Do I Perform Beauty for Myself or Is It Internalized Misogyny?

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Reader Asks: Do I Perform Beauty for Myself or Is It Internalized Misogyny?

Hi! I’m a feminist and while I think I manage to lead a life that doesn’t compromise my principles, I have mixed feelings about my participation in beauty culture. Sometimes I feel good about feeling good when I’m all dolled up or I take care of my skin, other times I just think that it’s internalized misogyny and patriarchal culture, because I can see how, even if I tell myself it’s just about caring for my skin as it is now, I do care about keeping aging at bay as well.

I read feminist theory about how harmful beauty standards are but I can’t seem to divest from them completely. And nobody seems to give some actual practical advice on how to do it less or how to figure out if your own use of cosmetics or makeup is reasonable or crossing the line into patriarchal bullshit.

Do you have any pointers on that? What do you personally do in this regard?

My Answer: You Don’t Need to Replace the Ideal Beauty Performance with the Ideal Feminist Performance

Questioning your engagement with beauty culture is already a very good start in not allowing yourself to be dominated by it.

Before I dive deeper into my answer, I want to start by recommending Jessica DeFino’s newsletter, Flesh World. She is a wonderful critic of beauty culture that deconstructs a lot of advertising that the industry relies on and I always enjoy her witty essays.

I think we don’t need to fret so much about whether we do a particular beauty practice or not, but to question what are the power dynamics involved; or who has power over whom.

Reading your letter, I don’t hear someone who loves beauty culture uncritically so I really think you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. We already have enough of that in the world. We don’t need to treat every mascara purchase like a feminist ethics exam. It’s true that our choices can be more or less feminist and pretending like all choices are equal is a particular blind spot of a lot of feminists.

I’ve been thinking a lot about choice feminism lately and I don’t want to imply that performing and not performing beauty work are exactly the same in terms of feminism, because the truth is they are not. But that shouldn’t translate into more pressure on our individual lives for small choices that may uphold patriarchal standards. We are born into a patriarchal culture and we grow up in it, pretending like we should somehow be immune to its biases and conditioning is not realistic.

One thing that feminism sometimes struggles with is distinguishing between participation and subordination.

Under patriarchy, almost all of us participate in beauty culture to some degree, at least in the most basic ways: we brush our hair, choose clothes, groom our bodies, use skincare, and many of us also wear makeup with varying frequency.

But participation alone doesn’t tell us very much and it doesn’t necessarily mean we are also subordinated to beauty culture. You didn’t tell me exactly what your participation looks like, though I assume it involves the occasional use of makeup (since you said ‘dolled up’), but it’s even better that you didn’t go into specifics, because we can now discuss participation in general. :)

What does your participation in beauty culture cost you and what do you gain from it?

The more interesting question for feminists regarding beauty culture is this: How expensive is your participation?

I think we could all benefit from making this calculation mentally, not just in terms of financial costs but also emotional and mental ones, in terms of time, freedom, self-confidence and self-worth. You can set aside some time to sit with the discomfort of thinking deeply about it and I promise you that the result will be liberating, even if you don’t get any dramatic take-away actions that will change your beauty habits significantly. Maybe you’re already fine with the smaller or greater amount of beauty work that you’re doing, but after you deeply consider it, you will also be closer to feeling fine about it.

First of all, consider how much of your beauty choices happen from a place of joy and h