The concept of an idealized image of the self has never been foreign from the human experience, but societal pressures have created a special image for those assigned woman. To fall short in any way - to be queer, to be Black, to be fat, to be anything other than the norm, something inherently unattainable, is to be imperfect and ridiculed by the others and hence by the self. John Berger's book Ways of Seeing exemplifies the external gaze applied to women as well as the gaze as applied to oneself in the image of a woman in a painting looking into a mirror. "You called the work Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman who's nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure" (51). The feminized subject needs no other to watch her as she watches herself in constant vigil.
The white gaze is one that perpetuates myths of Black womanhood's inadequacy. If womanhood is a socialized system, Black womanhood exists an institution within of reform and reclamation, and a body striving towards liberation, something the Combahee River Collective was keenly aware of ("If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression" (278)). According to a study done by University of Colorado from 2012 on white men's perceptions of Black female beauty, it was found that generally "respondents espoused white traits in Black women as more beautiful, thus alluding to a multiracial black woman as the most desirable" and some spoke of features such as "nappy hair" and "disproportionate bodies" which put them off from Black women entirely. These trends are reflected, too, in fashion magazines and porn magazines catering to a white audience, though the Black male gaze is not free of these standards too (Covergirl, GQ, Black Women, Players Magazine). The inherent fatphobia and colorism in the words of these men shows just some of the long standing norms cast upon Black women not only presently, but historically.
"To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in a living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself waking or weeping. From earliest childhood, she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.
And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elemnts of her identity as a woman.
She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another." - Ways of Seeing, John Berger
Ways of Seeing, John Berger
"Sexual attraction for me is a combination of physical and personal attributes. IF I find a 'black' woman attractive, it is because their hair type and facial features are more repesentative of the caucasian race." - A Body That Does Not Compare: How White Men Define Black Female Beauty in the Era of Colorblindness
"These respondents espoused white traits in black women as mroe beautiful, thus alluding to a multiracial black woman as the most desirable. Indeed, there has been a long history of presenting black women with a multiracial background of white ancestry, formerly referred to as the derogatory term mulatto, as the ideal black women. During slavery, mulattos and quadroons, the products of nonconsensual sexual relations between enslaved black women and white slave owners (as well as overseers), were heavily sought after and paid handsomely for by white slave masters." - A Body That Does Not Compare: How White Men Define Black Female Beauty in the Era of Colorblindness
"According to one slave trader, he would not sell a mulatto child while she was young because he believed she could be of much greater worth to him when older, as a "fancy piece":'she was a beauty - a picture - a doll - one of the regular bloods - none of your thick lipped, bullet headed, cotton picking niggers..." Although both multiracial and all black women were enslaved and divested of rights, by this quote it is clear that there was a distinction between the "beauty" and "worth" of blacks who were imbued with a white racial background versus the perceived "ugliness" of those blacks who were not." - A Body That Does Not Compare: How White Men Define Black Female Beauty in the Era of Colorblindness
TikTok has a current trend of feminization training in which women teach other women the ways in which to appear more feminine, how to act proper, and general etiquette. This revival of etiquette trends is an alarming one, and brings with it a racist connotation, as pointed out by YouTuber Shanspeare. In a TikTok, a white woman points out hairstyles which are elegant and those which are not. Markedly - all the non elegant styles are bantu knots, braids, natural hair, and locs, while alternatively the elegant styles are pressed hair, straight hair, and gentle waves. This, and other such videos that write off vernacular like "slay" and "yass" as juvenile and unlady-like are examples of just the type of material which perpetuate the idea of white womanhood as the ideal. The current idea of femininity and the It Girl are made inexorably ripped from the hands of those who do not fit into her boxes. Search on Instagram "It Girl aesthetic" and you are rapt to find representations of brown, Black, fat, or gender non-conforming examples of people embodying this trend. These make absent from "pure" womanhood the presence of Black natural hair, AAVE, and other things core to the Black community. Are Black women not queered from conception?