We Can Do Better: Zadie Smith's On Beauty

All right, let’s talk about beauty.

I can’t come close to claiming authority on how black women feel in a culture full of white beauty standards, but I can talk about how it feels to exist as a white woman in a culture full of impossible beauty standards. Part of me doesn’t want to write this because it feels like beating a dead horse, but Kansas and I had a conversation the other day that made it clear the horse isn’t dead yet but definitely deserves to be.

We were talking about cellulite, and how there’s an insanely large industry built around getting rid of it. Companies who have a profit to make have successfully convinced us that a) cellulite is unattractive, b) having it is something to be ashamed of, and c) getting rid of it is possible. And none of those things are true. As far as we can tell, all women have some cellulite, no matter their weight or build, and not a single product has ever been proven to get rid of it. I’m five feet and seven inches tall, solidly above average, and whether I weigh 100 pounds or 130 pounds, whether I am solid muscle or haven’t exercised in a year, I still have cellulite. Which, I will be honest, has never bothered me, because of my superhuman self-esteem, probably, but that doesn’t mean that seeing celeb beach bods on tabloid covers denounced for something only Photoshop has control over doesn’t drive me a little up the wall.

So I read a book like Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, and while there are a lot of themes at play other than beauty, I am drawn to the universal insecurities that all women have from being constantly told they are not, physically, good enough. The novel tells the story of a family in the aftermath of the father’s affair. Howard is a white, English college professor, and his wife, Kiki, is black and less educated. Their three children embrace varying sides of their heritages. Race, class, education and belonging are all explored, but noting that Smith chose to title her work On Beauty, passages like the following stuck with me the most:

“This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn’t be able to protect them from self-disgust. To that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman’s magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki’s knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies-- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.”

I think most women feel the same way, when they stop to think about it. It’s Barbie’s world, we’re just living in it. It’s a dangerous way of thinking: we should be perfect. If we aren’t, we deserve nothing more or less than hate, from ourselves and from others. Affairs like Howard’s, then, are to be expected, and when they happen it’s only a confirmation of what so many women already believe about themselves.

Claire, the woman with whom Howard had the original affair, is interestingly optimistic about the future of women’s self-image (long quote coming, but stick with it, I promise it’s worth it):

“And were they still like that, [Claire} wondered-- these new girls, this new generation? Did they still only want to be wanted? Were they still objects of desire rather than desiring subjects? Thinking of the girls sat cross-legged with her in this basement, of Zora in front of her, of the angry girls who shouted their poetry from the stage-- no, she could see no serious change. Still starving themselves, still reading women’s magazines that explicitly hate women, still cutting themselves with little knives in places they think can’t be seen, still faking their orgasms with men they dislike, still lying to everybody about everything. Strangely, Kiki Belsey had always struck Claire as a wonderful anomaly in exactly this sense... her beauty was awesome, almost unspeakable, but more than this she radiated an essential female nature Claire had already imagined in her poetry-- natural, honest, powerful, unmediated, full of something like genuine desire. A goddess of the everyday... For Claire, Kiki was proof that a new kind of woman had come into the world as promised, as advertised.”  

But while Claire’s optimism is encouraging, the overall conclusion is that it’s unwarranted. It is clear from the rest of the narrative that Kiki doesn't think of herself this way at all. She sees herself now as overweight, undesirable, unworthy in comparison with the women her husband is surrounded by. Her daughter Zora is nineteen and the inevitable heir of the same cycle. She is beautiful now, but won’t always be, and her intelligence and force of will make men react negatively to her, choosing other beautiful women whose personalities offer less resistance to their single-minded goal. Kiki knows that there is always beauty to be found, but never will it stay with one woman for her whole lifetime. Claire's idea of the "essential feminine nature" is a wonderful one, relying on the best characteristics of humanity rather than anything stereotypically feminine, and it is something for all of us to pursue. But until our value is found outside our beauty, that ideal nature will never be possible. 

-Lemon