American Girls (12 page)

What is a beauty guru? A beauty guru is typically a girl or young woman who shows other girls and young women how to put on makeup. She advises them on fashion trends and shows them how to style their hair. She suggests beauty products, often ones she's paid for endorsing. She sometimes shares details of her life and talks about her insecurities concerning her own appearance. She even discusses how the pressure to be beautiful lowers her self-esteem. And her answer to this problem is always: look better, look beautiful, because that will raise your confidence and make you feel better about yourself.

In the culture of beauty, this notion has a name: “beauty therapy.” A beauty guru is a kind of beauty therapist who lives in a computer; she's like a beauty-savvy big sister or friend, and she's always relentlessly cheerful. “They seem really nice and helpful,” said Victoria, the Montclair girl. And they're always beautiful.

Beauty gurus are popular with American girls. In 2015, there were more than 180,000 of them on YouTube, along with their millions of beauty “tutorials”; the most successful have millions of subscribers to their channels. They're like a living, breathing version of the “how-to” pages which have appeared in women's magazines for more than a century (in the 1850s,
The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine
guided women on how to be fashionable). Beauty gurus have more of a presence on YouTube—one of the most wide-reaching media outlets of the modern era, exceeding a billion users—than any of the other popular female YouTubers in a specific role. There are female comedians, singers, actors, activists, feminists, and others who upload content to the site, but beauty gurus eclipse them all in sheer numbers and total numbers of views.

Beauty gurus started appearing soon after the launch of YouTube in 2005. One of the first to acquire a following was Michelle Phan, a then twenty-year-old Tampa girl who, in 2007, uploaded a seven-minute “Natural Looking Makeup Tutorial.” In it, she stared alluringly into the camera as she demonstrated how to apply concealer and foundation as tinkling beauty salon–style music played. Today, Phan has had more than a billion lifetime views on YouTube and has achieved the kind of outsized fame and fortune which are the promise of the new American dream via social media: she has her own L'Oréal cosmetics line (em), a beauty products sampling company (ipsy, which had expected sales of $120 million in 2015), and a social media talent network of her own (Icon). In 2015,
Forbes
put her on its list of “30 Under 30—Art & Style,” recognizing those who are “creating and designing the future, from the street to the runway.”

But is Phan a feminist? In a cultural moment in which it seemed that every female celebrity's feet were put to the fire on this burning question (Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Ellen Page, Shailene Woodley, Meghan Trainor, Kelly Clarkson—yes, yes, yes, and no, no, no), Phan said no. “I don't believe in bringing any politics to an idea like feminism,” she said on Cosmopolitan.com in 2015. “I love the idea that women should be celebrated, but I also believe men should be, too.”

A post on Seventeen.com argued that while it was “a bummer” that Phan was “perpetuating” the mistaken idea that “being a feminist has anything to do with bringing down men,” she was still a source of feminist inspiration because she was a “woman who's found great success following her dreams.” In a popular notion of feminism, a woman is a feminist simply if she is successful in her career.

Nowhere in the Seventeen.com post, and rarely anywhere in the current discourse surrounding feminism, is there any question of whether the pursuit of beauty through beauty products is problematic for feminism. Whether a woman who makes her living showing other women how to get “perfect brows” and plump their lips is actually engaging in an antifeminist enterprise does not seem to be a consideration, especially if it makes her rich and famous. Feminists who bemoan the pressures of media standards of beauty also defend the desire of women to try to improve and perfect themselves through the use of makeup, plastic surgery, or whatever means they choose.

This is a change from the early days of the feminist movement, when feminists were more skeptical about beauty as an empowering goal. In 1968, hundreds of feminists traveled on buses to Atlantic City to protest the Miss America pageant, which they saw as ground zero for looks-based sexism. “This was a completely outrageous event and marked a watershed in American history, a watershed virtually ignored in retrospectives of the 1960s in general and 1968 in particular,” wrote Susan J. Douglas in
Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media.
Women who joined the protest objected to the attitudes pageants promoted—the objectification of women, impossible yet rigid standards of beauty, the Madonna-whore fantasy that women should be both virginal and sexual, and the idea that women are in competition with one another over who is sexier or more beautiful.

Playfully, the protesters set up a “Freedom Trash Can” into which they threw perceived symbols of women's oppression, including high heels, nylons, girdles, corsets, false eyelashes, makeup, and bras (it was from this event that the media myth arose that feminists “burned their bras”). In the PBS documentary
Miss America,
Gloria Steinem reflected on how, for those feminists, the pageant symbolized how marginalized groups in society had to compete for the “favors of the powerful. So what could be a greater example of that than a beauty contest?”

In 1991, Naomi Wolf's
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women
amplified this theme. Wolf saw in the increased pressure for women to be beautiful a reaction against feminism. She contended that as women achieved more social and political power, the demands of “beauty” worked to undermine women's empowerment. “The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us,” she wrote. “During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing specialty…pornography became the main media category…and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal…More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers.”

Wolf's book was criticized by some women of color for failing to represent their different issues with body image and racism. “The consensus was that Wolf didn't appear to recognize that black women were battling equally tyrannical but very different standards of beauty,” says Jeannine Amber, a contributing writer at
Essence.
Many feminists of the 1990s rejected Wolf's thesis as well, though on other grounds. “Lipstick” or “girlie” feminism said that for women, beauty
was
empowerment. Beauty was a form of self-expression; it was liberating, not a sign of internalized oppression—in fact, it could be seen as a symbol of resistance, in that traditional symbols of femininity could be reclaimed by feminists. How a woman dressed or whether she used beauty products was her own choice and not some manifestation of patriarchal control.

