Advocating for more and more âtypesâ of beauty isnât destroying or challenging The Beauty Myth, its simply moving the goal posts. Beauty standards, by their very design, cannot and will not include all women as beautiful- thatâs not what they were created to do.Â
The entire point of beauty standards is to create a sort of âarchetypeâ of beauty based on qualities and characteristics that only a minority of women possess, (or require a significant amount of time and labor to achieve), then tell the majority of women that these qualities are what they should strive to achieve. What I donât think a lot of women realize is that weâre not at the goal, we just moved the goalposts-which has created an  entirely new set of rules and standards, creating the opposite effect of what a lot of us originally intended.  For example:
If natural hair is to be considered âbeautifulâ, it must now meet this particular set of criteria- long, loosely curled, or super defined. The goalposts have been moved, making achieving âbeautifulâ natural hair a laborous and time consuming process. This is why TWA isnât considered as attractive as say, a perm-rod set, because in addition to a 4c afros association with Blackness and short hairâs association with masculinity, it is not as time consuming and tedious as, say, a woman with waist-length hair taking three hours to create a flexi-rod set. Femininity= time consuming, and the more time, money, and labor spent the more feminine we perceive a woman to be. Natural hair is only considered attractive if the amount of time, energy, labor, spent on it is equal to that of a weave, and even still, natural hair in its most basic form is not considered to many in the Black community as attractive as straight long hair or weave, creating this fucked up hierarchy of attractiveness.Â
The solution, of course, is to do away with the concept of âbeautifulâ hair and focus instead on healthy hair- yes, even in the natural hair community we should do away with the concept of beautiful hair. Healthy hair should always be prioritized, and as long as we continue to put emphasis on curl-loosening styles and length, then we find ourselves closer to falling into the hierarchy of natural hair, which says that looser curl patterns and long hair are better and more desirable than kinky, short hair.Â
The solution is to get rid of beauty period, and instead focus on other qualities and characteristics, namely self-worth and confidence building. Instead of telling girls that theyâre beautiful, why donât we tell them instead that beauty doesnât matter, that they are talented, strong, capable, outstanding, that they can achieve anything that they set their mind to?Â
The concept of beauty has become so entangled with the concept of self-worth that I donât even feel like we can separate the two, and it seems almost unfathomable for us to have one without the other. Its okay to be ugly, its okay to not be considered attractive. Black women do not have to be beautiful to be of worth.Â
If you teach a little Black girl that sheâs beautiful, youâre still telling her that beauty matters. Sheâs going to realize one day that while she might be beautiful that thereâs an entire scale of beautiful and that on a scale of 1 to ten her dark skin, wide nose, and belly make her a 3, and that sheâll never obtain that perfect 10, but sheâll die trying because that;s what women are just supposed to do. If you teach her that her self-worth is not dependent on whether or not sheâs attractive, then whether or not sheâs considered attractive wonât have any bearing on her self-worth.Â
Tackling the dehumanization of Black woman by making strict adherence to femininity the goal isnât helping us, and its only becoming more and more obvious to me that itâs not the solution. We humanize ourselves when we confide in each other, when we create spaces centered on ourselves an our needs. We humanize ourselves when we speak our pains, when we create mirrors of each other in the forms of art and literature, when we provide opportunities for Black women to see themselves gazing back. We humanize ourselves when we laugh and dance, we humanize ourselves not by adhering to femininity, but by growing strong, by finding support in one another, by building strength while also allowing ourselves to be weak.
But we donât like this method. We like goalposts. We like being considered more attractive than other women, we like the privilege femininity affords us and the ease of life it can provide. Weâre willing to continue to engage in femininity, because we know what happens to those women who donât, and we like being considered more attractive than that other girl.
Until a significant portion of Black women decide to abandon femininity, this plan wonât work. It wonât work because without enough Black woman to support each other, weâll always be tempted to go back, because of the privilege and comfort femininity provides, if only socially. Â Until we see enough gender non-conforming women reflected back at us, like a mirror, then femininity will always be the norm.Â
Because eventually, somehow, somewhere, someone is going to tell that Black girl that sheâd look better with a perm, and unless she has enough women to guide her and support her, enough women to help her fight against the beauty myth that screams at her from every source of media, every newspaper, magazine, commercial, and radio song, eventually sheâs going to see that the closer she is to someone elseâs beauty ideal, the more humanity sheâs granted.Â
