All Preferences are Valid, but Some Preferences are More Valid than Others
The tale of the blue shirt
Imagine you’re a kid. You really like blue. Lots of people around you wear blue, day in and day out. There are, of course, other colors that people wear, but for some reason, you really like blue.
You, however, don’t own any blue clothes. Of any shade.
But you love blue. You’re obsessed with it. Cerulean, indigo, phthalocyanine, turquoise. You know all the words. You paint in blue. You draw people wearing blue clothes.
You tell the adults in your life that you want a blue shirt. They scold you and tell you that wearing blue is an “unrealistic beauty standard” and that the people you see in real life aren’t as pretty as you think. If you looked closely at their clothing, you’d notice that the blue isn’t quite as vibrant as what you see in the movies. The clothes can sometimes be stained. The wearers are carefully hiding any inconsistent patches in the dye job. After a certain number of washes, the color fades and has to be touched up with dye from the craft supplies store. This costs a lot of time and money. The actors wearing blue in the movies are photoshopped. Those portraits and cartoon characters are drawn using pigments that can’t be turned into fabric dye.
With the adults around you being useless, your friend helps you out by giving you one of their blue shirts. You hold it in your hands. You lift it up above your head to put it on, and—
You can’t.
No matter how hard you try, inexplicably, you can’t put on the shirt. As if by some psychological block, you just can’t bring yourself to pull it over your head.
You scream in frustration. You cry in helplessness. It’s just a shirt! Why can’t I put it on!?
You just want to vent to someone, anyone. But your friend is baffled, and your parents and schoolteachers don’t care. The adults just repeat the same tired lectures—don’t you know that a blue shirt won’t solve all your problems? Why are you chasing an impossible goal? Even if you managed to put on the shirt, you’d never be happy. It’d never be as perfect and awesome as you think. Why bother?
Years pass. You grow up. You grieve the fact that you won’t ever be able to wear a blue shirt. Your friends and peers wear blue, right there in front of you. You struggle to accept your lot in life.
You repeat the mantras. Those blue shirts aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
Then one day, a new drug comes out. It supposedly treats inability-to-put-on-blue. You think about trying it, but it’s expensive.
Your peers sneer at anyone who takes it. Why are they risking serious side effects... just to wear clothes? Why? They must’ve bought into the patriarchy. Chasing all those unrealistic beauty standards.
You nod along to the slogans.
More time passes. The price comes down. The side effects turn out to be overblown.
One day, a friend who’d never worn blue before shows up wearing a blue shirt. You question them, and they admit to taking the drug.
Finally, you try the drug.
And you reach into the back of your drawer to that old, ratty thing your friend gave you years ago. You hold the shirt in your hands. You run your fingers over the fabric.
You put it on and look at yourself in the mirror. And see... a blue shirt. You see all the slight splotches in the dye job, and a small stain near the hem line. It’s cerulean, and not a bright phthalocyanine true blue.
But you don’t care. It’s blue. And you’re wearing it. And it’s every bit as beautiful as you always imagined.
This is how it felt to grow up as a chubby kid who wanted to be thin in the 2000s. The “heroin chic” era of severely underweight models from the 90s had sparked a massive backlash in pop culture. Girls like me were casualties of that backlash.
This cultural milieu produced strange, conflicting goals. Health classes would warn about the dangers of obesity one week, and then the dangers of eating disorders and “unrealistic beauty standards” the next. These appear complementary at first glance, but in practice, the latter didn’t limit itself to warning about becoming dangerously underweight; the anti-eating disorder messages pathologized any desire to lose weight at all.
If I came out and said, “You’re right. I’m overweight. I want to be thin. Help me,” I would not have gotten any tips for how to lose weight. I would have gotten a non sequitur lecture about how the models in the magazines are photoshopped, and how real people have cellulite and blemishes. If I’d persisted, I would have been referred to the guidance counselor for an anorexia or bulimia screening. It was as if a switch flipped in the teacher’s brain, and the entire chapter on heart disease had been forgotten.
