The Power of Vanity

The upcoming scene required quite a bit of makeup—much more than my friend, Sarah, would wear in her everyday life. She sat still, relaxed by the rhythmic licking of the powder brush on her face.  She didn’t say much; just stared ahead. I watched as the face that stared back at her became stranger and stranger, until it was no longer recognizable at all.

“It’s weird to see a reflection that almost looks like me…” …but prettier, she later admitted to thinking.

Whether she realized it or not, her external admission was more than a meaningless comment; it was a symbolic interaction, in which she made an excuse for staring at herself. Because it was not really her own face, but one created through blush and powder, it was an acceptable request. As she turned her head this way and that, I’m sure she thought about how funny it was that she needed to be wearing someone else’s face to have permission to look at herself.

I watched, fully aware that a woman’s face is as much a prison as her body.  There are enough journals on the problem of ugliness—the unattainable standards we are held to. Look anywhere online and you’ll see a myriad of women in all shapes and sizes standing up and saying they are beautiful! But what we fail to note is that by being in campaigns and commercials, these women are given permission to make such admissions. They'd hardly be viewed in such a heroic light were they to say these things in their everyday life. For in our society, there are few worse sins for a woman to possess than vanity. Vanity, the way we interpret it, is in itself oppressive, because it implies that a woman's role is to care enough about our appearance so as to please others, but never to be pleased herself. And inherent in this role-making is the idea that we are objects to be looked at. Never are we to look. Unless, of course, we are wearing a different face. 

I’ve known Sarah my whole life, and know that -like many women- she had been taught to be apologetic about her appearance. She knows that paying too much attention to her reflection, or believing she's pleasing to look at is an unspoken sin, and that the vitriol for committing such an act would come from both men and women.  I remember when we were about fourteen, we were in a hot, crowded room, chaperoned by a student's mother. Sarah developed faster than the other girls in class, and when she took off her cardigan, the mother snapped at her: “Don’t show off!” Sarah sheepishly put her cardigan back on, suddenly aware that her body might be looked at; that her figure was inappropriate. If Sarah had not seen action as a sin before, she saw it as one now. Because -whether she intended to show off or not- taking off her cardigan showed off her body.  And confidence was forbidden; the cost for such an act was public shaming. As an adult, the truth remains much the same.

These campaigns cannot be effective until we change as a society.

Despite our ground-level insistence that women be humble, everywhere the external mantra is about being comfortable in your own skin, loving your body, loving yourself. We can have as many campaigns for body acceptance as we’d like, but the whole thing will be perpetually disingenuous until we as a society become comfortable with the idea of a woman actually finding herself beautiful. Until then, if we are to give these “body positive” advertisements any mantra it’s: Love yourself, but not too much, because a woman who believes herself to be aesthetically pleasing is a cow (if she’s far from the objective ideal, then she’s a deluded cow). The belief in our own ugliness (or at least in the absence of our own beauty) is really the only respectable relationship we can have with our appearance. And that is a tragedy, because it means that we live an inherently separate existence from our physical self. 

Vanity forces us to build our relationship with our bodies around how others see us. In doing so, it splits our awareness into two planes-- our existence within ourselves, as a person, and our existence outside of ourselves, as an object. We are all a Children of the Earth, as Plato would say, and we are fated to a lifelong desire to reunite with our other half.

Sarah admitted that –despite what you would think looking at her now- she had spent most of her life subliminally conscious of the fact that she was very ugly; to this day she feels ambivalent toward her own appearance: “I believe I’m objectively pretty, because people have told me so. But would I look twice if I saw myself crossing the street? Probably not.” The girls in elementary school never wanted to play with her; the boys barked at her and called her a dog. She had a wood hairclip that made her feel pretty for a week, until a boy unceremoniously cracked it in twain and that was the end of that. “Put together,” she admitted, apologizing for her own admission of weakness “this sounds tragic and self-involved. Sorry.” Of course. It's inappropriate for her to feel ugly. Just as it's inappropriate for her to feel beautiful.

But I knew she was only trying to describe a state of being she had previously taken for granted. Ironically, despite the teasing, Sarah was more whole when she believed she was ugly. Of course it brought its own set of problems, but by being excluded from the beauty game, she was allowed to dwell at peace with herself; her appearance was irrelevant, because her appearance was un-salvageable. Would she go back? Probably not. But this is the point zero at which we compare her journey from a whole self, to one that -like many of us- is ultimately two entities.

In many ways, we’re afraid to tell our girls they're beautiful, because we're afraid they'll grow up valuing only their beauty if they believe they are pretty. This conjures too many images-- Narcissus, the fox and the fruit, or even celebrity folk figures like Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian. But if beauty is given too much weight in society, then it is certainly not from the hearts of little girls—little girls live in that plane of existence where they are one with their faces and bodies, and never once think about what image others project on them. They simply exist. There's a vanity in this; one which says that their bodies are for their own pleasure, and not for the gawking of others. It is when they become self-conscious that this utopia fades away. Beauty is the catalyst to separation between the living, breathing, soul of a girl, and the body she inhabits. It is the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. And the taboo surrounding vanity, forms the gates which keep her from ever reuniting with herself.

I remember how, toward the end of high school, Sarah and I were crossing the street to the food court, when a popular girl stopped to tell Sarah she looked pretty with her hair down. It was an insignificant moment for the other girl, but it was the start of Sarah no longer being invisible. She wasn’t determined to be a model or anything, but it took her from a reality where she felt like she was watching everyone, to a reality where she was being watched. Suddenly, she was aware of her own body and image in a way she’d never been before. Good or bad.

She dressed to please, began wearing makeup, and agonized over every coarse hair on her head.  Some days she whined to me that she had a fat face, big teeth, tired eyes, and blotchy skin. Other days she made me smile, as she declared how much she felt like a fairy princess in a school uniform; it all depended on how many men honked their horns, how many yelled at her from their car windows; how many were kind to her at school. Somehow that one comment from our classmate moved her outside of herself, and she began to view her body through the eyes of others.

We all have such a moment; such a moment when we realize we are expected to be as pleasing to look at as we possibly can—without ever being satisfied. The “unattainable beauty” of the media thus becomes irrelevant; we are, by society’s design, expected to always be unsatisfied, lest we be seen as vain—as whole. As dangerous. 

Far be it from me to say I have a cure for this kind of oppression-- oppression born of ideology is ultimately a complex thing. But if there's anything I've learned as a student of history it's this rule: an ideology can only exist so long as people do not notice it. By being aware of the ways in which our own thinking holds us back, we are able to chip away at the taboos that are our chains.

What I didn’t say to the makeup artist that day was that I see a different person in the mirror always. That person (who I've called Sarah in this blog) is not allowed to look at herself the way that others are. She lives a separate existence, as the me that others see, but I'm not allowed to. We constantly try to put ourselves back together, to stop seeing ourselves as separate entities, but the truth is that we probably never will. Because our uniting is a sin; she and I exist for others to look at.

“It’s weird to see a reflection that almost looks like me…”  I say, excusing myself from the sin of vanity.

Just as I pretend to talk about someone else, in order to reflect on my own relationship with my appearance.