Peace On Earth?
On viral Christmas cards and beauty culture.
Earlier this week, a very specific family Christmas card trend went viral: Mothers and daughters restrained with strings of holiday lights, mouths taped shut; fathers and sons free, smiling, holding signs that read, “Finally, peace on Earth!”
Twitter user @mattxiv collected four of these photos (yes, multiple families did this!) under the caption, “Straight male humor is like ‘I regret getting married and I fucking hate my kids LOL right fellas?’”
Anyone who’s seen a straight man do stand-up knows this is true. However! As Gawker writer Brandy Jensen pointed out, “people tweet about these types of photos as though the husbands are responsible for them. highly unlikely!!!” Not to stereotype, but the kind of guy who equates taping his wife’s mouth shut with “peace” is probably not the kind of guy who comes up with a themed Christmas card idea and color-coordinates outfits for a family of four.
A more realistic scenario: Women are conceptualizing and organizing these photoshoots themselves — poking fun at the patriarchy, perhaps, but also embracing it, amplifying it, reenforcing it.
Because my brain is broken, this makes me think of beauty.
So many of the beauty standards society foists upon on us are products of patriarchy (and white supremacy, and colonialism, and capitalism). As a coping mechanism, we learn to adopt them as our own, and we perform them well, and it feels good to perform them well, because we’ve been conditioned to see beauty as a moral imperative, and because performing it is a form of productivity, and so we confuse this feeling of a duty fulfilled for pleasure or joy or love. This is exactly how oppressive beauty standards are “supposed” to work. The male gaze is internalized; objectification becomes self-objectification. In the words of Glennon Doyle, “A very effective way to control women is to convince women to control themselves.”
We emulate these ideals and say, “I do it for me!”
We tie ourselves up and call it peace.
The bright side: This means a not-insignificant portion of performing beauty, of perpetuating these standards, is within our control. Sure, our individual beauty behaviors reflect the rules of society* — but at what point are we polishing the mirror instead of punching it? At what point are we taping our own mouths shut?
Anyway, just something to think about! Happy Holidays! Let there be peace on Earth!
…and, on Christmas Eve, she delivers the gift of wokeness! If yr brain is broke, I hope it never gets fixed. Brilliant analysis as always.
Jessica, I love your work so much. It has single-handedly given me the wherewithal to cut my spending on "beauty" dramatically in the past year or so. Keep being the voice of reason—my hope is that the rest of the world will become so fatigued by the relentless whirligig of capitalism that it will finally catch up someday. BTW, do you have any sense of when your book will come out? (Yes, thirsty over here, ha ha.) Can't wait!