Femininity and Power

I recently watched a TED Talk given by model, Cameron Russell, titled ‘Looks aren’t everything- Believe me, I’m a model.’ Her talk was a truthful introspective look at how her ability to thrive in the world is due to her feminine agency. Said agency is as a result of historical racial bias that persists today. She unpacks the gender and racial oppression that embody industries of consumption and media. These industries operating as “the gatekeepers of beauty” as described by Oscar winning actress, Lupita Nyongo’o, prescribe femininity as skinny with white skin. Cameron’s talk highlights the fact that saying looks don’t matter, doesn’t make it so. Based on the feminine beauty prescription, looks do in fact matter and negatively affect the lives of not just women, but men who don’t fit into particular prescribed body standard aesthetic. In Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he explains “Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual’s choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the prescriber’s consciousness.”(2005, p.47). Oppression today exists in the form of repression by those who are othered and suppression of otherness, particularly the positives of otherness, in the media and in everyday life. Prescription is telling people how to be or exist, which when it comes to looks is ridiculous given that physical attributes are generally immutable and out of anyone’s control. “There are people paying a cost based on their looks not on who they are.” Russell says. Additionally, the power or agency that women like Russell have is placebo power because as she pointed out she and women like her are not in control of anything including their own agency. They too are slaves to the need to ascribe to the prescription in order to maintain the power they do have. So what is to be done about the persistent gender and racial oppression?