some can’t handle that,” @lisafaus commented.
The pursuit of ‘effortless beauty’
On June 1, Rhea Shetty (@rhea.shetty) posted a video sharing her own insecurities in dealing with the standard of beauty. To Brown’s point, Shetty’s perspective is that of a woman who is struggling to feel wanted in a society that subscribes to a narrow definition of beauty.
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“I’m actually genuinely tired of being ugly,” Shetty says. “And I think that it’s not even a matter of, like, ‘Oh, I’m just, like ugly.’ Like, I know that if I put in the work, I can look nice, but I want to, like, look effortlessly nice.”
Effortless beauty, Shetty notes, is likely not as effortless as it appears to be — but knowing this doesn’t make her pursuit of it any less intense.
“And I get it, because I know chances are, there’s a lot of people that I look at and I’m like, ‘You’re so effortlessly gorgeous.’ They probably put in some level of effort to looking that way, but I can’t perceive it as that,” she admits.
“I know you won’t believe me bc of the ‘girls supporting girls’ thing but trust me when I say you are genuinely beautiful,” @vividstone wrote in response to Shetty’s video.
“Girl you are so beautiful it is so clear to me please don’t stress. It takes so much maintenance to look ‘effortlessly’ pretty,” @alphabetown also replied.
“Perhaps the biggest shift was learning why I’d reduced my self-worth to being entirely defined by how I look, and that made me realise how imperative it was to root my self-esteem elsewhere, in the qualities that really define me — my character and positive traits,” Indian British beauty editor Anita Bhagwandas wrote in the Guardian. “Because ugly is an ever-changing, politically charged construct — and the biggest lesson I’ve learned is never to trust those binary categories, ‘pretty’ and ‘ugly,’ don’t actually exist.”
Feeling “less than” is especially common for women of color, and that’s in part due to our society’s Eurocentric values. If you let it, this internalized sense of inferiority has the capacity to negatively affect virtually every area of your life.
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