On Beauty
I've been thinking of this the past few days, because of some stuff jimhines has said on his blog, and because of a review of Deerskin that went up a few days ago, and because of this post from the Lazy, Self-Indulgent Book Reviewer, and because I just finished The Last Unicorn, but it is yuki-onna's post that was the tipping point, the thing that made me have to write.
I cannot decide what order I want to post these thoughts in. It's absolutely paralyzing. I suppose I should do the heavy lifting first.
I am now quite literally two of myself, as in if I lost exactly half of myself, I would be right about what I consider my "ideal" weight. That ideal wouldn't even be particularly thin; it would be roughly my sister's body type, which is a top-heavy size 6. (We're not tall.)
But of course, our society being extremely fucked up about weight, the single year in my life that I was essentially that size I still considered myself grossly fat and wore baggy clothes to hide myself. By the time I figured out how to properly dress to my advantage I was fifty pounds heavier and it was far more work, and it's just gotten worse since then.
When I was at my most depressed, my weight was the failing I threw up at myself most often; after all, there wasn't really anything else to complain about -- I was always top of my classes, I was a good daughter, a good friend, a good person, overall, and I wasn't lost to those facts. I could castigate myself for being selfish and self-absorbed, but those comments didn't have much sting unless I was really far down in a well, and I could never call myself stupid. All I had to hold against myself was my weight, but that easily outweighed everything else I did; in my mind, I was disgustingly fat, and therefore a failure, and UGLY, which is the worst sin of all, and so I was entirely unworthy of love, which made it not at all surprising that nobody did love me.
Hell, that chain of logic still has some hold over me, even after eight years of daily proof that I am loved.
And you know what? This is one thing I can entirely blame my parents for.
Because it IS their fault.
My parents are as weight-obsessed as the rest of our culture. My mom has been exactly the same weight since high school -- 95 pounds. She had some health crises a couple years back and dropped down to 89, a weight at which she was quite literally faint if she went more than a few hours without a snack. Even now, she puts off the colonoscopy she's supposed to get because she knows her body can't handle the day of fasting it requires. And now matter how much evidence I put in front of her, she is proud of her weight. She'll say she would be happier with three (3!!!) extra pounds of cushion, and it's true, she probably doesn't need to weigh a lot more than that because she's only 4'11, but. . . *headdesk*
My dad is my "fat" parent. . . meaning he is a whopping 30 pounds heavier than he was in high school. He wasn't even that until the last few years; for my entire childhood he was around 190 at 5'10" and carrying a fair amount of muscle because he has a physical job. But all my life my mom has been on him about eating better, exercising more, losing weight. . . and even though he complains that she's just as unhealthy as he is because she's so skinny, he can't summon any force to his argument.
(An aside: They also both smoke. I don't. I hate all the people who pile on smokers and blame them for everything evil under the sun, but c'mon. If we're really talking about what's healthy, even being two of myself doesn't compare to two packs a day for forty years.)
And of course, they're just a product of their parents. . . every time I visited my dad's mom the first thing out of her mouth was "You've gained some weight, haven't you?" When I was eight and growing taller I told myself that's what she meant and put on a smile, but I knew that wasn't the sort of weight she was talking about. My mom's parents weren't so blatant, but my grandma on that side was constantly commenting on which family members had gotten fat, and complaining about the ten pounds she put on after retiring (I think when she died she might have weighed 115 pounds).
But all that. . . that I can grow away from. I know that I was in roaring good health, no matter what the scale said, until the last fifty pounds or so; and even that weight is only "bad" for me because it's making my latest injury (a micro-tear in my right meniscus, which is in the knee) take forever to heal. My blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar are all JUST FINE, thank you. And again, until various injuries took me out of things, I could both run laps around and out-bench either parent. (My dad's strength is all in his back.) So with a little more work I think you'll find me in the fat acceptance camp, and with a little work beyond that I might actually believe what I say. So the weight. . . while certainly not a non-issue, is one I can deal with.
