The aesthetics of "should"

 This is a longer version of an article entitled 'A woman's business is not to be beautiful' published originally by thred. 

Appealing to the “ugly sisterhood” 

“The first requisite in a woman toward pleasing others is that she should be pleased with herself”, so begins chapter 1 of the The Ugly Girl Papers; or, Hints for the Toilet, first written by a Ms S.D.Powers and continued (apparently “by request”) as an anthology in 1874. Appealing to the “ugly sisterhood”, Powers argues that women are prevented from being “worshipped lovers” as a result, not of their souls, but of their complexion. 

Since she posits that it is in fact “a woman’s business to be beautiful”, her advice includes things like rubbing opium over your face at night and washing with a solution of ammonia in the morning to refine the skin. or else a cure for freckles which involves “half a pound of clear ox gall, half a drachm of borax, two ounces of rock-salt, and the same of rock-candy” is recommended.

Although there are occasionally some obscure ingredients which crop up in the papers’ various recipes, you may recognise borax as a cleaning product that EU banned after deeming it ‘potentially hazardous to health’.

Despite the illusion of self-love that we’re first introduced to the book with, then, it quickly becomes apparent that this guide of sorts is far from a self-help book, or indeed an exercise in self-acceptance. 

Rather, S.D.Powers tells us that, as a woman, your purpose is to please others. That you must look the part, no matter the cost. And if we were still unsure about who the ‘others’ are that our beauty is meant to please, this, unlike borax-treated skin, is cleared up when male author Nathaniel Parker Willis is named as the ‘connoisseur of feminine graces’. 

Similarly, in a later chapter Powers makes reference to the indispensability of powders for a complexion beneath the foot-lights ‘in amateur theatres’.(p.63) The message then, is obvious: not only are women innately on display, but if you cannot (literally) perform feminine beauty to a degree that will satisfy the male observer critic, you’re worthless. 

The beauty standard 

The absurdity, not least of the harmful and health damaging recipes and potions, but also of the notion that beauty has an age limit that is espoused in the Ugly Girl Papers is a ludicrous one. So much so, in fact, that we might find ourselves questioning the validity of Powers’ claim that a mixture of carbolic acid and rose water was used successfully to clear the complexion of a baby. 

So too does the ‘nose machine which…so directs the soft cartilage that an ill-formed nose is quickly shaped to perfection’ seem like a bizarre contraption, and perhaps we even find humour in her closing remark to chapter 10 that “the only thing women would not do to increase their comeliness is to put themselves on the rack” 

Except, it’s difficult to find humour in things which are not too far from the scary reality of oppressively unrealistic beauty standards, endured by people of all genders and perpetuated through today’s comparison culture. 

While people may not be subjecting themselves to the torture of being stretched on the rack in as many terms, there are some, as young as 16 years old, who have undergone cosmetic limb-lengthing surgery to appear taller. This involves breaking both femurs in order to lengthen them. 

According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, in 2023 there were nearly 45,000 rhinoplasties performed in the United States. And this seems like a lot, until you compare that statistic to the staggering nearly 9.5 million Botox or Jeuveau procedures carried out in the US in the same year.

We might have considered ourselves grateful when Powers told us that “‘the latest authorities” (seemingly no further fact-checking carried out on that one) “assert that women’s prime of youth is twenty-six” instead of sixteen as it was considered to be prior to the Papers’ publication. Thankfully this earned us an extra ten years. 

However, thanks to the normalisation of procedures like preventative botox, people “are young while they seem young” and no more needs to be said about it. 

Except, as you may have guessed from the placement of this paragraph, there is always more to be said. In a term coined the ‘Love Island effect’, ‘plastic surgery and injectables done incorrectly can make you look older.’ Moreover, preventative botox causes a weakening of the muscles in one area resulting in the overuse (and consequent wrinkling) of another area of the face/body. This means not only that you might actually look older, but also that it might make you want yet more botox. 

What’s more, as people, especially women, are being influenced younger and younger thanks to social media into getting procedures like botox, it raises the question of whether girls are allowed to be girls, or whether even as children we’re being told to adapt ourselves to invest in our appearance in a way that is deemed more socially acceptable. 

Self surveillance and comparison culture 

Arguably, the pressure to conform to a specific aesthetic has been exacerbated by our partially self-imposed surveillance on social media platforms which enables the comparison of real bodies with photoshopped ones. Ultimately, this contributes to an increasingly problematic sense of personal devaluation or inadequacy, which, unfortunately, is only the first of many issues to do with the homogenisation of a certain idealised standard of conventional beauty. 

First of all, as we’ve seen most recently with the supposed return of heroin chic following the BBL phenomenon - both of which have led to much online speculation around the size of Kim Kardashian’s bum - the internet is a place not of bodies but of trends. 

This means that, unless you’ve got a spare few thousand pounds to spend on a new cosmetic procedure to reverse the work that is no longer deemed attractive by the rapidly changing beauty industry, you could be stuck with a body you’re not happy with. That is, until someone decides that boobs are back in or that thigh gaps are trending again. Which is exactly what the people making a profit out of your physical insecurities want to happen. 

The other issue, as Jameela Jamil has talked about openly on social media, is that even if you can afford the currently trending cosmetics procedures, “how much of a choice is it (cosmetic surgery) when you’re being bombarded with a “beauty standard?” when it’s everywhere you look.” In her Instagram post, Jamil raises the concern that women are “all just gonna look like 50 shades of the same exact woman in 5 years”. 

Interestingly, she also brings up the issue of gender disparity. Obviously, men are not exempt from the pressures of the beauty industry. While she’s right in that more often men’s physical differences are celebrated, nevertheless we’ve seen some men’s willingness (some may call it desperation) to invest in themselves and their appearance through the monetisation of their insecurities through looks-maxing and the pick-up industry. 

However, why is it that men are predominantly told to invest in themselves through gym memberships and dressing well, whereas it’s mostly women who are encouraged to surgically, and potentially irreversibly, modify themselves to conform to a certain aesthetic standard? This is perhaps worrying if we consider, like Jamil does, women’s motivations behind these procedures. 

Gymcels for instance, according to Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, may (subconsciously or not) perceive time spent at the gym building muscle as a form of homosocial bonding which allows them to maintain and protect their networks of power without fear of homosexual desire or male-competiton. Whereas women, by contrast, certainly don’t have the same systems of power in place to protect, and in fact have shown more openness to same-sex attraction. 

Nor, Jamil speculates, can it be to increase their desirability to straight men, given that “straight men are not all raised with the same identical taste in all women”. She raises the example of “the bullying of the footballer whose wife isn’t the standard “WAG” aesthetic”, and expresses horror at the “stadiums of men chanting derogatory comments about the natural face and body of the woman their idol has chosen as his personal love.” 

In which case we must pose the question, why are we doing this to ourselves? Moreover, in a world in which the beauty in variety has been superseded by the aesthetics of “should”, what does the future look like for beauty standards that change faster than we can change our clothes?