'Pretty pressure': Girls - it pays to be pretty, but not too pretty
I am engaged in girl talk with a friend and her eight-year-old daughter, Lizzie. We are discussing a child in Lizzie’s class whom no one likes. The way Lizzie describes it, this child – let’s call her Amy – is attention-seeking, divisive, always striving to break up friendships and inveigle her way in.
I remember the exhaustion of being a girl, the excruciating emotional nuances. But there’s a new subtext.
“What do you and your friends have in common?” asks her mother.
“We’ve all got long, blonde hair and we all like fake-fur jackets.” She shows me a picture, all lithe limbs and button noses. And what does Amy look like? Another image: a squat child clad in a curious hessian affair, her dark hair an electric frizz around her scalp. Amy isn’t pretty.
“Hello Mean Girls,” says Lizzie’s mother, rolling her eyes.
Among young women, pretty is not so much a cult as the new orthodoxy.
It is the primary descriptor, the thing they value more than anything else. Cameron Diaz, who has been filming the remake of Annie, recently related how young female extras “come up and say, ‘Oh, Cammie, you are so pretty, your hair is so pretty, your clothes are so pretty, your make-up is so pretty.’
"And that’s sweet but it worries me that girls are conditioned to value themselves and judge each other by how they look. Every time we address our daughters or our nieces by saying, ‘You look lovely today,’ we are reinforcing the idea that the most important thing for a woman is to look good.”
It’s not just women who are alarmed by the trend. Johnnie Boden, the founder of the Boden fashion brand, tells how his three daughters “always mention another girl’s looks before anything else, as if this is the most important thing about them. They never say first that she’s funny or kind or brave. It is always that she is ‘pretty’. Young people have always been overly concerned with appearance, but it does seem to have become worse.”
We might have thought that 21st-century girlhood would aspire to something beyond banal, chocolate-box homogeneity. Yet pretty pressure surpasses the demand to be intelligent, witty, charming, athletic or moral. Pretty surpasses even “beautiful”. Beauty alienates and sets apart. Beautiful people can appear arrogant, insufficiently “team player”. Pretty is reality TV. It’s attainable, approachable, unthreatening. Beauty can alarm, but upon the pretty we smile.
If, like me, one is of fortysomething vintage, one wonders when all this prettiness stuff took flight. There was a beautiful girl in my class (plump, vapid, looked like Snow White); there was a cool one (edgy older siblings, power fringe). There was a brilliant girl and one who smelled of biscuits.
But I do not recall any of us being pretty in the way that today’s young women are uniformly obliged to be. No one did fashion, no one did make-up, and the words “manicure” and “model” were unknown to us. Contrast that with a recent Mintel survey that revealed that six out of 10 seven-year-olds wear lipstick, and two in five eyeshadow. I harboured no notion whatsoever that blondes had more fun. Tans were merely the side effect of a T-shirted summer.
The changing face of pop music: Suzi Quatro in 1974 and Taylor Swift in 2013 (Rex)
I knew no one afraid of gaining weight, as two-thirds of 13-year-old girls today are, according to a study by University College London and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Our musical icons were the Abba duo and Suzi Quatro – fine-looking women, but nowhere near the goddessy, pitch-perfect prettiness of Taylor Swift.
Perhaps the sea change took place when it became unremarkable for “normal” teenagers – rather than just Hollywood starlets – to have their teeth, ears or noses fixed. Was it when highlights and hair straighteners went mainstream? Or when a reasonable standard of health, nutrition and fitness became more generally available to all?
Science teaches us that these norms have rules. The psychologist Nancy Etcoff argues in Survival of the Prettiest that much of what we consider attractive takes its cue from evolution. Biology hard-wires us to find children appealing so that we nurture them – hence our fascination with soft skin, fair hair, button noses and big eyes.
Proportion has been deemed vital since pre-Socratic times, and there is evidence that it may reflect fecundity, genetic fitness and superior brain function. A waist-hip ratio of 0.7 (a waist circumference 70 per cent of the hips) is judged the ideal across Europe and, give or take a point, the world. Feminine features imply an abundance of oestrogen, glowing skin reproductive potency, engorged lips arousal.
These attributes used to be a matter of chance. However, with the capacity to fake these phenomena comes the expectation that all must possess them. One should be smooth and honeyed of complexion, slim yet curvaceous, luxuriant haired, blonde or blonde-ish, pert mouthed, Bambi lashed, glossed and groomed – and woe betide any woman who fails to make the grade.
Unless, of course, she is prepared to undergo that most celebrated modern rite of passage: the makeover. Late last year The X-Factor victor Sam Bailey became a winner not only because of the power of her voice, but also, you might be forgiven for thinking, because her face and body were able to be transformed. Only in looking like a heroine was she permitted to become one. For within television “pretty” is the entry qualification to everything from “reality” to news.
