Alina Waidhofer: Beauty as a factor of social exclusion
Beauty and the overall concept of looking good was never as important as it is in our contemporary world. People who look, dress and act according to the standards of our society receive more attention and get furthermore better included into our society. Or to put it more clearly, they get better chances at the distribution of social and economic resources of a society.
Beauty (including having a “good looking” body) must be seen as yet another dimension of intersectional discrimination and in this sense as a possible factor for social exclusion (joining the trias race, class and gender), which describes how people can be discriminated not only based one factor, but that it is always a network of aspects for which woman and man get judged and in the next step discriminated and further excluded.
The sociologist Nina Degele once wrote about beauty-acting as a kind of instrumentally acting (conscious or unconscious) that people use to receive attention and recognition from others or the overall society. Beauty acting has a great range; it includes everything from the daily shower, using a certain kind of perfume, shaving and make-up up to tattoos or cosmetic surgery. The need that people feel to make themselves pretty underlines that the need for a certain kind of look of body and face is already deeply enrolled into the norm/value system of our society. This means that, people who don’t fit the beauty ideal or don’t want to fit into it, get excluded from parts of the society, they are simply considered not beautiful enough.
Not only is receiving attention and recognition for the way you look important for one’s self-esteem and identity but it is also crucial for the number of private and professional opportunities someone will get to participate in the process of social power. So, extremely said the styling of our body or the adaptation to common beauty ideals (to get recognition and attention) is therefore a prerequisite to remain in our society at all, or to have the same chances as everyone else. Appearance (especially in the contemporary society) is an important symbolic value of the social inequality and therefore for the intersectional exclusion and discrimination.
Beauty ideals or norms are nothing fixed, especially in our rapidly moving society, but they all have one thing in common- they get produced in a public discourse of what is beautiful in contrast to what is ugly, and they are controlled by mass media. The concept of beauty gets expressed inside a society and than in the next step gets institutionalized and integrated so that it becomes a norm by which we evaluate both, our own appearance and the appearances of our environment. The relations and evaluations of different social positions are on the one hand constituted by society but they are at the same time, the basics on which our society works. The evaluation is used to include or exclude people from our environment - because if there aren’t categories to which we can assign our environments – we would get overwhelmed pretty fast. This delimitation of and from others makes not only an over/subordination possible it is also an opportunity to explain the diversity of social positions. This diversity leads to the fact that it is possible to exclude someone not only on the basis of his/her ethnic group but also on an intersectional level, including gender, class and as I outlined above, the body. As an example we can look at the intersectional exclusion woman can face when it comes to the female stating of the body. In print media (Sports Illustrated, Playboy…) and especially in social media (Instagramm, Facebook) woman often are only able to draw attention to themselves if they show a lot of skin and present their body in a “sexy” or “erotic” way. Through the conscious "flaunt" of the body they are reaching an audience of millions in social media and this is consciously exploited by individuals as a career opportunity. The measurement of common beauty ideals and the adjustment to it do not stop in front of anyone, and therefore they also require more time and attention than this was the case in previous generations, the opportunity of attention and furthermore the possibility to earn money with your look is highly exclusive, and this is were the double encoding shows, woman not only get excluded due to their (gender specific) body (by they are measured on unrealistic ideals of beauty) but also due to their social position-for example, a rich, famous and attractive model can present herself in a bikini on social media and get recognition and success, but the bikini pictures of a somewhat chubby and less well-known woman were deleted by Instagram , on the ground that the presentation of the body is "offensive" and "unsuitable". This applies not only to professional life of a person, but also their private life is affected. Anyone who looks "better" has higher chances for partner selection and in most cases gets all the attention of the desired sex. Dating websites like "Tinder" are only designed for the visual, first impression, the more "handsome" one presents themselves the more Likes one receives and the more matches can be seen in consequence. Actors are often clearly discriminated because of their appearance (in addition to sex, ethnicity and class), and people who do not correspond to the scale are excluded from many opportunities for professional, personal and social development.
Physical attractiveness is not only important on the micro level for individuals, but also on the macro level. Focusing on clothing, fitness and lifestyle among actors and/or politicians, shifts the public focus from individual performance through actions to looks and appearance.
Through mass media the beauty ideals (in the form of celebrities, models, fitness trainer...) are publicly accessible and accessible to all. In the fifties and sixties, Marilyn Monroe (clothes size 40) or Marlene Dietrich, for example, were regarded as beauty icons and thus represented the beauty ideals of the time and insofar presented the standard of beauty for society. But unlike in our life-world which is characterized by mass media, these "icons" and their beauty still surrounded something mystical, unintelligible - they were more admired than imitated. Through this medial presentation, the body is increasingly made a status object and who does not meet the requirements of the given norm (weight, height, age, gender, skin color, proportions…) is excluded and discriminated.
However, the body or the appearance can not be regarded as a separate factor. It is only in terms of origin, gender and class that the impact of intersectional discrimination on an individual can be understood, but as I tried to outline beauty or appearance needs to be seen as another dimension of it, which also means that the concept of looking good according to standards that were set up by the society has to be seen as a further, possible factor of social inclusion.