I have a terrible confession to make, one that I hope you
won’t hold against me. I understand this may make you think of me in a
different light but remember that we are all entitled to our guilty pleasures.
I really like the One Direction song “What Makes You
Beautiful”.
Now, once you’ve stopped throwing rotten fruit at me, hear
me out.
It’s an abysmal song lyrically. I’m fully aware of that. I
just think it’s fun to dance around the house to in my pants (apologies for
that mental image). However, when it comes to the content of the song, I want
to scream.
“You don’t know you’re beautiful, that’s what makes you
beautiful.”
Ignoring the total lack of effort put into the rhyming
scheme of those lines, let’s look at the message here. Kudos to the genius team
behind One Direction’s image and PR because their biggest hit really is a
manifestation of the teenage girl id, or at least that one assumed by big men
in suits who take baths in their money. You may think that you’re plain and
totally ordinary but you’re actually gorgeous and it takes the platitudes of
five relatively attractive young men with lots of hair to make you see the
light.
I’m all for instilling confidence in young women when it
comes to self-image. We could use more of that. Wouldn’t it be nice if that
message didn’t come from men? Wouldn’t it do wonders for us all if the standard
of beauty wasn’t dictated by a patriarchal system? It makes me cringe that One
Direction’s basic message is “Your total lack of self-confidence in yourself
and your body is what makes you so hot to me because I like to prey on the
vulnerable, na na na na na na na.”
There seems to be a weird aversion to self confidence in
literature, and it’s a common trope in YA. The heroine seldom sees herself as
beautiful, even when it’s evident to the reader that she’s a total knockout. I
say “heroine” because I’ve yet to read a YA with a male protagonist who
continually insists he’s plain while all the other characters fawn over his
appearance and fall at his feet.
The first example that comes to mind is, surprise,
“Twilight”. While Bella Swan’s appearance is only sketchily described in order
to allow for a smoother self-insert experience for the reader, her supposedly
unremarkable looks are mentioned many times by Bella herself. Of course,
they’re described in the most flattering manner possible. Bella is plain and
dull because of her pale skin, a trait that is obsessed over by the fashion
industry. Indeed, when Stephenie Meyer provided a more detailed description of
Bella on her website, it was hard to see her as anything else other than
beautiful (or an idealised teenage version of the author herself, but that’s a
clichés post for another day).
There are many things about this trope that bug me. The
biggest issue for me is the way it renders heroines to be utterly passive
wrecks with no self-belief. I understand lacking in self-confidence. I’ve been
there many times myself. However, it becomes incredibly tiring once you see the
trope repeated over and over again and almost entirely coming from young women.
It sets in place a deep-seated assumption about young women and the importance
placed on looks.
Why is it so uncommon to see a YA heroine, or heroine of any
category or genre, happily own her attractiveness? I would love to see a YA
where the female protagonist knows she’s sexy and just gets on with her life
without needing validation from a stock romantic hero. Of course, then there
are the issues of how we perceive women who talk of their own attractiveness.
There’s still a pretty unfair and gross generalisation of such women as “smug”
or “bitches”, and the appearances of such women are then sneered at by both men
and women. “She’s not that pretty” is all too often said, as if the standards
of beauty placed upon girls and women weren’t ridiculous and unattainable. Indeed,
the attractive female characters who exhibit some sort of body confidence are
often smeared as “sluts” or “whores” because it’s seen as a sign of sexual
promiscuity, something that the “good” girls don’t do. The reader is supposed
to empathise with the shy but gorgeous protagonist who the boys love but has no
self-belief, not the “slut” who dares to show some skin.
Such confidence is often written off as unrealistic for the
intended age group, a justification I find insulting as well as perplexing. So
a 17 year old girl won’t be able to, or want to, relate to a protagonist with
self-confidence? The only possible option is one of meek passivity and zero
sureness in oneself? Discomfort and confusion are relatable to all but they’re
not the default mode, nor are they the legal precedent for characterisations of
teenage girls. Once again, I specify girls because I’ve yet to find a YA novel
with a male protagonist who spends most of the book putting his appearance
down. Actually, given the unrealistic standards put on men in our society with
regards to acceptable masculinity and what it means to be a “real man”, that
could be an interesting story.
The trope of the ugly duckling who’s not so secretly a swan
carries with it a certain fantasy element as well. You were always beautiful,
my love, you just didn’t know it. You needed this equally good looking
individual of the opposite sex (because such stories are usually
heteronormative) to inform you of this. The kind of beauty presented is, as
expected, pretty narrow; usually fair skinned or pale, skinny, big eyes of
varying colours, bouncy hair, etc. It gets tiring very quickly to see the same
kinds of beauty elevated to the ideal over and over again in YA. Fortunately,
there are some great authors busting these expectations with their heroines,
but we need more (and we also need publishers to portray these characters
properly in the cover art. Come on, after all the fuss we’ve made about this
for the past couple of years, you’d think people would get with the programme).
Given the many discussions we’ve had about YA and its part
in asserting gender roles of teenagers, it’s hard to miss the obvious
implications of the plain girls gone beautiful trope. It’s one that strips
young women of their confidence and leaves them constantly depicted as
trembling little creatures desperately in need of a man to make them feel
better. There’s a realistic portrayal of teenage awkwardness and then there’s
just lazy writing. Our literature often reflects reality, or what is
continually asserted as the norm, but it can also subvert it. Why not give the
world more female characters who are happy with their appearance, an appearance
that doesn’t fit the singular version of “beauty” shoved in our faces at every
moment? Because, as that pillar of greatness RuPaul once said, if you can’t
love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love somebody else? Let’s face it,
RuPaul is far superior to One Direction.
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