Feelin’ Good as Hell?

The Influence of Cardi B. and Lizzo’s Music Videos on College-Aged Women’s Perceptions of Beauty, Sexism, & Sexualization [Excerpt]

As featured in One Size Does Not Fit All: Undressing the Performance of Bodies in Popular Culture (2022) and presented at the 2022 Central States Communication Association Annual Convention

Despite standards and ideals that have shifted with the times, women’s beauty has been dictated and scrutinized for centuries. “Don’t assume that standards of beauty are accidental. They reflect the power structure in our society” (Steinem as quoted in Romm, 1987). The ancient Greeks prized facial symmetry and blond hair, while the streets of Elizabethan England were punctuated with red locks and white faces that echoed the Queen’s. In some ways, the quintessential beauty icon of the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe, harkened back to the singular Queen with her ruby lips and fair complexion, both of which undoubtedly played some small role in the pale visages of London’s 1980s punk scene (Romm, 1987). 

Modern expectations are, for many, as wildly unobtainable as the proportions of a Greek statue or the cinched waist of a Hollywood bombshell. Peer pressure, family expectations, and especially the mass media are to blame for the increasingly unrealistic representations of beauty that now permeate the cultural zeitgeist, with movies, television shows, magazines, and music videos having the largest impact on adolescent and college-aged women (Irving, 1990). These representations are rooted in Eurocentric beauty standards that value white skin, straight hair, blue eyes, and narrow facial features (hooks, 1994; Qasim, Hayat, & Asmat, 2012; Russell-Cole, Wilson, & Hall, 2013). And perhaps the most damaging measure of American beauty is a persistent obsession with thinness, one that is heightened through dishonest media practices such as airbrushed magazine editorials and both covert and overt advertisements for diet aids. This is largely done in part to enhance the profits of the billion-dollar beauty and health industries: 

Because advertisers are continuing to change the “bar” or standard of beauty as represented in mediated images, consumers will never be able to reach that bar; thus, health and beauty products continue to be sold at a rapid pace, and women and men’s self-esteem as it relates to their body shape and appearance is in question. (Bissell & Rask, 2010, p. 646). 

Because of the excessive amount of media that they are exposed to on a daily basis, young women are especially susceptible to the negative consequences of rigid and impossible beauty standards. The dress size of the average American woman has steadily increased over time, yet the sizes of models and actresses continue to decrease (Bissell & Rask, 2010). While the standard weight for an American woman in 2019 is 140lbs., the standard weight for a model remains nearly unchanged since the 1970s at 117lbs. (Percy & Lautman, 1994). This sort of endless psychological conditioning of desire for a nearly emaciated body type can have damaging long-term effects on girls and women, including low self-esteem, body dissatisfaction, eating disorders, and depression (Bissell & Rask, 2010; Engeln-Maddox, 2005; Lokken, Worthy, & Trautman, 2004). 

Fortunately, some forms of media are beginning to cater to the growing demand for realistic and inclusive representation. Major retailers like Target and CVS have vowed to remove airbrushing from all of their marketing materials, and women’s sleepwear and lingerie brand Aerie’s advertisements often feature models with cellulite, stretch marks, and stomach rolls. The user-generated content of social media sites like Instagram has also helped to turn the tide of beauty expectations, with searches for hashtags #bodypositive and #bodypositivity each resulting in over one million posts (Cohen, Fardouly, Newton-John, & Slater, 2019). Body positivity “aims to challenge the aforementioned narrow appearance ideals and instead represent a diverse array of bodies of different shapes, sizes, colours, features, and abilities, with the presumed aim of fostering body acceptance and appreciation” (Cohen et al., 2019, p. 1548). Through the media’s promotion and celebration of multiple versions of womanhood, girls and women can begin to validate their own beauty and existence, increasing confidence and overall well-being.    

Beauty standards for women differ across cultures, but the fervor with which these standards are promoted and enforced remains universal. Black women and their appearances have been demonized by the West’s obsession with Eurocentric physical features. “Their African features, kinky hair, lips, nose are associated with ugliness” (Qasim et al., 2012), a belief made possible through the binary of exalting one standard of beauty above another. “Judging White women by their physical appearance and attractiveness to men objectifies them. But their white skin and straight hair privilege them in a system in which part of the basic definition of whiteness is superiority to blackness” (Collins, 1990, p. 79). The perception of whiteness as goodness and blackness as evil are residual effects of slavery, when Black women and girls were defined by a White cultural hegemony that served to dehumanize and humiliate them (White, 2005). Once slavery ended, White Americans justified their actions and maintained dominance over Black women by labeling them as “breeders, mammies, matriarchs, and hot girls, women with the deviant sexuality, welfare recipients and the ugly and unfeminine creatures” (Qasim et al., 2012). 

Progress has been slow for Black women to reclaim and redefine their own beauty. As Naomi Wolf noted in The Beauty Myth, “women of colour [are] seldom shown as role models” (2002), and those who are featured in the media reinforce damaging ideals of colorism by selling products like skin lighteners and hair straighteners (Rooks, 1996). “Colorism, or skin tone bia(es), within the African American community fosters an environment in which European physical attributes (i.e., light skin, narrower noses, and thinner lips) are preferred to African physical attributes (i.e., dark skin, wider noses, and thicker lips)” (Maxwell, Abrams, & Belgrave, 2016, p. 1489). These biases are especially prevalent in rap and hip-hop music; in a content analysis study of 108 music videos in the genre, 34% of the featured women were light-skinned, while only 13% of the featured women were dark-skinned (Conard, Dixon, & Zhang, 2009). 

Because they exist at the intersection of gender and race, Black women are especially vulnerable to the influence of these messages. Persistent comparisons to light-skinned and White women, coupled with the deprecation of African features, can often lead young Black women to question their identities and their values, and can produce long-term damage on their body images (Bell, Lawton, & Dittmar, 2007; Jones, 2004). In 2006, Black filmmaker Kiri Davis reproduced a famous 1947 experiment in which researchers presented Black children with two baby dolls, one Black and one White, and asked them to choose which doll they liked better. The 2006 experiment yielded the same results as the one conducted in 1947: an overwhelming majority of the children chose the White doll. When Davis asked one little girl which of the two dolls looked worse, the girl chose the Black doll, and at first reached for the White doll when asked which doll she most resembled (“What Dolls Can Tell Us About Race in America,” 2006). While dolls may seem a relatively innocuous subject, the perceptions that both the outside world and Black women have of themselves can impact everything from job placement to education to health and safety.