On Beauty

There's a very moving (and beautifully written) post over at Hoyden about the Beauty Myth and what happens to women's self identity as they age and are no longer noticed/praised for being desirable. Although the thread sometimes degenerates there are several comments as insightful and revelatory as the original.

I'm particularly cautious of thread derailment on feminist topics so I thought I'd post over here and just link there.

I'm interested in the other side of the coin - how to avoid perpetuating and reinforcing the message. For a long time I'd almost never comment on a woman's appearance at all, lest it be reinforcing of the idea that this was what matters. More recently I've slipped into sometimes telling a woman how attractive she looks, and it struck me the other day that I've said nice things about one particular friend's looks more often than her intellect/academic success. (Since she's well into a PhD in a hot area of science the latter is considerable, but she's not entirely confident of her abilities, so its not like such comments would be superfluous)

I realised that as a society we're so conditioned to talk about women in terms of their appearance that it takes a fair amount of effort not to. Certainly such effort is pretty minor compared to the efforts women have to go to in order to block out the messages that their worth is measured in milli-Helens[1], but I'm pondering how important this is, and if any comments are too many. May post in more depth later.


[1] In case this is not self-explanatory, the milli-Helen was a measure of beauty proposed at one point on the basis that if Helen of Troy had "the face that could launch a thousand ships" beauty could be measured on the scale of how many ships would be launched to rescue/recapture an individual. I'm not sure how tongue in cheek the idea was, but besides the sexist (and hetrosexist) assumptions, it is does reveal that in a society where cultural notions of beauty are strongly reinforced such a scale is much less use than one in which diverse visions of beauty are encouraged.