This was a problem for me, because I wanted to be thin. And I wasn’t.
My personal aesthetic growing up most closely matches Lindsey Stirling in the music video for her 2013 cover of “Radioactive“.1
There was just something about a black sleeveless shirt and interesting cloth/leather wrap bracelets. I’d always been drawn to that style, long before that particular music video came out.
In addition to the clothing, I wanted a body to go under that badass outfit. I wanted to look a certain way, feel a certain way. I wanted to be a badass, not just look like one.
As a chubby nerdy kid, I knew I could never, ever pull that look off unless I got thin. My forearms were too pudgy. Just putting on the outfit wouldn’t have made me feel like a badass.
One evening when I was maybe 11 years old, I complained about my pudgy arms to my (thin and fit) older sister.
She chastised me and told me I was beautiful and perfect just the way I was.
How do we end up with the aesthetic preferences that we do?
In a way, all preferences come from cultural exposure. We tend to like the things that are modeled for us as being desirable. People have to find out about their options somehow, after all.
But this is so reductive as to be meaningless. I was exposed to plenty of aesthetics and styles as a kid. I was bombarded with competing and contradicting ways to be. I plucked one out of the aether that spoke to me. Why did I want to look like Lindsey Stirling instead of, say, Kelly Clarkson? I don’t know. Why was I so drawn to black sleeveless shirts and wrap bracelets? I don’t know. I just was.
Meanwhile, 2000s culture had an assumption that aesthetic preferences we get from pop culture are bad or wrong somehow.
But why does it matter? My preferences are my own, regardless of where I got them.
For all that talk of female empowerment and helping girls achieve whatever goals they wanted, it was clear that some preferences were more valid than others.
I knew, vaguely, that I needed to cut back on the junk food if I wanted to be thin. I needed to eat healthy if I wanted to avoid heart disease and diabetes when I was an adult. But I just... couldn’t.
Every day I just wanted to eat, eat, eat. It was like some other entity was in control of me, and it stood between the body I had and the body I wanted.
It wasn’t so much that what I wanted was out of reach in some cosmic sense. There were plenty of fit and thin people around me. I knew, in theory, the behaviors that I needed to do in order to look a certain way.
It’s just that I... couldn’t, and I didn’t know why. It was out of my reach for no discernable reason.
In college, I would learn that a popular webcomic had dubbed it The Blerch. Nowadays, we’d call it food noise. But back then, when I was in middle school in the late 2000s, this force was unnamed. Unexplainable. Invisible.
At some point in late middle school, the messaging in health class shifted. The heart disease warnings gave way to anti-eating disorder PSAs. I was told about “body positivity.” Dove launched their “Real Beauty” ad campaign in 2006. In 2013, the “Real Beauty Sketches” ad went viral:
The ads are meant to reassure us that we were, again, beautiful and perfect just the way we were. This reached the peak of cultural dominance when I was in college in the mid-2010s. Alessia Cara’s song “Scars To Your Beautiful“ hit the top of the charts in 2015.
As a result of this cultural milieu, when I would talk to the adults around me about the distress and powerlessness I felt at being unable to stop eating so much, I would get a lecture on the dangers of anorexia instead.
Which was absolutely maddening. The real source of my distress and turmoil wasn’t that I’d tried this aesthetic and found it wanting; it’s that I had zero control over it at all.
It wasn’t like I wanted to be an underweight heroin-chic model! I just wanted to be fit and a healthy weight. For example, this is a healthy weight.
These messages definitely didn’t name or help me defeat the mysterious entity that forced me to binge eat every evening.
You know what did eventually fix me? Big Pharma. Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and a funny-looking lizard with a very painful venomous bite that lives near the Gila River Basin in the American Southwest.
We figured out that this mysterious force is called food noise. After a few injections, I finally felt empowered to pursue my aesthetic preferences. All the “body positivity” in the world didn’t “fix” my preferences. Because my preferences were not the problem.
Further reading:
This particular example was created long after I grew up, but the primordial aesthetic was always there.