Black Women, Size, and Beauty

I recently joined an online group dedicated to Black women’s fitness. I thought it would be fun. More importantly, I thought it would be a way to maintain motivation through connecting with other women who might share the same issues, such as hair, body type, and skin protection. As a black woman who exercises on a pretty regular basis and has a hard time finding other black women to work out with, I thought that this community was right for me. I started following their website and their twitter feed. I couldn't have been more was wrong.

My first inclination that this group was wrong for me was that their target audience was black women with processed hair. One of the hottest topics on the website is maintaining one’s hair. This is a considerable issue among black women who relax their hair because it is chemically straightened and the more you wash it the more likely it is to “go back” to its natural un-straightened state. I have worn my hair natural for 14 years. I have locks, so I do not worry about them too much. If I have just freshly twisted them I tie them up and get on with the business of working out. Also, there are so many natural hairstyles that are deemed acceptable at corporate jobs, there are few reasons to maintain a perm/relaxer these days. But still, I don’t bash women with relaxed hair, but I don’t like to spend a lot of personal time listening to them complain.

So, I ignored the hair issue because I am still interested in having a community, when I should have seen it as the canary in the coal mine. Then the other day on twitter, I saw them tweeting the following, “Feeling like you want to up chuck means that you worked hard.” Then she adds that her husband told her this little nugget of wisdom. Uh no. In my world, feeling like you need to puke means that you did not wait long enough after eating to work out. Then the woman tweeting on behalf of this group goes on to talk about using running as a way to preserve the sexy. As if the only good reason to workout is to maintain your sex-appeal. Um no. I think that working out to maintain your health, challenge your body, connect with your body and nature, or train for a marathon. I do not work out to be deemed acceptable within the size regime of US beauty standards. Why would I, no matter how much workout I will never be a part of those standards or that regime because it does not include black women, thin or not.

Why do black women need to get involved in the size movement? Because our bodies are considered not the ideal therefore, even when we are not “fat,” many of us cannot fit into the clothes at mainstream stores because of our hips, butts, and small waists. Or we cannot fit because we are voluptuous all over, large breasts and butts, hourglass style. Fashion designers need to accommodate women’s bodies, especially the bodies of women of color. For those of you who are very thin, and do not have a large butt or breasts, who think that you don’t have to worry about this issue because you fit into their standard of what a body should fit, you should join the movement in solidarity with other women. And because there will come a time when you will not fit because bodies are precarious rebellious creatures.

The US Regime of thinness says, that if you don’t fit into clothes sized 00-12 then something is wrong with you. It says: punish your body to get into those sizes. Don’t eat, and workout to the point of exhaustion, perfection is around the corner. To further encourage us to keep our eyes on "perfections," we are bombarded with images of women’s bodies sans cellulite, giggling thighs, arms, etc. And the only time we see non-photoshopped images in mainstream media is when a celebrity is showing us that they are indeed--that thin. Of course there is resistance, youtube and blogs are full of images of real human bodies that are unvarnished, but those places are outside of mainstream media.

Many of the mainstream media outlets do not have any real diversity. What they call diverse is a cafe-au-lait black and Latina women that are barely distinguishable from white women. And there are so few Asian women and Indigenous women it is really embarrassing. For the few that are on network television are relegated to second string jobs, while the white woman is the lead female anchor, who is seen as second string to the male anchor. For example, on The Today Show Meredith Veira is the anchor, a little known fact is that Viera is Portuguese, but today that is defacto white. I digress. The women of color, Natalie Morales, Anne Curry, and Tamron Hall, are all second string correspondents, while Viera is the anchor. Anne Curry has been on the show the longest and was doing the news portion when Katie Couric was still on the show. Was she promoted to anchor? No. Now, The Today Show's 9:00 hour the people of color are allowed to anchor, but that is not so on the main hour. There is a rumor that Viera will leave, I wonder if any of those women will be promoted or if they will find another white woman to be the "face" of the show.

Even when women of color  meets the standards of skinniness, has European features, and demonstrates professionalism they are still passed over for jobs in mainstream media, be it fashion or a daytime talkshow. Check out the film below that follows a black fashion model trying to get booked during go-sees.

The Colour of Beauty: Elizabeth St. Phillip, 2010

Featuring Renee Thompson, Part 1

Part 2

This film highlights all that is bad in the fashion industry. The recent outbursts of John Galliano illustrate how this culture of exclusion is closely related to racialized religious oppression and marginalization. The idea that some bodies are in, and others are out, is the kind of binary thinking that leads to genocide. People are more than bodies. And People Matter.

The story isn't all bad. Some designers want to break with the old rules. I want to say thank you to Christian Siriano for casting mainly women of color in his winning runway show on Project Runway. He specifically said that he wanteH black girls because they are fierce. He did not rant and rave about their hips and butts. he wanted the best models and for him that meant brown skin. Now, some might argue that he was exoticising them, but I would have to disagree because he was admiring their beauty not exaggerating their differences. The history of exoticising in fashion is long and the practice is pretty overt. Here is a prime example:

This image of Alek Wek is an example of exoticising. She is being made to look like an other worldly creature, an animal. She has a headband that consists of two horns, her tongue is sticking out, and she is wearing a black bustier. All of this is done to make her look less human, and allows the viewer to fetishize her dark skin.

The few times when women of color are the inspiration for something in fashion, the product is used to propel racist ideals. Example Rodarte's collection for Mac that was "inspired" by the city of Juarez. Colorlines writes: 

The makeup company MAC released its new “Juarez” collection in collaboration with the high-fashion label Rodarte, with lipglosses named “del Norte,” bloodstreaked eyeshadows in a shade of “Bordertown” and a pale nail polish called “Factory.” The Rodarte designers said they were inspired by Juarez and the lines of women workers who’d make their way to factory jobs in the middle of the night. Sleepwalking, they called it. It was this collection that spawned their makeup line with MAC. (Read more of this article here.)

