By Malak Mansour – Senior Editor
Internet trends that originate from and are propagated by social media have always been an indicator of the current cultural zeitgeist. To analyze and critique these trends, it’s critical to understand that dismissing such internet phenomena as simply trends that rise and fall can be reductionist. Trends mostly related to aesthetics eventually coincide with and mold the consumer’s identity. As such, consumerist culture leads to the conflation of what we want with who we are, or at least, whom we should strive to be. With every post, trend, or overnight ‘micro-celebrity’, one wonders how our online behavior is going to reflect in our offline social interactions. One way we can visualize this manifestation is through the field of aesthetics, especially when it comes to those who identify as women or have been socialized as one. Aesthetics have never been constant throughout eras and the platonic ideal of what is beautiful is quite turbulent. Aesthetics are propagated throughout younger generations by selling the idea of individualism and uniqueness. It is the idea that everyone is living unique, independent, and never-seen-before lives, which might sound appealing at first sight but is false, and to take it a step further, alienating.
Women online have seen it all: clean girl aesthetic, cottage-core, dark feminine energy, e-girl aesthetic, it-girl aesthetic, trad wives, light or dark academia aesthetic, and more oddly specific derivatives of femininity that are niche enough to grant a false sense of individuality and differentiation. Maybe you are in your Fleabag era or in your manic pixie dream girl era, whichever you feel like you relate to the most for the month. However, these aesthetics are not restricted to what you wear or how you present yourself but extend deeper into your lifestyle, emotions, and thoughts. Nuance and complex personhood are reduced to identity labels that are mass-produced via viral trends, so you are another Type of Girl. One interesting manifestation of this internet phenomenon is the Divine Feminine aesthetic; a vaguely feminist way (at best) of reclaiming traditional femininity but in a cool girlboss-it’s-my-choice way, not in a misogynistic and patriarchal way, of course.
The divine feminine is the feminine counterpart to the traditional patriarchal figure. The person who embodies the divine feminine is in touch with their femininity or ‘inner goddess’, which is to say that there’s a spiritual aspect to it as well. The aesthetic encourages being in touch with nature and routinely practicing self-care. On the surface, these preaches are quite helpful; there can’t be downsides to taking care of yourself. While this is true, it takes a few minutes of watching ‘how to tap into your divine femininity’ videos to realize that the philosophy of the aesthetic is simply re-packaged gender roles. When you are nurturing, giving, and receiving love and affection, and being understanding you are radiating feminine energy, and when you’re being productive, chasing goals, and being assertive then you are tapping into your masculine energy. But the divine feminine is not just adopting certain behaviors or principles, it can also be largely consumerist because it is based on aspirational beauty, which can never be fully attainable. It heavily relies on how you present yourself aesthetically i.e., what is considered beautiful. Not shockingly, the idea of beauty is parallel if not congruent to what traditional feminine beauty is: no wrinkles, clear skin, hourglass figure, voluminous hair, and so on. Below is a collage of some screenshots from TikTok videos that include #feminine, #feminineenergy, or #divinefeminine as hashtags. The videos allude to womanly hygiene (which includes manicures and shaping eyebrows), being a high-value woman, how to prevent smile lines, wrinkles, crow’s feet, and other natural signs of aging or having a different body type.
For feminist activists that have been involved in the movement for a while, especially during the early 2010s, all the strides that have been taken to challenge and deconstruct such beauty standards and ideals of femininity have been revoked, which can be exhausting and tiring to see. The aesthetics of the divine feminine have been preached and encouraged for decades, especially regarding the fact that the standards remain Eurocentric! Moreover, if we were to deconstruct it from a class point of view, much of what is practiced can be financially inaccessible. Maintenance of feminine beauty is costly, and the heads of beauty corporations will be proponents and advocates for such movements if it means more supply and thus, more profit.
At the fundamentals of such trends, we keep going back to the same concept: an obsession with beauty. Adopting archetypes and aesthetics signifies an inability to exist outside of performance, and we end up handicapped by how we are perceived, what other people think of us, and what we hope to embody. We commodify ourselves to appeal to the constant surveillance of beauty and to a perceived audience. What is really required of us is to engage mindfully, actively, and critically with what we choose to consume. Choosing to express a curated aesthetic is really a personal choice, and it can be a fun one as well. But allowing trends to consume us and affect our self-esteem is dangerous because if there’s one thing the internet has taught us, it is that trends are ephemeral, but can greatly affect our identities. Engaging in aesthetics and beauty is not only inevitable but also natural. We connect with and are attracted to what we think is beautiful because it’s indulgent and surrounds us naturally. The problem becomes attributing beauty with morality i.e., what is good and bad. Aesthetic trends seem motivating because they are what drive us to take care of ourselves and to feel better, but they are detrimental in the long run because we never will attain them given that we are complex individuals, and not a carefully curated Pinterest board of idealized images.
References:
- ‘Our Obsession with Beauty is Dystopian’ https://youtu.be/55MshtmGsP0
- ‘Social Media’s Obsession with Aesthetics and Curated Identities’ https://youtu.be/31NDzvFtNnI
- ‘Gender Performativity and the Surveillance of Womanhood’ https://youtu.be/clt3Nj6dHwk
- ‘Being a queen is your birthright’ https://youtu.be/t9506JGYNDs