Honey Money

It’s Fashion Week in New York City. Pics of frozen-eyed, skeletal women flicker across my Facebook feed, as friends report from the front lines, and yesterday I ploughed my stomach through a street crowd assembled around a ring of photographers, assembled around a model, who was bending her knees and elbows and chin for the flashing cameras, looking even more contrived and hilarious than women in similar poses do on the flat pages of a magazine.

As I lounge in my uber-couture pajamas (Motherhood Maternity tank, $14.99, Calvin boxers $16.00, becoming the comfort-obsessed woman you always vowed to never be, while crying over how unrecognizable you are in recent photos: priceless), I contemplate the advantages of beauty, specifically, a review of Catherine Hakim’s book “Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital” by Will Self in the Guardian.

Hakim, a respected sociologist, claims that society lies to itself by understating the importance of beauty – women’s beauty, in particular. She believes that a woman’s beauty/sex appeal is a valuable asset and should be respected, acknowledged and capitalized on. I haven’t read Hakim’s book, and Self goes on to explore Hakim’s other claims and conclusions, but I have been thinking about this one central idea: are feminists (or religious fundamentalists – a group Hakim charmingly throws together) willfully blind to the reality that sex appeal matters more than we want to admit? Is our emphasis on non-physical assets ignoring the true power beauty possesses?

My main issue with this whole argument – and fashion week (let alone shidduch markets) — is the underlying assumption about how beauty is defined. In our culture, beauty is largely defined by commercial interests. Although certain aspects of beauty (ie symmetry) have been posited to be universal, many of the standards our culture obsesses over are set by companies whose billion dollar revenues are invested in making women feel inadequate (because they don’t measure up to that standard), in order to create a sense of lack that they can respond to with their products. To emphasize the power of beauty, but then let that beauty be defined by a bunch of self-interested money factories, seems hardly constructive or positive or honest.

I remember having a crush on a little, red-headed, troll-like rabbi in seminary, whose brazen confidence and brusque charm were intoxicating. Or the snub-nosed plus-size high-school classmate who radiated sex appeal with her sleepy eyes and precocious dignity. I’d love to see beauty celebrated in all its forms, and then I would most certainly agree, beauty is a powerful tool that should be relished and openly wielded, by everyone — including me, one day, in some not-so-distant-future when I heave myself off the bed and find the willpower to wear something other than jeans and a sigh.