they won’t hire those who are easily disdained (e.g., fat people or old people, unless they are absurdly cute and entertaining). Without reasonable accommodations, no amount of tenacity will help a wheelchair user turn a flight of stairs into a ramp. Yet we still discuss personal tenacity and positive thinking as the key ingredients in overcoming public barriers.
While modeling schools showed women (and others) how to conform to beauty standards, we less often discussed what the particular homogenization of those standards meant to consumer America. People of color were taught to act and dress and appear whiter in order to gain access to everyday advantages. Fat people were taught to “reduce” or give the appearance of disappearance, to blend in. Disabled people were taught to develop personality, to emotionally manage others’ expectations regarding their abilities. Conformity to the gender binary was paramount. These are the values with which I grew up, and our family business was to teach people how to navigate social expectations successfully.
And, of course, those lessons cost money. “Personal development” courses were marketed by modeling schools as an investment in one’s familial and professional success. While these courses were not the first or only expression of consumerist values in personal improvement, they were a strong precursor to the current-day thinking that encourages us to spend money to improve ourselves. Whereas previous (turn-of-the-nineteenth-century) ideas of self-improvement may have encouraged reading more classic literature, doing good deeds in one’s community, or learning to play a musical instrument, current thinking assumes that people—women more than men, people of color more than white people, fat people more than slender people—must engage in appropriate appearance management. The undertaking is so important that rather than learning the skills of fashion, design, and hairstyling, for instance, individuals spend huge sums for professional help to be sure they get it right. Indeed, spending money has become tantamount to expanding personal power, even when it paradoxically leads to impoverishment and long-lasting debt.
You may not have discussed the tools of conformity as openly as my family did (and we didn’t discuss it using this language), but you grew up with these norms too. These values didn’t just go away because we were learning about them on the Internet or discussing physical modifications with our doctors rather than taking classes in a downtown high-rise after work as in the heyday of John Robert Powers.
The basic idea of “self-improvement”—learning how to better play the game—was benevolent, except that it reinforced a hierarchy to keep racial privilege, social class privilege, and all the other privileges in place. Appearance matters. People behave differently toward you if you’re white, well-dressed, pretty, young, gender-conforming. This is another way of saying, as bell hooks so often does, that we live in an “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” We can all test the idea that appearance and cultural capital matter using reflections on our own lives. Consider how people spoke about each other’s appearance following your last large family gathering. What was she wearing? Did he really put on that much weight? How does she not know how old she looks with that hairstyle? Consider the process of job interviewing. With rare exceptions, these experiences uphold hegemonic appearance standards, and, if you are recalling an exception, you are aware that it is indeed an exception to the norm. The criteria by which we judge others—even if we have the compassion not to speak our judgment—betray the cultural values over which we believe we have control.
For instance, most people think they’re choosing how to look and expressing individuality without considering the built-in desire for maximum social privilege and how that keeps systems of oppression based on privilege intact. Most don’t consider the importance of expressing group solidarity—appearing like one’s friend group or political party or profession. With an array of options on the Internet, most don’t consider the paucity of choices in local shopping chains and how much of what we order online actually conforms with the inventory already available at the local Home Depot or Marshalls.
These factors drive decision-making. Even when the pursuit of privilege becomes invisible, it is easily revealed by trying to imagine an opposite. Author hooks has also commented on how white supremacy influences everyone—even white people—to aspire to whiteness. Think about the increasing number of salons that specialize in giving patrons blond hair and “natural” highlights, often accompanied by straightening or “blowout” services. Now think about how absurd it would seem to walk past the same salon focused on giving patrons of any race artificial dark afros. Yet somehow we remain uncomfortable talking about the descriptor hooks uses persistently: “imperialist, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” She reports that people often laugh when she says this, like it’s hyperbole, a joke for effect. She reminds us that she’s just being concise.
No, we’d rather take on the neoliberal beauty project and lament the fact that hierarchy still exists but that at least we’re doing our best not to be at the bottom. When I first started giving public presentations in the 1990s on the distribution of wealth and income based on race and gender, I worked with community-based coalitions. Though they were often quite progressive, they still felt that a focus on how people should dress for interviews would be more useful than showing people how the cultural and political deck has been stacked against them.
“Couldn’t we videotape people so they could see how their lower-class ways, words, and appearance are defeating them?” I was asked. “Shouldn’t we be focused on changing the individuals? People need immediate results.” And, “Hey, what if we have a drive for plus-size business wear for women. That’ll help.” The thing is, these tactics do help some people who are on the edge of appearance acceptability. But they will never help restructure economic opportunities, revise policies, or lead to true inner peace about how one looks. These tactics may pull up a “movable middle,” but they will always keep a social hierarchy, with a clear top and bottom, intact.
Look, I get it. So much of what’s influencing our lives seems out of our control. We just want to know what we can do to make things better. That’s why the neoliberal nonsense about self-improvement enhancing upward mobility (primarily via educational degrees and appearance modification) seems so attractive. Of course, personal improvement goals like degrees, weight loss, and wardrobe improvement overwhelmingly serve to feed the consumerist growth monster of debt and bolster the notion that we are not worthy unless we look and achieve in certain ways. That is, these aims actually rob of us of time, money, and personal sovereignty. The idea that people can assume debt in order to create a better future is the leading personal paradox of our time.
Nowadays, dieting and dressing well are not enough. Doctors (wrongly) say that the body can be safely and surgically slenderized, noses trimmed, breasts enhanced—and all on an affordable payment plan. And if you still feel badly about how you look for any reason, add body positivity to your to-do list because failing to love your body is yet another personal problem to be solved. Self-esteem is sexy; confidence helps you become employable; loving yourself improves health.
In her book, American Plastic, Laurie Essig calls the widespread availability of plastic surgery and consumer credit “the perfect storm.” She also points out that we are acculturated as consumers to believe that these entail our personal desires rather than cultural conformity. As she explains in the chapter “Learning to Be Plastic,” “To keep beauty profitable, our bodies must be colonized as if they were foreign lands. In this way, beauty can create new markets and extract more wealth.”
My body has been used to frighten people into doing something about their own, so as not to become like me. I’ve often been targeted by advertising campaigns and doctors for surgical interventions, which I’ve not pursued, so you won’t read about those experiences in this book. I hope it is clear that we are all influenced by living in a culture that sees these efforts as reasonable self-improvements despite the health and financial risks. The intersections of various forms of appearance privilege, along with the intertwined pursuits of credibility based on social class or educational attainment, are also explored here. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu extended Marx’s idea of capital into the realm of the cultural,
