“Would you rather be pretty or smart?” my friend abruptly asked me.
As 7th or 8th graders, her question interrupted our activity and conversation as if it were a life or death matter. The intrusion of choosing between two personal traits—that I didn’t realize I had a choice in—seemed like a morose fairy tale riddle. Any answer except the correct one would result in either the giant hideous troll under the bridge eating me, or worse, my friend mocking me.
“Smart,” I replied, confident I had answered correctly. “Because then I would be smart enough to figure out how to be pretty.”
I can’t quite recall my friend’s response, but I remember the gist of it being she was already smart (which she was), so she choose pretty (which I thought she already was as well).
This intimate moment between childhood friends pivoted my awareness of my self. Up until then, I was just being me: a girl who still played with toys and games with her younger siblings, and also a young woman sorting out how to apply makeup and navigating the whole menstruation thing. Suddenly I was supposed to choose my fate and decide what role I would play in life! Why did I need to decide between being smart or pretty? Couldn’t I just be me without a label?
It was the early 1980’s. Michael Jackson was just getting started with something that would thrill fans for decades and thrust him into pop culture perpetude. Meanwhile, President Reagan began his first term promoting the return of prayer in schools. The second wave of the women’s movement (and it’s subsequent backlash), a little over a decade old then, continued to influence and alter the perception of gender and equality. Cultural shifts seemed to be increasing at an exponential rate. Some people enthusiastically rode all the new waves. Others held onto their boogie boards for dear life. Many were thrashed in the riptide. Two iconic movies of the period demonstrate how American culture, if represented by Hollywood, dealt with this cultural tug-of-war and the challenges women experienced.
In 1980, Dolly Parton starred in 9 to 5. Her character, a secretary fed up with the unwanted sexual advances of her boss, teams up with the other secretaries who were frustrated by his condescending attitude. Two years later, Dolly played the owner of a brothel in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Her boyfriend, the local sheriff with political aspirations, tries to help save her illegal business when it gains national notoriety. In both scenarios, she portrays the real world frustrations of women dealing with demeaning perceptions of them and their limited career opportunities. However, Hollywood didn’t offer credible solutions for how to cope with these issues in the real world; Ms. Parton would have been arrested for her actions in both movies.
On a micro level, the feminist cultural push-and-pull also played out in individual families. Some baby-boomer parents embraced the movement and tried to catch up with it. Others were caught off guard and were unprepared to deal with teaching their children about this new-fangled equality thing.
Growing up, my devoted dad, a self-proclaimed meat-and-potatoes kind of guy and an advertising executive shaped by the Mad Men era, often insinuated that women were shallow, vain and materialistic because they mostly cared about hair, makeup and shopping. My dear, sweet mom, on the other hand, had learned and internalized that women’s opportunities were limited. However, for her, this didn’t mean that a woman couldn’t take pride in her physical attributes. My mom, like many, found no shame in a woman (or a man) wanting to look her (or his) best. Thus, during my senior year in high school she enrolled me in a modeling school at an agency in Milwaukee, forty minutes away. My parents’ differing views of women combined with the shifts in culture left me feeling overly self-conscious, insecure and confused. As a result, I recoiled with embarrassment about enhancing the perception of women as “shallow, vain and materialistic” by attending modeling school.
I spent my Saturdays for the next several months on the second floor of a downtown office building learning how to apply makeup, pose in front of a camera, walk on a runway and other skills specific to the industry. I didn’t understand why I needed to learn any of this. The instructors at the school even warned us that a modeling career was not only difficult to achieve but also short-lived. I struggled internally: Shouldn’t I be focused on preparing for college? And doesn’t all of this confirm the stereotype that women are more obsessed with their appearance to the detriment of developing more useful skills or knowledge?
I stopped attending at one point, but my mom convinced me to return. She gently but confidently assured me that people just want to look nice. That is how humans are. I could be providing a useful service to others. There was nothing wrong with that and I needn’t be ashamed.
When I returned to the modeling classes, we had transitioned beyond the basics and were now focused on headshots, portfolios, television commercials and going to auditions. A supposedly well-known figure in the industry visited our school to teach our class acting techniques we could use in front of the camera or on the runway. He had us crawling on the floor pretending to be lions or gazelles. He gave us cues to elicit emotions that the camera would capture in our faces and bodies. After the class, he met with each of us privately for personal feedback.
The one window in the small office room provided a view of the nondescript building next to ours, empty of its workers enjoying their weekend off. I slumped into the chair opposite the acting coach, the only other piece of furniture in the room, wistfully gazing out that window wishing I could be enjoying the day off too. He told me I had a lot of potential and I could go far if I applied myself. My problem, he said, was that I had a really bad attitude. If I didn’t change that I would never have a modeling career.
