On The Tyrant Beauty

So I know these twin sisters, pursuing PhDs in Comm, researching unhealthy portrayals of women in mass-media.  They have a website called "Beauty Redefined."  They give presentations and run workshops for teenage girls about resisting oppressive media stereotypes of women and so forth.

I admire their intentions and efforts, and any work to counterbalance harmful media constructs is better than none.  But I sometimes wonder...

Let me try and articulate what I'm getting at.  I knew one of these twins once, in my ward. Great girl, Relief Society pres, boundless energy, very friendly, charismatic, outgoing, compassionate, deeply intelligent...

...and who also clearly spent a lot of time on her make-up, her hair, her outfits.

That is, she expended a lot of energy worrying about her looks, even as she taught young girls to not worry so much about their looks.  Her very act of railing against mass-medias' obsession with beauty is itself indicative of an obsession with beauty.  Very Foucaultian.

I know, I know: News-flash!  Women care about how they look!  Who'd-a thunk! 

But I know a bit about the history of Women's Studies, and I know that much of the movement against media objectification and exploitation of women was spearheaded in the 80s by feminist Andrea Dworkin.  Now, here's the thing about Andrea Dworkin: she is, by every modern American standard, unattractive.  She's overweight, wears no make-up, doesn't shave, her hair is frizzy, and she wears unflattering overalls.  In fact, she is a punchline of sorts for the male chauvinists and counter-feminists who snear that feminism is just the ugly women trying to level the playing field.

But that's just it: Andrea Dworkin has the courage to be ugly.  She's absolutely dead-set opposed to mass-medias' objectification of women, to the point where she refuses to participate in the game altogether.  She wishes to be totally free of the male-gaze, so strives to not be subject to male-gaze in the first place.  She does not try to redefine beauty; rather, she refuses to be defined by beauty at all.

And that's the thing: I support Beauty Redefined, but beauty is still a tyrant, no matter how it's defined.  I feel as though these girls are merely moderating the tyrant, not overthrowing it.  Perhaps the yardstick of our progress against the tyrant is by how little we obsess about beauty, either for or against it.  Yet I would not live in a world sans beauty.  But how do we make beauty our friend, not our master?  How do we depose the tyrant?