The Beauty Debt

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!

Getting Dressed

Posted by Annalytica

The transcript for this video is under the description on YouTube.



I wrote the sketch “Getting Dressed” to highlight one of the many ways that our culture invites women to feel bad about ourselves: namely, the social acceptability of commenting on a woman’s choice of clothing, in a way which can be really quite vicious. In this post I want to explore this issue further. Comments about clothing are obviously related to comments about women’s appearance in general, and there are other issues about the pressure on women to change not only our clothes but our very bodies. I don’t want to play down in any way the importance of body image issues, and I hope that they will be discussed elsewhere on this blog by others. For me personally however, clothing is a source of more anxiety than body image, so that’s what I’m going to focus on here.