She lies there for us to consume, sumptuous and smooth, her body bearing the emblems of fashion brands and fast beauty-culture. The labels cover her bright skin, which seems dull under the gloss of the magazine cuttings. Though at first glance she appears confident and beautiful, we feel a sense of unease. The images sit awkwardly as they peel from her skin.

This work, from a new series by artist Jess Cochrane, forces us to reflect on how we became conditioned to compare our physicality to the images we consume. The idolatry and fetishism of perfection, especially amongst the young women of Cochrane’s generation, pervades her work. In a masochistic ritual, we enhance, contour and conceal ourselves to satisfy the impossible beauty standards force-fed to us every day. Hyper aware of our flaws and viewing our appearance through the lens of others, we’ve learned to crave beauty—whatever that means—in its contemporary, homogenized form.

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.” When John Berger penned these words back in 1972, he referred to the [now well-established] idea of the male gaze in his analysis of the female figure in art and advertising. A woman sees herself through the eyes of men and is trained to consider her appearance at every moment, however fleeting, as they see her. Berger’s progressive views, expressed in the four-part BBC series, Ways of Seeing, marked a key moment in the democratization of arts education and visual culture. 

As women in a Western, patriarchal society, we have been taught since a young age to continually critique and correct ourselves for the benefit of others. Simultaneously we have been kept from seeing other real women’s bodies. The censorship of the female body leaves us only with contemporary images from pornography or high fashion for comparison.

Our relationship with our own bodies becomes one of permanent dissatisfaction or dissociation. Even in art, we are confronted with a predominantly male, eroticized view of the female nude (think Jeff Koons’ “Made in Heaven” series, or Allen Jones’ “Hatstand, Table and Chair”). What place do we occupy if we choose to refuse this image of feminine sexuality? To answer this, we may look to appraise the women around us to see how we measure up. Because in today’s image-centric culture, a woman’s validation still comes from outside of herself. Her main concern, however, is no longer the male gaze, but a critical female one.

“Because ‘beauty’ lives so deep in the psyche, where sexuality mingles with self-esteem, and since it has been usefully defined as something that is continually bestowed from the outside and can always be taken away, to tell a woman she is ugly can make her feel ugly, act ugly, and, as far as her experience is concerned, be ugly, in the place where feeling beautiful keeps her whole.”

Naomi Wolf

In her book, The Beauty Myth [1990] Naomi Wolf speaks of the uniquely intense relationship young women have with images and the effect they have on her sexuality. “For as far back as women could remember, something had hurt about being female.” The beauty is pain rhetoric hangs over us, forcing a belief that in order to be beautiful, we must suffer: if it hurts it must be working. This socially acceptable self-harm was created to hold women down. An illusive, poisonous construct of beauty that gives with one hand and takes with the other, making us feel ugly and ashamed when we are free from physical pain. When we engage in this kind of beauty self-harm we are damaging our relationship with ourselves for the benefit of strangers. We need to shatter the distorted mirror that has been placed in our hands and see our true reflection more clearly. This will require a collective movement in three acts:

I. REDEFINE

In order to liberate beauty and redefine it on our own terms, we must first question who created the beauty complex to begin with and the motivations behind it.

In many ways contemporary beauty has detached itself from the basis of aesthetics. Our visual landscape has been shaped by corporations and advertisers for one purpose: to sell. The consumerist ideology that we live in is so all-encompassing that we cannot see its horizon. It is implicit in our society and engrained in our perspectives: we simply cannot un-see it. Habitually shamed and made to feel that we are only as good as the clothes on our backs, or the money in our pockets, it serves to distract us from what’s really important in our lives. As Berger noted, “all publicity works upon anxiety”. To reclaim beauty as a feeling that grows from within we must make our new ambition progression, not perfectionism. 

II. CHALLENGE

In our binge-image society, we consume thousands of pictures a day. Our visual diets largely consist of airbrushed, sexually gratuitous and elitist lifestyle imagery. This can leave us feeling hollow and inadequate, but the omnipresence of the images makes them inescapable.

Social media has perpetuated our quest for perfectionism; whether it’s authentic or manufactured is unimportant. Validated by “likes” and addicted to “follows” we feed our egos, suppressing the increasing sense of vulnerability and anxiety that grows inside us. These metrics have given birth to an obsessive ranking and appraising of one’s self-image. A way for us to democratically decide our place in the beauty pecking-order and, subsequently, our worth.

We need to challenge the way we currently consume imagery and interact with social media by subverting the qualities that we typically praise in women: thinness, prettiness, youth, conceit. Not until we have achieved a truly diverse representation of women in the media will this new dogma sink in. 

III. SUPPORT

Historically women have viewed each other as both ally and opponent. The idea that we must compete to coexist is a product of a visually-gluttonous, consumerist, heteronormative culture. We mirror the behavior we see, looking at others the way we ourselves are looked at and projecting our insecurities outwards to avoid keeping them inside.

But it doesn’t need to be this way! When we are kind to our bodies, and to each other, we are all stronger. There is a growing movement to support the sisterhood in all her forms (inclusive of trans-gender and female identifying), consciously pushing for diversity and divergent thinking. Strong women like Cochrane are raising their voices by serving us raw, visceral responses to the issues facing modern woman. Her work is a colorful, joyous celebration of imperfection and honest beauty. The use of highly-gestural paint expresses her physical determination to reclaim our image. To embrace our own personal aesthetic. Like her, we too must speak up and talk to each other.

AFTERWORD.

As we move forward, we can feel reassured by the positive change we are seeing. The internet has provided the ultimate free-thinking platform for liberated female art and literature. We have witnessed the emergence of many wonderfully unexpected new spokespeople and social activists. Women (and men) who wouldn’t have had the confidence to speak out on the traditional stage, now feel empowered to broadcast their truth. Artists who have gone previously unknown because of their gender now highlight the digital and emotional manipulation we are unconsciously subject to; the artifice, the beauty slurs and the dog whistling. They highlight the power of self-love in lieu of self-branding. They remind us to see the female body in all her glory: an incredible, imperfect, intuitive vehicle for life and creation. Our sexuality, our choice.