No, the thing that I hold against my parents is what really struck a chord for me in yuki-onna's post. She started it all by saying "I used to be beautiful."
And fuck me, but I just cannot say that.
There are I think three pictures taken of me since puberty that I think I look decent in; I have taken two of them myself, with webcams, when I could simply retake and retake and retake until I liked the result. There is exactly one angle at which I like the look of my face: tilted down and cocked a little to the side, hair falling slightly in front, so that all you see is hair, enormous eyes, and high cheekbones while the too-wide jaw and too-small mouth recede.
I'm pretty sure, when I force myself to distance my emotional response, that I'm not hideous. There have actually been several people who have called be beautiful -- something I know, because I have kept track. I have never believed them, and I am sure that this is because none of those people are my parents.
When I was a teenager and depressed, this was proof enough that I was ugly. After all, if even your parents can't call you beautiful. . . But with a little distance that lack of comment (because they never called me ugly; other than harping on my weight they never mentioned my appearance at all) just started seeming very strange.
And then, a couple years ago, I was able to put the pieces together from a couple of different conversations with my mom.
You see, they had a plan.
At least, my mom did; I have no clue why it was never something my dad said. He may have agreed with the plan, or maybe it just seemed strange to him to compliment his daughter's appearance, or hell, maybe he really does think I'm ugly, though I hope not. But my mom, at least, made a conscious decision never to tell me I was beautiful from the time I was an infant, and she carried it out. (That's incomplete; she never told me I was beautiful, present-tense, but she did used to reminisce about how photogenic I was as a child, and how I used to light up rooms and cause complete strangers to compliment her on her little girl. That REALLY used to screw me up, that I could tell myself that I was beautiful as a six-year-old and then fucked everything up when I entered middle school.)
Now I would maybe give her a pass if she refused to call me beautiful because she didn't want me to get a swelled head; if that had been her reasoning, I probably would simply have had to reevaluate her intelligence and ultimately write off most of her opinions, because that is one of the most illogical things I ever hear from people. No, her plan was far more well-intentioned and twisty.
You see, with all the blithe confidence and privilege of being 95 pounds and looking twenty years younger than she actually is, my mom gets to say things like "I'm happy I'm not beautiful" and "I was happy when I turned 40 because by that point nobody would care about my looks anymore." And mean them. And while that statement, in black and white, looks like it could be hiding a world of hurt. . . everything about my mom has always communicated pleasure in her appearance. She takes joy in the way clothes fit her, and she moves through the world comfortable in her own body, and she can study her face in a mirror without shrinking away. And, of course, there is the matter of her maintaining exactly the same weight for forty years. . .
So, if I take her at her word having no evidence to the contrary, she also meant it when she said that she wanted me to feel the same way, which makes sense. She sees all the emotional turmoil practically every other woman in America suffers from their appearance, and she wants her baby girl to be immune from that.
And here comes the cunning plan. Because she thinks she isn't beautiful and is therefore happy because beauty, if anything, is a curse, well, clearly she has to raise her daughter never to think about her appearance at all. All she has to do is never mention it, and her daughter will never think that beauty is something to aspire to.
Which, of course, completely ignores the fact that her daughter is not growing up in a vacuum, but is instead surrounded by the cult of beauty that is American advertising.
Hell, it completely ignores the fact that her daughter's father read her poetry as she fell asleep, so all her early memories are of lines like these:
He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.
and:
She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely apparition, sent
To be a moment's ornament;
Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;
Like twilight's too, her dusky hair;
But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful dawn;
A dancing shape, an image gay. . .
and:
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee. . .
and one more:
O my Love's like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Love's like the melody
That’s sweetly play'd in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in love am I:
And I will love thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry. . .
I mean, there was "The Raven" and "Paul Revere's Ride" and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in there too. . . but most poetry appears to be about lost (female) loves, and of course they're all stunningly beautiful and little else.
