Sexy Baby: On Beauty & Decades of Hunger
Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby
And I'm a monster on the hill
~ Taylor Swift
When Taylor Swift released the single ‘Anti-Hero’ from her recent creative offering, Midnights, she did what many of us have come to know and adore her for: she perfectly encapsulated a core part of our human experience.
In ‘Anti-Hero’, Swift lays down all the ways we are too often our own worst enemies, shedding light on her flaws, that despite self-awareness, she can’t quite seem to challenge and change. Knowing these flaws usually result in her downfall across various life domains, Swift harmonises something I know many of us have felt to our core:
I should not be left to my own devices
They come with prices and vices
I end up in crisis
Like many of Swift’s songs, several careful listening sessions are needed to acquire the depth of meaning she’s carefully curated together, but it’s the lyrics I’ve included at the top that often get stuck in my mind when I think about this song:
Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby
And I'm a monster on the hill
It’s a powerful play on how we compare ourselves to others, and to have it come from, arguably, one of the most classically attractive women on the planet is startling and emblematic of how no one escapes the beauty myth unscathed. Swift regularly speaks out about how she is not taken seriously as a businesswoman, pointing to the ways we often reduce women with power (in any form) to their looks and/or sexual histories. In another track from the album titled Lavender, she sings about the questions she receives, condemning her to one of the two core roles attractive women should be playing within society:
All they keep asking me is if I’m gonna be your bride. The only kind of girl they see is a one-night or a wife.
Off the back of her current Eras world tour, Swift tipped her financial scales to become a billionaire – one of only a small handful of female musicians to achieve this status (Beyonce and Rihanna beat her to the title, and there’s a significant conversation to be had here about these two women reaching this status – perhaps another time). Yet, all the media wants to talk about is the progression of her romance with her latest beau. Visionary women are expected to be successful and beautiful as they supposedly ‘break the mould’, but what does breaking the mould mean if our fixation remains firmly on who she’s dating as the most newsworthy detail of her life? Paris Hilton, another prime example, has been speaking out more recently about how she was pigeon-holed early on as the ‘dumb bimbo’ and how it was often easier to lean into this mask than speak out against it, stating, ‘I’m not a dumb blonde. I’m just really good at pretending to be one.’ It’s long been claimed Hilton is only famous for a leaked sex tape, her looks, and generational wealth, but Hilton is a successful entrepreneur and incredibly savvy businesswoman.
There are, of course, countless other examples throughout our contemporary society and our histories. I don’t know if it’s just a coincidence or something I’m unconsciously drawn to right now, but I’ve found myself devouring a range of literature that deals with these topics in recent months. As I venture into my late 30s, I’m noticing the early edges of an aging body, no matter how minor. It takes me oh-so-much-longer to shift the weight I gain from a month of skipping my workouts; foods I used to devour without a care now cause bloating and cramps; aside from some smile lines, I remain relatively wrinkle-free, but the skin on my neck is definitely feeling the slower flow of collagen – and where did that extra chin come from?! In the split hair of a second, I find myself lamenting these things and simultaneously berating myself for being so vain as even to care.
As women, our worlds are filled with never-ending comparisons, media, and marketing campaigns designed to draw our attention to our ‘flaws’ in increasingly bizarre ways. The parts of my body I’d never previously considered are somehow pulled into stark awareness as yet another social media video about eliminating ‘hooded eyelids’ washes up on my feed. Never in my life have I scrutinised my eyelids, but now, it seems, they are the thing most preventing me from achieving the current standards of conventional beauty.
I recently read Bri Lee’s Beauty (2019), and it does an excellent job of summing up our collective experiences:
‘You were either fit and trim, or you weren’t working hard enough. Your body was how you conveyed wealth and status to your peers, it was a personality trait, a symbol of goodness and values: an ethical ideal.’
Lee writes openly about her struggles with her body and weight, her pursuit of thinness as her version of beauty ideal – but Lee is also an attractive woman – something she fails to really acknowledge in the book. Most people can dedicate themselves to losing weight to fit the metaphorical boxes of physical acceptance, but beauty is more than this. Even at my thinnest, I would never have been deemed ‘beautiful.’ Too short, nose too prominent, lips too thin – I could write an endless list. I recall an instance at university where a female friend looked through photos of us from our previous night out, deciding which ones to share on social media (Facebook at the time – Instagram was yet to come). ‘You know, Elaine,’ she turned to me, ‘you’re actually really quite pretty.’ Backhanded though this comment was, it was the first time anyone had acknowledged me in such a way as a complete person. People often commented on my lovely hair or clear skin, but I was never the complete package. I remember beaming at her comment but also how hard I was working at that time to be thin. She didn’t share any of the pictures with me in them on her Facebook.