This line of makeup was appalling, especially when it is coming from one of the few manufacturers of  makeup that is pigmented enough to show up on brown skin. Brown girls in the States know that Mac is a go-to brand because it actually shows up on our skin, unlike many department store brands, which does not have enough pigmentation to do anything, but leave our skin looking ashy. Bloggers took them down and eventually, Mac apologized and donated the proceeds to efforts to help Juarez.

The fight for more inclusivity in the fashion industry is a move against exclusionary thinking, which is the close cousin of racism and oppression. 

Jessica Simpson and Tyra Have it all Wrong: The Beauty Myth Updated

I miss the old Tyra; yes the one that told American beauty standards to kiss her fat ass.

Now, she is on a diet and extolling the virtues of not eating pasta for the last two months. What happened to her? On her talk show, she says that she realized that she was getting too big/fat. Then she started doing a workout regime while watching DVDs of "Sex in the City." The symbolism is hard to deny. Tyra who was attempting to do some good work around opening up beauty standards, succumbed to the Beauty Myth once again. The Beauty Myth is the title of a book by Naomi Wolf that was published in 1991. In this book, Wolf outlines that "The Beauty Myth" is a form of political backlash against the gains that women have made since the 1960s. Wolf writes, "this counterforce is operating to checkmate the inheritance of feminism on every level in the lives of Western women."  So the more political, social and economic power that we gain, the more heavily society weighs on us to be beautiful. She writes that after "the sexual revolution promoted the discovery of female sexuality; "beauty pornography" which..links a commodified  'beauty' directly and explicitly to sexuality--invaded mainstream to undermine women's new and vulnerable sense of self-worth."

On a micro-level, but played out in front of thousands of viewers, Tyra succumbed to "The Beauty Myth." The papparazzi called her fat, she went off on them, then she went on a diet. When she went off on the papparazzi and the print media that carried the photographs I was proud of her. Women and girls all over the country were proud of her owning her body, cellulite and all, telling the world to kiss her ass. Tyra was more than a budding feminist that day. Today, you turn to her show and she a shadow of her former self. Small, hollow-eyed, non-existent. Some might say that I should not have hoped to find feminism in a former-supermodel, but I hoped that she could stand up with other women and for young women, who dare to say that they are more than their measurements. She could have continued to create a space where women are thought of as people who have something to contribute to society and are deserving of respect no matter how they look. Well, that did not happen.

Jessica Simpson has had a rough couple of years. A divorce, the mom jeans incident, and John Mayer. Now she has a new show entitled "The Price of Beauty." She claims that the premise of the show is autobiographically motivated because she has been critiqued for being "fat." So now, Jessica is going on a search to find 'beauty' all around the world and to colonize practices of people from non-Western countries. I hate the whole idea of the show. The first reason I don't like the show is because she is taking her hairdresser and friend, who has had more plastic in his face than Barbie. The second reason is that instead of critiquing the idea of beauty, Jessica goes out to colonize beauty practices of non-Westerners. Basically, she is going on a colonizing mission to find out how the 'natives' live. Bad idea. Third, Jessica Simpson should be telling the media to kiss her fat ass like Tyra did. Jessica has a beautiful voice and is a talented singer. Now, I will admit that because she is not the smartest person in the world her music is not great because their is little feeling or intelligence behind her words. But there is a market for pop princesses like her, so why is she doing reality television? She should be focused on sharing her voice with the world. But, I digress.

As Naomi Wolf argues, beauty is tool used by a patriarchal society to discipline women by making them feel personally inadequate. She writes, "The beauty myth tells a story: The quality called "beauty" objectively and universally exists. Women must want to embody it and men must want to possess women who embody it. This embodiment is an imperative for women and not for men....None of this is true. "Beauty" is a currency system...Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact." This system leaves women "to unnaturally compete for the resources that men have appropriated for themselves."

What this boils down to, is that Jessica and Tyra are sadly misguided because it is not that beauty standards need to be more accepting, in actuality, women should refute and rebuke beauty as a standard by which to measure a person's worth in the beginning. The focus should be on what young girls add to our society in terms of politics, social relations, and community, rather than making them feel beautiful. Beauty should be one of the last things a girl worries about in the US because we face a crumbling economy, rampant acts of violence directed against women, and an eco-system that will expire if we continue to consume at this rate. How is beauty going to solve any of these problems. Moreover, how does beauty enable a woman to get the skills that she needs to survive in this world? As a a black woman, I would love to re-write the black female body as beautiful in this racist society, I would rather go to bed knowing that all black children in the US are going to bed with a full stomach and a warm place to lay their heads.

So, Jessica and Tyra both miss the mark. Some will say, Miss Lady, why are you going in on two women about a beauty culture that is patriarchal in nature. Isn't that just another form of bashing women? To that I say, Tyra and Jessica have an opportunity at the big microphone (mainstream popular culture), to actually reach millions of women, and instead of offering something revolutionary they just recycle and sell the beauty myth from a new angle and call it empowerment. Furthermore, in this day and age it seems that they would have some contact with feminist critiques of beauty--don't they research these topics. They must have one intern that is capable of doing a google search on feminism and beauty. Basically, there is no excuse for them to be manipulating young women into thinking that they are just one-step away from achieving beauty.

For now, I will just turn-off the television, catch a break from the beauty industry, and continue to work for social justice.