So yeah, needless to say, the plan failed. It's true, I did not grow up to think I was beautiful. . . but I sure as hell think it's something I should be, and that I'm a failure because I'm not.
* * *
So that's the personal. But being me, one of my coping mechanisms is getting all intellectual to distance myself, so here's the larger-scale stuff.
Why the hell is there so little mention of my male relatives in all that above? Even deeper, why the hell would my dad telling me I was beautiful not really have helped?
I suspect it's probably because at some point in western history beauty stopped being a human thing and started being a female thing.
I have too little grounding in history to be able to pinpoint when this happened, but I remember when I first encountered the idea that beauty isn't strictly a female thing, and I remember how it was kind of shocking to me. It was when I read The Epic of Gilgamesh, sometime in late middle school or early high school. I don't have a copy with me to pull out passages, but I was struck at the time by the sheer strangeness of Gilgamesh's appreciation for Enkidu's body. I suppose if I were less stuck in my own head, I would have just dismissed the passages as "gay" but this was before that slur had any meaning for me so I took them at face value, as from a culture where a man's body was something to be appreciated from a purely aesthetic standpoint, and it was just. . . alien to me.
I cannot think that I'm alone in this. In fact, a year or two later (it must have been late middle school, making a year or two later 9th grade) I remember the titters in World History over some of the stuff we were taught about those craaaaaazy homos, the Greeks. . . *eye roll*
And it must have been far more recently than that that we still appreciated the male form. . . why else would men have worn hose and heels to show off their legs just a few hundred years ago?
But I likewise cannot think that I'm wrong in thinking that today beauty is almost exclusively the purview of women, and this is where Deerskin and The Last Unicorn come in. There may be some general spoilers. . .
The review of Deerskin pointed out something I had not consciously thought about before. The story is a retelling of the Charles Perrault fairytale Donkeyskin, in which a King rapes his daughter the princess. The novel is all about the daughter's healing from that assault, and I love it for that.
But I also love it for the opening, which is creepy and magical and, as the reviewer pointed out but I did not see until then, not at all fitting with the otherwise feminist themes of the novel. Because while the father is a monster. . . ultimately, he's not the monster. A much stronger presence is the Queen, who was so beautiful that when an illness robbed her of just the tiniest shred of that beauty she turned her face away from the light and quite literally wasted away. But before she died, while she was still quite beautiful, she commissioned a painter to paint her portrait, and commanded that portrait be hung in the throne room watching over her kingdom, and then insisted that her husband never marry unless he can find a woman to match her beauty. That portrait is an actively malevolent force in the novel, its beauty sucking life and joy from its surroundings, and when the daughter grows up to be as beautiful as her mother. . .
And then, in the end, the daughter is still just as beautiful as her mother. . . but her beauty is somehow qualitatively different, the sort of beauty that inspires rather than represses, a beauty with warmth rather than the beautiful deadliness of ice.
So I was thinking about that when I read The Last Unicorn, and you know what? Beauty is treated exactly the same way. The unicorn has that same cold, inhuman, painful beauty, particularly when (definitely a spoiler) she is transformed into a human; the story ends with the male main character deciding that the female human main character is more beautiful than the unicorn, because her beauty is more warmly human.
And that's all fine. The nature of beauty is a theme ripe with storytelling potential -- in fact, the power of that sort of meditation is part of what won me over with both books.
But why, to tie this back in with the above, did the characters whose beauty was so important thematically have to be female?
I can't even imagine what the stories would look like if it was the princess's father who died because he lost his beauty, or if the unicorn had been male rather than explicitly female. . . or rather, I can imagine it, but it would just strike me as fundamentally bizarre.
I'm sure I am not the first person to have wondered these things. But it was all very much on my mind lately, along with a comment I saw somewhere about how we not only need to make it okay for women to like traditionally male things, because we're on our way there, but instead need to also focus on making it acceptable for men to like traditionally female things. . . because it's only when we totally divorce all those things (the conversation, I think, was about romance and child-rearing, but applies as well to beauty) from gender that we can have anything approaching an equal society.