This third-wave take on beauty was much in evidence in the attitudes of girls I interviewed at the Miss Houston Teen and Miss Houston beauty pageant in the spring of 2014. When I asked Miss Houston Teen contestants, ages fourteen to eighteen, why they did pageants, almost all of them said that it “empowered” them. They talked about the “empowering” effects of pageantry in a kind of mantra: “Onstage I felt empowered.” “I felt like nothing till I started doing pageants.” “Pageants saved me.” Bri (her real name, which I use with her permission, as with all the pageant contestants quoted here), then age sixteen, said, “Growing up, I've always felt, like, fat. I've always felt, like, not pretty enough, and…[doing pageants] helps me. They're a confidence-booster. You feel like a princess up onstage.” Taylor, then seventeen, another Miss Houston Teen contestant, said that she had been bullied and cyberbullied in middle school. It was competing in pageants that had given her “confidence.” “They told me my head was too big for my body so they called me a Bratz doll,” Taylor said with a laugh. “One time on Facebook I got a huge message just saying how I'm ugly, how I have a gap between my teeth, how I was never going to amount to anything in my life, how I wasn't good enough for anybody.” Almost every pageant contestant I spoke to had suffered some traumatic event in her past (including a young woman, twenty-one, who said she had been beaten by a boyfriend) which only being “beautiful” and “looking like a princess” onstage had helped her to overcome.

The idea of beauty as empowerment has actually been part of the marketing strategy of the beauty pageant industry for decades. As a result of the feminist critique of the 1960s, it seemed that beauty pageants were forced to repackage their brand. Pageants are sexist? No, they're not, they're just the opposite of sexist, they're empowering, said the rebranding. The current motto of the Miss America pageant is “Style, Service, Scholarship, and Success.” Its literature stresses the idea that competing in pageants actually prepares girls and young women for the business world. “Some call her a beauty queen, we call her a scholar,” says its familiar fund-raising ad.

The bigger picture is the way in which things once considered sexist have been reinterpreted by and for girls as “empowering”—beauty pageants, stripping, even porn. Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis often argued in interviews that it was the “choice” of the teenage girls and young women who appeared in his infomercial-marketed soft-porn videos, a symbol of their “freedom” that they flashed their breasts for his cameras. “I'm ready and willing, and I'm a dirty slut,” said a girl in a typical Girls Gone Wild moment from 2005. But whether or not the girls in Girls Gone Wild videos acted out of choice, some experienced unwelcome consequences. Lindsey Boyd was fourteen when she says she accepted beads in exchange for exposing her breasts to a Girls Gone Wild camera crew while she was on spring break in Florida; her face wound up on the cover of a Girls Gone Wild video box. “Teachers knew about it, coaches knew about it. It was devastating. It was so embarrassing,” Boyd told ABC News in 2012. “A stupid split-second decision you make could follow you for the rest of your life.” Four young women in a 2008 Florida lawsuit said they suffered emotional distress and had to leave their schools after appearing in Girls Gone Wild videos, which were shot when they were thirteen, fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen. In 2011, an all-female jury denied their claim, deciding that Francis had shown no intent to cause them emotional damage.

“I think what happened in the nineties,” says Susan J. Douglas, the author and a professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan, “was that various advertisers in corporate America picked up on the whole third-wave ‘girl power' moment and they ran with it. They took this desire among girls and young women to have the same sexual agency as boys and young men and they exploited it. They started taking this idea of ‘sexuality as power' and turning it around to young women, telling them they were more powerful if they were more sexualized. There was a lot more sexual display by women in television, advertising, and music videos, and this started getting sold back to girls as empowerment.” In her book
The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild,
Douglas expands on how advertisers, beginning in the 1990s, co-opted the third-wave feminist celebration of female sexualization to market everything from media to clothing to beauty products.

The idea that sexualized fashion is an expression of feminist power can also be found in the controversy over dress codes in American schools. Two thousand fourteen was a battleground year for the issue of dress codes all over the country; in Illinois, Iowa, New York, California, Utah, Texas, and other states, high school and middle school girls held protests over the installing of dress codes banning clothing items such as crop tops, tank tops, yoga pants, and booty shorts, restrictions the girls called sexist. The issue had its own hashtag, #iammorethanadistraction, with which girls were tweeting their indignation over being told what to wear, especially when similar limitations on boys' attire were not being imposed. The hashtag was a reference to how some schools had been alleging that girls' fashions were “distracting” to boys, as if boys' rights rather than girls' were of primary concern.

A middle-schooler in Montclair, Beatriz Bellido-Guevara, wrote a letter to
The
Montclair Times
denouncing the “sexualizing” of girls she believed dress codes promote. “Why don't schools do something to stop this rape culture and sexism, instead of slut-shaming females for their bodies?” she asked. It was a powerful point, as well as an example of the complicated terrain for discussions about feminism which a general atmosphere of hypersexualization has created. Girls agree that they are sexualized and objectified by a sexist culture; but when they self-sexualize and self-objectify, some call it feminist; or they reject the notion that there is any self-sexualization or self-objectification going on in their choices, and to suggest as much is called slut-shaming and an example of rape culture. It's a sticky wicket. A 2014 article in
The Nation
on the protest movement over dress codes cited the APA's seminal 2007 report on the sexualization of girls in support of the idea that dress codes themselves are sexualizing, quoting the report as saying, “ ‘Sexualization occurs when a person's value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics.' ”