I was watching season 2 of Euphoria recently when a scene came up that really made me think (which is shocking considering whatever the heck is going on with this show this season). It was that scene with Kat (one of the few scenes her character got this season which I think was unfair because Kat honestly deserved such a better arc than what she got), and she is lying on her bed while being ambushed by a group of influencers who are screaming at her to be more confident, to “fake it until she makes it.” But Kat is lying there, depressed and unhappy, and all she can say is she doesn’t want to get up and make herself up and be “confident,” whatever that word means.
It got me thinking, how much of what social media is promoting as “confidence” is really confidence, and not just another form of body-shame and look anxiety?
In “Beauty Sick,” a book on how the cultural obsession with appearance hurts women and girls, author Renee Engeln explores how the women in her story, sometimes conventionally beautiful sometimes not, sometimes young and sometimes not, are impacted by the way our obsession with “attractiveness” hurts women (2018). I remember one story well: a highly attractive woman who grew up with a mother who did everything she could to discourage any semblance of caring about her appearance in her daughter and a father who encouraged her to try to be beautiful. The woman says, in the book, that to this day, though she is already attractive enough that Engeln characterized her as almost like a movie star in her glamor, to still worry about the way she looks. Engeln contemplates on how women spend hours agonizing over what to wear, yet men seem to be able to throw on a look without a second thought.
That type of body shame, of being anxious about our appearance, is understandable, and is relatable, unfortunately, especially to young girls and women. But in the light “woke” movements that have taken the Western world by storm, more and more companies and members of the fashion industry, traditionally where much of what we consider to be beautiful is determined, are trying to re-brand themselves as “politically correct” or “woke,” either by hiring different body types to model for them or by displaying racial diversity in their ad campaigns. And that’s great. I love that. I think it’s important that we have representation, because in the case of the lack of representation, it can make a group feel like they are systematically annihilated, which is when they are so underrepresented that members of a group feel like they are so lacking in value that they are unworthy of representation.
UK fast fashion brand Boohoo and its ad campaign back in 2018, where it didn’t touch up its models’ stretch marks, received a good deal of social media exposure and praise (Di Filippo).
But even companies who continue to brand themselves as “woke” and “progressive” continue to bend to capitalistic needs. The desire above all for companies is to earn profit, and right now, with the wave of “body positivity” and “self confidence” sweeping the internet, this is what sells. This doesn’t mean that the world has suddenly magically changed to be able to accommodate all body types and shapes. It hasn’t. If it had been, there wouldn’t be a constant influx of pictures of Barbie Ferreira on TikTok, with people comparing pictures of her when she was lighter to her weight now and asking “which was better.” The world at large is still very much fat-phobic and obsessed with attractiveness, and these companies and campaigns really don’t add anything to the discourse surrounding these topics.
What’s more infuriating as a young teenager is the connection people make between outer appearance and confidence. Recently, on the Chinese social media RED, there has been a growth in the amount of videos that are encouraging girls to be more confident. But the comments I see most are comments like these:
Essentially, what these comments are saying is the same: confidence comes from things outside of one’s control. The first commenter believed confidence came from family, and how it was difficult to develop self-confidence in oneself later in life. The second believes that looking good has to do with looks, and outward appearances.
Once again, confidence has become synonymous with appearance. It is as though being attractive immediately makes you confident, and being unattractive precludes you from having that golden “self-confidence.” The idea of inner confidence has been proposed to the masses of women who consume social media as this idea of a foolproof idea of how to make everything better, how to make your lives suddenly and magically better, and companies market this in connection with their products so that they earn more money. Confidence has become something that can only be achieved through looking a certain way, buying certain products, and choosing a certain lifestyle.
In “Confidence Culture,” a book published in February, sociologists Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill make their argument for why confidence culture has been hurting rather than helping women reclaim their bodies and their self-confidence (2022). In an interview with Vox, Gill said that confidence has become “like a cult in the way that it’s been placed beyond debate: Who could be against confidence? Nobody could possibly argue against it because it’s so taken for granted. I think it’s good to be suspicious of the things that get placed in that space where they can’t be interrogated at all. It was also just a culture in the way that it saturated right across society — it was disseminated so, so widely. We were encountering exactly the same messages, literally word for word, in our respective areas of research" (Jennings).
The body positivity movement has largely failed because people started arguing for attractiveness instead of respect. Attractiveness is in the eyes of the beholder; there is no reason why everyone needs to find everyone attractive. But the thing that needs to be understood is that all physical flaws should be insignificant when judging a person's worth.
There are ways to be confident without having to spend money, without having to work on your outer appearance. For instance, focusing on your relationships with your friends and family. Focusing on prioritizing your own happiness and health doesn’t have to mean buying farmer’s produce and drinking green smoothies, though if that makes you happy then go ahead. Loving yourself can be as simple as going to bed earlier than usual so that you get ten hours of sleep instead of six instead of feeling pressured to buy creams and other facial products to achieve “glowing” skin that seems to be so associated with confidence. Instead of relying only on inspirational quotes on Instagram, reach out to a friend or a therapist to have someone to talk to and find inspiration from them, or the world around you. Journal! Sing! Dance! Draw! Stare at nothing for a while!
Do what makes you happy with no strings attached. Self-confidence comes from being happy with who you are, with recognizing the flaws that you have, physically or mentally, and still learning how to love who you are. It doesn’t mean trying to be perfect, because perfection is both impossible to maintain and to attain. Body-positivity should have been a movement encouraging people to do what’s right for them and learning to live with their own differences, instead of trying to homogenize all of us into one big “self-love” cult. Self-care is important to have and to understand, but being vulnerable and dependent on others for a little push isn’t going to make you less confident, less sure of who you are.
I don’t subscribe to the “fake it until you make it” mindset when it comes to confidence. I believe that there are going to be some days along the road where I just feel terrible, where I won’t feel confident when I won’t like who I am. And there will be some days when I feel great, when I feel like the world is my oyster and I can be whatever and whoever I want to be. And that’s OK. That’s fine. On the bad days, I don't have to slap a smile on my face. On the good days, I don’t have to feel pressured to try to maintain that feeling. Instead of faking it, allowing yourself to feel it makes you more able to change, makes you more available to your own emotions.
Confidence has become a cult in the climate of “self-love” and “body-positivity” that tries to make us love ourselves in the most shallow way possible. But confidence doesn’t have to be that, and hopefully, as more and more voices begin to realize this trap that corporate “wokeness” and elitist “confidence” has attempted to pen us into, the ideas of confidence become more and more accessible to everyone, whatever size, shape, gender, race they come in.
Works Cited:
Di Filippo, Elizabeth. “'This Is What Girl Power Is All about': Company Praised for Showing off Models' Stretch Marks.” Yahoo!, Yahoo!, 28 June 2018, https://uk.style.yahoo.com/girl-power-company-praised-showing-off-models-stretch-marks-145125096.html.
Engeln, Renee. Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women. Harper, 2018.
Jennings, Rebecca. “Is Confidence a Cult? These Sociologists Think so.” Vox, Vox, 18 Jan. 2022, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22884379/confidence-culture-shani-orgad-rosalind-gill-book.
Orgad, Shani, and Rosalind Gill. The Confidence Culture. Duke University Press, 2022.
コメント