I cannot decide what order I want to post these thoughts in. It's absolutely paralyzing. I suppose I should do the heavy lifting first.
I am now quite literally two of myself, as in if I lost exactly half of myself, I would be right about what I consider my "ideal" weight. That ideal wouldn't even be particularly thin; it would be roughly my sister's body type, which is a top-heavy size 6. (We're not tall.)
But of course, our society being extremely fucked up about weight, the single year in my life that I was essentially that size I still considered myself grossly fat and wore baggy clothes to hide myself. By the time I figured out how to properly dress to my advantage I was fifty pounds heavier and it was far more work, and it's just gotten worse since then.
When I was at my most depressed, my weight was the failing I threw up at myself most often; after all, there wasn't really anything else to complain about -- I was always top of my classes, I was a good daughter, a good friend, a good person, overall, and I wasn't lost to those facts. I could castigate myself for being selfish and self-absorbed, but those comments didn't have much sting unless I was really far down in a well, and I could never call myself stupid. All I had to hold against myself was my weight, but that easily outweighed everything else I did; in my mind, I was disgustingly fat, and therefore a failure, and UGLY, which is the worst sin of all, and so I was entirely unworthy of love, which made it not at all surprising that nobody did love me.
Hell, that chain of logic still has some hold over me, even after eight years of daily proof that I am loved.
And you know what? This is one thing I can entirely blame my parents for.
Because it IS their fault.
My parents are as weight-obsessed as the rest of our culture. My mom has been exactly the same weight since high school -- 95 pounds. She had some health crises a couple years back and dropped down to 89, a weight at which she was quite literally faint if she went more than a few hours without a snack. Even now, she puts off the colonoscopy she's supposed to get because she knows her body can't handle the day of fasting it requires. And now matter how much evidence I put in front of her, she is proud of her weight. She'll say she would be happier with three (3!!!) extra pounds of cushion, and it's true, she probably doesn't need to weigh a lot more than that because she's only 4'11, but. . . *headdesk*
My dad is my "fat" parent. . . meaning he is a whopping 30 pounds heavier than he was in high school. He wasn't even that until the last few years; for my entire childhood he was around 190 at 5'10" and carrying a fair amount of muscle because he has a physical job. But all my life my mom has been on him about eating better, exercising more, losing weight. . . and even though he complains that she's just as unhealthy as he is because she's so skinny, he can't summon any force to his argument.
(An aside: They also both smoke. I don't. I hate all the people who pile on smokers and blame them for everything evil under the sun, but c'mon. If we're really talking about what's healthy, even being two of myself doesn't compare to two packs a day for forty years.)
And of course, they're just a product of their parents. . . every time I visited my dad's mom the first thing out of her mouth was "You've gained some weight, haven't you?" When I was eight and growing taller I told myself that's what she meant and put on a smile, but I knew that wasn't the sort of weight she was talking about. My mom's parents weren't so blatant, but my grandma on that side was constantly commenting on which family members had gotten fat, and complaining about the ten pounds she put on after retiring (I think when she died she might have weighed 115 pounds).
But all that. . . that I can grow away from. I know that I was in roaring good health, no matter what the scale said, until the last fifty pounds or so; and even that weight is only "bad" for me because it's making my latest injury (a micro-tear in my right meniscus, which is in the knee) take forever to heal. My blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar are all JUST FINE, thank you. And again, until various injuries took me out of things, I could both run laps around and out-bench either parent. (My dad's strength is all in his back.) So with a little more work I think you'll find me in the fat acceptance camp, and with a little work beyond that I might actually believe what I say. So the weight. . . while certainly not a non-issue, is one I can deal with.
No, the thing that I hold against my parents is what really struck a chord for me in yuki-onna's post. She started it all by saying "I used to be beautiful."
