Sunday 30 November 2014

Race and the ‘politics of beauty’ – A male’s view

I recently paged through the latest edition of Men’s Health SA and it struck me how the majority of cover models tend to be white.

I decided to count all the black men in the December 2014 edition and I found 27 different black men of which 17 are models; the other ten appear in DSTV and Telkom adverts. I then counted all the white models and I found 47 white men. This total would have been more if I included the DSTV and Telkom adverts.

More disturbing was the under representation of black women in this edition. I counted 3 black women compared to the 24 white women. More interesting was how these women were portrayed. Firstly, the 3 black women shared the spotlight other white women. Secondly, white women were portrayed as sexually desirable which ranged from the girl next door to models who suggestive press against men in jeans and libido enhancing adverts.

I did not stop there, I also looked at the cartoons in the Magazine and I found that it is evidently racialized and there is a clear underrepresentation of black people.

So what does this say?

Firstly, this edition of Men’s Health is targeting white men and this is evident from the underrepresentation of black people.

Secondly, the underrepresentation of black people in Men’s Health says something about how Men’s Health sees and portrays beauty in the cosmetic industry. This is obvious by how they portrayed intimate relationships (relationships between men and women). Their portrayal reinforces the apartheid objective[1] which was that white people must date and marry white people and black people must date and marry black people. Through this they do not encourage interracial relationships. The evidence is their lack of portraying black women as sexually attractive beings. They clearly work from the assumption that white men would not be interested in black women. Thus, they do not encourage interracial relationships.

I see this as a ‘politics of beauty.’ For me the ‘politics of beauty’ is where the dominant social force reinforces or enforces their notion of beauty through popular media such the television, radio, print media and social media.

Fanon speak about this phenomenon in length in Black Skin, White Masks and it worth mention here briefly. Black women in particular are guilty for reinforcing the mainstream portrayal of beauty. Fanon speaks about the whitening process black women undergo to become desirable for white men and to match the standards of what white women consider as beauty. Fanon point out how black women will go through extreme measures such as skin bleaching and hair straightening to become more like white women.

This is still the case today. In South Africa there is currently a ‘yellow bone’ trend going on amongst ‘black’ women[2]. If you are considered to be a ‘yellow bone’ you automatically moved up the beauty hierarchy in the ‘black’ society. The same trend is visible amongst ‘coloured’ women. The lighter you are in complexion the further you move up the beauty ladder in the ‘coloured’ society. Some ‘coloured’ women do not even want to be in the sun for 10 min because they do want to ‘become black.’ Another trend is weaves and hair straightening products amongst ‘black’ and ‘coloured’ women.

However, we black men are not saints because we let our inferiority complex cloud our notions of beauty. This is evident by the gender of the male in interracial relationships. My observation is that in the majority of black and white interracial relationships the male is white and the female is black. The minority of cases are the other way around.

Once again let’s use Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks to make sense of this. Fanon argued that for the black man to see himself of worthy dating a white woman he will first try and overcome his material limitations so that it equals that of his male white counterpart. Only once this is achieved he will develop a sense of self-worth to approach a white woman. The reality however, especially in a society like ours it is hard for a black man to equal the resources of their white male counterparts. Thus, white women stay goddesses which mere mortal beings such as black men can only dream of and since they dream of white women they encourage black women to become white so that their fantasies become a reality even if it is only in their dreams.

I cannot but conclude that in this particular case Men’s Health’s portrayal of beauty is racialized and reinforces the racist notion that white people are more beautiful than black people. Their aim, intentionally or unintentionally, is to maintain the status quo in a society that was torn apart by racism. However, this notion is also reinforced by black people’s inferiority complex towards white people.

This left me with something to ponder: can you consider this kind of politics as racism especially since it has the same end in mind as the racist project which started in the previous century.





[1] For those of you who do not know to what I am referring to it time you take a history lesson on the effects of the Immorality Act.
[2] Where I use inverted commas to describe races I refer specifically to the racial classification of the groups of people in South Africa.