How do we reassure our children in a world where adverts and toys don’t reflect reality?
Let me confess: I’ve fallen prey to body angst. In my head I know that there is no perfect body. In my head I know that it is a societal ill that we are so obsessed with smoothing out bumps, and with wailing about thigh gaps or sucking our teeth in at the sight of cankles. I know that all of these are part of a toxic phenomenon that is implicitly designed to reduce women to their looks, and to find us failing at every turn. Sadly, it is starting to affect men too.
I know all of this. After all, we all tell ourselves that it is about being beautiful on the inside as well as the outside, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that we are all beautiful.
Yet despite all of this rationalisation, I found myself in front of the mirror, wondering why I do not look as I once did.
My five-year-old daughter was observing me as I recounted to her the times before I was married when “I was slim and beautiful”. What to me sounded like a story about mummy’s past was much clearer to her as a wail of despair. “Mummy,” she gently encouraged me, “you are still slim and beautiful.” I found myself repeating my frustration a few days later and this time she chided me more fiercely: “Mummy! Why do you keep saying that? You are still slim and beautiful. You are lovely.”
There you have it, lessons in feminism from my five-year-old daughter.
I felt a swelling of pride at her understanding and acceptance of beauty. But it made me worry: how will her ideas about beauty change as she grows up and sees the beach-body-ready advertisements around us, the teen magazines that harp on about hair and make-up, or even the female cartoon characters and toys that today are increasingly elongated, beautified and glamorised? How will she ensure her sense that she is beautiful remains intact when the ideals of beauty in the public space do not reflect her? After all, their Photoshopped beauty doesn’t really reflect anyone.
Teaching young girls about the meaning and nature of beauty seems a tall task. Of course it is important to talk about inner beauty, but we live in the real physical world. Women continue to be judged on their looks. In a recent study about athletes, women were more often described with reference to their looks while men to their power and athleticism.
As adults we try to create a utopia for our girls to inhabit, where we constantly compliment their beauty together with their competence and skills (and if you don’t, you should, especially dads). My worry is about transitioning girls from this safe and wondrous space where we lay the foundations for strong self-esteem into a harsh world of judgement.
The bigger challenge is that what we glorify as beautiful also says something about who has privilege in our societies and who has the right to occupy public space. So our discussions about beauty with children have consequences that reach much farther and deeper.
What is key are celebrations of diverse beauty ideals from different ethnic backgrounds, or different shapes and sizes, hair and eye colours. We need constant expressions of appreciation for all the beauty in daily life – especially avoiding criticism of the looks of our children or those around. However, as I learnt from my five year old, the first step is to accept ourselves as beautiful.
Shelina Janmohamed is the author of Generation M: Young Muslims Changing the World and Love in a Headscarf