And fuck me, but I just cannot say that.
There are I think three pictures taken of me since puberty that I think I look decent in; I have taken two of them myself, with webcams, when I could simply retake and retake and retake until I liked the result. There is exactly one angle at which I like the look of my face: tilted down and cocked a little to the side, hair falling slightly in front, so that all you see is hair, enormous eyes, and high cheekbones while the too-wide jaw and too-small mouth recede.
I'm pretty sure, when I force myself to distance my emotional response, that I'm not hideous. There have actually been several people who have called be beautiful -- something I know, because I have kept track. I have never believed them, and I am sure that this is because none of those people are my parents.
When I was a teenager and depressed, this was proof enough that I was ugly. After all, if even your parents can't call you beautiful. . . But with a little distance that lack of comment (because they never called me ugly; other than harping on my weight they never mentioned my appearance at all) just started seeming very strange.
And then, a couple years ago, I was able to put the pieces together from a couple of different conversations with my mom.
You see, they had a plan.
At least, my mom did; I have no clue why it was never something my dad said. He may have agreed with the plan, or maybe it just seemed strange to him to compliment his daughter's appearance, or hell, maybe he really does think I'm ugly, though I hope not. But my mom, at least, made a conscious decision never to tell me I was beautiful from the time I was an infant, and she carried it out. (That's incomplete; she never told me I was beautiful, present-tense, but she did used to reminisce about how photogenic I was as a child, and how I used to light up rooms and cause complete strangers to compliment her on her little girl. That REALLY used to screw me up, that I could tell myself that I was beautiful as a six-year-old and then fucked everything up when I entered middle school.)
Now I would maybe give her a pass if she refused to call me beautiful because she didn't want me to get a swelled head; if that had been her reasoning, I probably would simply have had to reevaluate her intelligence and ultimately write off most of her opinions, because that is one of the most illogical things I ever hear from people. No, her plan was far more well-intentioned and twisty.
You see, with all the blithe confidence and privilege of being 95 pounds and looking twenty years younger than she actually is, my mom gets to say things like "I'm happy I'm not beautiful" and "I was happy when I turned 40 because by that point nobody would care about my looks anymore." And mean them. And while that statement, in black and white, looks like it could be hiding a world of hurt. . . everything about my mom has always communicated pleasure in her appearance. She takes joy in the way clothes fit her, and she moves through the world comfortable in her own body, and she can study her face in a mirror without shrinking away. And, of course, there is the matter of her maintaining exactly the same weight for forty years. . .
So, if I take her at her word having no evidence to the contrary, she also meant it when she said that she wanted me to feel the same way, which makes sense. She sees all the emotional turmoil practically every other woman in America suffers from their appearance, and she wants her baby girl to be immune from that.
And here comes the cunning plan. Because she thinks she isn't beautiful and is therefore happy because beauty, if anything, is a curse, well, clearly she has to raise her daughter never to think about her appearance at all. All she has to do is never mention it, and her daughter will never think that beauty is something to aspire to.
Which, of course, completely ignores the fact that her daughter is not growing up in a vacuum, but is instead surrounded by the cult of beauty that is American advertising.
Hell, it completely ignores the fact that her daughter's father read her poetry as she fell asleep, so all her early memories are of lines like these:
He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.
and:
She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely apparition, sent
To be a moment's ornament;
Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;
Like twilight's too, her dusky hair;
But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful dawn;
A dancing shape, an image gay. . .
and:
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee. . .
and one more:
O my Love's like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Love's like the melody
That’s sweetly play'd in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in love am I:
And I will love thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry. . .
I mean, there was "The Raven" and "Paul Revere's Ride" and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in there too. . . but most poetry appears to be about lost (female) loves, and of course they're all stunningly beautiful and little else.
So yeah, needless to say, the plan failed. It's true, I did not grow up to think I was beautiful. . . but I sure as hell think it's something I should be, and that I'm a failure because I'm not.
