Beauty Standards

I read Melina's post with great interest. I immediately thought of a conversation I had last weekend with my uncle and my sister . My sister began teasing me about the cluster of grey hair I have coming through on the crown on my head. She asked, "When are you going to dye your hair?" My sister and my mother like to periodically ask me this question. They think that if they ask me enough I might change my answer. I gave her my standard reply: "I don't have any plans to dye my hair". This produced an immediate and strong reaction from my uncle. I listened to him emphatically explain about how I HAVE to dye my hair. Grey hair on a woman is SO unattractive. It will make me look much older than I am. Finally, it would be unfair to my husband because it will appear as if he is married to a much older woman. I smiled and, for the most part, kept my mouth shut (I have learned in my 30 years when it's worth it to defend my ideals and when it's just a waste of energy). I responded "I've learned to not say never but I highly doubt I will change my mind. I have no plans to dye my hair" and changed the subject. Yet this conversation bothered me and, obviously, stuck with me. Reading Melina's blog brought it back to the surface.

The one thought that has always ran through my head is this: why is it SO bad to look your age? Who are we primping for? Why do we waste so much time and energy doing our hair and makeup? Why do we put ourselves through pain and trauma (e.g. plastic surgery) just to meet this impossible beauty standard that our culture gives us?

As I followed this train of thought, I was reminded of a passage written by Derrick Jensen in The Culture of Make Believe . I want to share it with you here (p.125):

He said, "I still think we can make a case for intent. Say, for example, a group of people live in a community that values relationships more highly than material objects."

He was, of course, describing the vast majority of communities through human existence.

He continued. "Now, introduce television. TV is based on creating dissatisfaction. It cannot exist without dissatisfaction. Happy people make bad consumers."

I remembered a conversation I'd had earlier this year with Kalle Lasn, an anti-corporate, anti-consumeristic culture-jamming activist who runs Adbusters Magazine out of Vancouver, British Columbia. He'd told me, "The first agenda of the commercial media is to sell fear, because it breeds insecurity, and then consumer culture offers us any number of ways to buy our way back to feeling secure, however temporarily. We're fed these images of what we're supposed to look like: pouting lips, pert breasts, buns of steel, everlasting youth."

"White," I added.

He continued, "It's not possible to internalize again and again these images of what's beautiful and what's desirable without having that affect your self-perception. And it alters the very foundation of your personality. It distorts your sexuality. What does it mean that so many of us are willing to give up so much of our power, voluntarily and systematically, to strangers? What does it mean that the most private parts of ourselves - how we are in a relationship to ourselves and to those we love - have been designed in great measure by those who have no interest in us other than that we feel insecure enough to buy their products?"

I told John this, then told him that I think the problem with television is even more fundamental than just causing insecurity. The problem is existential. We all know what happens when you introduce television into indigenous communities. In her book, Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, Helena Norberg-Hodge commented that the "incredible vitality and joy that I experienced in the villages was almost certainly connected to the fact that the excitement in life was here and now, with you and in you. People did not feel that they were on the periphery; the center was where they were." The arrival of television changed all this, she said, because "idealized stars make people feel inferior and passive, and the here and now pales in comparison with the colorful excitement of faraway places."

Okay, so this went a little off the path and into the woods, so to speak. It still drives home the fact that we have to see through the noise. We need to realize that it is just marketing bullshit hammered into our heads, beginning at a very young age, until we believe in some facet of it enough that we purchase these products and make the attempt to live up to these "expectations" of us. I, for one, refuse. I will not dye my hair. I will embrace what the great spirit has blessed me with and be proud of who I am, without any product.