Friday, March 07, 2014
Lupita Nyong'o Beauty Standards
The Mary Sue: This week, actress Lupita Nyong’o was given the Best Breakthrough Performance award at Essence’s Black Women In Hollywood Luncheon. At the beginning of her acceptance speech, she described a letter she received from a young fan, who’d been considering buying skin-lightening cream before Nyong’o rose to fame. For Nyong’o, the sentiment was all too familiar.
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I believe this is an incredibly important issue that many in the majority do not fully grasp. A straight white middle-class male doesn't have to look far to find someone just like him. We recently studied prejudice as well as stress in social psych and it's essentially impossible for someone who is not a minority in some way to understand the extra energy the consciousness of this societal separation takes out of a person. Seeing someone in power who has the approval of a section of society is incredibly empowering. The more female, hispanic, black, and queer celebrities and politicians arise in the media, the more equality I believe individuals that fit into these groups will enjoy. I believe it is interesting to see the correlation between the number of significant individuals in a group and the group's integration in society. Women's equality is much further along than queer rights and there are many more female politicians. I am grateful that individuals such as Lupita are so willing to support young individuals in an effort to thwart these fears.
I was just reading an article about a French company that mentors young women of color working in environments where they are the minority based on those two aspects of their identity, and have no one to look up to in their workplace. This piece reminded me of it because they both outline the fact that individuals need role models that look and think like them. It is important that all kinds of people are represented in movies and the media because encouraging diversity means that soon, those people will no longer be pioneers but simply faces that we are used to seeing on the big screens and magazine covers. People like Lupita inspire the younger generations that will allow for representation of minority to be the norm, not the exception.
It's crazy how influential the media can be on how you feel about your own appearance, even after being fully aware of it. I know that magazines use photoshop, I know that movies and television set unrealistic beauty standards, and I know that these are too trivial of things to be spending my time worrying about. But even knowing this, I still feel insecure when I look through a Vouge at the models with perfectly flat abs. The statement of the writer of the article: "If there’s one topic I will never tire of writing about, it’s the importance of representation. There is something about our brains that makes it damn well impossible to feel okay about ourselves unless we are able to see someone like us" really captures it perfectly. Seeing people who have a quality that looks like us in a movie makes a huge difference. The lack of representation of various races in film is a huge hindrance on girl's self esteem. I have a friend from India, and she showed us a product called Fair and Lovely, which girls there use to bleach their skin to get closer to that of American movie stars. Here, a lot of girls are obsessed with getting tanner to get to the color of stars. Whatever it is, girls will look up to women in movies and want to look like them. So increased diversity is extremely important.
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