On Inclusive Beauty

Lately, in thinking about romance and boudoir and trying not to think about current events (any more than I have to), I've been mulling over the inclusiveness of beauty.

In modern romance writing, there's been a real push toward including different types of characters. Old-school romances typically centered around impossibly gorgeous (and always white, and always able-bodied) women, with chiseled hunks for heroes and giant showers of money raining down upon them from the heavens. And you can still find some of those stories here and there, but they're nowhere near as common as they used to be.

Modern romances, more often than not, feature heroines who probably wouldn't feature as Maxim cover models. Lots of them have to work for a living, and they aren't always financially secure, let alone rich. They tend to represent a broader swath of ages, races, and physical and psychological traits. (In particular, because it pushes back against a common crutch, I want to commend Courtney Milan for including a black heroine in her Regency historical "Talk Sweetly to Me." It's such a common misconception that historicals can't have minority characters that this excuse even gets trotted out to "explain" why fantasy worlds can't have minorities in pseudo-medieval settings, because that wouldn't be "historically accurate." In actuality, of course, true historical accuracy would include characters from cross-cultural exchanges [all these historicals include exotic silks, teas, and spices, so why never any people from their cultures?], and it's good to see cracks starting to appear in the old whitewashed wall that artificially excluded them.

Plus it's just a good story with smart dialogue and witty, appealing characters. None of the rest would matter a bit if the story weren't any good. But it is!)

I think this is good, and I also think it's maybe uniquely important as it comes to romance.

Representation in fiction is always important. It's important that people get to see versions of themselves reflected on the page and on the screen, and that these versions be recognizably human, not just Morgan Freeman as Long-Suffering Saintly Martyr Mk. 239872394.  (There's a time and a place for that too, but the time and place was "the '80s.")

But it's uniquely important as it comes to romance, I think, and the reason for that is bound up with the fraught and confusing thing that it is to be a woman in This Dumb Country, where you are bombarded from a very young age with images of an idealized and unattainable beauty that most of us never begin to approach. With conflicting and impossibly complicated messages about sexuality, with varied stripes of shame for having a female body, with -- if you're lucky -- the conscious awareness of all the ways in which you're expected to Perform Being a Woman, and the penalties that society is more than ready to impose if your performance falls the slightest bit short.

And then, maybe, a nagging sense that pretty clothes and painted nails and all of that might be frivolous and restrictive and hearkening back to prescriptive femininity, sure... but they're also kind of fun, at least once in a while, and is that so wrong?

So there's all this stuff about how having a female body is shameful and gross and weird, but also you should put it on display because it's beautiful, but also you can't put it on display because that would be attention-seeking and/or playing into the hands of the Patriarchy, and also it's not perfect enough to be displayed anyway, and and and. And then on top of that, when it comes to sex and relationships, you have to consider how the other party reacts. What does your partner find sexy? Because that's all shaped by cultural influences too, and very few people are willing to speak frankly about it (especially early on in a relationship), so pretty much you get to run through that whole entire maze again, but this time wearing somebody else's glasses.

No wonder all my female friends -- yes, every single one of them -- go a little bit crazy about this stuff. No wonder every teen and 20-something woman I know, no matter how gorgeous, is secretly and agonizingly self-conscious about some perceived flaw. Some of us grow out of that with time and experience, but I think every woman goes through it in youth, and many stay in it forever.

In this context, the inclusivity of representation in romance is invaluable. Because what it says is that you don't have to be conventionally beautiful to be desirable. That's the true heart of the fantasy: not that you can be cookie-cutter beautiful (which no one would believe, because we all know it isn't true; standard beauty definitions are about exclusivity, not inclusivity), but that you can be uniquely and irresistably desired. That in the eyes of at least one lover, you can be wanted, and you can be wanted as nothing else in the world is.

What romance is really about is not beauty. It's about desire. It is that sense of wanting, of being totally accepted and appreciated even after revealing all your weaknesses. And when that comes as a celebration of individuality, then I believe it's enormously empowering to women, because it says that you are not inadequate, but unique. That you are not a lesser version of some other thing, but a whole version of yourself, and that what you are is worth wanting.

So how does this tie into boudoir photography? At its best, I think, boudoir photography reaches for the same goals: celebrating uniqueness, appreciating difference, and reassuring women that they are attractive and desirable because of their own individual selves. At its best, it allows women to express their personalities and explore their sexuality in a controlled setting, where they can try out different visions of sensuality and have final say over which, if any, of those images they want to be lasting. The choice is yours and the control is yours.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that boudoir photography doesn't always achieve that lofty goal. There are some boudoir photographers who seem, judging by their portfolios, to push every woman into playacting the same porno-doll role, which is in my opinion not great. (NB: If that's what you want to do, do it! More power to you! But if every woman in the portfolio is made up the same way and wearing the same outfit and posed in the same position then I start to think that maaaybe what I'm seeing is less the women's vision than the photographer's, and that I'm not so into.)

But there are others who have a great talent for bringing out and showcasing the uniqueness of their subjects, and if you can find one of those teams, then I think it can be a really worthwhile experience in (literally!) getting to see yourself as a creature of desire. In stepping out of your own skin and looking through different eyes and seeing your own kind of beauty.

And I also think that's why it can be a profoundly romantic thing: because if you choose to put yourself before the camera's eye, and if you choose to keep those images, then you're memorializing the flaws as well as the beauty. Should you give those images away, you are (again, literally) making a gift of your self, and there is bound up in that a level of trust and vulnerability. Maybe a lot, maybe just a little, but always something.

Next time I'll talk in more concrete terms about some of the ways in which I think you can (hopefully) achieve some of those goals, but that's more or less my mission statement for what I think they are: empowerment, exploration, and the celebration of individual beauty in the manner and extent that each woman chooses for herself.