All the Ways That Beauty Traps Me
All the Ways That Beauty Traps Me
The Cult of Beauty and More Than Human Power
THE OTHER MORNING, as I was walking hand in hand with my daughter, we pretended to be toddlers marveling at the world and asking big questions. “Why is the sky blue? Why is the grass green?,” she asked. “Why are we even here at all, on planet earth?”, I responded. “Because it’s beautiful,” she said. Her answer filled my eye with tears for the briefest second. I was, at once, so grateful for her clarity of mind, and yet also afraid for her.
Beauty is a more than human power. It can fill us up, and give us some of that power. It can lift our hearts, and help us stand up a little straighter. But it can also corrode us, from the inside out and the outside in. Especially in the world that we inhabit, dominated as it is by a cult of beauty that’s organized around patriarchy and capitalism.
My daughter is eight, and infamous among parents in our friend group for getting messy. There has never been a time in her life when she didn’t gravitate toward mud. But she’s also an artist. In her down time she draws, takes photographs, builds worlds for her toys, plays on her keyboard, and composes songs on GarageBand. She’s not picky, she just likes to create, on any sort of palette.
She’s always liked watching me put on my makeup, and she recognizes that there is an art to it. I’m literally painting my face, after all. She’s always asked to use my makeup and I’ve always said “no”. I used to tell her that makeup is just for old ladies, and for a while she believed me. But this year, in second grade, kids started to bring toy makeup kits to school, to show off. And she knows now that I was making things up. For a little while, I told her that makeup is too toxic for little girls, and that worked. But then she started to worry about me, putting this toxic garbage on my face every day, and I had to tell her about “clean beauty”. Now she’s asking to use my makeup again and I’ve reminded her about all her friends that (to her dismay) are trying hard to be teenagers. “Think about what will happen if you start wearing makeup around them!” I said, “they will start telling their parents ‘even Matilda is wearing makeup now!’” And she likes the idea of trying to be a positive anti-teenager influence. But that will only last so long.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about my own complicity in the cult of beauty that’s threatening to engulf her. I’ve been trying to figure out how to help her navigate it without being destroyed. Because, more likely than not, she will be drawn in. Part of what I want to impart to her (in a slightly different language, of course) is the ability to understand this cult of beauty as a lesser form of more than human power, one that can’t (and won’t) let beauty in its full richness and complexity in. For me, this sort of understanding helps to depersonalize one’s participation, in some key sense. And for me, this depersonalization can help to preserve a sense of worth and value outside of that cult, and the capitalist patriarchy it supports.
I WAS TRYING TO THINK ABOUT how it was that I first started to abstract myself—my own body, my own face—from this cult of beauty. How was it that I first started to feel as if it wasn’t necessarily me—in the most complex and internal sense—that was participating in it, but a facade of me, me as a character who acts in the world, a particular performance of me? How did I first start to understand that it was a performance and not myself? That wasn’t always true. At some point, I can remember feeling dimly as if my sense of worth as a person hinged almost entirely on the way that I looked, or appeared. As if my visible body was my deepest truth, and I was expected to craft that truth in the image of a profitable ideal.
You might be thinking that, if I’d been parented differently (or if I parented my own child differently) then none of this would be an issue—as if the problem is the participation and nothing else. Resist the cult! But my own mother, when I was growing up, rarely wore makeup. She kept a little bit around, for special occasions. But she was a free spirit and disdainful of this cult of beauty. She prided herself on the asceticism that kept her from indulging in its costly little pleasures. Nevertheless, I was drawn into the cult myself. Perhaps this was part of my youthful rebellion against her. Or perhaps it was simply because she was, despite her disdain for the cult of beauty, nevertheless a beautiful woman and in my drive to be like her, I somehow had to ensure that I would be too. I don’t know. Whatever the case, my mother tried to keep me out of it, but I was drawn in anyhow. It’s really difficult not to be, today, if you identify as a woman.
When I think back and try to remember when it was that I was finally able to hold this cult at bay, and to understand that it would never draw me in completely, the images that come to mind for me are of drag queens. I think it was drag queens who gave me this spiritual gift. For me, they held a mirror up to the cult of beauty, with a hyperbolic and yet also totally pristine, perfectly executed performance of the femininity the cult produced and reproduced. In the performance of drag, I saw both the apex of this cult’s visions and dreams for a woman’s body and yet also the clear acknowledgment that this execution was performance. It was liberating to feel as if I, too, was putting on a kind of drag performance. It felt like a profound reminder that I both was, and yet was also always so much more than, this costumed person. It felt like a spiritual gift.
