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Yes, 100% yes!!! Beauty standards are just another way that we agree to assimilate ourselves to White culture, and the amount you assimilate yourself is directly equal to the amount of success you are considered to have socially. The more you're able to cut yourself off from your body and heart, the more status you'll have in our America…
Yes, 100% yes!!! Beauty standards are just another way that we agree to assimilate ourselves to White culture, and the amount you assimilate yourself is directly equal to the amount of success you are considered to have socially. The more you're able to cut yourself off from your body and heart, the more status you'll have in our American mainstream society. And of course that is by design. As you've pointed out before, the farther we are from our bodies the farther we are from our true personal power and the easier to control. I find the body to be the only portal through which I can truly experience the divine. The more I become in tune with my body and my desires (this is why it's so important in our culture to slut shame women) the more I can hear my intuition and feel my spiritual connection to all that is. When I saw my body as my enemy, that connection felt non-existent and I felt entirely lost and miserable. Diet and beauty culture are huge ways that culture enacts control and trains women to uphold standards and train their children (as women as still expected to be primary caretakers by society) to do the same. I've been circling a lot around this idea that women (mainly white women) are the main enforcers of the patriarchy, at least in American society.
Currently I've been feeling certain that when I walk out into the world after hours of beauty labor, what I am truly communicating to community members around me is my willingness to conform to White mainstream society, and through that a belief (unconscious or otherwise) in it's supremacy and correctness. I communicate this willingness through beauty standards, but culture comes all as one bow-tied unit - there is no picking and choosing. If you uphold social standards in one area, you support the toxic whole. When I wear foundation and contour, I am broadcasting my agreement with all of White culture right on my face. I feel it when I choose to perform White beauty now - like a giant pro-dominator/colonizer-culture flag waving in the place of my natural human face.