I was reminded the other day of the Case of the Ugly Opera Singer.* If you haven’t heard, a young mezzo performing at Glyndebourne was branded by five British critics to be stocky, dumpy and ‘a chubby bundle of puppy fat’. Oh, now that you’re asking – she DID sing rather well, but who cares, right? Although I had already heard and raged about it, I had a day-long anger attack that got me thinking about beauty.

I’m not supposed to, of course. Women who expect to be taken seriously, should not ponder the issues of appearance. Unfortunately, I find it very difficult not to think about beauty, as it’s so intertwined with many things I do consider relevant – including work, health, relationships and pleasures. One needs to address the B question somehow, to have a philosophy, a line to take, a policy of the exterior, to successfully function as a member of society. But it’s impossible to get it right. Everything about beauty is so ideologically and emotionally loaded and practically complex that one simply cannot win.

There are so many aspects to this that I don’t even attempt to be comprehensive. But let’s start with the obvious: women are expected to be beautiful (I’m not saying men don’t have their own pressures, I’m just not personally familiar with these). There are variations – pretty is good, well-maintained is in some cases even better than too beautiful and so on, but the point remains the same. I use the word ‘beauty’ for the sake of convenience, not necessarily meaning Christy Turlington-level gorgeousness. Slim, reasonably polished, slightly made up seems to be the general minimum standard, but it depends on context. If you’re not beautiful (in the right way), you risk being punished or ignored.

The thing is, however, you’re not supposed to try. You need to be naturally, effortlessly beautiful. Oh, the scorn when a woman has obviously tried to be beautiful, but not quite managed! Or, even worse, has tried to look both young and beautiful! If I could ban one saying from global vocabulary, ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ would be a strong contender. The endless lists of things you must stop doing at 25/30/35 – wearing mini skirts and orange lipstick and trainers with skirts, among other things – fill me with incomprehension and impotent fury.

At the same time, no matter what you look like, you must love yourself and love your body, we are told. Failure to do so is a crime against yourself. But have you seen what happens to women who actually like how they look? Or who even – gasp! – dare to say so? The more positive (and relatively rare) scenario is that the audience agrees and simply pronounces the woman in question a vain, vapid bitch with no sense of propriety. Being beautiful is one thing, but saying that you are – it’s just not done. (You don’t of course actually need to say it, appearing like you think you look good is enough.) Much more likely is that the world disagrees with glee and spends hours, days, months drowning that carless person in vitriol.

I could go on and on, but I would get seriously depressed, so I’ll skip to my 3-step plan I have devised to improve the situation. Because I’m naive like that.

1. Let’s agree that wanting to be beautiful is OK. Not especially important, not evil, just OK (if you honestly don’t give a shit, that’s OK, too). Now, I’m the first to say that when women are made to feel that their only/primary value is in their appearance, it’s bad, bad, bad. There’s a lot of ugliness and unhealthy motivations in and around beauty; many moral, social and psychological issues. But wanting to be attractive for one’s partner or for oneself, trying to avoid scaring the children on the street after a rough night… Seriously, I see nothing horribly wrong with that.

2. Let’s have some imagination, people. I don’t think the appeal of beauty will vanish any time soon. I believe it’s a human trait and we’ll always respond – in one way or another – to what we consider attractive. But the eye adjusts, one needs only to look at a Rubens or Venus of Willendorf to realize that. So let’s work on our eyes and make an effort to see beauty in different things, not only an idealized version of ourselves (yes, it’s not a coincidence I like Cate Blanchett). It is possible to stretch and nudge the norms in the more inclusive direction, to appreciate different skin tones, body types, hair arrangements, proportions. I sometimes think Alek Wek and Christina Hendricks cannot possibly be of the same species with me, but boy am I glad they are.

3. Let’s just not be total assholes. In the end, you can probably stretch the norms only to a certain extent and people will most likely always find a number of other people not quite their cup of tea. In some areas, deviating from the agreed norm has serious consequences and it makes sense to condemn it. You know, killing or raping someone – not that the latter seems to be considered a serious faux pas in many parts in the world. But vilifying people for not confirming to your idea of beauty? I mean, really? Why do we punish people for something that isn’t hurting us in any way? Let’s not do that.

Full disclosure: I used to enjoy being scathingly sarcastic about the taste and look of famous/rich people. It’s partly explained by the total lack of money at that stage of my life and ridiculing those who made such bad choices (I thought) with theirs was fun (also, I was just so WITTY). But I did it in private and I would never have wanted to contribute to a public shit storm. These days, I find even private sarcasm much less fun. Could be I’m becoming old and boring. Could be I’m gaining some perspective.

Yes, I feel better now. So excuse me, I’m gonna go and apply some lipstick.

On the picture is the my photo of the famous Horst photo – I have a repro at home.
*I wrote this piece a while back already for my Facebook friends, but when I started to tackle this issue for the blog, I realized that I don’t have much to add to what I said back then.