Thoughts needed please - feminism, appearance and guilt

[Seaside1234]

I’m fed up with being overweight and feeling frumpy, but I’m struggling to reconcile this with guilt. My mother brought me up to essentially believe that I shouldn’t care about how I look, that it’s shallow and incompatible with truly held feminist views. She was a 70s feminist, but also had other issues that might have affected her opinion about appearance (almost certainly an unhappy marriage, and almost certainly undiagnosed autism - I was diagnosed at 42). In particular, I feel very guilty for wanting to lose weight. I’ve had binge eating issues all my life, and now have borderline high blood pressure as well as feeling uncomfortable and limited in how my body works. I have lost weight in the past, and felt much better and happier for it, but also felt guilty. I’m now 48, and at least 3 stone overweight. I feel frumpy and unstylish, but also happy to stay in my safe zone. Additional background- marriage is a bit of shambles, and I am essentially responsible for holding us up financially and practically (husband has a worsening drink problem).

Thoughts pls. How does caring about your appearance, and weight loss in particular, intersect with feminism in your opinions? I know it’s what I believe that matters, and that’s not related to how I look, but this underlying belief is very hard to shift and is limiting my ability to make decisions that would be best for me. Thanks.

i think there’s a strong psychological drive to please our parents.When my mum died I had a revelation that for most of my life I had an almost subconscious urge to make her proud of me and seek her approval. After she died I felt like life had lost some of its meaning because I don’t feel like anyone has any expectations of me, I don’t need to please anyone.
Doing something that we think our parents wouldn’t approve of can feel jarring - but it doesn’t mean your mum was right, or that you have to live your like this. It’s a gremlin imprinted on you from child hood. You need to do what you want, release yourself from what’s been drilled into you. It’s ok to want to do things your way. Being empowered to make your own life choices is feminism.

I struggle with this internally, including hating looking older as well and riding myself of body hair. I tell myself I want to be slim for health but that's really 5% true - it's primarily for vanity. I hate how much of a slave I am to societal conditioning but just don't have enough balls or energy to fight it.

Also my mum wasn't a feminist, I developed my own ideals as a teen.

Don't know if it helps but men do also care about their appearance. There might not be as much external pressure on them but I don't know why "not caring at all about your appearance" is something particularly for women or feminists to aspire to. It is a (patriarchal) myth that only women (and un-feminist women at that) care at all about their appearance.

You could aim for "I'm going to care about my appearance as much as a man" and still want to lose a bit of weight and look in good shape. My husband lost a bit of weight recently and noone has been checking out his body more than him(!) . I can tell from his discussions with his friends that they generally do care a lot about their appearance - their hairlines, their waistlines, their beards, their muscles etc he is not an outlier. These are really typical fellas not gym bros, I'm not talking all of their discussions.

To care somewhat about one's appearance not anti-feminist in my opinion, it's just standard human. No offence intended to those slightly non-standard humans who really don't care about their appearance at all - more power to them. But most of us to some extent want to control our appearance to reflect our self image, that's not un-feminist to me. You can be vain (and gain the health benefits and all that yada yada). It's okay.

I've found that I've felt very differently about this as I've got older. In my 20s I also felt like I was being immoral to want to look nice to a male standard that I didn't want to endorse. I still wanted men to notice me and be attracted to me, but I felt like I'd be doing the wrong thing to play up to those ideals. The end result was just being pretty miserable, sadly!

But now that I'm older (my 40s) I've taken a different view of things. I'm not looking to have a man actually ask me out (I'm married with kids) but I definitely get a thrill out of thinking that someone might be attracted to me. I don't think that makes me a bad feminist (I certainly used to think that) so long as my reasons for dressing nicely (and yes, some make-up) are my own. Honestly, I don't know where I can draw the line of what I'm doing for myself vs what I'm doing to impress others, but aren't we all past the "feminism=ugly" stage? That feels kinda last century, no? We were right to reject the artificial ideals imposed on us, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have standards of our own making.

Well, I can only speak for myself but I care very much about my appearance. I love makeup, adore fashion and looking good. My mother wore no makeup and didnt care how she looked so it wasnt something that was passed down to me as a pressure by family.

I wear makeup even if I am not leaving the house because I like the way it looks and it expresses who I feel I am inside. That doesnt mean I think I am in any way "less" without it btw, I just love it.

I would still do it even if every other human was wiped off the face of the planet. I do it for me and I am very much a feminist. I have dated men who told me they didnt like women who wore makeup (and prefer the natural bare faced look) so I told them to jog on because I am not changing myself for a man and I dont give a shit if men dont like my makeup, I like it and thats all that matters. I couldn't give a flying fck what a man thinks about my face or body. Its none of his business how I choose to present myself to the world.

I have two degrees and started my own business, I am taking boxing lessons, I campaign for the issues that matter to me and so wearing makeup is neither here nor there for me in the scheme of things. It's just something I do because it brings me pleasure. Thats literally it. I dont give it any more consideration than the fact its something I enjoy because it interests me and it brings me happiness.

OP- a good way to discover what is behind all this is to fill in the blanks but do it without thinking too much, use your very first gut reaction to the sentences below:

1. Women who wear makeup are__
2. If I lost weight it would make me__
3. Makeup is for ___
4. Caring about my appearance means that I am__
5. If I lost weight it would mean that as a person I am___
6. People who care about their appearances tend to be___
7. When I see a woman who has taken care with her appearance I think she is____

(etc and make up your own ones too)

I am not remotely suggesting you should be plastering yourself with makeup mind, but looking at your first reaction to such statements will tell you a lot about your subconscious beliefs about self care and self worth. Then you have a starting point to address if these beliefs are dysfunctional and/or not serving you.

I personally think the feminism angle is a bit of a red herring and that you are using that as a way of justifying not taking care of yourself because inherently you believe you dont deserve it. That absolutely should be addressed because it speaks to an underlying belief that you arent worthy. This isnt really about makeup being a feminist issue, this is ultimately about believing that you dont deserve to look after yourself which is a very destructive and damaging self belief in the long term.