[W8] Girls, You Never Look Good Enough 💋
🤳 The Selfie Culture Phenomenon
The rise of social media has fundamentally up the game of beauty standards, making the "perfect" look, once seen in magazines, easily accessible through beautifying filters on various apps. This pervasive "selfie culture" facilitates a constant performance of the self, where users experiment with "digital adornment" (Barker, 2020), similar to makeup or clothing, sparking debate about beauty standards, self-perception, and mental health, encapsulated in the concept of digitized dysmorphia.
☠️ Digitized Dysmorphia and 🖤 Unrealistic Standards
Isabelle Coy-Dibley defines "digitized dysmorphia" as the alteration of perceived flaws through digital image editing, reflecting both individual and collective efforts to meet unrealistic beauty standards (2016). This is particularly significant for women, whose bodies have historically been subject to societal concepts and modifications, with digital editing adding another layer to their body image concerns.
🎭 Theorizing Femininity: The "Femininity Mask"
The concept of the "femininity mask," discussed by theorists like Luce Irigaray and Mary Anne Doane, explains the pressure to adhere to beauty standards (Coy-Dibley, 2016). Doane suggested that "womanliness is a mask which can be worn or removed," indicating that femininity is a performance of societal expectations rather than an inherent trait. In the digital age, this performance extends into the virtual realm, where apps enable the alteration of facial features and makeup to align with "acceptable" standards.
🧙 Whitewashing and ✨ Exclusionary Beauty Ideals
Beautifying filters and editing apps have significant global impacts but also raise concerns about exclusionary beauty ideals and whitewashing. Jessica Barker highlights that these filters often promote a narrow idea of beauty, including slimming faces, altering noses, enlarging eyes and lips, and lightening skin, which can negatively affect self-perception across different cultural contexts (2020). This issue is compounded by the fact that the developers of these beautifying apps are predominantly straight white males, whose biases can shape the technology and further skew perceptions of female corporeality (Barker, 2020).
🗺️ Cultural Specificity and 🌐 Global Impact
It's crucial to acknowledge that beauty standards and the impact of beautifying technologies are, perhaps, global. As highlighted in Jiayang Fan's "China's Selfie Obsession," the preference for "whiteness" in skin tone, as seen in China, is a key example of how the Eurasian beauty standard influence the design and use of these apps, demonstrating that digitized dysmorphia and its associated pressures are experienced globally, not just in Western cultures (2017).
🤖 Tech Industry Influence
The tech industry's role in perpetuating beauty standards is evident in apps like Perfect365, developed by ArcSoft, a company that openly acknowledges its influence in shaping images. The design and marketing of these apps often target women, reinforcing a "femininity mask" that aligns with societal expectations and the male gaze, often perpetuating a narrow, culturally specific ideal of beauty (Coy-Dibley, 2016).
🍎 Impact on Self-Perception and Mental Health
The impact of these filters on self-perception is profound, with reactions ranging from satisfaction and guilt to insecurity and body dysmorphia. Women are increasingly pressured to meet not only societal beauty standards but also their own edited images, leading to a disconnection from their natural appearance, heightened insecurities, and in severe cases, body dysmorphia.
In conclusion, the digital age, fueled by a global selfie culture, has intensified the pressure on individuals, particularly women, to achieve "perfection," often defined by whitewashed and culturally specific beauty ideals perpetuated by predominantly male developers. While digital image alteration can offer a sense of control, it also perpetuates a cycle of self-criticism and the pursuit of an unattainable ideal. It is imperative to critically examine the sociocultural systems that reinforce these standards and their detrimental effects on self-esteem and mental health worldwide. The concepts of the "femininity mask" and digitized dysmorphia underscore the complex interplay between societal expectations, technology, and the evolving and increasingly globalized standards of beauty in the digital era.
Barker, Jessica. (2020). Making-up on mobile: The pretty filters and ugly implications of Snapchat. Fashion, Style & Popular Culture. 7. 207-221. 10.1386/fspc_00015_1.
Coy-Dibley, I. (July, 2016). “Digitised Dysmorphia” of the Female Body: The Re/Disfigurement of the Image. Palgrave Communications. 2:16040 doi: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.40
Fan, J. (December, 2017). China’s Selfie Obsession. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/chinas-selfie-obsession
