Toxic Beauty Standards
Gender nonconformity is the behaviour or self-identification of acting in a way that opposes the societal construct of how we should act.
In short: The harmful “Men wear pants, Women wear skirts” expectation.
Essentially, ‘male’ gender nonconformity is breaking the gender binary by wearing/acting/identifying in a way that isn’t seen as ‘masculine’ in society’s standards. For example, wearing makeup.
However, ‘female’ gender nonconformity is merely just existing in our natural state. For example, not removing body hair.
This is the first harmful beauty standard I will get into:
Body Hair
It stems way further than generally disliking how body hair look on yourself or others. The issue isn’t hygiene either, because if that were the case, it wouldn’t be normal for men to have body hair.
The history of body hair summed up (poorly):
- We all know about the shaving company Gillette. They have managed to profit off of creating an unnecessary problem for women. They managed to convince women (even though we did not have a beard) that we must shave something.
- Sex workers would shave their body hair in order to earn more from their clients. The men absolutely loved it and decided that they want everybody they had sex with, to be completely hairless.
Which, of course, promoted pedophilia.
The unattainable beauty standards include being shaved, being shorter, obedience, loyal and pure.
Which sounds very much like a child. This also brings us to the disgusting ‘overpowering’ dominant trait that men like to have. Purely because it gives them power and validation to show off to other men.
We hate the male gaze.
(Here are some shocking statistics from rudders 2013)
Women of Colour
Now, because all of these beauty standards consist of Eurocentric ideologies, women of colour are impacted way more.
Society are essentially treating us like animals. You’ve taken the ‘desirable’ traits and features of someone and made your own unattainable Frankenstein with our cultures. With what once we were made fun of for having, it is now being appropriated or ‘borrowed’ as a costume because it is trending.
To the people that tell us we should be grateful: F*** You.
You haven’t faced the years of oppression that actually living with these features have caused.
To the people that liken cultural appropriation with lifestyle choices: Also F*** You.
A quick difference between Gender and Sex
This should not be used interchangeably. Sex refers to your biological attributes, whilst gender refers to the societally constructed roles. (Please note that there are more than two genders and *biologically more than two sexes)
- X, XX, XXY, XY, XYY, XXXY
To finish:
There is so much oppression saturated in beauty standards and gender.
This was simply a brief. Not that this topic can be made simple of briefly.
But hopefully, as a reader and member of society, you’ll notice that so much of your life correlates with this topic.
