If there is one show on TV which highlights the underlying
beauty standards, judgements in our culture and the underlying patriarchy
behind it, it’s Snog Marry Avoid?. For
those unfamiliar with this programme, this BBC Three (A TV channel aimed at
impressionable young people) show finds young adults, aged roughly between
16-25 and tells them exactly how awful they look. It is not just women on this
show who are subjected to this, it is men too. Basically, it is people who do
not conform to the ‘norm’ or the gender roles ascribed to them.
A few years ago I went on holiday to Cornwall with my family
and best friend. I was going through a phase where I enjoyed wearing my hair in
a big top bun. I felt it looked clean, sleek, edgy, and I felt comfortable
wearing it that way. My mum, however, wasn’t sure. She didn't think it looked
‘pretty’, and in her not-so-persuasive argument to wear my hair down instead
asked, ‘don’t you want men to find you attractive?’. I was taken aback, unable
to answer as my head swam with reasons why this was, for me, a ludicrous
question. For a start, I do not care what men think of me, I style myself based
on how it makes me feel. Secondly, if a man was so shallow as to base his
attraction to me on my hair rather than who I am as a person, then I am not
interested. Thirdly, amazingly, I still manage to find plenty of people who
find me attractive regardless of how I style my hair. I think it is important
to add that my mum is a wonderful supportive women, who in general does not
hold sexist or backwards attitudes. I was brought up reading The Independent
for god sake. I think of this day on a regular basis, not so much for any kind
of resentment towards my mother, but as a stark and personal reminder about the
pervasiveness of the attitudes of the society in which we live in. There is no sexism worse than the
sexism which seeps out, casually, unnoticed, from the mouths of the people we
love.
It was with this in mind, the idea that women should dress
for men’s desire, that I watched a recent episode of Snog Marry Avoid?. The
participants on the show, and this episode focused on a couple of young women,
are asked to enter ‘Pod’, a white room where a robotic women’s voice echoes
like some omniscient authority, asking questions like ‘why are you wearing so
much fake tan?”, “do you think those eyelashes look good?”, and “why are you
wearing a iceskating suit?”. When they try to pipe up and defend their choices,
men are brought out to shoot them down again. The shows producers, presumably,
show a selection of random men on the street a picture of the girls. They then
vote on whether they would ‘snog’, ‘marry’, or ‘avoid’ the girl in question, and
provide helpful comments like, ‘she wears too much make up’, or ‘I’d defiantly
avoid her in a club because she looks plastic’. She is then presented with the
exact percentage of men who would avoid her, as some kind of confirmation of
the terrible mistake she is making.
At times the show forgets itself and realises that maybe it
needs to bring down the misogynistic tone. It does this by pretending the show
is about empowerment and making the girls feel better about themselves, by
freeing them from the constraints of the idea that they need to wear lots of
make up or not much clothing in order to feel good about themselves. It is this
deceit which possibly incites me the most, because it is patriarchal bullshit
trying to disguise itself as liberation. They are not liberating these young
people from anything, they are just transferring them from one type of
subordination to another. Or worse, as many of the participants on the show may
identify with a certain subculture such as cyber goth, hippy,
alternative/metal, or drag and gender queer. The show runs on the assumption
that to belong to one of these subtypes is inheritantly bad, and tries to prove
this by asking (male) strangers what they think.
In the particular episode I watched they showed one girl -
who happily and unashamedly described her style as taking influence from drag style and glam rock androgyny – and tried to normalise her
based on our cultural beauty standards. She, however, had other ideas. After
the ‘make-down’ (where they re-do the participant’s hair, make-up, clothes, to
make them look unrecognisably boring), she stated that she felt the hair and
outfit was vile. When a new selection of public men approved of her new ‘cute’
look, she scoffed. Good. She should not let strangers tell her how to feel
about herself. She soon reverted back to her old look, and in case the premise
of the show wasn’t obvious enough, the presenter brushed over the fact that she
did not feel comfortable with her new and natural look, and instead asked,
earnestly and persistantly, ‘but what did your boyfriend and dad think?’.
I’m not against making people feel good about themselves.
But this is not what this show is about. Snog Marry Avoid? is about taking people who deviate from the norm in
various forms, making them look more ‘normal’, and telling them that now people
will find them more attractive. The show is an obvious manifestation of this
widespread attitude. It is a theme constantly reflected in our culture and
media through advertising, magazines, and fashion. Sometimes it jumps from the
abstraction of the media and into our lives, and it is why we are asked by
people close to us, ‘don’t you want men to find you attractive?’.
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