Being Pretty

How Beauty Standards Keep Women Weak, Skint, and Fighting

By Chelsea May Walker

Bolton, U.K. - Have you ever sat and watched a woman put on her face and started to think that her applying makeup was an actual form of "stimming"? According to the National Autistic Society, stimming refers to "repetitive movements or actions that individuals engage in to regulate their emotions, sensory experiences, or cognitive state." And women? Women stim hard when they do their makeup. Because living in a world designed by and for men is terrifying, and the ritual of "becoming presentable" is as much about emotional regulation as it is about covering blemishes. Women paint their faces not just to look good but to soothe ourselves, to build a socially acceptable armor, to suppress the gnawing anxiety of existing in a world where male approval dictates everything from our safety to our social currency.

I was on a date with a woman recently—a lesbian, which you would think might mean a break from the male gaze, but no such luck. Before we even met in person, she informed me that I was an 8 out of 10. I didn’t ask for a rating, but there it was, neatly packaged like an Amazon review of a mid-tier vacuum cleaner. The two missing points? My height. At 180 cm, I was apparently too tall for her 167 cm frame.

This is what happens when men build the rulebook on beauty—women start enforcing it, too. We rate each other the way men do, whittling down our own worth based on criteria we didn’t even set. Beauty, as it’s sold to us, isn’t about self-expression or confidence. It’s about control. It keeps women in a constant state of self-surveillance, insecurity, and physical weakness. Quite literally, beauty standards make women less able to move, fight, and function freely in the world.

And that’s the thing—performing femininity isn’t just about looking good. It’s how men got us to fight to win them, to fight for a prize that is, quite frankly, not a prize at all. It is women cutting each other down for validation from men who will never truly value them. It is spending hours of our lives in front of mirrors, agonizing over our weight, our skin, our hair, our desirability, when we could have been doing literally anything else.

Let’s start with the obvious: high heels. Supposedly the height of elegance, these medieval torture devices do exactly one thing—slow women down. They make it harder to run, to stand for long periods, and to walk without pain. Ever seen a woman at the end of a night out, barefoot and limping with her heels in her hand? That’s not beauty. That’s suffering. Then there’s fake nails, those shiny little talons that make it impossible to type, open a can of soda, or make a fist. Imagine needing to throw a punch and realizing you physically can’t. Beauty standards don’t just limit women’s mobility—they limit our ability to defend ourselves.

Makeup? It’s marketed as a confidence booster, but let’s be clear: it’s a mask, and one that damages the very thing it’s supposed to enhance. Foundation clogs pores, lipstick contains carcinogens, and waterproof mascara might as well be glue. We’re taught that our bare faces are incomplete, flawed, or even offensive—so we buy products to "fix" them. And when our skin inevitably breaks out from all the junk we slather on it, guess what? There’s another product for that, too.

And then there’s plastic surgery—the ultimate testament to beauty culture’s ability to convince women to risk their lives for the cause. Whether it’s breast implants that can rupture or liposuction that can lead to fatal complications, women literally go under the knife just to look more palatable to an impossible standard.

This obsession with "beating our faces" and "snatching our waists" isn’t just among women, though. Trans-identified males—men who claim to be more "woman" than biological women—are the most extreme version of this performance. They mock the idea of womanhood itself by reducing it to makeup, outfits, and exaggerated femininity, insisting that because they "do it better," they must be more valid in their womanhood than actual women. This is how deeply the beauty myth has been ingrained in us—as if the ability to contour cheekbones means more than the lived experience of being born into a world that wants to keep you small, quiet, and afraid.

I grew up tall, pale, and covered in freckles—none of which fit the classic beauty mold. I learned early that beauty is an ever-moving goalpost, and no one is ever good enough. This is by design. The beauty industry is the most successful oppression machine ever created. It makes sure women never feel comfortable in their own skin, never feel strong in their own bodies, and never stop spending money to chase a fantasy. If beauty were truly about self-love, it wouldn’t be making women weaker, poorer, and more insecure. But that’s exactly what it does. High heels, fake nails, makeup, plastic surgery—they aren’t just fashion choices. They are shackles, dressed up as empowerment. And the worst part? We enforce them on each other now.

A woman on TikTok recently asked what other women would do if men disappeared from the planet overnight. The responses were devastating in their uniformity. Comment after comment described total happiness, freedom, peace. Women talked about taking walks alone at night, wearing what they wanted, feeling safe for the first time in their lives. Because even when we think we’re just choosing to "look good," we’re really choosing to survive. And that is the saddest truth of all.