On Beauty and Power (2023)

To live as a woman in a system that equates feminine beauty with feminine power is to inherit a narrative long before we learn to question it. From an early age, we are taught that desirability is not simply an attribute, but an achievement. Beauty becomes something socially defined, culturally reinforced, and so deeply internalised that "being beautiful" begins to feel like a condition for existence itself.

And so, we are led into a narrative that promises reward: to be seen is to be validated. Beauty is presented as access, as a condition through which power, recognition, and belonging may be obtained. Like a kind of passage into womanhood, attaining beauty becomes a golden threshold. All we have to do is be pretty, we tell ourselves. If we align with the ideal, everything else will follow.

The promise carries a cost it never names. To seek power through appearance is to accept a position in which you are primarily an object, something to be looked at, evaluated, received. We accept the terms without reading them, drawn in by what is being offered, moving forward without fully understanding what we have agreed to in return.

Over time, the external gaze is internalised. We begin to monitor ourselves continuously, adopting the same perspective that has always measured and ranked us. What appears to be self-awareness becomes a form of self-enforced surveillance, a quiet imprisonment in which the watcher and the watched become one. Always under observation. Always on display. The mirror becomes an instrument of judgement, and we are both the judge and the judged, without pause and without mercy.

What makes this dynamic so enduring is how naturally it disguises itself. It does not feel like oppression. It feels like care. Like discipline. The language around it is almost always positive, taking care of yourself, putting your best face forward, feeling confident in your own skin. The vocabulary of self-improvement conceals the architecture of control so completely that resistance becomes difficult to even imagine. To refuse the gaze feels like negligence. To question beauty culture feels like ingratitude toward the very tools that were supposed to set us free.

Within this structure, beauty functions as a mechanism of control. Its standards are unstable, shifting across time and culture, never fixed and never secure. Designed, whether consciously or not, to remain just beyond reach. The ideal is a horizon. The "most beautiful girl" is a changing standard, a position always quietly being reassigned. Power tied to appearance remains perpetually precarious, something that can be granted and just as easily withdrawn, by age, by fashion, by the shifting preferences of a culture that was never loyal to begin with.

The consequences are deeply felt. They settle into the body, into how we inhabit it, how we feed it, how much space we allow it to take. They move into ambition, into whether we believe our ideas are worth as much as our appearance, into whether we enter a room expecting to be heard or only to be seen. A self-image built on external validation carries within it a structural fragility. When desirability becomes more essential than respect, the capacity to develop our full potential is severely limited.

To move beyond this requires a shift at the level of narrative. The stories we tell ourselves are the frameworks through which we interpret the world and position ourselves within it. They are our personal myths, the invisible architecture that determines what feels possible. When these myths are built on systems of veiled oppression, they ask to be rewritten.

This begins with a question, simple and radical in equal measure: are the symbols we choose to wear truly serving us?

Fashion is a form of language, a system of symbols through which identity is expressed and made visible. To dress is to speak. Every choice carries meaning, communicates something about what we believe, how we wish to move through the world. When that language is used unconsciously, it can reinforce the very structures we seek to resist. Even the choices that feel voluntary, such as the performance of desirability and self-sexualisation, ask for a careful, honest look. Are they truly expressions of autonomy, or are we mistaking conformity for agency?

This is where a different approach becomes necessary. We are not trying to deny these structures, but to reframe how we engage with them. While we cannot ignore the forces that shape us, we surely can choose the narratives we sustain. This is not a call to naïveté, nor to passive acceptance, but an invitation to refuse to feed the very stories that limit us. Reclaiming power is not about confrontation, but about redirection.

Writing a new narrative asks that we separate beauty from oppression, allowing it to exist as a choice rather than a condition. It asks us to recognise that respect, confidence, love, and individuality are not rewards distributed by a system of evaluation we did not design. Not prizes concealed inside the right body. Not access codes hidden behind the right face. They were never contingent on appearance to begin with, but inherent qualities within us all and available by birthright.

When we begin to live from this understanding, something shifts. Not immediately, and not without difficulty. But the narrative loosens. A different story becomes possible: one that no longer divides us through comparison, but holds us together through a recognition of shared experience and individual difference. One in which our value is not a variable.

And here, something opens. Not loudly. Not with proclamation. But with finally speaking in a language that was not imposed upon us. In a language we have chosen for ourselves.

The story being told is, at last, our own.