Ye Beauty Standard

“Have you seen the new portrait of the Queen?” 

Catherine stormed into the chamber, her brocade dress swirling behind her.

The noise startled Thomas, causing a drop of ink to fall from his quill and form an ugly blot on the parchment upon which he was writing.   Looking up in irritation, he saw the vehement look upon his wife’s face that meant she had again found some fault with the way of the world.  “Oh here we go again…”

“I’m serious!  It’s outrageous how they manipulate the picture, painting her skin as flawless and white, and at her age!”

“Come on, she’s the Queen, for Jesu’s sake; of course they are going to make her look as good as possible.”

“But it’s not what she really looks like!”

Thomas sighed, gently sprinkling sand upon the inkblot.  “So what?  Maybe it’s how she wishes she looked.  How is that bad?”

“Because it isn’t fair.”

Thomas paused over the parchment, poised to blow away the excess sand. “What?  To whom?”

“To women.”

A moment passed.  Thomas set down his scroll and turned to face his wife.  “Prithee explain to me,” he began in his most infuriatingly calm and patient voice, “how one woman’s portrait can be unfair to other women.”

“It establishes an unrealistic and unachievable standard of beauty.”

“A what now?”

Catherine rolled her eyes, feigning impatience as she gleefully launched into her explanation.  “By modifying the physical image of the queen; removing blemishes, adjusting features to be more desirable, lightening skin tones and the like, they hold her up as the standard by which other women shall be judged.”

“What do you mean?  It’s just a picture of Queen Elizabeth, how can it even affect other women?”

“Don’t you see?  She’s a celebrity.  As an important female public figure, strewth, as the most important female public figure, she becomes a role model for all women.  Women see her, and the very fact of her wealth, power and especially fame establish that whatever she is doing, that is the right way to do it.  She is the model for a successful life.  And that includes her appearance.”

“Soooo… you’re saying women want to look like the queen?  What’s wrong with that?”

“Because they can’t!  By painting her to be flawless, it makes women who see those paintings think that they are supposed to look like that, and they can never look that way in real life.”

“So those women won’t look as good as the Queen, so what?  They can still be as beautiful as other, regular women.  Isn’t that enough?”

“It isn’t just the flawless face, there are many other aspects to body image.”

“Body image?” asked Thomas.

“It’s a term I just made up,” she said in her best intellectual tone.  “It refers to the way people, mainly women, see themselves.”

“You mean like in a mirror?”

Another long sigh.  “No, I mean how women perceive their own appearance when compared to the women they see around them.  And when they do not match up with what they see in those women, their sense of worth suffers.”

“But didn’t the good Lord make each woman unique?  Why should it matter that a woman cannot look exactly like another?”

“It’s not about looking just like another woman, it’s about society establishing a set of parameters of what constitutes beauty.  And when that standard is unattainable, it guarantees that women will be miserable.”

“But soft, you claim that this ‘standard of beauty’ of yours is unattainable.  Thus by your argument, no woman could ever be considered beautiful.”  Thomas smiled at his own cleverness.

“That is only because the painters make the standard unattainable by altering their subjects’ appearances.  Women compare themselves to the paintings and are always found wanting.”

“It sounds to me like it’s the women who have the problem, not the painters.”

Catherine put her hands on her hips and gave a disgusted bark of exhaled air.  “Of course you would say that, you are a man!”

“Hey, we men have to look at portraits too, and I don’t hear you complaining about the terrible burden it places upon us.”

“Oh it’s not the same for men,” she insisted, waving her hand dismissively.

But now Thomas had found his angle for engaging her in this dialog, and he was determined to have some fun with it.  “Oh but it is!  Why just the other day I saw a portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh and thought to myself, ‘Oh how I wish my own goatee could curl so.’  But since it couldn’t I ran home and cried while eating an entire tray of sweetmeats.”

“It isn’t funny.  Men never realize how important physical appearance is to a woman.  A man gains a wife by being successful in business, but a woman can’t simply work harder to attract a good husband, she has to rely on her beauty.  I mean, if women were allowed to work for a living on equal footing with men, I’m sure such obsession with beauty would disappear, but as long as a woman must rely upon her appearance to acquire a husband, this need to meet impossible standards of beauty will continue to work against women, young and old, and drive them to such desperate states that they will surely endanger their health!”

Thomas smiled in his most infuriatingly indulgent manner.  “Peace, good wife, you are being too dramatic; I’m sure the situation is not so dire as all that.”

“Think you so?  Have you seen that new continental painter, Reubens?”

Thomas’s smile faltered, and he turned back to his writing.

“Ah, so you are familiar with how he paints his women then?  They are all full-figured, voluptuous and bedight in curves.”

“So?” began Thomas somewhat defensively, “there’s no crime in portraying women as beautiful and desirable.”

“There is when young women cannot hope to look like that!  Those models are paid to look that way, and they can afford to spend all day at the dining hall maintaining their figures.  But what about the regular girls?  They are far too poor to eat enough to look like that.  But they will spend all their time and money trying to stuff themselves, just to try and fit some ridiculous ideal of beauty.  And that’s not even mentioning the clothes…”

“Ay, me, let us not,” groaned Thomas.  “What would you suggest then?  Ban corsets?  Paint everyone with the pox?  Perhaps in future all women could be painted as simple stick figures, and merely labeled?”

Catherine sighed, and gazed wistfully out the window.  “No, I just wish that, in the future, there could be some way to capture images without the bias of a painter.”

“What do you mean?”

“Imagine a device that could capture the actual picture of a person, not one person’s impression of what they see, but the actual physical image, captured forever in perfect detail.”

Thomas was thoughtful for a moment.  “Forsooth, that’s not a bad idea.  Such a device could just take in light and capture a picture exactly as people see it.  There would be no individual interpretation on the part of the artist, merely the stark truth, showing exactly how a person looks.”

“Exactly!” She laughed in triumph.

“It would show every blemish, every spot, every tiny wrinkle at the corners of the eyes, and preserve the true beauty of every woman.”

“Oh I don’t know,” mused Catherine.  “Perhaps one could always correct a few flaws in such pictures.”