#2: The Hot Girl Hamster Wheel

Beauty confers power and I find that deeply unsettling. We’ve all heard or innately understood that those who fall within the [arbitrary, narrowly defined, and Eurocentric] beauty standard can benefit greatly— from earning higher salaries to being perceived as moral or intelligent. Even if we intellectually understand looks don’t correlate with morality we’re likely subconsciously drawn to or repelled by people based on their superficial attributes, as many studies have reliably shown. Living by this precarious framework creates conflict in so many ways:

• Whole billion dollar industries profit off making us feel like we have a deficit, intentionally creating unattainable idealized models for what we should look like. They invent issues so they can sell us the solutions.

• When we tie our own attractiveness to our self-worth we fall into a state of hyper and constant vigilance about how we appear to others.

• This will often lead to appearance anxiety, body shame, and a completely exhausting, all consuming need to be “hot”, which is an ever moving target.

Morning Brew’s The Money with Katie Show podcast dubbed this the “Hot Girl Hamster Wheel,” referring to the expensive maintenance “traditional female beauty ideals” prescribe. While she talks about the financial cost of this maintenance, I want to get into the psychological toll it has taken on me.

Try as I might to intellectualize and challenge why we prop up beauty as a virtue, I dedicate untold hours, energy, headspace and resources into beauty performance. When I say performance by the way, I mean just that. There is no objective metric for what is considered beautiful, and we can look at how drastically different the look of the moment has been throughout history to prove this point. We mold ourselves according to what media, society, and the fashion-beauty industrial complex dictates for us.

Depending on the time in history or part of the world someone is in, this beauty performance will look different. A lifetime of mainstream media consumption has definitely informed my own beauty maintenance. This has meant hours spent at the gym everyday, a regimented skincare routine, hair care, cosmetic dentistry, a strict adherence to “clean eating,” an intense clothing shopping habit, body hair removal, and hours and hours consuming information about what other products to buy to fill an unfillable void. I have a disordered relationship with food, and yet I’ve built my professional and personal life around food. I constantly think about the fetishization of youth, and have so much anxiety about going through the natural process of aging. This of course drives me to buy more products to feed Big Beauty. I have been fully indoctrinated.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit here just how calculated I am about this maintenance. Society tells us we’re supposed to be attractive but we can’t care too much about it lest we come off as vain. I’m also hesitant to make these statements about how oppressive I find beauty performance to be when at this stage I am unwilling to hop off the hamster wheel. It’s such a difficult phenomenon to critique when I am locked inside of it.

Since I was a child I have been told that my inherent value is inextricably linked to the way I look. My mother, who used to model, suggested that being beautiful could override institutional power structures that disenfranchised women of color like us. She herself, and her mother before her, was also trapped by the pretense that beauty would empower us. These empowerment narratives are reinforced to me in a multitude of subtle ways on a daily basis. How can I divest from these beauty practices when I feel doing that would disempower me? The prospect is pretty scary.

I’ve been actively working on my beauty anxiety in therapy for years. My high school senior year thesis was even on this very subject. A practice that helps me quell these pressures is being around people and thinking about the qualities I find alluring about them that have nothing to do with the way they look; the way one friend remembers everyone’s food allergies or how another friend likes to break into dance whenever he’s excited. I remind myself that others observe more about me than my fire outfit or the definition of my abs. I like building my days and weeks around activities that use my body in ways where the aesthetics of it aren’t calculated into the activity one iota; hiking in state parks, cooking a really complicated dish that takes hours to prepare, curating biking food tours. I surround myself with people who show me I don’t have to do anything but be me in my natural state to be loved. I still need to figure out how to stay in these blissful modes without backsliding into a total preoccupation with my appearance. Acknowledging this is a societal issue is a step in the right direction.

If you’re someone like me struggling with this topic, here are some questions you can mull over:

• If you lived in a vacuum, how would you present yourself to the world? Would you dress the way you currently do? Would you spend as much time grooming yourself, etc? This is mainly a theoretical question because we don’t live in a vacuum, but it’s a good thought exercise.

• Where do we draw the line between self-expression/self-care through attention to one’s own aesthetic, and coerced modification?

I’ll leave you with this excerpt from Jessica DeFino, one of my favorite writers on this topic:

Looking more youthful might “empower” the person who gets Botox/filler/face lifts — “empower” as in, grants them the literal power to prevail in a society where “beautiful” women statistically see more professional, personal, and financial success and beauty is defined, in part, as youth — but it does not empower people as a whole. It disempowers the collective by continuing to perpetuate unrealistic and unachievable standards.

So… what if we solved the original problem by upending the system instead of making it easier to live within the confines of the system?

That sounds like it’s hard. Time-consuming. Impossible.

But, uh, so is the Sisyphean task of “anti-aging.”

—Jessica DeFino, The Unpublishable

Friends, I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts on beauty performance. The comments are open if you want to start a conversation there, but also feel free to text or email me too.