As the actress Victoria Frings recently opined on the website Salon, “Why do all the women on TV have to be beautiful while the men don’t? Are we still so sexist that a man is identified by what he does but all that matters about a woman is her looks? Will the words a woman says fail to resonate if she is not conventionally pleasing to look at?”
The eye-blink rapidity of modern communications means that this has become a global tyranny, the ideal universally shared. Accordingly, fashionable Japanese women seek breast implants to attain the buxomness of corn-fed American cheerleaders, and the citizens of Seoul flock to “rectify” their “flat faces”, “Asian eyes” and “sagging” smiles to appear more Caucasian.
Interviews with teenage girls for the artist Louise Orwin's Pretty Ugly projectBack in the West, last year the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that attractive people are more successful throughout their careers, regardless of factors such as socioeconomic background, parental education, even their own IQs.
Previous studies have suggested that the pretty tend to be hired sooner, promoted more rapidly and earn more than less attractive colleagues. The pretty are recipients of a halo effect, with beneficial impact upon their exam results and ability to make friends. They are perceived as helpful, receive quicker attention from medics. They even have more chance of getting away with crime. It remains uncertain whether this prettiness premium is a by-product of positive discrimination, swaggering self-esteem or some more metaphysical quality.
Either way, it pays to be pretty. But not too pretty. An excess of loveliness may be dangerous. In America there has been a spate of recent cases in which women have been deemed too comely for their jobs.
In November Col Lynette Arnhart expressed distaste for an image of Cpl Kristine Tejada that appeared in the Association of the United States Army magazine. The picture, which accompanied an article concerning a campaign to encourage greater equality, depicted Col Tejada in Iraq looking attractive – too attractive, according to her superior.
In a leaked email, Arnhart, who was leading a team studying the integration of women from which she has since resigned, wrote: “Such photos undermine the rest of the message (and may even make people ask if breaking a nail is considered hazardous duty).” She continued: “In general, ugly women are perceived as competent, while pretty women are perceived as having used their looks to get ahead.” As Chloe Angyal, of the website feministing.com, remarked, “You have to be beautiful to matter, but beauty can and will be used against you.”
In a similar case, Iowa’s all-male Supreme Court ruled that a dentist, James Knight, was within his rights to dismiss his assistant, Melissa Nelson, because he found her “irresistible” and thus a potential threat to his marriage. Their judgment ran: “Relationships between men and woman can often produce personal emotions and conduct that are unfamiliar to the workplace relationship.” Better, obviously, to adopt a Taliban policy towards the pretty to save men from their uncontrollable desires.
Today’s young women would appear trapped in a prettiness bind: if you are not pretty, you don’t count; if you are, people cannot see past it. Inspired by this paradox, the British artist Louise Orwin recently took to the streets to ask teenage girls to say something positive about themselves, beginning with the words “I am…”. There was one condition – the statement could not be about looks.
A video of the interviews, which forms part of Orwin’s Pretty Ugly project, invites the viewer to see these girls as more than pretty – or non-pretty – faces, and to acknowledge less superficial strengths, whether an aptitude for maths or a sense of humour. The subjects, says Orwin, found it revealingly challenging.
“This is all compounded by the social aspect of the web – ‘liking’, commenting, sharing,” she explains. “We are more free to comment on each other’s personal lives with all these platforms – and with that comes the constant pressure to maintain our ideal selves online. It is as if this generation are carrying around a mini-me, or an avatar… that they are constantly editing, and promoting to make themselves feel better.”
While adapting said avatar may be a matter of Photoshop, adapting the body is a matter of blood and bone. And for the Amys of this world, the not-pretty, this may be what they resort to in order to break into culture’s collective girl gang. It is not difficult to see this as a form of socially sanctioned masochism dressed up as self-expression.
Sheila Jeffreys, the author of Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West, maintains that the beauty industry operates as a form of corvée, or feudal forced labour. In other words, the more advances women make in the workplace, the more prettiness is turned into a stymying full-time job.
The “characters” on reality television series such as The Only Way is Essex and Made in Chelsea are the manifestation of this theory at its most grotesquely cartoonish. These are women whose grooming regimes allow for little more than preparation and display, who cannot walk, so lofty are their heels, and whose only professional options involve the modelling and selling of prettiness’s wares, be they clothes, false eyelashes or fitness regimes.
And if it is not these young women striving to attain perfection, it is older women literally taking pains to simulate the smooth skin, wide eyes and pert breasts of youth. What hope do we have of relieving the young of their prettiness obsession when we old strive desperately to cling to it?
Personally, I will always love powder and paint – the more playful aspects of constructed femininity – but only where they remain playful rather than culturally enforced. That said, I relish the power of age to put me beyond such norms, of feeling old enough and ugly enough to decide what my “pretty” will be – and it is middle-aged, non-blonde, unfit and empowered. It feels pretty cool to me.
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