It's interesting to read the negative reactions to this updated diagram. The focus is generally on individualism and defense of the individual woman's "choice" to partake in beauty practices, as is expected. However, women's "choice" to engage in beauty practices cannot be analyzed under an individualst lens. Individualism is a divide-and-conquer tactic that weakens the ability to analyze how women, as a class, are forced to act and behave in a patriarchal world.
I would recommend reading the transcript of Sheila Jeffrey's Beauty and Misogyny; in the beginning, she goes over the Beauty Hurts diagram:
Beauty practices aren’t just some kind of interesting optional choice, extra, but they fundamentally construct who a woman is and therefore how she is able to imagine, because they constrict her movements and create the behaviours of her body.
Now beauty practices have psychological effects on women too, she says, because the relationship between physical freedom and psychological development, intellectual possibility and creative potential, is an umbilical one. So she’s stressing again, what we’re able to think is going to be related to the way our body is tied down. Like other radical feminist critics of beauty she describes a broad range of practices that women must engage in to meet the dictates of beauty[.]
Now she says, the description she gives of what happens here, is that in our culture, and I think she’s writing about a culture here, not one part of a woman’s body is left untouched or unaltered, no feature or extremity is spared the art or pain of improvement […]. From head to toe every feature of a woman’s face, every section of her body is subject to modification and alteration. And I remember when I first saw this diagram it had a considerable effect on me. Now I think, what are we missing? But at the time when I first saw it I thought that was very helpful, because it actually maps out what women take for granted, the extraordinary practices they perform on themselves every day, before they go out in the morning and so on. So many women take them for granted and it’s very important to actually have them mapped out here so we can see them.
The last part is emphasis mine, the updated diagram is merely an extended list of more beauty practices woman have been expected to do throughout various cultures in the name of "beauty." Some of these can be physically painful practices, like high heels, extreme diets, piercings, and so on. Some can be mentally painful, ie. women who feel they must wear makeup before they go out in public, as if their natural face is unacceptable.
What Andrea also says about these practices is that “Beauty practices are vital to the economy.” Of course that’s true, there’s been hardly any work on how vital they are to the economy, and “They’re a major substance of male female role differentiation, the most immediate physical and psychological reality of being a woman.” In other words, they create sex difference. These practices–very harmful, painful, enormously expensive, time wasting and constricting to the body, and affecting what women can think–they create sexual difference. Otherwise how would we know who was on the top and who was on the bottom, and it’s crucial for male dominance that we know who’s on the top and who is on the bottom. Otherwise the system cannot work.
I think claiming beauty practices are simply "the human impulse to customize or express" is quite a reductive take. If that is the case, why are men as a class not doing the beauty practices listed in the diagram at the same rates as women as a class? Why is it overwhelmingly women who make these specific beauty practice "choices"?
To talk about women’s free choice is to enter into the tricky terrain of how much free will we really have as human beings. While we all have some power to act as the author of our own lives, we are not free-floating individuals who come into the world with a ready-made set of identities; rather, to paraphrase Karl Marx, we are social beings who construct our identities within a particular set of social, economic, and political conditions, which are often not of our own making.
— Gail Dines
On the point about braces: yes, braces can be used as a medical treatment, but for the most part, they are focused on esthetics. Some countries, especially the United States, have a huge obsession with "perfect" straight white teeth over a health reason to get braces. My sister and I got braces, not because of health reasons, but because my grandmother kept insisting we needed to be "beautiful." The fact that the braces treatment eroded my gums so much that I got severe gum recession and had to start exclusively using sensitivity toothpaste in my early twenties in order to stop the horrible zaps and aches of nerve pain from my now-exposed tooth roots? Nah, doesn't matter, because now my grandma can demand I smile and coo over my "now beautiful" smile. Because I suppose before it wasn't worth me smiling; before, with my crooked teeth that I loved so much, I wasn't "beautiful". For me, this was a literal example of "beauty hurts." We all have different experiences.
Aka it's an individual moral failing to be anything but a neutrally presenting cis woman.
I think it's interesting that pointing out all the extensive beauty treatments women have had to endure over time and cultures is considered feminists claiming women who participate in said practices have a "moral failing". The fact it is called an "individual moral failing" seems to show the individualist mindset this post is coming from, which I suppose is expected from those upholding "choice feminism". I do not think women who abide by these practices have some "individual moral failing", I believe they're doing their best in a patriarchal world stacked against them. This falls into the radical feminist notion of female solidarity:
While radical feminism analyzes what harms women as a class, it also recognises that women are making choices in unequal systems that are biased against them. Therefore, there is no judgment towards the individual woman who makes imperfect feminist choices in order to survive in her society. Keeping this in mind does not invalidate the understanding of the power dynamic in which men as a class extract economic, emotional, social, physical, sexual, and reproductive power from women as a class.
Acknowledging harm to women as a class is not judging women as “less than” for being the victims of female socialisation and unequal systems stacked against them. Women can show up for radical feminism without needing to be a perfect radical feminist—radical feminists aim to not hold women to the unfair double standard that is conditioned by female socialization.
