If your reasoning is just that beauty standards should be makeupless, that’s no progress at all and chains women to those standards just as hard as before.
I’m reminded of all the women who love makeup and the artistry of cosmetics only to run into (mostly) men who demandingly shout that it isn’t natural and they shouldn’t cover up and this and that. They may think that they’re being feminist heroes or whatever, but they’re just doing the same shit just with different preferences.
People accepting their natural selves as beautiful and being happy with who they are, and other people being happy with who they are, without pressure to alter their appearance in order to be loved and accepted, is not this kind of unhealthy misogynistic standard of beauty like you are claiming. Saying that makeup is a passion for art or something is whitewashing the exploitation of some of humanity’s deepest insecurities. Probably the vast majority of women, if they really thought the use of makeup was socially unacceptable, would never wish otherwise. They would also have more free time and more money.
People should accept their natural selves, yes, and it should not be expected of them to alter themselves. There are extreme pressures pushing those things which need to be smashed. But you don’t get there by telling people that their makeup is not beautiful. You don’t get there by shaming women in the opposite direction like you did in your original comment. I was guilty of this myself when I was a teenager before realizing I was a woman and I deeply regret it now both because I see and have experienced the also-toxic fetishizing of women being “natural” and “untainted” and because I now see firsthand just how difficult makeup really is and how much of a creative eye it takes to master it…I’m nowhere near.
And you’re just erasing tons of real artistry that is exceedingly difficult to do well and which many women do have a passion for. Tons of women nowadays have stories about men giving them shit for not being “natural” and it’s like…is this really what we want? A woman’s body is not liberated when the standards she’s forced to aspire to are different. The core problem is that she’s pressured into trying to match those standards, NOT the actual content of those standards which will naturally drift around as time goes on.
Hell, because of these newer expectations, making your makeup look less and less like it’s there has gotten more and more highly valued. Women realize that the “natural” look being valued is not necessarily what they actually look like without makeup, so what do they do? They still wear makeup, they just instead aim for the look the “natural” standards want from them. It’s more subtle than in the past, but guess what: When you have standards telling women to look a certain way, they will do what they have to to live up to that…including wearing makeup. This is how you end up with the now-classic situation where men compliment women for not wearing makeup…when they actually are wearing makeup. I’ve seen it happen again and again. This is without getting into how women who wear very heavy or apparent makeup are seen as slutty or looking for attention, which is its whole other issue which is contributed to by these “natural” beauty standards.
And none of this has anything to do with the Miss England finalist: good for her.
If your reasoning is just that beauty standards should be makeupless, that’s no progress at all and chains women to those standards just as hard as before.
I’m reminded of all the women who love makeup and the artistry of cosmetics only to run into (mostly) men who demandingly shout that it isn’t natural and they shouldn’t cover up and this and that. They may think that they’re being feminist heroes or whatever, but they’re just doing the same shit just with different preferences.
People accepting their natural selves as beautiful and being happy with who they are, and other people being happy with who they are, without pressure to alter their appearance in order to be loved and accepted, is not this kind of unhealthy misogynistic standard of beauty like you are claiming. Saying that makeup is a passion for art or something is whitewashing the exploitation of some of humanity’s deepest insecurities. Probably the vast majority of women, if they really thought the use of makeup was socially unacceptable, would never wish otherwise. They would also have more free time and more money.
People should accept their natural selves, yes, and it should not be expected of them to alter themselves. There are extreme pressures pushing those things which need to be smashed. But you don’t get there by telling people that their makeup is not beautiful. You don’t get there by shaming women in the opposite direction like you did in your original comment. I was guilty of this myself when I was a teenager before realizing I was a woman and I deeply regret it now both because I see and have experienced the also-toxic fetishizing of women being “natural” and “untainted” and because I now see firsthand just how difficult makeup really is and how much of a creative eye it takes to master it…I’m nowhere near.
And you’re just erasing tons of real artistry that is exceedingly difficult to do well and which many women do have a passion for. Tons of women nowadays have stories about men giving them shit for not being “natural” and it’s like…is this really what we want? A woman’s body is not liberated when the standards she’s forced to aspire to are different. The core problem is that she’s pressured into trying to match those standards, NOT the actual content of those standards which will naturally drift around as time goes on.
Hell, because of these newer expectations, making your makeup look less and less like it’s there has gotten more and more highly valued. Women realize that the “natural” look being valued is not necessarily what they actually look like without makeup, so what do they do? They still wear makeup, they just instead aim for the look the “natural” standards want from them. It’s more subtle than in the past, but guess what: When you have standards telling women to look a certain way, they will do what they have to to live up to that…including wearing makeup. This is how you end up with the now-classic situation where men compliment women for not wearing makeup…when they actually are wearing makeup. I’ve seen it happen again and again. This is without getting into how women who wear very heavy or apparent makeup are seen as slutty or looking for attention, which is its whole other issue which is contributed to by these “natural” beauty standards.
And none of this has anything to do with the Miss England finalist: good for her.