I don’t mean to suggest that I have the performance skill, or the skill as a makeup artist or costume artist, that a drag performer has. I’m not bad at applying makeup, but I’m just a hobby artist. I only mean to say that it was drag performers who helped me see what a game, or what a show it was that we were all putting on when we participated in the cult of beauty.
It wasn’t a center of worship, where we brought our true selves and could anticipate something like spiritual fulfillment or redemption. We could anticipate some sort financial remuneration or social power, perhaps. But it wouldn’t go deeper than that. The cult of beauty could only offer us the truth of artifice. There would always be some dimension of our human creativity, and passion, and power, and sense of purpose that would not fit into the narrow confines of that cult of beauty. And there would always be a more than human beauty that radically exceeded whatever it was that the cult of beauty offered up. The silkiness of our hair, or our dress, would never be as wildly beautiful as the simple fact that silk itself is a protein fiber excreted by larvae who are striving to turn into moths. That’s a more than human beauty, a power of smoothness in transition, that we are only trying, in utterly simplistic ways, to celebrate and channel.
I think the spiritual gift of drag performance was that it helped me enter into the cult with that sense of depersonalization: I wasn’t outside it or above it, but I took it all less personally. This helped me remember the way that more than human powers exceed whatever sort of power the cult itself seemed to have. It helped me think about myself as a channel for something much richer, and more powerful, than the cult of beauty’s paltry pleasures.
THEOLOGIANS HAVE A SORT of (perhaps unhealthy) obsession with this kind of depersonalization. And churches have often weaponized it. That is to say, theologians have often been very quick to point to the more than human beauty that’s always stirring within any thing of beauty we can grasp or glance at. In the parlance of classical theology, what’s beautiful is not beautiful in itself but beautiful because of God. The beauty of God is the truest form of beauty. It’s not you, it’s God. Don’t take it personally.
I sometimes find this kind of depersonalization offensive because it can feel so incredibly dismissive; as if real things, real bodies, the tangible and actual world doesn’t really matter at all. These things only matter as channels for God. I find this reductive. In his Confessions, Augustine of Hippo famously thanks God for breastfeeding him because (wait for it...) God basically filled the breasts of the women who breastfed him. Why can’t he just be grateful to the women who nourished him? Why does he have to pass all of the credit on to the ghostly father figure who haunts them all?
So, I don’t mean to suggest that I’m totally on board with this intellectual strategy as if it can solve all problems, or functions as some sort of blameless intellectual maneuver. But I do think that it has its place: this sort of depersonalization that can serve as a reminder of the more than human powers that fill and surround us, and will never let us be reduced to the more corrosive (we could even call them demonic) powers that are constantly eating away at us. It can be God, it can be nature, it can be other than either of these. But I think it’s important that it’s wild and more than human. I think that this is what helps lift us up, in some small way, out of the institutions that structure our lives and can sometimes feel so convincingly greater than us in all possible ways. We need something big to help us struggle against that.
ONE OF THE CLASSIC TRICKS THAT religious studies professors will use, when they’re trying to get their students to understand that the word “religion” is a little arbitrary and doesn’t necessarily point to what we think it points to, is to talk about football. What is a religion? Is it a group of people who bond together in community and share a set of rituals, and uniforms, and songs, and holidays, and beliefs? Well, then, I suppose we could call football a religion, right?
It’s a silly intellectual exercise, really. But I’ve discussed it with my students enough that it’s now difficult for me to think about American football without thinking about it as religious in some key way. It’s gotten into my head.
I was recently convinced by one of Jessica Grose’s newsletters (who I have come to appreciate for her periodic commentary on religion and spirituality in the US) to watch the new Netflix series “America’s Sweethearts”, about the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. Grose wasn’t suggesting that there was anything especially religious about this cheer establishment. But I think I intuitively sensed that there would be. And, indeed, religion (mostly Christianity) was all over the place in that series. So, of course, was the cult of beauty. In some sense, these two things function like forms of more than human power that are in conflict for the hearts and minds of the cheerleaders.
A lot of the commentary on the series has pointed out the pretty grim working conditions these cheerleaders are subjected to. They are all incredibly skilled dancers, athletes really. They work and train incredibly hard. The tryouts are absolutely grueling. Many of them end their tenure as cheerleaders and need immediate hip surgery, perhaps largely because of these wild split jumps they’re expected to do at every game. And yet they are paid next to nothing. In a season, they make (as one of them points out) less than someone who works full time at a Chick-Fil-A.
Those who run the organization don’t seem to think that there’s anything wrong with the pay structure. Instead, they stress that the women do it for the pure pleasure of being part of this organization. They do it for the privilege of being part of this elite: a world-famous Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. They do it for the sense of family, and community, they get. They do it because Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders are sisters for life.
