The Beautiful Anthology (19 page)

We know this and so we spend our lives, our money, trying to be beautiful. We tweeze and we pluck and we shave and we wax. We curl our eyelashes and we host Botox parties. We starve ourselves or we corrode the pipes with our vomit. We go under the knife again and again. We buy, buy, buy.

And we never give up the hope, propagated by Hollywood and children’s books, that we will wake up one day and be – quite suddenly – transformed. A swan.

For women, looks matter. Pretty is pretty damn im portant. I always knew this. And when I was sixteen, I decided that if I wasn’t going to be beautiful, I’d better be thin. If I was thin enough, I reasoned, no one would notice that I was ugly. Models, after all, are allowed to be unusual. To have crooked noses that meander leftward and asymmetrical faces. So I’d be thin. Yes.

Yes.

And for a while, I was. I was very thin. I was ninety-five pounds and then, for a moment, eighty-eight pounds.

But I was also starving. I was puking in the shower and cutting my stomach with razor blades. And I wasn’t any prettier.

My friend Lacey recently tagged this awful photo of me on Facebook. I de-tagged it. Because I’m vain and I’m insecure.

“I look hideous,” I wrote on her wall. “And fat.”

In the picture, I’m in the midst of a story, in full flow, prattling on about something or other. I’m clasping my tote bag. Emily Martin’s
The Woman in the Body
is poking out. Maybe I’m extolling its virtues.

My breasts look enormous, and so does my nose. I look heavy and cow-like and the photographer has, unflatteringly, shot me from below. Also, it’s my bad side.

And so I de-tagged the picture. Of course I did.

The picture continued to haunt me, though. I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. Ugly with a capital U. It wouldn’t go away.

It wouldn’t go away because, I think, it really did look like me.

This is what I look like,
I told myself. Caught up in the moment. Living and breathing and reading and, yes, eating.
This is what I look like.
No careful cropping, no artful lighting. Just…candid.
This is what I look like.

It may not be pretty, but it’s the truth.

NORA BURKEY

THE POLITICS OF BEAUTY

Whenever I show friends or family pictures of the female students I taught in Cambodia, they usually remark the same thing: They’re all so
beautiful
.

What’s strange to me is how this is the first thing I always hear, as if the reason poverty is unfair is because it means beautiful people don’t have the chance to show the world just how beautiful they are.

As if it’s unfair that beautiful people have to be poor.

As if it would somehow be okay if the world’s ugly people were sent to the same poverty-stricken island to perish.

Next to the largest high school in Siem Reap, Cambodia – Angkor High School, educating about five thousand students daily – there is a dormitory for thirty girls from Cambodia’s countryside. The dorm resembles a maximum security prison, down to the barbed wire lacing the top of the walls. Men are not allowed to enter the enclave, and there are no exceptions to this rule. Fathers squat outside the premises next to the girls’ brothers and friends. All volunteers must be women, though the foundation that enables these poor girls to go to school is run by a Cambodian man named Paul, a wiry, excited, young tour guide equipped with an arsenal of English buzz words like “networking” and “empowerment.” Years ago, Paul handpicked his crop of girls by conducting interviews, screening for “leadership potential.”
Leader
is the role he wants to breed them for.

I first met the girls from this foundation at a TOMS shoes distribution. TOMS is the company that exploits Western consumerism by promising to send free canvas shoes to someone, somewhere, for each pair sold in the wealthier world. TOMS didn’t show for the distribution but asked that the recipients take pictures of the event and send them back to the company, presumably to their marketing team. So, the poor Cambodian girls who’d been gifted TOMS shoes stood crowded around their school’s green-tiled kitchen, a large space open to the outside with one sink and a few charcoal burners. Some girls posed for the camera with the best model’s pose, others took the shoes off immediately after the photographs, complaining that the back of the shoe hurt. (Many people from Cambodia’s countryside have never worn a shoe restricting their ankle. Even farmers wear flip-flops, or go barefoot.)

From the ankle up, the girls wore ripped jeans with Tweety Bird and Hello Kitty patched on the leg. Their shirts boasted sayings in the English language, such as
Princess
or
Sassy Girl
. Some girls wore shirts designed for men. But ankle down, they now had something different, something new. Incidentally, the girls needed new shoes for school. The principal had recently decided all students must wear “real” shoes, with backs that hide ankles and fronts that hide toes, because, the theory went, out in the “real” world, people wear “real” shoes. I couldn’t help but feel that “real” was supposed to mean “better.” Is it possible for one type of footwear to be categorically “better” than another? Shoes cannot be representative of rotten things, the way it is clear life under Stalin was worse than life under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Shoes are not politics, are they?

Well, maybe. One girl from the dorm was able to wear only one shoe. Her left leg is atrophied and she uses a crutch to walk, so no shoe ever goes on this foot. A Cambodian woman affiliated with the foundation told the girl to go in the front of the photograph. “If she goes in the front,” she told me, “everyone will feel sad and send more money to Cambodia. She must go in the front.” I didn’t know the best way to tell this woman I doubted very much there was any truth to her statement. If TOMS shoes were any proof, people give when they get something back. What could this girl possibly give back? She was so shy she could barely speak, so poor she couldn’t afford the fifty cents that shoes cost in Cambodia.

The woman later instructed the girls to be grateful for their new shoes because the same pair cost $60 in America. I wanted to disappear, fearful that the only thing the girls would see when they looked at me was everything people in my country hold dear: fashion, getting noticed, looking right and desirable in a world of suffering.