He obviously didn’t know anything about my self-shaming internal monologue. In a room full of girls and young women who had begged their parents or saved all their babysitting money to attend modeling school, wasn’t he curious why one person spent the entire class sulking? Couldn’t he see the problem wasn’t me? Internally I screamed: The whole world is telling me if I try to look pretty I’m a narcissistic, stuck-up, entitled princess and if I don’t I’m a miscreant troglodyte severely lacking in basic social niceties! I felt misunderstood and attacked. So, I disassociated; I was physically in the room, but no longer present mentally and emotionally. My unresponsiveness to his one-sided conversation didn’t help to boost his impression of me.
In order to graduate from the program, the school required us to tryout for an audition at the agency. They told us to dress in our best outfit, put our hair up so the judges could see our faces, and bring our black pumps if we didn’t wear them. The experience would help us feel more confident about auditioning since that was the main way to get gigs.
The morning of the audition I showed up at the agency in my nicest outfit: a pink, lacy, long-sleeved dress with a hem that fell slightly below my knees. My hair was in a ponytail. The bulk of it, as well as the other loose strands, were randomly fastened to my head with bobby pins. I carried my black pumps in a large gray tote bag that had absolutely no fashion relationship with my outfit. My face featured brightly colored 80’s makeup. White sneakers completed the look.
The line for the audition started at the agency’s reception desk on the second floor and trailed down the stairs, out the front door of the building and ended near the end of the block. Women wore black miniskirts or short black dresses with black high heels. The men dressed in tight-fitting polo shirts or t-shirts. People passing could have easily assumed it was a line to get into an exclusive nightclub. Had they noticed me towards the end of the line with my baggy, frumpy prairie dress, messy hair, black eye liner, blue eye shadow, and haphazardly applied red lipstick, they could have easily assumed I was a homeless person with severe mental illness. I laugh about the absurdity of the situation now, but at the time I felt like such_a_dork.
The audition judges asked me lots of questions about my size, measurements and other personal things I didn’t know and made up answers to. “That doesn’t seem right,” one said, squinting her eyes and wrinkling her forehead. After scrutinizing me, she announced the correct answers that I should have stated. The other judges nodded and scribbled on their notepads. All I could think was, please, please, please let’s just get this torture over with. I need this nightmare to end now. I’m already late for meeting my boyfriend at Summerfest and he is going to be sooooo mad at me.
A few weeks later a woman from the agency called me. She rattled off a bunch of rehearsal times, show dates and dollar amounts. I didn’t even know what I had auditioned for, but apparently I got it: a year’s worth of rehearsals and shopping mall runway shows…just as I was about to depart for college two hours from the agency. My uncomfortable misadventures in modeling would continue for a few more years. During that time, Pretty Woman, a movie about a prostitute rescued from her profession by a handsome millionaire, became the top romantic comedy.
Ania G. Wieckowski wrote an article for the November-December 2019 issue of the Harvard Business Review entitled, “For Women in Business, Beauty is a Liability.” The author based her article on an interview with two professors who had conducted a study of how people perceive a woman who gives bad news, like a layoff, to employees. Their study revealed that participants considered an attractive woman in this role as less truthful and not trustworthy. The professors attributed the results of their study to the stereotype of the evil female seductress who manipulates people with her looks. This study further proves my point that beauty can be a painfully confusing issue for some women.
The human impetus to stereotype stems from a primal need to determine the threat level of another being, i.e., whether that being is safe or dangerous. Putting people into boxes allows us to think faster and to instinctively react to our circumstances more appropriately. Some people also find security in occupying a box, or several of them. They feel more confident and grounded knowing how to act, who to be, and where they fit into this ever-changing and uncertain universe.
Unfortunately, stereotyping others can also dehumanize them, making it easier to dismiss them as individual fellow human beings. For some people, those boxes are Alcatraz; dungeons they bravely attempt to escape from by digging their way out of the subsequent physical, mental and spiritual damage the sequestering caused. They put monumental effort into unlearning things imposed on them since childhood. They try to resurrect and shape that former child into becoming whom they once knew they were. Despite personal gains, many struggle to garner societal acceptance.
Wikipedia says we are now in the third and fourth phases of the feminist movement, which recognizes continued forms of inequality, especially for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) women and those traditionally marginalized. Ultimately, the women’s movement, like many others, is a human movement. Being a witness to, honoring, and loving another being’s individual existence is at its core.
I still retain my childhood desire to just be me without a label, but now realize I can be both pretty AND smart. In fact, I fit into so many boxes Amazon could never build a warehouse large enough to contain them. And when the mean bullies start their shaming litany in my mind, mocking me for being a girly girl, insulting me for being too sensitive, or whatever items they list from their ridicule du jour, I employ my secret weapon. It turns out the giant hideous troll under the bridge is actually a member of a strong and fierce army, loyal to my sanity and self-esteem. On my command, the trolls voraciously devour all the shaming saboteurs.
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