It’s a stereotype that all women want to look beautiful. Our culture often mocks women for this obsession, considering it shallow or silly. The media jokingly portrays women as being fanatical regarding clothing, hair, and make-up. We laugh at our roommates who take an hour to get ready for class in the morning. Ironically, however, this same culture is what requires women to look beautiful in the first place.
For a long time, women were primarily valued for their appearance. Since women rarely worked outside the home and had little political power, their chief work was getting married and having children, which meant being as attractive to men as possible. A woman’s only real opportunity to raise her status in society was through her physical appearance. A man’s status was also defined by the appearance of the woman he had on his arm. To some extent this is still so. During the national championship football game, Alabama’s quarterback, A.J. McCarron, was appreciated for his performance in the game, but a huge amount of attention was also given to him purely for his ability to secure former Miss Alabama, Katherine Webb, as his girlfriend. The media portrayed him as a successful athlete partially based on his ability to be connected with a beautiful woman. Katherine Webb, in the process, was only highlighted and defined by her looks.
This means that the time and effort women put into looking their best is not as superficial or meaningless as people often claim, but is work that has real consequences. In contemporary feminism, this type of work is called “affective labor.” Historically, when social expectations of women were too entrenched to be easily challenged, a woman’s only rational option was to focus on what she knew could get her ahead. Today, women are still held to a higher standard of beauty than are men, even in the workplace. For this reason, women who focus on their appearance are often not superficial at all, but just acutely aware of what is expected of them if they want to succeed. Instead of criticizing women for focusing on their appearance, we should criticize the society that holds this double standard. Women are being asked to do more work: their jobs and the extra affective labor necessary to meet beauty standards.
Wanting to look good is not a bad thing. Historically people believed that, since affective labor is associated with women and women are less capable than men, affective labor must be less useful. In reality, however, affective labor is inherently valuable. When a person puts effort into his or her appearance, they demonstrate to people around them that they care about what they are doing. There is no injustice in looking good out of personal preference, or even in society deciding that looking good is a good thing. The real injustice is that this type of labor – the labor of looking good — is expected more from women than it is from men.
Women have long been hyper sexualized and valued only for their appearance. It is fine to appreciate someone’s effort in appearance, but it is not okay to derive her sole value from appearance. Nor is it right to value someone’s worth or accomplishments based on the physical appearance of his girlfriend, wife, etc. Most of all, it is certainly unfair that this happens more frequently to women than men.
— Lisa Dicker, a junior in political science, and Kathleen Connelly, a senior in philosophy, co-authored this article. They can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].
