Heather Widdows on the Beauty Ideal

The single global beauty ideal

0:00This is Philosophy Bites with me, David Edmonds. And me, Nigel Warburton. Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybites.com. What is it that makes another person physically attractive? What characteristics do a face and body need in order to be beautiful in the eyes of others? Is there consensus on this, and why does this matter? Heather Widows is a philosopher at Warwick University. Heather Widows, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

0:30Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here. The topic we're going to focus on is the beauty ideal. Now, most people think there are many ideals of beauty, historically, culturally, and so on. Why do you focus on the beauty ideal? Historically, there have been many. I think it's changed dramatically over the last few years. And now that there is only one global beauty ideal for women, that has four features. It's not true for men, but for women, I think there is now a single global beauty ideal. So what are the four features? Thinness, firmness, smoothness, and youth.

1:02And you might think youth has been around for a while. I'll grant you that. But the other three, I think, are now forming a very dominant global beauty ideal that applies to all women, increasingly younger, increasingly older, and in times when it didn't used to. So times of illness, and even as we move towards death.

Technology and the global peer group

1:19What is it then about our situation today that could have produced this skew towards a single view of beauty? Really hard to know exactly how it's come about. I'm not a historian. I'm married to a historian. So I'm always careful what I say about history. But there are many features that I think might have led to this. I talk about a perfect storm. So one piece of the puzzle is the way that the tech has changed. And the tech has changed both in what we can do to our bodies, but also the way we see bodies, the tech of the social media and the digital.

1:52One is the way we do consumption. We are writing ourselves on our bodies. We've gone from the it bag and the it car to the body as our kind of site of dominant consumption. Another thing is one that I talk about most, how we value appearance has changed and the ethical nature to now how we consider our bodies and faces, that they tell us something really important about who we are. Our bodies, in a way, have become ourselves. So technically it matters. It matters in terms of how we're doing consumption.

2:23It matters ethically. And the other thing is we now have a global peer group. It used to be the case that cultures had very different beauty ideals, and that's no longer true. The more we have this global peer group, the more we have this single ideal. So obviously, technically, carrying a camera around on a smartphone has changed the way people both perceive themselves and exchange images with one another, combined with the ability to change our bodies in a much more dramatic way than has been available to previous generations.

2:54Those two features are incredibly important in how we see ourselves. I mean, if you compare ourselves with people who had no access to mirrors, we have a lot of self-reflection, as it were, that goes on. But so what? So what that we are thinking about what we look like? We've always thought about how we look all the way back to cave paintings. We are adorning beings. We adorn our faces, our bodies, and our surroundings. This is part of how human beings relate to themselves and the world. But something as different happens when it becomes a global ideal.

3:26So only a global ideal can normalise and homogenise in a way that it makes beauty practices become invisible, become health and hygiene practices. So we've had some really dominant beauty ideals that make us do all kinds of terrible things for beauty. So foot binding and corset wearing have been two really good examples of things that are really devastating and damaging to the body. But they always were and always remained beauty practices, adornment practices. They could never become invisible and become health and hygiene practices.

3:57So there were always women who didn't do those practices. So most obviously, working class women in those societies did not do those practices. And indeed, Sulfrajects pointed to their maids when they threw off their corsets. They still managed to be women. They still managed to have children. But they didn't wear the corsets. Likewise, with foot binding, that tiny lotus foot, it might have been beautiful, but you could never think it was natural. As it becomes global, it becomes invisible. So already normalised are things like body hair removal that we now talk about as dirty,

4:28disgusting, unnatural, and it becomes health and hygiene. And people are now talking about, so for instance, Dana Berkowitz talks about Botox in the US as now more like teeth cleaning. So you see that kind of ratcheting up that could only happen if we no longer have all those different cultural ways of doing beauty. And that's something that I think is fundamentally different from any previous beauty ideal. That's fascinating. Do you think this is just a kind of sociological observation that is important that we need

4:59to draw attention to because it's happened gradually and then suddenly we're in this world where people are seriously thinking they're obliged to use Botox or have those kind of lip inflations that you see all over the place?

Ethical values and the tyranny of the majority

5:11Is it just of sociological interest or is there something philosophical particularly about this? A sociologist can track those changes, but what a sociologist doesn't notice, which I as an ethicist notice, is that this is fundamentally connected to our changing values. It's not kind of a change in taste. It's a change to who we are and what we value, what we think matters about human beings and how we define ourselves, judge ourselves and judge other people. And that's fundamentally philosophical. People aren't all the same though.

