Beyond Beautiful: A Practical Guide to Being Happy, Confident, and You in a Looks-Obsessed World

by Anuschka Rees

What you do need to do is fix your buggy self-worth barometer and understand that your physical appearance (whether you fit the current beauty ideal or not) is just a single, volatile, and not even particularly interesting aspect of yourself. You are worthy for a whole set of other reasons.

but that you want what everyone wants: to feel worthy, happy, loved. And just like every other woman out there, you have been taught that being attractive is your best chance of getting there.

You don’t feel self-conscious or insecure or unhappy because of the way your thighs, your face, or your boobs look. You’re unhappy because of the millions of messages that have drilled into you that your thighs, face, or boobs could even have an effect on your happiness to begin with.

People with a healthy body image don’t love their hips or their waist any more than their lungs or their sense of balance. Looking in the mirror doesn’t give them a tingly jolt of happy energy. In fact, the reason they’re at peace with their bodies is precisely because they don’t have strong feelings about their physical appearances.

But if your goal is to be happy and feel confident, understanding that you are more than your body is miles more valuable than writing love letters to your individual body parts.

In any other area of our lives, that same logic would be considered ridiculous. You have probably made it a goal to change something about yourself before. Perhaps you wanted to stop procrastinating, or go to bed earlier, or stop snapping at people when you are stressed. But does that mean you didn’t have respect for yourself or judge other procrastinators or night owls? Of course not! When you have a healthy body image, you understand that your appearance is just one small aspect of yourself. And if something about that small aspect is not serving you well, you may make the executive decision to change it—no biggie.

But cultural socialization is a powerful thing. On an intellectual level, you may not want to like slim bodies, large breasts, petite noses, or hair-free legs, but when you grow up surrounded by messages telling you those things equal beauty, then honestly it would be very impressive if you hadn’t internalized those ideals to at least some degree.

And what makes you a feminist is not the extent to which your personal aesthetic preferences align with society’s beauty ideals, but the fact that you a) understand that these ideals are discriminatory and harmful and b) are doing your bit to fight them.

By letting go of your avoidance habit, you stop feeding that flame and, equally valuable, you are also giving yourself the opportunity to notice that nothing bad actually happens when you expose your flaws.

All of this tells us that as women in this world, the way we look influences everything: success, love, and how well people treat us.

Their body image is fine, because they simply don’t believe that their happiness depends on their looks.

Because when you live in a world that teaches you that your value depends on your appearance, every tiny weight gain, every stretch mark, and every expression line is a real threat.

Ten extra pounds means the difference between having fun at a party and feeling self-conscious all night. A little razor burn on your bikini line means the difference between feeling sexy and wanting to turn off the lights to make sure your partner won’t get grossed out. A zit on your cheek means the difference between kicking ass in a meeting and not speaking up because you don’t want to attract attention to yourself.

If you hadn’t grown up in this culture, you would have never even had the idea that something as inherently natural as leg hair could ever be a detriment to your well-being.

When the predominant way the female body is presented in the media is as an object whose main purpose is to be evaluated, then we ourselves (whether we are male or female) can’t help but use that same perspective to judge the female bodies we see in real life, including our own.

Girls and women start thinking of their own bodies primarily as something to be looked at and desired by others. A good body is a body that others find beautiful and sexy.

“Because photo-taking is so constant nowadays, many girls and women feel like they have to at all times monitor their appearance and be ‘camera ready,’ ” says Renee Engeln, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University and author of Beauty Sick. “We start to see the types of anxieties that used to be limited to celebrities dealing with paparazzi.” Plus, in the age of social media, the evaluation and scrutiny that we’re trying to manage by monitoring ourselves is no longer just imagined. It’s real and quantifiable, in the form of likes, comments, and shares, upping the pressure even more.

The problem is that our media landscape shows, values, and celebrates women’s sex appeal more than any of their other qualities, opinions, or accomplishments.

“You’re wandering around the culture looking for norms about what it means to be female. But since there’s only really one dominant image of femininity in this culture, your options are limited: you’re either fuckable or invisible. And no adolescent can tolerate being invisible.”

Today, the ideal women is still above all one thing: hot. She can run a company, she can be a UN humanitarian, she can be an artist, she can be a mom, but the one thing we’ll admire her for the most is her looks and her sex appeal. Being desirable is the one nonnegotiable of today’s ideal woman. And because of that, women in our culture have no choice but to deeply care about their looks.

While the main message of “all bodies are beautiful” does address the issue of narrow beauty ideals (the tip of the iceberg), in doing so it also reinforces the core belief that got us into this mess in the first place: that looking (and feeling beautiful) is a prerequisite to happiness.

But women are more than bodies, and we must back that up with the ways we choose to represent and value ourselves and all women, online or otherwise.”

If your mother constantly criticizes her own body and tells you that she is “not allowed to eat pizza” because she “needs to look good for the summer,” you learn that women need to fit a certain standard and that restricting your food helps you do that. If your mother gets complimented on her appearance all the time, you learn that beauty is good and that it leads people to be nice to you. If your dad criticizes women on TV or your brother makes fun of girls at school, you learn that men judge a girl’s appearance and that not having the right appearance can lead you to be ridiculed.

Just because something is common does not mean it’s okay.

Even twelve-year-olds are fully aware that the way you look is a crucial, if not the most important, value for women in our society.

