Posted by Galatea
Horrible joke I remember from high school:
Q: Why do women wear perfume and make-up?
A: Because they stink and they're ugly.
Why don't men wear perfume and make-up?
A: Because they stink and they're ugly and they don't care.
I've been noodling around this idea in my head for quite some time now – in fact, this is a version of a post I wrote lo these many years ago, about the time of the Great Fuss Over Susan Boyle Being On National TV in 2009. It’s about a concept that I think I want to call ‘the beauty debt'.
Essentially, what I’m thinking of when I say ‘beauty debt’ is the idea floating around in modern culture that women owe a certain standard of attractiveness to those who 'have' to look at them, and that if a woman's 'natural' beauty is not sufficient (and it very rarely is), she must perform a certain amount of beauty work in order to rectify the problem, to 'pay the debt' as it were. This work might involve shaving, waxing, dyeing, surgery, food restriction, exercise, straightening, lightening, tanning, all according to individual situation, sub/culture, race, class etc. It almost always involves paying money, and quite often involves physical discomfort or pain. I probably don't need to list here what happens if she fails to perform this work or fails to perform it to a sufficient standard, but what's interesting is that often the undercurrent is we don't want to see that!; she's hurting my eyes!, how dare she make us HAVE to see that!
