Beautiful Beauty

I think I have a permanent hang up on the concept of beauty. During my studies at Austin College I had a few courses on feminist studies, but one class called Feminist Thought with professor Mark Hebert sticks in my mind when I think of beauty. We had a few weeks in the class in which we focused specifically on advertising.  I think I can speak for the whole class when I say, our eyes were opened to how much power advertising holds not just on capital, but on ideas. Ads captivate even our faintest notions of a concept.  In the U.S. the beauty market’s arms spread incredibly wide. Because of this ever spreading influence, our perception of beauty has changed throughout the years. We have slowly shifted from the Marilyn Monroe years into what I like to call “the starved years.”  Models must give off an air of perfection because they are selling the perfect teeth, the perfect hair, the perfect skin, the perfect body. Yet the women other women see in advertising are emaciated and unnaturally thin for developed adults. Is this really perfection?
Many people in this industry suffer endlessly from the demand to be “fit” for work in a storm of eating disorders.  This is the kind of power the media has on beauty. It can take away one’s wages, health, and in some cases one’s life. What is the message this gives to young women everywhere? Now, I’m not saying we should all have pity on models, but we should be conscious of the way all people, even people who perpetuate this system, participate in creating multiple meanings of the word beauty.  We are told beauty is a good thing to seek by ads, but we are simultaneously told that to be beautiful means to sacrifice something. Whether it is our eating patterns, our normal amount of sun exposure, or our entire body to painful treatments, surgeries, and injections, we are told we must change our natural appearance. It creates a strange surge of instability. My Dad always tells me “you are beautiful inside and out.”  We are told by the media that only the out part matters, not the inside. This also creates a hierarchy of most beautiful versus least beautiful. It helps us judge one another, therefore it becomes a distinct part of our interactions and our culture.

Thanks to globalization, the instability of beauty messages are worldwide. Here in India (though I can only speak for Kerala) I have observed that girls don’t generally desire to be super thin. More traditional people actually value being “fat.” Now, fat is a sensitive term in America, but here it is thrown around like nobody’s business.  It is a positive thing to be fat because it means you are eating enough and you are healthy. I put fat in quotes originally because fatness here still has a limit. Obesity is barely visible because it is looked down upon and sometimes labeled as gluttony.  For what the Indian beauty industry lacks in super thin models, they make up for in skin and hair campaigns. Most women here desire clear skin, a very light complexion, and super long hair. The daily beauty routines consist of an array of skin creams and hair oils and always, always, always, eyeliner. Even some of my Lower Primary School students wear eyeliner. I can’t really explain why. Keep in mind these are just observations.

So, some things that we consider “beauty issues” in the U.S. are naturally not issues here.  We speak a different beauty language. For example, pimpled skin. I will be the first to tell you, my skin is going crazy over here. Pimples galore. I get many questions still about pimples. A teacher points to my face almost every day and says “Pimples? Any pain?”  At first, I turned this inward. I thought that they meant I looked bad and ugly and wrong. This is of course, the American beauty language speaking in my head. The question that mattered to them was really “Any pain?”  Each day I have a group of women asking about my well-being. That is actually a pretty cool thing. I have also been called fat here. It is very rare, but every once in a while that word slips out of someone’s mouth and all those middle school memories of being awkward and overweight and teased come back.  Fat is a big issue for me. But, being called fat here has begun to re-define many of the ways I treat my own appearance. I now know that I am the “fat” kind of fat to the people here.  The “just the right amount” kind of fat. In fact, I have come to believe that the word fat is an incredibly unintelligent way to abuse another person. Everyone needs fats in their diet, everyone has fat on their body, so why state the obvious? Of course I have fat on my body. It is normal. It is natural.  I feel like this redefinition is helping me break through a lot of the self-confidence issues I mentioned earlier. It has also helped me bury some skeletons in my closet. I am called beautiful here on many days of the week, and that is something I am truly thankful for. It reminds me that I, with all my insecurities and all my fat and all my pimples, am beautiful inside and out. My Dad was right about that.

