To egalitarians, anything that rises above the average, be it wealth or exceptional beauty, is questionable. And, as in the economic and social spheres, this is another area in which they expect the state to intervene with regulations and bans.
Heather Widdows, whose book ‘Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal’ was published in 2018, is regarded as one of the world’s leading critics of the prevailing beauty ideal. She even spoke before the British Parliament in March 2022 and during the Health and Social Care Committee’s inquiry into ‘The impact of body image on mental and physical health’.
Widdows criticised ‘the extensive harms of beauty, the harms of normalisation, of the epidemic of anxiety that is increasingly regarded as normal and about the massive physical, psychological, social and financial costs that accompany the beauty ideal in its current and emerging form’. She rejects the idea of appealing directly to individual women or men to place less emphasis on appearance, probably because she recognizes that such appeals have, in the past, generally been ineffective.
Her main thesis: ‘Only collectively can change happen, and if we seek to mitigate the harms and costs of the emerging inhuman and punishing beauty ideal, we should focus collectively.’
By ‘collectively,’ what she actually means is government regulations and bans.
For example:
Regulation could be on images, ads, and beauty coverage: for instance, on what you are permitted to say and imply beauty practices can do for you.
It would, she suggests, be conceivable to only allow ‘factual statements’ in beauty ads or to oblige companies to include ‘health warnings’ in ads that advertise beauty products – similar to the health warnings on cigarette advertising and packaging.
It is also about depicting faces or bodies that do not correspond to the ideal of beauty. ‘If we all saw more bodies and bodies of different types, perhaps we would feel less inadequate. There are many suggestions about how this can be done and most focus on attempts to increase diversity by requiring a larger range of sizes, as well as encouraging the beauty industry to promote more varied looks.’
By ‘encouraging,’ she actually means government regulations and bans. As a positive example she cites the following: ‘Argentina has laws about model size and the clothing sizes that shops need to stock.’ In addition, she calls for ‘body positivity’ to be included in the school curriculum.
She adds: ‘I am not sure what else can be done, and have joked (or half-joked) about flyposting images of “normal” breasts on every bus stop and billboard.’
As with all egalitarians, what Widdows is proposing is essentially a large-scale, state-run re-education program. Apparently, she believes that societal perceptions of which breasts are considered beautiful and which are not can be shaped through such propaganda campaigns. In schools, in advertising, and increasingly in all areas of life, she believes that the government should actively combat the beauty ideal or replace it with a different one.
This is likely to be a futile endeavor. We know from scientific attractiveness research that people’s opinions about what is and is not beautiful have far more in common than the saying ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ implies.
It is a shared characteristic of all egalitarian ideologies to strive to ultimately create a ‘new human’ through the establishment of new norms and the indoctrination of individuals by the state. However, history has shown time and time again that this vision never works, as evidenced by the numerous failed socialist experiments.
When companies are encouraged by ideologues to run advertising campaigns featuring images that are not well-received by the public, they lose money. The razor brand Gillette Venus sparked outrage among customers following a body positivity social media campaign in 2019 that featured a very overweight female influencer in a bikini.
Ideologues are not fazed by such things. Their reaction is usually to call for an increased emphasis on state-organised or state-sponsored re-education.
Rainer Zitelmann’s novel ‘2075. When Beauty Became a Crime’ is out now. It depicts the rise of an egalitarian dictatorship that targets the ‘overly beautiful.’
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