Be 'beautiful' and be damned
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It is certainly not true that there is, in the mind of man, any universal standard of beauty with respect to the human body, wrote Charles Darwin in his Descent of Man.
Social scientists that came after him have convincingly argued that taste – including what makes the perfect woman – is a social construct. Who is considered beautiful has a direct correlation with wealth and other markers of status. Voluptuous women were considered beautiful in the past, because their voluptuous figures signalled affluence.
To showcase a contemporary taste, a skinny figure can be achieved in two ways – by toiling in the fields picking cotton or burning money on diet clinics and gyms. The skinny labourer is, of course, not considered beautiful, but a skinny model is, precisely because the latter’s figure is a result of affluence.
Beauty, therefore, is as much a product of class and other social hierarchies, as it is of physical traits and “looks”.
Nobody understands the socially constructed notion of beauty better than the beauty industry, for which the human body is a means for advertisement and sales. Beauty helps sell everything from beer to cars, but what really helps make profit is being able to convince millions of women – and increasingly, men – who want to imitate the current standards of beauty that they can achieve the advertised standards with the diligent use of beauty products. It is therefore important for the merchants of beauty to establish firmly what is considered beautiful.
To give a South Asian example, forcing the image of light-skinned beauty sells whitening cream to millions of women and men. If plump was tasteful, gym memberships would dwindle and cosmetic plastic surgeons would go out of business.
This is an age of advertising that, collectively, pushes a narrow idea of what is beautiful and who is considered beautiful. In Nepal, one means of doing so has been beauty pageants. The proliferation of pageants is merely one symptom of the attempts to control the notion of the perfect woman. There is a contest for Miss Nepal coming soon, as well as Miss Tamang, Miss Rai, Miss Limbu, Miss Chhetri, Miss Kindergarten, Miss College, etc. But all of these pageants reinforce such a narrow idea of beauty that, for the millions who can’t take part, it leaves a distasteful, and incorrect, feeling of inadequacy.
The modern ideals of beauty set by judgements of the female body force women to strive for something that is physically impossible, psychologically damaging and biologically unhealthy. This is the dark side of the beauty industry. With the innocent smiles and harmless struts on the ramp, the organisers, judges and participants of beauty pageants promote anorexia, bulimia and obsessive compulsive disorder.
Acknowledging this dark side of the beauty industry and accepting that beauty pageants are businesses aimed at exploiting the weak and vulnerable – not to mention the young and the insecure – is a progressive step towards the liberation of both men and women from the tyranny of the beauty industry.
