task.

This morning I came across an oddly anti-feminist piece of rhetoric literally plastered on the walls of my workplace. Someone has put up several pink post-it notes in the bathrooms on the first floor. These bathrooms are for adults only, so I know that a colleague of mine posted the notes, and I know they were intended for me and for my fellow school employees. The bathrooms are single-stall affairs intended for use by all adult members of the community (ie, they are not gendered.) The notes have one- or two-line affirmations handwritten on them. At first I felt neutral about them, but as the day progressed and my exposure to them lengthened I began to feel kind of beaten down by them. And then I got increasingly pissed off at whoever put them up. 

They draws heavily on words and themes that imply the utter importance of beauty. More specifically, the notes implied that one must feel beautiful in order to have a pleasant time at work. The notes were structured as affirmations; some read like sets of instructions and some read as though the reader were being addressed by some external voice, addressing the reader as “Hey Beautiful!”, or instructing her to find her true beauty by gazing into her own eyes in the mirror (an act which would allow her to realize that she is “truely [sic] beautiful” and therefore continue the rest of her day feeling happy and secure). This language implied that all of one’s self-worth relies on one’s ability to measure up to beauty standards. The notes are not affirmations of our inherent value, they do not make us feel happier or more secure. Rather, they remind us that we should be constantly striving to meet beauty standards; that our emotions, intellect, ability, and talent should have no place in informing how we feel at work or how we interact with one another; that we need this voice of reason in the form of pink post-its to remind us of our beauty and therefore our value, as we obviously are too hapless to remember it on our own. 

Why do I assume these condescending and ultimately damaging post-its address only women and not men? Because they were printed on pink paper, used the words “beautiful” and “gorgeous”, and were explicit attempts at affirmation, all of which are traditionally associated with members of the female sex.

What really got to me about this message is the realization that only women are supposed to benefit from this kind of language. Men don’t need to actively affirm their own self-worth while looking in the mirror at various points throughout the day. Men are affirmed passively, through media and through our collective historical memory, in which men are constantly being praised and raised up based on their non-physical traits rather that on their ability to meet a standard of attractiveness. Women, on the other hand, are too weak and too downtrodden by their hectic lives and thankless pursuits in the male-dominated workplace (ie, outside of the home, outside of the kitchen) to focus on the importance of their good looks. Oh, thank you, anonymous do-gooder, for affirming for me something I’ve so long neglected to realize! I am a beautiful creature and therefore I am worthwhile!

I personally felt neither comforted nor affirmed by the messages on the walls of the bathrooms today. Rather, I felt more self-conscious than usual. This “You are beautiful!” statement didn’t make me feel beautiful. To be honest, it made me ask myself “Am I beautiful?” and “If I’m not, will I still be well-liked and respected by my co-workers?”. I’d never stopped to think that, were I to be or feel more beautiful than I do now, I’d be happier or have a better more successful day. Now that the concept has been introduced into my worklife, I find myself worried over it. The statement itself suggests that I should be spending more time and energy than I currently do on trying to attain that state of beauty-success. I never cared about my looks at work before, my attractiveness seeming to me to take a back-seat role to my ability to do my job well. The presence of these seemingly-innocuous messages creates an environment that is fundamentally anti-good work, and therefore, in our case, anti-education. It’s irresponsible to  promote a workplace full of women who are only powerful because they feel beautiful; worse still that that mindset would be the ideal role-model for the children we teach. 

The notes included the URL of a website, operationbeautiful.com. While I agree that it’s important to teach ourselves and others to have self-confidence, self-esteem, and positive body-imagery, I think it’s utterly irresponsible to disseminate the message that your ability to measure yourself according to a standard of beauty is inherently linked to your worth. We exist in this hyper-body-conscious world. Rather than accepting that and moving within it, why can’t we move beyond it through our own perceptions of ourselves?  Rather, as someone much smarter than I has put it, “Beauty must be defined as what we are, or else the concept itself is our enemy”…. A better message would be to tell women that their ability to enjoy the world they operate within relies not on their feeling pretty but on the confidence they have in their intellect, emotional intelligence, strength and ability to think critically. I refuse to be told that I fit that mold of beauty forced upon me; I challenge us all, instead, to define ourselves individually and not with respect to the rest. I challenge the next anonymous post-it poster to compliment my autonomy, my empowerment, my intellect and my ability to think critically in the face of such strange and superficially appealing rhetoric. No- I challenge the next anonymous post-it poster to allow me the ability to measure myself as I choose and not against the absurd standard he or she were railing against in the first place.