With this painting, an enduring theme was introduced. The Judgment portrayed what was by now an established idea: that a man—or men—looked at naked women; but it introduced a new and crucial element, that of judgment. “Thus beauty becomes competitive. Those who are not judged beautiful are not beautiful. Those who are beautiful are given the prize.” This would go on to have a transformative impact on relations between women and men, as well as between women themselves.4
Berger explains that the attitudes and values that once informed oil painting are now expressed through other, more widely diffused media—advertising, journalism, and television. “Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations, reducing everything to the status of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity. All reality was mechanically measured by its materiality.”5 The historical period in which these developments took place is key. Oil painting emerged as a popular art form at the beginning of European global expansion, African subjugation, and the birth of the system of capitalism that has grown increasingly powerful over the last five hundred years.
As Berger argues, this paradigm determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relationship of a women to herself: “. . . thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”6 For extra potency, add to this heady concoction a generous dose of white supremacy, and we have a hierarchy whereby women with certain racialized features are considered more beautiful than others. As Patricia Hill Collins puts it:
Within the binary thinking that underpins intersecting oppressions, blue-eyed, blond, thin White women could not be considered beautiful without the Other—Black women with African features of dark skin, broad noses, full lips, and kinky hair. Race, gender, and sexuality converge on this issue of evaluating beauty . . . African-American women experience the pain of never being able to live up to prevailing standards of beauty—standards used by White men, White women, Black men, and, most painfully, one another. Regardless of any individual woman’s subjective reality, this is the system of ideas that she encounters. Because controlling images are hegemonic and taken for granted, they become virtually impossible to escape.7
European features exist at the pinnacle, with value progressively decreasing the more your features correspond to certain types of African features, particularly those found in the parts of Western and Central Africa from which people were kidnapped and then enslaved.
The binary tradition advanced by French philosopher René Descartes separated the mind from the body, associating men with the lofty pursuits of the objective mind. The cerebral and the intellectual were the man’s domains. Meanwhile, women were relegated to the subjective fleshiness of the body. Being just bodies, the way women looked was given far more emphasis then the way men looked.
Men act and women appear.
Men look at women.
Women watch themselves being looked at.8
Many feminist scholars have analyzed beauty ideals and considered women’s involvement in beauty practices within a political context. As Kathy Davis explains: “Beauty is integral to the construction of femininity in a gendered social order, and the female sex is idealized as the incarnation of beauty, while the bodies of most ordinary women tend to be treated as inferior and in constant need of improvement.”9 The competition created by the prizes and rewards bequeathed through the possession of beauty (which is turbocharged by our society’s notions of romantic love and its key institutions: monogamous marriage and the nuclear family, the natural progression of romantic love) creates in turn a fertile market for advertisers.
“He will love you too,” they whisper. Or perhaps, in this era of commodified female empowerment, it is more likely you will hear them breathe, “You will love yourself” (as the necessary preparatory state before he can love you fully, of course). In one Madam C. J. Walker advertisement, “a dreamy woman clad in an evening gown sits at her dressing table applying cosmetics. She is a light-complexioned black woman with wavy hair pinned up in an elaborate style.”*
You, too, may be a fascinating beauty.
Perhaps you envy the girl with irresistible beauty, whose skin is flawless and velvety, whose hair has a beautiful silky sheen, the girl who receives glances of undoubted admiration. You need not envy her. Create new beauty for yourself by using Madam C.J. Walker’s famous preparations.10
When we think about how beauty products—in this case black haircare products—are sold to us, we need to consider the art of publicity. “The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product . . . the publicity image steals her love for herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.”11
Just like the poster promises: You too can have good hair!!! Instant Hair. Instant Beauty. Instant Success. He will love you too! It’s all so beautiful and achievable; you’re so close you can nearly touch it. All you need to do is make the purchase. Buy the product.
For the black market, the sales pitch was rendered even more emotive through the association of beautification with the process of black racial uplift. The secret behind the success of the most memorable hair capitalists was not so much the creation of products but their marketing. The new narrative developed by black manufacturers capitalized on the desire of black communities to improve their circumstances through hard graft and general excellence.
The vision of beauty promoted was one that made sense primarily in relation to its proximity to whiteness (although not as much proximity as media representations might have suggested). In 1929 the New York Interstate Tattler, an African American celebrity gossip and entertainment paper, launched a Lonesome Hearts column that continued throughout the following decade. Susannah Walker has shown that its advertisements provide a rare glimpse into the prevalent beauty attitudes of a largely undocumented world, revealing the aspirations of ordinary African Americans, which are usually obscured behind more prolific media representations.
But whether or not the lonely hearts accept or reject the dominant standard, they clearly position themselves in relation to it. Walker notes that most of the letters highlight quality of hair and complexion, either of the author themselves or of the partner they desire. Hair and skin are mentioned as frequently as age, and more frequently than weight or height.
Some of the letters make for painful reading, demonstrating the ravages of colorism on people who imagine themselves too far from the ideal to be considered beautiful and, by extension, imagine themselves to be undeserving of love. When a woman describes herself as “a black girl,” a later writer comments, “I venture to say that she is not as black, or as unattractive as I . . . I don’t expect anyone to want to take me places, or to become interested in me, but oh, how I should love to receive a letter now and then . . . I am black, have short hair, very unattractive, a typical Negro type.”12
Elsewhere we see defiance of those same norms. At least among a minority, there is a significant distance between what people are told they want and what they actually want. Consider a letter from a male correspondent writing in the same year as the unhappy girl above. The author declares that any girl he seeks “must be dark,” “she doesn’t have to be good looking but she must be dark. In other words, a real Negro is what I wish better than anything else in the world . . . I’m a Negro and I want a Negro pal.”13