#ellen atlanta

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Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women

By Ellen Atlanta.

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You taught a girl that beauty labour was an investment essential for her worth, that braiding and preening and plucking were necessary skills for her humanity. You told her over and over again that beauty labour is only valuable when unpaid, and when she started to profit from her beauty work you reduced her efforts to frivolity.

Ellen Atlanta, Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women

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The rise in the sexualisation of young girls hasn’t correlated to an increase in sexual pleasure and agency in the same group. The orgasm gap still proliferates. The objectification and denigration of women’s bodies is still rife. Young men and boys still feel entitled to nudes, as well as physical access to women’s bodies and sexual pleasure. For most, sex still ends when the man finishes, with little regard to the woman’s experience.

Ellen Atlanta, Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women

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Influencers, without formal training or qualifications, can reach a vast audience making claims about diet, health and wellness, spreading harmful misinformation that can fuel obsessions and damage relationships to food, fitness and self-esteem. An extension of the halo effect, we are more likely to trust these influencers because they are beautiful.

Ellen Atlanta, Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women

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To exist as a young woman today is to flounder in this sea of paradoxes. It’s to live in a world that criticises a beauty standard whilst continuing to uphold it. It’s to know that this beauty standard is unhealthy whilst being painfully aware that adherence is the best way to thrive. It’s to resent the images that envelop you on social media whilst obsessively consuming and recreating the same content. It’s to know that this beauty is often artificial and yet still strive for it. It’s to reject the male gaze whilst profiting from it. It’s being ‘empowered’ figuratively but not literally.

Ellen Atlanta, Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women

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What we are doing is defined as aesthetic labour – work for which you are compensated, directly or indirectly, for your body’s appearance. This may include sex work, modelling and social media influencing. In our highly visual online world, aesthetic labour is becoming a more common line of work and lifestyle. When everyone can strive to be professionally beautiful, we increasingly choose to do so, with certain aesthetics (such as Instagram Face) creating currency in the digital world.

Ellen Atlanta, Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women

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The result is a paradox, in which women are valued for their beauty and physical attractiveness, but often penalised and judged for putting effort in to enhance their appearance. Women are expected to employ rigorous self-discipline and monitoring, whilst appearing nonchalant and unconcerned by beauty at all.

Ellen Atlanta, Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women

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An ethnically ambiguous beauty ideal represents a middle ground – one that everyone can strive to achieve. For darker-skinned women, access can be achieved through skin bleaching, wearing wigs, relaxing afro hair, contouring the nose or getting surgery to erase ethnic features. For white women, a tan is a necessity.

Ellen Atlanta, Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women