Is it not politics when some people can spend $60 for their twentieth pair of shoes and still others cannot afford to attend school without the help of a foreign government or foreign donors?

And is it not political when outside parties decide what is best for the people of Cambodia, decide how to make their culture “better,” decide that they’re so far not good enough?

Months later, I was asked by an affiliated American woman to aid a computer class at the high-security dorm. When I arrived there for my second time, I spent one hour swiveling around on an office chair, watching as several Cambodian men worked on computers, the machines humming from hard work in the heat. Mosquitoes buzzed around us, though I was the only one who noticed or seemed bothered. The men were quiet and reserved. We all smiled at each other and asked for names, then forgot the answers. I looked at their résumés until Paul and his staff showed up. Each was typed in English. From what I read, the men apparently all enjoyed playing volleyball and practicing their English.

Half as many girls as boys attend school in Cambodia, and even fewer girls enroll in college to work with computers. In order to get computers installed in his dorms, Paul had to hire men. He and his staff of three American women agreed: The first priority was protecting their girls, which meant the several grown men in front of me needed a babysitter.

“We don’t know what these men will do,” one of the American women with short white hair told me. “They could go into their rooms and do something bad.” Inside each bedroom there are at least ten bunk beds. For rapes to be successful, all nineteen witnesses would have to stand back and watch, not one running for help.

“That could happen?” I asked, unconvinced.

“Cambodian men don’t act right around girls,” she said, as if this were a
de facto
rule I had yet to hear about. But I wondered: If I were to assume that all Cambodian men were potential rapists, why exactly was I, a young woman, chosen for the role of supervisor? The answer came soon enough.

“You’re a Western woman,” Paul said. I noticed his fingernails were exceptionally groomed. “You’re an independent woman. Girls in Cambodia are not like girls in your country.”

He explained that Cambodian girls were shy and didn’t want to speak their minds, that for this they needed an example. He wanted me to be their example, and also their computer-class helper.

“It is easy to teach them,” he said, “because my girls are like blank pieces of paper. Anything you put on them will stick.” He pushed his thumb against a white piece of paper to demonstrate.

He also wanted me to write reports on each man who was working with the computers and comment on what they were doing to the machines and classroom. I knew they were all at least five or ten years older than me, with an understanding of computers I wasn’t even close to touching. I told him I didn’t think I was the best person for the job, that we barely understood each other, and that I certainly didn’t know what they were doing well enough to write about it. Even had they been able to explain in English, I was doubtful I would understand their technical terms.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We need a Western woman. That makes our foundation look important. They think you’re important.”

An excellent message, I thought, for the empowerment of teenage girls in Cambodia. Nothing else matters but how you look to other people. White faces mean importance.

The liberation of women in developing countries is a hot topic in the political world. Cambodia – a country where girls are half as likely to be literate as boys are and “good” women come home before 6 p.m. – is certainly under scrutiny. I lose hope when a foundation dedicated to women’s empowerment acts against progress.

I spent a total of four months in Cambodia, and never did I feel women were treated as lesser individuals more than when I met Paul and his team of three American women. Every time, their message left me wanting to run in the opposite direction.

One time Paul asked twenty-two-year-old Jenna (who lives in New York City off her father’s money) to teach a feminism lecture. Jenna’s qualifications were similar to mine: She was a Western woman. She spent two nights with the thirty girls in a hot, sticky classroom connected to their bedrooms. The classroom contained three broken fans, another thing only men could be hired to fix, and later
were
hired to fix (
these
men, however, were trusted by the Americans, as one was a priest).

Jenna said of the girls, “They don’t have real body-image issues. They don’t think they’re fat or anything. They just want to be white.” Only weight issues were “real,” is what I gathered Jenna meant.

Her decision for their second class was to show them a picture of Beyoncé Knowles, “who is both dark and beautiful.” I’d no idea qualified feminists thought that thin and rich Ms. Knowles was the epitome of “inner beauty” in the Western world. Of course, none of the girls understood a word Jenna spoke to them. She lectured them in English, in which their skills are severely limited.

Even if they had understood her, a few hours of Feminism 101 does not quite take down the competition. Billboards dot the city: “Be white,” they all say.

Some men in Cambodia wear makeup to lighten their faces, and most soap contains a whitening agent.

Before I arrived in Cambodia, I knew it to be a country that stands not quite on its own two feet. It is a country with one of the largest NGO presences in the world. Until I arrived, I didn’t know that each NGO delivers its own brand of liberation. What exactly were these girls being taught? That as females they had the
right
to be beautiful, the
right
to be protected from the men of their society, who are unscrupulous in whom they take for sexual prisoner? Should a feminist believe that all men rape? That skinny, rich, and famous dark women from America are at the forefront of feminism? That all Western women are liberated?

In country, the beliefs were a little different. One conviction I encountered many times was a conservative one, a “pull yourself up” mentality about how poverty doesn’t mean you have to be unclean. The lack of food and access to school and beauty products in Cambodia was old news. At the dormitory, a different American woman, this one younger and agreeable to everything Paul said, asked if I’d be willing to show the girls how to wash their hands better. She said this is something they often neglected because they really didn’t know how. Their “backward” parents had never taught them. She also complained of them not wearing deodorant. They were teenagers, after all, and should have been concerned about the smell of their underarms.