“Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal” by Heather Widdows

This book has been on my reading list for a very long time. It is a philosophical work, but it is immensely readable without a ton of references that are hard to understand. The extent of the difficulty is more in that she is writing in a very specific way to craft an argument, which I think also at times makes it easier to see what she is trying to argue than anything else.

There is a lot covered in this work, but to be brief, Widdows starts by examining beauty and arguing that the pressures are increasing and that there is an ethical ideal to be beautiful for many people. The ethical aspect of the beauty ideal is what distinguishes it from previous beauty ideals, as it is globalized and solidified. The needs of the beauty ideal are also slowly rising incrementally, it is easy to move from one form of a routine to another as the beauty ideal is normalized. She also has an interesting section on the benefits of the beauty ideal, in that it allows for socially acceptable forms of touch and intimacy between individuals. There are multiple chapters on the self and objectification, which she complicates as with beauty work we are both subject and object. Then she discusses consent under the beauty model and argues that information is not enough as we are increasingly pressured to conform to the beauty ideal or else. And finally, she examines gender and how men are also subject to a beauty ideal, but in key ways that differ from women that have the potential to harm women more.

First of all, I think it is really fascinating to see an academic work look at beauty and take it seriously. The idea that there is “pretty privilege” and that there are key differences in how we treat people that we think of as pretty vs ugly has always been around, but I haven’t had the resources to really examine it. I hope that she expands on this work as when I was going through it I was constantly thinking about myself as a dancer and a transgender individual. How does this resonate with how I feel about my body and what it can do? Increasingly I am harder on myself and how I look as I age. Additionally it talks about surgery for beautification, and I was thinking about my decision to have top surgery. I don’t think that it made me beautiful, but there was an ideal in my mind that I wanted to use the surgery to reach. Some very key similarities and differences that I hope she’ll explore further.

Now a lot of what she was saying resonated with me, but there was one point that I think I disagreed on within the chapter on consent. Widdows was first arguing that information isn’t enough for consent, and then talks about false consciousness and consciousness raising and how that model fails here because women aren’t being duped. There are real benefits of beauty, even if they are overstated sometimes. And these feel at odds to me, if you are saying that information is not enough, then there is a misconception or incorrect information somewhere. And especially if we are acknowledging that the benefits of beauty aren’t always what they are cracked up to me, that feels to me as though people are in need of information. I do agree that consciousness raising might not be the solution, but I do think that false consciousness, where we think we know everything but don’t, might be part of the problem. Separating the two doesn’t seem that hard and might even lead to part of the solution.

This book was published in 2018, and I suspect that things have only gotten worse since the pandemic. I don’t know stats and studies, but I have heard of and read more about young girls spiraling into eating disorders since lockdown, and even adults being impacted then. Widdows repeatedly mentions that we are in a “visual and virtual culture” and that has only increased since then. I really hope that she continues this work and we can get an update, because I haven’t seen others articulate what she is picking up on in the zeitgeist.