All Girls Must Be Everything

Our  week-long homage to Bossypants by Tina Fey continues, for more about the series, you can read here.

When I was 13, I was cast in a community theater production of How to Eat Like a Child. One day, a friend’s older brother — a high school boy — came to watch one of our rehearsals.  After the rehearsal, while sitting in the green velvet seats of the auditorium, my friend gave us his review. He didn’t have much to say about our acting or singing, but he did mention that the slightly older and cooler than us girl in the cast was “hot,” another girl was “weird looking” and I was “beautiful, but not hot.”

First of all, looking back on this, what in the hell was this 15 or 16-year-old boy doing evaluating the looks of  young girls? Sadly, at the time it didn’t even occur to me not to give a shit — I  was flattered to have been noticed at all. However, I’d already had one too many “You’ve got such a pretty face, you’d be stunning if you lost some weight” comments to take his “beautiful” at face value. Nearing the end of my own pubescent rough patch, I had the  chest of a 35-year-old woman with four kids, weird permed hair, adult features on a kid face and baby fat.    More than anything,  his comment got me worried about my not-hotness.

I was only 13, but I already knew that it wasn’t good enough to have a pretty face or strong legs or nice skin; it was what you didn’t have that was important. If you had big boobs, you wanted small ones. If you had straight hair, you wanted curly. Pale skin, you wanted to be a bronzed goddess; dark skin, you wanted to be lighter and on and on. It’s a phenomenon that Tina Fey describes in a chapter called “All Girls Must Be Everything.”  She explains,

“Now if you’re not “hot,” you are expected to work on it until you are. It’s like when you renovate a house and you’re legally required to leave just one of the original walls standing. If you don’t have a good body, you’d better starve the body you have down to a neutral shape, then bolt on some breast implants, replace your teeth, dye your skin orange, inject your lips, sew on some hair and call yourself the Playmate of the Year.”

And it just gets harder and harder. Even when we celebrate (slightly) more diversity, it doesn’t broaden the definition of beauty as much as it just adds more things that women are expected to have. We take what is unique and beautiful about individual women — Kate Moss’ natural slimness, JLo’s butt, Beyoncé’s amazing legs, Christina Hendricks’ rack — fetishize those things and, as Fey says, add them to the “laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful,” which she describes in detail as:

• Caucasian blue eyes
• full Spanish lips
• a classic button nose
• hairless Asian skin with a Californian tan
• a Jamaican dance hall ass
• long Swedish legs
• small Japanese feet
• the abs of a lesbian gym owner
• the hips of a nine-year-old boy
• the arms of Michelle Obama
• and doll tits

This doesn’t just apply to looks. In many ways, feminist  values have not replaced patriarchal values, as much as they’ve been layered on top of them. Women are expected to be gorgeous, amazing decorators and cooks (organic, of course, using vegetables they’ve raised themselves and eggs from their own hens), demure, but sexually adventurous wives and girlfriends, educated, employed full-time and Helicopter/Tiger mothers.

Fey asks, “How do we survive this? How do we teach our daughters and our gay sons that they are good enough the way they are? We have to lead by example.” To that end, Fey makes a personal inventory of healthy body parts that she is grateful for. Bossypants is a hilarious book and Fey is known for her wry self-deprecating humor, but it is also worth noting that Fey, a conventionally beautiful woman widely recognized as being sexy, can’t resist making fun of herself in the list, like when she says she has “droopy brown eyes designed to confuse predators into thinking I’m just on the verge of sleep and they should come back tomorrow to eat me.” Enjoying what we have is a process.

Still, I’m inspired when Fey says, “I would not trade any of these features for anybody else’s. I wouldn’t trade the small thin-lipped mouth that makes me resemble my nephew. I wouldn’t even trade the acne scar on my right cheek, because that recurring zit spent more time with me in college than any boy ever did. At the end of the day, I’m happy to have my father’s feet and my mother’s eyes with me at all times.”

Similarly, I’m happy to have my mother’s straight nose and big boobs — they’ve always been a soft place for my husband and children to nestle in.   I’m glad I have my Nana’s legs, those things kept her spry and in short skirts until she was well into her 80s. I’m grateful for the Walker skin — which is pale and smooth and mostly clear (with some occasional chin acne to keep us humble). I like having green eyes and light eyebrows like my father. At the end of the day, I hope that I can value enough things about myself to set a good example so that my daughters won’t get so fixated on the things they don’t have. Life is too short not to try.