“Louise, you would be so much prettier if you took care of yourself,” laments my mother, sitting on the sofa and sipping tea, during my Sunday visit. I answer him with a big smile: “But I take care of myself, in fact. I play sports, I see friends, I see a psychologist; I am completely fulfilled.” My mother dismisses the argument with a wave of her hand: “You know what I mean, you should take a little more care of your appearance.” I smile again. “Excuse me, I didn't understand that by taking care of “self”, which involves my whole being, you actually meant my appearance. But I don't know if trying to eradicate my cellulite through painful processes or stopping myself from eating when I'm hungry is really taking care of myself."
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Lips pursed, she leans towards the teapot to refill herself, a sign that the debate is over. One of the first things that struck me when I was researching my book was how, as women, we grow up with the idea that being beautiful is our duty. As if there was nothing more natural than not being. But to quote American author Erin McKean, “beauty is not a rent that we must pay to society for the simple fact of being a woman.” What bothers me about the injunction to beauty is that it pushes us to care more about what we look like rather than how we feel. A formal dinner is being organized?
We know we'll wear heels, even if our feet already hurt. The waiter arrives with macaroons for dessert? We refuse, even if, deep down, we are still hungry. In fact, it's simple: beauty as it is erected today leads us to consider our body as an object and not as a subject. Like an appearance, not an essence. This is already what Plato explained when he distinguished appearance and essence: essence represents what we are, appearance what we appear.
This is where, in my eyes, the crux of the problem lies, and therefore of the solution: if we freed beauty from these constraints, it could become not a means of conforming, but a means of expressing oneself. The fact of being “too much” or “not enough” would no longer have any meaning, this judgment could only exist in relation to a reference standard. The day when there are no longer arbitrary standards, then beauty will be able to be understood not as a model to follow, but as a model to create. Not as conformity, but as freedom. It is time for beauty to stop being a way to confine us, but instead becomes a way to express ourselves.