[This is chapter 7 of my upcoming book! I hope you enjoy it!]
“You’re gonna die someday no matter how young you look.” –
Men scream at women online for using beauty filters, especially if done so frequently. Even some women yell at other women for this. There is an unwritten rule that using a filter once in a while is fine, cute even, but if you use them repeatedly, you’re told you are contributing to unattainable beauty standards–and you are. With these “beauty” filters, our faces create a portrait of a new being–a new us. We see ourselves with what is considered “perfect” features for the time: symmetrical eyebrows, fake dark eyelashes, small noses, big lips, narrow jaws. We are stitched together with features from a facial detection algorithm. We are poreless, bright, and artificial. We can’t stay in the beauty filter space for too long or we’re interrogated, yelled at, dismissed. However, we’re yelled at for showing our real, unfiltered faces as well. Comments about wrinkles, pores, and acne are constant. The loudest viewer on social media is the anonymous person sitting cozy behind their photoless account.
As girls, we do all sorts of things to fit in or stand out. I was consistently reminded that I didn’t fit in. I didn’t have the right clothes, the right hair, or the right kind of beauty. During story time in second grade, none of the girls wanted to play with my hair. Each girl would pair up, quietly braiding and brushing with their fingers the hair of another. Even I was paired up–with a blonde, straight-haired girl. I ran my little fingers through her glossy hair, smiling at its texture. When it came time to switch, the girl told me, “I can't play with your hair. It's too curly!” I sat, rejected and sad. I hated my hair even more than I did five minutes prior. Straight-haired girls have all the fun, I thought.
I attempted to kill my curls—death by flat iron. I read somewhere that straightening your curls could damage them, so I straightened them into oblivion. I brushed them out and always wore my hair in a high pony-tail. Before we had a flat iron though, my mom would brush my hair, wrap it around, and bobby pin it in place. For countless nights, I slept, uncomfortably, with my hair like this. Each morning, I would unwrap my hair like a Christmas present, thinking that long, luxurious straight hair would magically appear. It never did. It would look a bit straighter after unleashing the massacre of bobby-pins. My hair still didn’t look like the girls’ hair I saw at school. I mostly kept my hair in a high ponytail–hoping no one would notice my conformity or my poor attempt at curl-killing. I felt like a fraud. I was one.
By the time I got to middle school, I had a roll-on watery glitter eyeshadow that I wore religiously. One swipe on each eyelid was all it took for me to feel like a starling. I started shaving at the first sign of peach fuzz on my legs and armpits. I received Delia’s catalogs and circled the outfits I liked–trying to keep track of what was considered in fashion. There wasn’t an emphasis on big lips or big butts at the time, but I already had a larger posterior, and white boys in middle school told me I had a “ghetto booty.” I tried to shop at the stores that the popular kids shopped at, like Abercrombie & Fitch and 5, 7, 9 (which was a store that only sold clothing in those sizes), but these stores were expensive. I learned that beauty and class were reciprocal. If you had the money, you could buy a “better” you. However, I also learned that I could wear all of the “right” stuff, but I still didn’t look “right” in the eyes of the popular kids. I didn’t have their specific facial features, bodies or personalities. I studied these girls like an anthropologist. I had a notebook where I would document what they wore in hopes that I could somehow replicate their outfits, their hair, their makeup, their faces. I tried on their laughter, their flirting, and their stares. This is cyborg behavior, according to poet Olivia Gatwood.
We were cyborgs, made up of the world’s hand-me-downs and each other’s stolen parts; girls who wanted to look like other girls while desperately attempting to look like no one and, in turn, all looking the same. We were constantly tinkering with our prized machines in the tool sheds of our bedrooms.
Beauty was marketed everywhere around me. Walking the halls of middle school and highschool felt like a crash course in what beauty was and what beauty wasn’t. I was hit over the head with girls who had something I didn’t. Their straight hair, push-up bras, and body shimmer made a mockery of me.
In college, I bought a flat iron, and used it frequently. I singed my curls away. As the hot iron closed down on an individual curl, I would think, “Die, curl, Die!” I received more compliments with my straight hair. I was told, specifically by men, that I looked, “Pretty,” “Sexy,” and “Gorgeous.” I took those compliments, and placed them like secrets in the corners of my mind. I tried so hard to hold what others thought was beautiful about me–even if I didn’t agree. My hair isn’t nearly as damaged as it could be, but I always think back to how using a straightener probably wilted my curls. Now, I want my curls fully intact, but they’ve had it with my shit. My curly hair, which I only started loving in my 30s, has become thinner. I fear that I am losing a sense of self. Where do I begin and where do I end? Am I still trying to look like the beautiful popular girls from highschool?
I have deep-seated “11” lines in the center of my forehead. They are almost an exact replica of my dad’s. These lines carry a lineage. They have been here for a while, but I’ve noticed them more. They’ve been bothering me more. I’m not happy with how I look. I used to take so many selfies that I would then post on Instagram, and I’ve hardly taken any in the last few years. I try to remember that I look like my dad, my Nonno, and my grandma. I try to find solace in that, and I do, but I feel inadequate. Part of this is due to aging. I’ve never been this age before. I’m grateful for it, and I’m scared of it. I still recognize the person I see in the mirror, but it’s clear she is older now. I’m also still getting used to my shorter hair. Many months ago, I chopped off my hair into a bob. I like it, but still I remember boys in middle school saying “girls are prettier with long hair.”
My desire to keep my appearance from changing is not all due to vanity—it’s how I know myself; how I’ve come to recognize myself these last several years. We get used to who we see looking back at us in the mirror. We see the micro-imperfections, but we don’t see the aging–not as quickly, anyway. One day you’re you, and you look like the you you’ve always known until, all of a sudden, mirror-you becomes unfamiliar–another person entirely. Using Instagram or TikTok filters only quickens this unknowing of ourselves. Beauty filters, which are geared towards women, aren’t any different than the airbrushed women we’ve seen on magazine covers for decades. The difference is that now us commoners have greater access to distorting and correcting our images. These filters are inherently racist as they often lighten skin color, change eye shape, and adjust facial features to meet white European beauty standards.
In her seminal essay from 1985, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Donna Haraway writes:
Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women world-wide. Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings.
We exist as frozen moments on our curated social media pages. We delude ourselves into thinking that this is how we relate to each other. We think we’re making the rules, but we don’t have that power–not on these apps. The embodiment of technology is happening to us without our consent. How much of us is machine and how much of us is human? I’m concerned about social media platforms' biases and how they honor the continued freezing of ourselves, specifically the freezing of our appearance. There is nothing subversive about a frozen face. In Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russel writes:
Glitched bodies—those that do not align with the canon of white cisgender heteronormativity—pose a threat to social order. Range-full and vast, they cannot be programmed.
As feminists, as leftists, shouldn’t we be more interested in becoming “glitched,” instead of folding back into the mainstream, dominant culture?
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