Lizzo says she is the "beauty standard." Dylan Mulvaney claims he's hot enough—in his Kate Spade dress and hair extensions—to "steal" husbands. Elliot Page, who was Ellen Page prior to a double mastectomy and hair cut, is lauded for surgical bravery. Beauty companies and lingerie brands all over are pimping their concealers and bustiers to women using male models and spokespersons. None of these examples of beauty, or beauty standards, are ones women can truly or healthily live up to.
Whatever is a girl to do?
Aspiring to look like Lizzo will only lead to being unhealthy. Girls who seek to be overweight are inviting the scourge of heat disease, diabetes, and other ailments. In a recent Instagram post, Lizzo said "I just finished showering and doing my little routine, and you know what I realized? I am fucking gorgeous. I am the beauty standard. Catch up bitch!"
The body positivity movement has equated health advocacy with bigotry. Trying to lose weight? Trying to eat healthy? You must be fatphobic, you must have an irrational fear of being fat, or fat people—likely both. No one wants to be a bigot, and a girl will get more social media praise for bikini-clad fatness.
Elliot Page was an Esquire cover model after coming out as trans, and posed without a shirt after the double mastectomy
A recent edition of Self magazine was all about anti-fatness in fitness, which used to be called simply healthy fitness standards
Honeybirdette featured a non-binary male to sell women's lingerie, despite the company claiming to be made for women, by women
Dylan Mulvaney has been tapped to sell myriad beauty products and products otherwise geared toward women
Girls who want to look like Mulvaney, Lizzo, Page, or these new male lingerie models, would also have to aspire to drastic unhealthiness. To look like Mulvaney, a girl could starve herself, have her curves amputated, get hair extensions, and then try to look vaguely feminine. To look like the non-binary gent in the women's undergarments would be entirely impossible without breast removal, pec implants, and massive doses of testosterone to get a mustache like that.
Yet this is what girls are given, and we know how much representation matters. Is it any wonder girls are opting out of womanhood in increasing numbers and seeking to be perceived as anonymously male?
Growing up in the 1990s, I was no stranger to unattainable beauty standards. Super model Kate Moss epitomized a trend called "heroin chic," super skinny, wan, sad and vacant looking, Moss was revered for her lack of curves, her lack of f*cks, her drug habits, and her Calvin Klein billboard with Marky Mark on Houston and Lafayette in downtown Manhattan.
But there were also the remnants of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue culture, featuring beautiful women with curves, and sure, come hither stares, but showcasing what looked to be healthy living, along with breasts and butts that would not fit inside Prada's straight lines.
Grunge was also a thing. We girls wore flannels, mini skirts, our eyeliner all a mess, hair mussed, big Doc Marten 6-holes.
We were self-conscious, all teen girls are, we were worried about how we looked, how we were perceived, what people thought of us. We were even worried that we worried too much about how people thought of us. All teen girls do. We mocked beauty standards by wearing our hair all down in our faces. We tried to live up to them by wasting away from anorexia and smoking too many cigarettes in convenience store parking lots.
The fashion industry was roundly criticized for parading Moss before our young eyes, her skinny frame and blank stare sticking out from the pages of all the glossy magazines. Some in the industry started demanding that young girls, teens, not be permitted to walk the runway, for the protection of the girls themselves, also to protect all us kids from trying to attain the unattainable waistlines paraded before us.
Dwyane Wade's trans child Zaya is now praised for being a skinny 15-year-old strutting the catwalk in ladies clothes, despite the unrealistic beauty standards set out for teen girls by the fashion industry. Wade is one of those unrealistic beauty representations, but instead of people seeking to bar the industry from using kids to pimp fashion, Wade is praised.
Now 30 years removed from my high school graduation, new beauty standards are making their mark. Some of these are just as unhealthy as the old ones, if not more so. And the others are outright impossible.
Body positivity and gender ideology have only made beauty standards for girls that much more unhealthy and unattainable. Under the guise of equity, inclusivity and diversity, the progressive left has embraced even more unhealthy and unrealistic beauty standards. They have become that which they sought to replace, and as usual, women and girls are paying the price.