And it does seem to be the case that many of the women find something that looks a lot like religious purpose in this sisterhood. They find a kind of family. They find meaning. And their exploitation, as workers, seems to hinge precisely on that spiritual meaning and sense of purpose. They don’t need money, they just need the salvation that comes from being part of this little cult of beauty for just a little while. There are a lot of things that are sad, and depressing, and demoralizing in the series.
But one of the things that was an unexpected pleasure, for me, was remembering how wildly beautiful dance can be. While I definitely like to watch all manner of people dance on TikTok, there’s also a part of me that’s been a little bit at war with dance culture for the past several years. I’ve wanted to defend my daughter against it, because I know (I can remember) what a direct portal it is for so many girls into that cult of beauty. Here in Louisville, Kentucky (where I live) there aren’t great dance opportunities for girls that feel like they can celebrate movement without also celebrating skinniness and (as my daughter describes it) pink princess perfection.
And yet dance is such an incredibly powerful and potent thing that we can do with our bodies, in conversation with music and sound. There really is a special thrill in witnessing—being part of—that rupture in space and time when someone can throw their body into what look like impossible postures and shake our sense of what movement itself can look like. Dancing, and even watching someone dance, can feel like channeling a more than human power.
One of the cheerleaders that the producers chose to profile, in “America’s Sweethearts”, is a woman named Reece Weaver, who is originally from Jacksonville, Florida. From her first scenes, it’s made very clear to viewers that Reece is deeply religious. She dances not for herself but for the glory of God. “I pray that whoever watches this one day sees him and not me,” she says to the camera. And, I have to say, it’s a very cringey moment. My immediate assumption was that this was a pandering, and disingenuous thing to say.
But when I watched Reece dance, I will admit that she changed my mind entirely. In her audition she stood out, for the judges, as a performer who radiated with a kind of power and energy that most of the other dancers lacked. Many of them seemed too caught up in their own sense of anxiety, or nervous tension. They were constantly fighting it. Reece was kind of on fire. She was fierce, and fluid. She described herself as a vessel for God and, honestly, she really did look like she’d just turned herself into a direct channel for a more than human power. She seemed to have a kind of mystical sensibility about the whole thing. Her sense of meaning and purpose is bigger, and elsewhere. And it gives her a lightness.
Reece was a very sharp contrast with one of the other performers they highlighted: Victoria Kalina, a Texas native who is also the daughter of a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. Her mother, who was a cheerleader in the 1980s, now works for the organization alongside her long-term best friend, who cheered at the same time. Victoria grew up around these women, and basically grew up within the DCC establishment. Her participation in the religion was essentially preordained. And yet she struggled, constantly, to remain a part of it.
When she was 18, her audition was part of another documentary series on the organization, and that year she didn’t make the team. Victoria made it on the next year, but also found herself struggling with an eating disorder. The producers made it clear that her mother, and the director of the program, were constantly critiquing her. Perhaps they held her to a different standard. Whatever the case may be, Victoria was consumed by self-doubt and anxiety. It seemed, at least during the duration of the season, that her only sense of meaning and purpose was being a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. That was her ceiling, it was the limit to her imagination. She seemed to want nothing other, nothing bigger, for herself. And it seemed to have an impact on how she moved, and how she danced. It held her back, and down. All she had to channel was her ambition, but ambition is so thin it’s easily cut with self-doubt. I felt my heart constantly breaking for her. I wanted something more for her, I wanted her to be able to feel some other kind of power.
I’VE BEEN THINKING about more than human power a lot lately, as I mentioned to you already. It’s become the unexpected protagonist of my new book project. Because I’ve been thinking about it constantly, I’ve been seeing it everywhere. And because I’ve been thinking about beauty, I’ve naturally been thinking about the way that more than human power circulates within it.
Catching a glimpse of beauty, finding yourself in the midst of beauty, can feel sublime. Feeling beautiful can feel transcendent. It can give you a more than human feeling, when you remember that you’re beautiful. I love the way that this little lift can feel.
But there are many more than human powers, and not all of them are equal. There are even many forms of beauty. The movement of dance—that explosive rupture in space and time, that collaboration with music and sound—is more ecstatic than the shape and the face of the dancer. The silk moth, the power of silkiness, is more beautiful than the dress made of silk. Its more than human power is more charged, more intact.
I don’t think that this is dismissive, the way that theology so often can be. I don’t think that it demeans the powers that inhere within living forms. Or maybe it’s just what I need, in my own imagination, so that the cult of beauty doesn’t crush me.