5:42Some people are more affected by this sort of culture of physiological pressure, as it were, to conform to a stereotype of beauty that can be manipulated using cosmetic devices and God knows what. Some people just reject that out of hand and say, well, I'll just age gracefully, I'll be the person I am. Not everybody falls under the beauty ideal to the same extent, but it's certainly the case that if we look down the generations, the younger you are, the more likely you are to be subject to it and resisting it fully is something that has more to do with the demographic

6:14you belong to. I argue that very rarely is this a life choice in very many demographics. Obviously, if you're in a privileged position, perhaps if you're a member of the intelligentsia or academia where bare face and lack of makeup is normal, it may be easier to resist. But if you look at the statistics, the majority of women wear makeup. We talk about putting your face on, right? There's a colloquialism there that suggests that this is very normal. And we now see cancer charities, for instance, part of what they will do is provide women

6:47with makeup and that does increase self-esteem. Women are read as more competent, more intelligent and kinder if they wear makeup and so on and so on. So yes, of course, some people don't fall into it. You are not forced to do it. There's no gun to your head. But to just think that the pressures are therefore trivial, I think, is to misunderstand the power of the demands of the current beauty ideal. So this is something like what John Stuart Mill called the tyranny of the majority. Kind of. So I get, you know, told, oh, that's just what most people are doing.

7:20And sometimes people say to me something similar about, oh, this is just capitalism. And of course, both are true to some extent. But it's also the case that you can't be sold something that you ultimately don't want, as the Sinclair C5 told us, right? It might be very sensible for the planet and it might actually be a better way of travelling, but nobody wanted it. If we valued intelligence or health, then we'd all be maybe walking around with drips to improve our intellect constantly. We're not walking around with drips to give us better drugs that improve our consciousness

7:51or our capacity. We are spending our money on treatments and tweakments and surgery to improve how we look. From the way you're saying this, it sounds as if you disapprove of that tendency. I disapprove of it if we end up at a place where we don't think anything else is valuable. I do think philosophy is guilty of not valuing the body as much as it should to focus on the ghost in the machine, that we are not actually embodied beings. We are embodied beings, so I'm not at all dismissing this.

8:24In fact, I think there are many positive things about caring about appearance. So for instance, very much in our current society, adult-to-adult touch that is not sexual or not in health is the beauty touch. So I think there are actually lots of positive aspects of the way that we do beauty and how we care about our appearance, which is also a way of recognising that we care about our bodies. But I do think the trajectory that we're on, where appearance is mattering not just a lot but most, and where we are not spending time on other aspects of our wellbeing.

8:56So we think that it's not the case that if you look like a lawyer, that you will suddenly be a lawyer. Or if you wear the lab coat and eyeglasses, you will be a scientist. You also need to study. And we're going so down this line of believing that if we look the part, we will be the part, that there's something that is just fundamentally flawed about that. And we all sag, wrinkle and die. Compare this to other ideals. This is one where ultimately we cannot continue to improve. You can continue to be more truthful. You can continue to be a better daughter.

9:27You can continue to do all kinds of things better. But you cannot continue to optimise your appearance. That is not going to deliver you the goods of the good life. Pascal had this idea that if you don't believe in God, but you want to believe in God because you believe his wager proves that you ought to, one of the best things you can do is take on the outward appearances of somebody who is religious. Start praying. Start going to church. Start singing hymns and so on. That will push you towards a belief in God. Is it so obviously true that having outward appearances doesn't lead to a greater chance

10:03of becoming the person that you want to be? Luckism turns out to be real. And this is one of the complicated and interesting things about this topic. So it is absolutely true that looking good will bring certain advantages. You will be paid more. You are more likely to get an interview. Teachers treat attractive students better and not just because they think that they will have more friends. They also think that they are cleverer. Ugly criminals get harsher sentences and so on. So there are elements in which appearance delivers. So we talk about the halo effect.

10:33We talk about pretty privilege. These things are real. But what it will not do is deliver everything. So currently so obsessed that we come with our bodies that we really think that a better body will be a better self. That if you're thinner or smoother, firmer, that you will have better relationships, better jobs and better everything. And in fact, if you put too much attention in your appearance, then you are unable to do all those other things that will lead to the goods of the good life. Could it not be that we're not thinking this, that there's some kind of biological drive,

11:05perhaps symmetry, smoothness, firmness, those sort of things are markers of good health. And if you think that we're fundamentally driven by sexual reproduction, you know, we're looking for partners who have good health. And these could be good characteristics as simple markers. It's a heuristic. The obsession that we have with the body currently moves us a long way from those kind of evolutionary accounts. Of those four features, thinness, firmness, smoothness and youth, then yes, youth might be a longstanding feature and does exactly what you suggest, tracks to an evolutionary

11:36account and it's signalling health. But as we see the beauty ideal developing, we're not seeing healthy bodies. In fact, health and beauty are coming apart in many ways. So the kind of thinness that you're talking about in some parts of the body, so thin waists, thin ankles, thin wrists, that often requires kind of very slim bodies with then curves in the right places. Now that might be diet and exercise or increasingly it might be treatments, tweakments and implants on an otherwise thin frame. And often when you get too thin, you're then leading to an inability to reproduce.

