Beauty Privilege -or- How the “feminists aren’t all hairy and ugly!” reassurance actually hurts us all

OK so I wasn’t actually going to post this here because I thought maybe where my thought process came out of would come off as confrontational?  But then Rachel went and posted about conventional beauty and the would blow up around that and I just couldn’t resist…

Apparently I have one bone left to pick over one of Jessica Valenti’s choices in Full Frontal Feminism (and to be fair she was hardly the first to employ this tactic).  That is, her numerous reassurances that "not all feminists are fat, ugly, hairy, lesbians." Yah ok, that’s true, but how about those of us who ARE? Or those of us who maybe aren’t all of those things, but maybe, say, one of them? I’ve been picking at this sore for a while and Feminist Gal’s post on beauty privilege over at Oh, You’re a FEMINIST?! finally tipped me over the edge to post about it.

Now first of all, you should totally read that post, because it’s good. But what it brought up for me was consciousness of my own beauty privilege, which I have more or less recognized myself to have before those words were put on it. Being in possession of beauty privilege has certainly worked in my favor in life, and I’ve a lot of advantage of it, to be honest.  It makes my explorations of topics such as the hair on my body more easily accessible than it must be for others. I can afford to buck the system, because I can, if I choose to, assimilate very easily into it. And I have had an uneasy relationship with that fact, at turns choosing to conform and not to conform.

As Valenti said in her book, few things sting women worse than being branded "ugly" and I have, in fact, had my fair share of that (ironically, during period when I conformed more). It is harsh, it is lasting, and feminism did help me work against the affects of it. So I understood why she brought it up, and I think I understood her goal in doing so. However, the repeated assertion that "we’re not all like that!" only serves, imo, to distance ourselves from these notions of ugly, instead of stomping them into the ground. It was incredibly alienating, as someone who chooses to be hairy most of the time, to read a fellow feminist defining something of herself through what she was not , and what I am .

For most of us, reclaiming our bodies as our own, is going to involve bucking the system in some way. Coming to have the authentic relationships with our bodies is going to involve accepting pieces of ourselves that others have branded ugly. For me, that’s involved my body hair. For Valenti this involved her nose and those who branded it when she was she was young, as well as the whole stupid "boob-gate" thing.  It’s going to be different for each of us, but we share in the struggle.

This beauty stuff is vital to feminism!  There is a reason why second wavers paid so much attention to it.  There is a reason why hippies went hairy, and why bush was in, in the ’70’s. It was good work, promptly and thoroughly thwarted by "the ugly stick." And until we can get that shit training out of our souls, our choices are not based on our own desires. And if they’re not based on OUR desires, whose are they based in…whose standards are we reinforcing?

Conventionally pretty or not, we’re each fighting a similar uphill battle.  And I get sick of watching pretty feminists distancing themselves from conventionally unpretty ones, just as much as watching conventionally unpretty ones belittle the pretty ones.  It’s missing the point. And the reclamation of our bodies as our own  always has, and always will, be rooted in our ability to stand together, not in defining ourselves against each other.