* * *
So that's the personal. But being me, one of my coping mechanisms is getting all intellectual to distance myself, so here's the larger-scale stuff.
Why the hell is there so little mention of my male relatives in all that above? Even deeper, why the hell would my dad telling me I was beautiful not really have helped?
I suspect it's probably because at some point in western history beauty stopped being a human thing and started being a female thing.
I have too little grounding in history to be able to pinpoint when this happened, but I remember when I first encountered the idea that beauty isn't strictly a female thing, and I remember how it was kind of shocking to me. It was when I read The Epic of Gilgamesh, sometime in late middle school or early high school. I don't have a copy with me to pull out passages, but I was struck at the time by the sheer strangeness of Gilgamesh's appreciation for Enkidu's body. I suppose if I were less stuck in my own head, I would have just dismissed the passages as "gay" but this was before that slur had any meaning for me so I took them at face value, as from a culture where a man's body was something to be appreciated from a purely aesthetic standpoint, and it was just. . . alien to me.
I cannot think that I'm alone in this. In fact, a year or two later (it must have been late middle school, making a year or two later 9th grade) I remember the titters in World History over some of the stuff we were taught about those craaaaaazy homos, the Greeks. . . *eye roll*
And it must have been far more recently than that that we still appreciated the male form. . . why else would men have worn hose and heels to show off their legs just a few hundred years ago?
But I likewise cannot think that I'm wrong in thinking that today beauty is almost exclusively the purview of women, and this is where Deerskin and The Last Unicorn come in. There may be some general spoilers. . .
The review of Deerskin pointed out something I had not consciously thought about before. The story is a retelling of the Charles Perrault fairytale Donkeyskin, in which a King rapes his daughter the princess. The novel is all about the daughter's healing from that assault, and I love it for that.
But I also love it for the opening, which is creepy and magical and, as the reviewer pointed out but I did not see until then, not at all fitting with the otherwise feminist themes of the novel. Because while the father is a monster. . . ultimately, he's not the monster. A much stronger presence is the Queen, who was so beautiful that when an illness robbed her of just the tiniest shred of that beauty she turned her face away from the light and quite literally wasted away. But before she died, while she was still quite beautiful, she commissioned a painter to paint her portrait, and commanded that portrait be hung in the throne room watching over her kingdom, and then insisted that her husband never marry unless he can find a woman to match her beauty. That portrait is an actively malevolent force in the novel, its beauty sucking life and joy from its surroundings, and when the daughter grows up to be as beautiful as her mother. . .
And then, in the end, the daughter is still just as beautiful as her mother. . . but her beauty is somehow qualitatively different, the sort of beauty that inspires rather than represses, a beauty with warmth rather than the beautiful deadliness of ice.
So I was thinking about that when I read The Last Unicorn, and you know what? Beauty is treated exactly the same way. The unicorn has that same cold, inhuman, painful beauty, particularly when (definitely a spoiler) she is transformed into a human; the story ends with the male main character deciding that the female human main character is more beautiful than the unicorn, because her beauty is more warmly human.
And that's all fine. The nature of beauty is a theme ripe with storytelling potential -- in fact, the power of that sort of meditation is part of what won me over with both books.
But why, to tie this back in with the above, did the characters whose beauty was so important thematically have to be female?
I can't even imagine what the stories would look like if it was the princess's father who died because he lost his beauty, or if the unicorn had been male rather than explicitly female. . . or rather, I can imagine it, but it would just strike me as fundamentally bizarre.
I'm sure I am not the first person to have wondered these things. But it was all very much on my mind lately, along with a comment I saw somewhere about how we not only need to make it okay for women to like traditionally male things, because we're on our way there, but instead need to also focus on making it acceptable for men to like traditionally female things. . . because it's only when we totally divorce all those things (the conversation, I think, was about romance and child-rearing, but applies as well to beauty) from gender that we can have anything approaching an equal society.