12:11And we're seeing this in men. There is no global ideal for men, but in certain demographics of men, we're seeing this increasing obsession with the body. And here we're thinking particularly about buff bodies. We're seeing this in young men in the West particularly. So lots of muscle building that requires extreme diet and fitness and often steroid use. Then you're actually again hitting your ability to reproduce really hard. And I was recently talking to a reproductive surgeon who was telling me that when clients

12:41come and they find that their sperm rate is reduced and he suggests what they need to do is change their beauty regimes, although we don't usually talk about beauty regimes with men, fitness regimes, but often they're involving enhancements that aren't fitness. They're unwilling to do that because looking virile has become more important than being virile. So I think the health and the beauty are separating in a way that they haven't before. What about the idea that people should be free to do what they want? It's a kind of agency.

13:12Existentialists make us artists of our own life. Why can't we be artists of our own bodies? We absolutely can be artists, but I think there's very little creativity going on in the way that we're doing this kind of reproduction of the beauty ideal. The range of what is acceptable is narrowing and narrowing. So the more people do it, then the higher the bar gets, then everybody has to do it such that the kind of creativity that is and can and should be involved in our bodies and beauty becomes reduced and it becomes more required, more demanding with less choice involved.

13:48There is creativity involved in beautifying and I think we want to maintain that, but we absolutely don't want this ever narrowing beauty ideal that there is less and less choice about meeting because not to meet it makes you feel like a failure. And a failure in a really significant way, when people talk about failure to be good enough, they say we feel like failures. This seems to be global shame, shame of the self, not local shame of something we've done wrong. And that means that choice and agency is actually vastly reduced here rather than extended.

14:23So you're saying that the apparent freedom to choose what you look like is actually an illusion that basically there's a narrow range of choices that are socially acceptable. And strong pressure, a young woman would feel extreme pressure to conform to an ideal that she didn't choose. Absolutely. I think the demands of beauty are extraordinary. But yet at the same time, the learned narrative that we all have to say is one of empowerment. So I'm Doing It For Me is an almost required narrative in the West for any kind of choosing of beauty

14:57practices. There are different cultural narratives. The cultural narratives change, but the ideal, the kind of treatments and tweakments that you're having does not change. So all of the treatments make you thinner, firmer, smoother and younger. And yet the narratives that surround that are different. But the empowerment narrative is the acceptable narrative. But it is a narrative. It's a learned narrative. And if all the choices are going the same way, you have to question whether that is a true narrative or not. And I think it is not. So your claim that this is a global phenomenon seems to be plausible, that there is pressure

15:30to look a certain way that particularly women are feeling. And there are the means for many wealthier women to achieve some of those goals, as it were.

Recognizing and challenging the value framework

15:39Is there an alternative? Is there a different world that you could see? As a philosopher, you've diagnosed the problem. But do you have a solution? I hope there's a different world, because we're in that strange scenario where nobody wants it to be the case that they feel this pressure to do it. Very many people want to do some of it, but not under pressure. So the ideal would be for us to move to a more diverse range of practices, right? Not to forget about our bodies, but to think about our bodies differently. At the moment, if we don't pay attention to this and start recognising what's going on,

16:13I think that we will continue on this upwards trajectory. So I talk about the beauty ideal as both greedy and stealthy. So this is actually a dramatic change in what human beings are and what they value. But it's not one that we recognise as a society. We haven't kind of had this big radical change as we would if a new religion had come in or a new political belief had come in. But this is a new value framework. And if we want to move to a world where this value framework doesn't take over, then the first step is to start talking about it and recognising that we have had this change and

16:46that this matters. And how do we collectively want to address this? I'm very sympathetic to the idea that appearances affect your social standing, how people treat you as an individual. So I had terrible acne as a late adolescent through to my 20s. And I would have done anything to get rid of that because it definitely affected not only how people treated me, but also how I felt about how they treated me. So I became very cynical, seeing beautiful people getting a different kind of treatment.

17:18But that's just an individual case. When you've got something like this going on as a society and even on a larger scale across the world, aren't we just in the sort of position where we just have to lump it? This is just how people are, that they do have certain preferences that are maybe homogenised by commercial interests and so on, but are still very much dominant in the world. And we just have to work with them. I really think we shouldn't just accept it and lump it. I think if we just accept it, we're going to thin our values and stop doing so many of

17:51the most important things that human beings do. There are many things that we think of as natural or something we can't change. So really good examples of discrimination would be racism or sexism. Psychologists will tell us that those are perfectly natural reactions, just like people say exactly the same thing about appearance. But we do not choose to allow our society to go on to accept them. Oh, it's natural to have adverse reactions to people whose skin colour is different from you when you're a young child. Oh, it's natural for young children to look positively on their attractive face.

18:24We don't think that's acceptable. I see no reason to think that we should also think that this is acceptable. It's just as unacceptable. Also, this is new. Our grandparents and great-grandparents did not think appearance defined human beings. We haven't done it in the past. We don't need to do it in the future. And I can see no argument that suggests that we should. Heather Woodhouse, thank you very much. Thank you. Pleasure. For more Philosophy Bites, go to www.philosophybites.com.

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