Also, some things I don’t even consider issues, are issues here. For example, some days I forget to wear bangles (bracelets). This provokes many questions from both teachers and students. “No Wala (bangle in Malayalam) today? Why not?” It seems that wearing a necklace, earrings and bangles are like second nature to women in India. They typically wouldn’t leave home without one of these “essential” ornaments.  I also occasionally forget to wear hair oil, which is essential to the concept of beauty here. When my hair doesn’t shine like a well waxed floor, questions are asked. So this is just another way for me to say, beauty languages are different, but we have the same fundamental power over us. The media creates meaning and we perpetuate it. We take it as a “beauty essential”.

I am ranting on beauty not because it is a random theme and I am going to thematically bore your brains out, but because it is relevant to some of my thoughts during this Youth Festival. Elaborate costumes, makeup and hair pieces were pinned to the heads of girls of all ages so they could dance to traditional songs. It was enjoyable to watch, but I couldn’t help but look at those girls and think, yikes. It reminded me a bit of pageants back home. Stage makeup is one of those things for me that makes my skin crawl. Do we really need to have the illusion of shine-free skin on stage? Really? Is that even human? But then as the girls were up there dancing, I thought of their families. I thought of the money they spent on those costumes and that makeup. I thought about the pride a parent might feel for a girl who excelled in something.  I thought about all the rice each girl had eaten that day to make sure they could make it through a high energy performance. I thought of their parents working for the money to buy that rice and that costume. I wondered where that money came from. I also worried for the girls who didn’t win a prize. What would their parents say? What good did all of their money do?

I don’t know the answer to that, but I will tell you one thing, it made the girls at my hostel and everyone at the festival really happy. Three days of culture, and ideas of beauty played a big role in it. Even I “perpetuated the system of beauty” by wearing my two Saris in celebration. Wednesday night we had a big storm and a power outage during dinner. The girls sung prayer songs, and we huddled around one flashlight as Ammama lit a fire so we could have light. We sang and ate and then started walking back to the hostel. There was a really long pause right outside the door of one of the classrooms the festival dancers had been using as dressing rooms. I thought someone had dropped something. As we stood there waiting in the dark I noticed that more of the girls were joining Mariamma Kochamma. When the lights came back on, I walked in to the classroom to see why we had been waiting for over 15 minutes to walk back.  All of the girls were bending down and picking up all of the hairpins and bindis lying on the floor. Bindis go right in the middle of the forehead and are a big fashion here. These bindis were bejeweled and the girls were so excited each time they found a new one. To me it was hilarious. I thought we were waiting because something was lost, when in fact a lot of things had been found! Even the older women were finding all that they could from the beauty tornado that was that room. It wasn’t stealing because these things had been discarded, so the girls found their treasure out of another girls’ trash. To me, that moment was more beautiful than anything I saw up there on stage. It was the beauty of using the available resources. It was the same beauty we see in this world when people save their seeds, recycle, when people plant a tree where they chopped one down, and when people invent new, sustainable ways of providing communities with electricity. In the same spirit, the girls utilized their resources.

A small portion of the money of all of those parents gave a few girls in B.I.G.H.S. hostel some extra hairpins. It’s not enough to sustain their well-being. It’s not a head on approach or solution to the problem, but it is a flash of beauty that feels much more authentic than the manufactured beauty in magazines.  It is the beauty of an ear to ear grin over something small.  It is these little things that remind me that beauty grows inside of us. Beauty is in nature. Beauty is in artistic expression. Beauty is not an exclusive issue. It is something we choose every day. It is moveable, subjective and contradictory. Here in India, I am learning to live with contradictions like these. Beauty is a system we should fight, but beauty is also a plays a small part in things that make us happy. A hairpin. A towering tree. A well-executed dance. I have no conclusions on this issue…only a personal call to action…and more questions. I know that because I identify with the seed savers, tree planters and recyclers, that is how I will learn to live the beauty that fits inside my heart.  Beauty that is lasting instead of purchased.  If you have any questions or thoughts to add about beauty, the system or the small things, let me know.

“Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground”- Jedalludin Rumi