Suzanne Harrington: Let's celebrate beauty found in connection this International Women's Day
Cameron Writer Of Disobedient Picture: Dabiri, Bodies Alex The Emma Essay
It’s International Women’s Day on Friday and what better way to celebrate than to read Emma Dabiri’s glorious and rousing essay Disobedient Bodies. Female beauty, she says, needs to be about adornment and pleasure, rather than conforming to how we’ve been told to look (thin, young, pretty – no matter what size, shape, age we are) and driving ourselves mad and miserable in the process.
30 years ago, Naomi Wolf wrote how “a cultural obsession with female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience”. While body positivity borne of social media has slightly adjusted this – assisted by inclusivity champions like Edward Enniful, Lizzo et al– our beauty ideals still remain dull, narrow and prescriptive. Added to this, we have allowed female ageing to be pathologized, which is about as stupid as pathologizing the weather. And as self-defeating.
Dabiri’s beautiful, brilliant book is about reclaiming our own sense of beauty, so that joy and connection replace comparison and self-criticism. Remember getting ready with the girls before you went out, sloshing on lip gloss and glitter and screaming with laughter and telling each other you were rides and flas? It’s that. It’s that, across cultures, across age ranges, across history.
It's not just that, obviously. Dabiri sweeps us along, from the real reason so many ‘witches’ were burned – to disrupt female solidarity, female power, female knowledge – to how social media, while a democratiser in terms of representation, has also turned us all into broadcasters, and “exacerbated competition and comparison”.
I learn a new word – ocularcentrism. My spell check doesn’t know what to do with it. It refers to how, in Western cultures, we rate sight above the other senses, so that how something becomes more important than how something .
A specific type of woman, that is. Pre social media, traditional media - film, telly, magazines – showed the beauty ideal as blonde and blue eyed, taking up very little physical space. Women like Your Fat Friend - Aubrey Gordon – were unknown. The fat activist, who began anonymously on Twitter – back when that platform still retained some cultural worth – has since published several books exploring what it’s like to inhabit fatness, and is now the subject of a film. In contrast, you have apps on your phone urging you to get your lips filled during your lunchbreak, or your forehead frozen.
Dabiri suggests that true beauty is found in action and connection, “the intentional cultivation of feminine space” rather than bending yourself out of shape to conform to made-up notions of beauty. It’s about the Irish word meitheal - being "linked to the other". It’s collective activities - laughing, singing, dancing, swimming, crafting, doing fun stuff – with the focus on togetherness rather than what you look like: “Spaces where beauty is not something simply to behold, but something we can do, together.” Which is a polite way of saying fuck the patriarchy.
