Stopping Beauty Sickness

This video isn't about ballet, but it really resonated with me because a significant portion of ballet culture focuses on the appearance of dancers, and on meeting a certain "ideal."

Dr. Renee Engeln is a psychology professor and body image researcher at Northwestern University, and the author of "Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women" (Harper, 2017). In this TEDx talk, she discusses how we grow up hearing both implicit and explicit messages suggesting that the most important attribute we can strive for is beauty. The chronic focus on beauty directs cognitive, financial, and emotional resources away from other more important goals.

Below, I've transcribed her points that really spoke to me.  If you do nothing else, watch the last part of the video, starting at minute 15:45, where she discusses how to turn the tide on beauty sickness.

 Bottom line:  Your body is not for looking at; it’s for doing things.

• Our sense of what’s real, what’s possible, when it comes to beauty, is warped by our overexposure to [unrealistic] images.  Instead of seeing them for what they are -- which is extraordinarily rare -- we start to see them as typical or average.
  
  
• When evolutionary psychologists look at [unrealistic body images], they make the argument that this kind of beauty is like sugar; in our modern times -- we are getting too much of it, in too high of doses.  Our brains don’t quite know what to do with this.  It’s not good for us.  It gives us the message that this is typical, even though it’s not, so it warps out sense of what’s real.
  
  
• Beauty sickness is what happens when we spend time worrying not about our education, our career goals, our family, or our relationships; not about the state of the economy, the state of the environment, the state of the world, because we're are too busy worrying about our weight-loss goals, our skin-care regimen, the state of our arms, the state of our abs, and the state of our thighs.
  
  
• We live in a world where we're taught that our primary form of currency is our appearance; and you can’t escape it.  You walk down the street and people comment on your appearance; advertisers tell you how to be more beautiful; television programs, even news programs, ridicule those who fail to meet traditional beauty standards.  Your appearance is so chronically observed by other people, that over time you internalize that perspective.  So you become an observer of yourself.  Instead of moving around looking out at the world, you spend all that time imagining how you look to the world. You’ve internalized the notion that your body is always on display for other people, always up for evaluation, so you better keep an eye on it too.
  
  
• We have finite cognitive resources.  You cannot chronically monitor your body’s appearance, and be engaged with the world.  When you are beauty sick, you cannot engage with the world, because between you and the world is a mirror.
  
  
• There is nothing wrong with beauty; our brains are so sensitive to beauty.  We know it when we see it, we process it in milliseconds.  The desire to be beautiful is not something you can completely shut off in the brain.  Wanting to be beautiful is not the problem; the problem is when it’s ALL we want to be.
  
  
• How to turn the tide on beauty sickness:
  
  
• Invest less in beauty; instead, invest in things that last, in things you don’t have to fight to keep in middle- and older-age.
  
  
• If TV shows leave you thinking more about your appearance, instead of less, stop watching them.
  
  
• If there are magazines that leave you obsessed with a body ideal that most people can never realistically achieve, stop reading them.
  
  
• Try not to think of your body as a collection of parts for other people to look at.  Think of your body as unified, as whole, as your tool for exploring the world.  Stop worrying about the size of your thighs, and think about the strength of your thighs; because those legs are the legs that walk you around in the world.  Stop talking about your upper arms as though they are diseased; those are the arms that reach out and bring the things you love close to you.
  
  
• Limit your mirror time.
  
  
• Change the future for the next generation.  Every time you feel compelled to comment on a someone's appearance, consider complimenting one of their other many lovely qualities, instead (for example: smart, generous, persistent, curious, hardworking, kind, courageous).  When you do that, you undermine the system that reinforces the notion that our best bet for social status is the pursuit of beauty.

We will never live in a world where beauty doesn’t matter; our brains weren’t made that way.  But we can live in a world where beauty matters less, and characteristics like intelligence, generosity, persistence, curiosity, working hard, kindness, and courage, matter more.