Creating The Webbd Wheel: Objectification
In which beauty becomes identity ...
In post #36 of The Hanged Man, we meet new characters, Rose Red and her mother, Queen Snow White. Every reader will recognize the bones of the Snow White fairytale. As a storyteller, I learned to explore the layers and roots of old stories, and one of the most interesting characters to consider is Snow White’s stepmother, who was so obsessed with her beauty and her magic mirror.
The objectification of women has been going on for centuries. Here we have a character whose story was officially collected by the Brothers Grimm in the nineteenth century, but probably has roots much older than that. Variants of Snow White can be found throughout Europe, including Eastern Europe; the United Kingdom; and the Mediterranean.
What kind of mental illness, distress, or fear leads a woman to kill a younger woman out of jealousy? Why was it so important the stepmother remain the fairest in the land? Did her own life depend on maintaining her beauty and the position it gave her?
What would it be like to be forever forced to measure up to someone else’s ideal of beauty, to be powerless to ever be more than a pleasurable object, a prop for a man?
I suspect a lot of women, past and present, could tell us. I suspect most women have spent time carefully assessing how best to please and attract a lover. I certainly have.
Living up to the ideal of beauty is tricky, because it truly is in the eye of the beholder. I have more than once vacillated between an outfit, hairstyle, or scent I loved and felt good in and what I thought he would find most attractive.
Attracting a mate is a perfectly normal biological behavior, as is being attracted to one. But it was never meant to permanently overtake our whole lives and identities. As women, our years of fertility are limited. As women, we have historically been dependent on men economically and socially. The ability to be and remain attractive became a way to assure success for a woman and safety for her children.
More recently, as women have fought hard to gain financial independence, the right to an education, the right to vote, the right to divorce, and the right to manage their own healthcare, including reproductive choices, we are less dependent, but culturally we’re still obsessed with beauty in both men and women. So obsessed, in fact, we’ve created all kinds of technological and medical tools to enhance and maintain whatever our standard of beauty is.
That standard is not consistent. Sexual attraction is a strange and powerful force, and beauty a subjective judgement.
However, most agree youth is more beautiful than age, and those in their fertile prime more beautiful than those past it.
If we believe we are worth nothing but our looks, or our money, or our status, we have prostituted our identity and are wasting our lives. If all our effort goes into pleasing and/or attracting an onlooker rather than living in and decorating our magnificent and miraculous bodies according to our own pleasure and health, we have given away our power and become an image in a mirror rather than a multi-dimensional person.
High-heeled shoes, makeup, physical details, clothing, jewelry, hairstyles, and physical function cannot confer beauty, fertility, safety, happiness, success or true love. We believe they can. We act as though they can. It’s simply not true. Attracting a mate for the purposes of sexual pleasure or procreation is not the same as creating a lasting family unit or indeed a life. The first is relatively easy, especially during the youthful, hormone-driven years. The second is much harder to achieve; part of what makes it hard is how seduced we are by beauty. As we age and change, many look for someone younger, fresher, and less familiar. Someone more beautiful.
Beauty, like anything else, can get boring and stale.
It also doesn’t stay. With all the money and self-care in the world, our bodies age. We can’t stop it. What happens to an aging woman who has never been anything but her looks? What a terrible emptiness to face.
I’ve always felt a sneaking sympathy for Snow White’s stepmother. I don’t excuse what she did, but her rage and fear of losing the status of the fairest in the land hurts my heart. What an empty life. What a sad woman. She sits all alone in her room, communing with a pitiless and sinister mirror. No one sees beyond her looks. No one reassures her. As far as we know, she loves no one, especially not herself. What does she do with her time? What does she create? What kind of memories does she have? What has she seen and done, besides marry a man with a young daughter by a previous wife?
The only thing she ever was or cared about inevitably slips away as she ages, and she has nothing to fall back on, no place to go, no internal resources to help her age gracefully and become a source of wisdom and support to the next generation. She is alone.
My character of Rose Red’s Queen mother arose from years of imagining Snow White’s stepmother in the fairytale. When I first read Snow White, I was a child myself. Now I’m nearing 60 years of age. I’ve been a daughter. I’ve been a mother. I’ve been young and horny and fertile and attractive. Now I’m postmenopausal.
Life is a strange journey, and it’s about much more than beauty. A woman is a wild, primal creature, whether fertile or not. Healthy women live up to their own standards of beauty at every stage of life; they reach beyond their looks for identity and meaning.
A woman is not an object.
(This essay was published with post #36 of The Hanged Man.)