One Australian study that had women aged eighteen to forty report body talk as it happened in real time found that more than a quarter of all of their social interactions during the one week the experiment ran contained some form of body talk.

according to Renee Engeln, the prevalence of body talk is not just a simple reflection of our collective body dissatisfaction; it also further promotes it. “When we disparage our bodies in conversations with other women, we do three things. First, we implicitly give other people permission to talk about our bodies (or other women’s bodies) in that same disrespectful way. Second, we direct other women’s attention to their own appearance. Finally, we feed into the notion that body-hatred is a normal part of being a woman, that it’s something to bond over instead of something to actively work against.”

a less-than-ideal body image often goes hand in hand with an intense level of body awareness.

Ultimately, the goal of a healthy body image is, of course, to understand that it doesn’t matter whether you are a 6 out of 10 or an 8 out of 10 according to society’s beauty ideals. But I think a baby step toward that can be to recognize that your attractiveness is not fixed, but variable. We can all look better or worse, depending on a huge number of factors. Our level of attractiveness is not an inherent quality of ourselves. One bad photo is not proof that we are ugly, and one good photo does not mean we are hot shit. Or as Haley Nahman put it: “Maybe there is no definitive answer as to whether I’m pretty, adorable, or grotesque. Maybe I’m all of those things and more.”

women judge their own attractiveness not just more negatively than other people do, but also less accurately.

Participants who suffered from an eating disorder looked at their own bodies in a very particular way: they kept their eyes fixed on body parts they considered unattractive and pretty much ignored the rest of their body. They did the exact opposite when it came to the other people’s bodies: they kept their gaze on what they would later label the attractive parts and glossed over the rest.

Remind yourself of the reason for your strong reaction. You believe that looking bad is a big deal because that’s what you’ve been taught all of your life by big corporations and misguided value systems—and that’s messed up.

You know exactly how wrong they are, so their remarks just roll right off your back.

NOW These days, we still value a low body-fat percentage, but on top of that we now also need two more things to qualify as body-beautiful: a large butt and muscle definition.

Ugh wtf just worse and worse, this is such a difficult/unattainable combination

A photographer told me that body contouring (using liposuction, fat transfer procedures, or implants) is common among plus-size models because few women naturally possess the specific fat distribution that is required.

Wow not surprising though

We may be into big butts now, but we still want a tiny waist, thighs that don’t touch, and no cellulite, please!

Impossible!!! Ugh!

You’re thin? Okay, but you better not be skinny-fat. Your stomach is flat? Great, but do you have any definition in your abs? You have slim legs? Okay, but what about your glutes?

So true. .

If “strong” and “curvy” were real alternatives to our existing skinny ideal, that would be good news. But as it stands, they are simply add-on criteria that have pushed the female body ideal even further out of reach.

Although male and female obesity rates are at a similar level in the US, men report much less dissatisfaction with their bodies, no matter their weight, and are less likely to start a diet than women are. Less than 10 percent of eating disorder sufferers are male, and only around 9 percent of cosmetic surgery procedures are done on men. However,

In the survey that I ran for this book, many women admitted feeling embarrassed about the way they look “down there,” about feeling inhibited during sex, and even skipping gynecologist appointments. One woman wrote: “This is so private and I could never actually talk to anyone about it, but I feel very self-conscious about my labia minora, and I am considering plastic surgery just to make me look normal down there.” In 2016, labiaplasty was the fastest growing type of surgery in the US, and psychologists believe that it’s no coincidence this is happening as porn is becoming more available.

Sucks

“Labia minora vary greatly in size, shape, and color. However, in most media that depict women’s vulvas (erotic magazines, women’s magazines, internet, porn movies), labia minora are not protruding the labia majora. These images are either digitally manipulated or show models that have undergone a labia minora reduction or women who naturally have smaller labial size, and therefore do not provide a realistic image of natural vulvas.”

In fact, many of the “flaws” we want to fix nowadays—and that whole shelves at Sephora are dedicated to—were not considered flaws at all until the beauty industry decided to label them as such.

Women weren’t worried about dimply thighs until 1973, when Vogue magazine introduced its readers to a fun new thing from France: “Cellulite, the new word for fat you couldn’t lose before.” As Naomi Wolf states in her book The Beauty Myth: “Before 1973, it was normal female flesh.”

Before Botox hit the scene, fine lines around the forehead and eyes were just normal—actresses and models alike had them. Now, even people in their twenties worry about tiny expression lines and actresses who don’t go down the Botox route are considered “brave.”

Of course, it’s understandable why beauty companies continue to come out with more and more products. New products create hype and extra sales.

Fuck capitalism

Because there are enough people that do all of these things (such as celebrities whose career depends in no small part on their appearance), causing our beauty ideals to keep inflating. And at that point it does affect the average person—big time.

And plenty of people know about these procedures & do them. Its practically comoulsory.

“We could literally spend our whole lives doing stuff to make ourselves look better, but wouldn’t that be a waste of life? I mean, would you rather be lasering off your body hair and getting fillers, or would you rather be learning how to dance salsa or even just binge-watch your favorite TV show? I know what I’d pick.”

Because if there’s one thing that’s even less acceptable to be as a woman than unattractive, it’s to be “gross.”

but really the full au naturel bush is not unique to the 1970s, but to the entire time before that, too.

Lol seriously

the real reason so many women remove their pubic hair is simple: shame.