The morality of women’s bodies that Lee speaks to is not a new concept, and her book rifts off Naomi Wolf’s classic The Beauty Myth (1990), touching on the ideas of control and conformity surrounding women’s looks. The Beauty Myth is a book I read some time ago and revisited recently. It was Wolf’s commentary around thinness and dieting that burrowed their way into my mind once more:
‘A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.’
And this hard-hitting line:
‘The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.’
In a recent social media series to accompany their latest exhibition, ‘The Cult of Beauty’, the Wellcome Collection has humorously showcased ‘marketing’ executives demanding new ways to control women through fictitious – and ridiculous – beauty schemes that tap into known and unknown insecurities, anything to keep us preoccupied, channelling our demands away from the inequalities that surround us back into ourselves. More than thirty years after Wolf’s book – we’re still unpacking, acknowledging, ridiculing the same systems that oppress women through arguably one of the least important things about us.
Is anyone else just exhausted?
As a woman who came to adolescence through the late 1990s/early 2000s, I was unfortunately privy to the ‘heroin chic’ aesthetic we were bombarded with. Bony skeletal frames, devoid of curves and an ounce of fat, flooded our media. ‘Normal’ sized women were openly mocked, shamed and sneered at for being fat across most television shows. The movie Bridget Jones's Diary had us believing that a 136lb (61kg) woman was obese, a monstrosity to be shovelled into shapewear (to attain the attention of, you guessed it, a man). I still remember the interviews with Renée Zellweger, where all anyone wanted to know was how she had lost the weight. These things, amongst a plethora of lived experiences observing the women in my own life, shaped how I felt and still think about my body. My weight is not too far from Bridget’s in the movie, and there is still often a ball of dread, stone heavy in my stomach when I think about it.
Logically, I know this is somewhat insane, but as Wolf asserts – a quietly mad woman is easier to tame. My insanity around my weight is not born from anything grounded in reality. I recently learned of the concept of bicycle flush, a 19th-century ‘health’ issue that supposedly impacted women when riding bicycles first became a thing. Women were riding bicycles around the same time as the suffrage movement and needed greater freedom to ride them – leading more women to lean into the cause and demand dress reforms. Lo and behold, doctors warned them of ‘bicycle face’. In their article for Vox, Joseph Stromberg explains:
‘Over-exertion, the upright position on the wheel, and the unconscious effort to maintain one’s balance tend to produce a wearied and exhausted “bicycle face,” noted the Literary Digest in 1895. It went on to describe the condition: “usually flushed, but sometimes pale, often with lips more or less drawn, and the beginning of dark shadows under the eyes, and always with an expression of weariness.” Elsewhere, others said the condition was ‘characterised by a hard, clenched jaw and bulging eyes.’
Gosh. And I thought the 30-year gap between Wolf’s book and the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition was a long time. The control of women has been consistently attached to our bodies and looks for centuries. And our physicality and beauty must be maintained to the dominant desirably standards for good reason, right? How else are we to find a husband if we are not attractive? Ah, the self-fulfilling patriarchal prophecy.
Beauty and behaviour and greed and hunger and control. And this is speaking only from the lens of a cis, educated, non-disabled, white woman; I am only all too aware that this lens is dominant and that there are many other, far more nuanced and challenging perspectives on this topic to be explored and heard. (I am only just beginning to wade into these waters, and if you have recommendations and directions for my reading/viewing, I would love to hear them).
Some people tell me things are getting better. We are seeing more diverse bodies in our media. Big-name brands are exploring who features in their campaigns and considering representation. Our media is kinder about bodies, in some ways, and headway is being made – but I’m not sure how much this is trickling down. My hope is that it’s the tip of the iceberg that will continue to snowball and that for younger generations – my nieces, my goddaughter – this will be more meaningful, will help create a new wave of minds ready to be more willing to accept and love what beauty might mean and look like in all the ways it should be celebrated. I’m not convinced I’ll ever be able to get over my internal narratives and battle to reach for the sexy baby ideal I’ve been force-fed, that perfect body I still naively think I can have despite genetics being nowhere near on my side. Based on my conversations with many of my female friends in the same age bracket, I know I’m not alone.
My hunger to pursue what beauty might be for me can often be misguided, but I am learning that my hunger is not wrong. My hunger is my power, and as I continue to massage it in the right direction – divert it back towards the things that it has been forced away from for decades – I feel myself realising why it is female hunger that others have fought so hard to control:
‘It’s true what they say about women: Women are insatiable. We are greedy. Our appetites do need to be controlled if things are to stay in place. If the world were ours too, if we believed we could get away with it, we would ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care. These sexual, emotional, and physical demands would begin to extend to social demands: payment for care of the elderly, parental leave, childcare, etc. The force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want, in bed and in the world.’
~ Naomi Wolf
ELAINE CHENNATT is a writer, educator and psychologist-in-training, currently residing in nipaluna, lutruwita. She is fascinated by the ways we learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and the power of storytelling. You can find more of her words online at wordswithelaine.com