Beauty Sick

"So many women today are strikingly bold in important areas of their lives, but still crumble in front of the mirror. They fight so hard to be treated with respect, but seem, at least at times, to be willing to trade it all in an instant if they could only remake their physical appearance."

Beauty sick[ness]. Engeln describes this as what happens when a women's desire to be thinner/prettier/ more attractive by patriarchal standards, outweighs their ambitions within the other aspects of their lives such as their career. Beauty sick can affect men too but Engeln goes on to explain that it is more common amongst women due to the onslaught created by the beauty industry; constantly advertising ways to make women more beautiful. She tells us that women are more invested in their appearance than men. Our view of ourselves becomes distorted due to outside influences and we use up emotional energy comparing our bodies to that of what we see on tv, on the news, on social media platforms.

"Early in many girls' development, the desire to be prettier is already cluttering their thoughts... Girls today grow up knowing not just that prettiness is required of women, but that the standard for beauty is near perfection."

Not only are young girls already starting to question their beauty, they are learning that it is currency. That their value is tied up in their outward appearance rather than their abilities and qualities such as intelligence, kindness, compassion ect. This kind of thinking is then reinforced by images we see day to day and it is not just perhaps one image in the morning, it is a bombardment throughout the day of the same message, it is pervasive within all aspects of our lives, unavoidable, and so you cannot simply just grow out of it.

Beauty sickness distracts women, creating a barrier from what we can be, what we want to be and from the lives we ideally want to live. We waste time, money, energy on beauty products, skin care products, dieting, cosmetic surgery, watching beauty gurus. We become consumed in recreating 'looks' from different celebrities in the hopes that we can also achieve this ideal beauty.

"Women want to lean in, but in a culture that teaches them to value their beauty above all else, like Artemis, they're often leaning closer to the mirror instead of closer to their dreams. That mirror becomes a barrier, reminding them that the world will allow them to be powerful, but never so powerful that strangers won't comment on their body shape or insist that they 'smile sweetheart'."

While women are more educated/ ambitious nowadays than ever before due to social and political reformations in response to 3rd wave feminism, we still become preoccupied when confronted with this idea of beauty, this 'perfect woman', this unrealistic and unobtainable goal. Even though it is said smart women should know better, how can educated women not fall victim to beauty sickness when it plagues the mind twenty-four hours of the day.

Power is an interesting thing to mention within this quote. Beauty can potentially be weaponised. Women can take advantage of their looks in order to benefit. And while this is theoretically a form of empowerment, it almost seems like in actual fact you are conforming to society. You may be taking advantage of what exists but you are then also perpetuating the same message. On top of that women do not get things just for free or just because, even if beautiful by societal standards. This kind of beauty is transactional, we get drinks, free entry to clubs ect with the expectation that women will sleep with the 'provider' of these things as payment. Which to me is an incredibly misogynistic thought process. And while women may not 'provide a service'- since were using the metaphor of a sale, there is still that expectation from men that they are owed something for their 'kindnesses, so any power a woman could possibly gain through beauty is actually just an illusion.

"As a culture, we face a terrible loss when an entire group of promising citizens is spending so much time worrying about whether they are beautiful that they risk letting another generation go by without seeing the changes they hoped to see in the world."

It seems here that what Engeln is suggesting, is that beauty sickness could actually be halting the advancement if culture, of society, of politics. Which going by everything said previously would be a fair assumption. If great women, women with solutions locked away in their heads, are focusing all their time and energy on something that should be so trivial as their appearance, then how can we possibly hope to move forward within society. Societal reformations often strive for a utopia, with fights going on even today, for equality and rights, we have even progressed int fifth wave feminism; a solution that combines the forces of politics, economics, culture, media, and sustainability to build the argument for gender equality; yet this beauty sickness, this forced idea of beauty has been around for centuries without us being able to break through it, which in itself is empirical evidence that we are struggling to progress due to such a omnipresent disease of culture.

While I have not discussed sections of the texts that directly link to eating disorders within this blog post, I think that there is a very clear understanding that beauty sickness is invasive and is creating women that are obsessed with becoming thinner as thin is equivalent to beauty. We can also see how thinness is deemed beautiful just by looking at Victoria's secret, a very prominent business within the fashion industry. Their models have not changed since the early 2000's in terms of their physical appearance, I challenge you to spot the difference in waistline between these images ranging from 1996 to 2018:

Often the easiest way it is suggested to lose weight is under eating and over exercising with little concern as to the effects this has on your health as just how thinness is equal to beauty, it has unfortunately become synonymous with health, which is something else I may also explore later.

So How was Beauty Sickness Received?

When looking at reviews to texts like this, I prefer to look at a range of reviews to see how the book is received, not just reviews from literary sources but reviews from the public/ audience intended. To find the latter I go through the book cataloguing website known as Goodreads. Here, you can catalogue your favourite book, update friends on current reads and review your recent reads as well as creating a 'to be read' list. It is popular amongst the reading community with approximately ninety million registered users and is so perfect for me to get an idea of how the book is being received by the general population. It is refreshing to see 'normal' people praising Engeln's Work. Platforms like Goodreads create a sense of community and allow people to feel less alone. When reading through the reviews, for the most part, this is what was felt amongst readers; a unity that suggests people, or women more specifically, felt the same as the girls in the book and had been experiencing beauty sickness. Of course there was also some negative reviews which I have included in the slideshow, partly for your own amusement in some cases. It is important to remember that some reviews will be written by people who have not experienced beauty sickness and that most of these people may not be scholars or have any qualifications related to academia. But even so, they did raise a few valid points on the downfalls of the book.

Media reviews are often very short, snappy and mere quotes when attached to books. In fact I found it rather hard to find a full review written by any one credible source. Instead, I found myself a Waterstones' website, where they include reviews when selling the book. The issue with this, however, is that it is a very biassed representation of the book as their purpose is to boost sales.

Therefore only positive media reviews are included, giving an unbalanced and inaccurate view of how the book was received in an academic sense. This being said, the media reviews I did find, as stated previously, painted the book in a very favourable light. They sung Engeln's praises as they stated the book is 'inspiring', 'engaging' and 'thought provoking'.

Blog word count: 1422

Reference:

• Engeln, R. (2017). Beauty Sick. HarperCollins Publishers.