Every day Gloria's monologue from Barbie rings true – "It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong."
The last line especially is true for the way sections of the internet have reacted to Prachi Nigam who topped Uttar Pradesh's Class 10 board exams. She scored a whopping 98.5 percent. Most of us probably remember how daunting the 'board exams' can be and scoring 98.5% is definitely an achievement. But trolls discredited her achievement because they didn't find her conventionally 'attractive'.
The 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' reality is pretty obvious here – women get shamed for not matching beauty standards constantly. And it's no surprise that women of colour often face the brunt of these standards that tend to be inspired by Eurocentric standards of beauty.
It’s exhausting that something as simple as body hair being natural has to be repeated over and over again (it’s basic biology). And yet, we tend to shame women for having visible body hair, often labeling them as being “manly” (that’s a whole other discussion). This shaming is often internalised by young girls, making them wary of their own bodies.
The decision to shave or not shave body hair ceases to be seen as a 'choice'. It's one of the few reasons why people feel so comfortable trolling young girls like Nigam (internet anonymity aside).
Trolling, itself, can have incredibly adverse effects on a person – it can cause distress, lowered self-esteem, and disrupted sleep to name a few. In some cases, the effects can be much worse – people have lost their lives to internet trolling.
Some claim that 'grooming' is necessary to continue climbing the ladder of success – instead of questioning a system that places a woman's worth in her appearance, we would apparently rather ask women to 'deal with it'.
We actually live in a world where something as mundane as an unibrow is considered unattractive. Remember the TikTok trend where people would dress up "ugly" only to transition to a more "attractive" version? Go back to those videos and look at the attributes that most people picked in the 'before' segments – yes unibrows and moles are part of it.
And really, there is no winning in any scenario. Look at the response Nigam got and then look at journalist Meghna Pant's experience.
Pant tweeted, "When I got a 90 percent in my ICSE some building aunties went to my school to crosscheck that my family and I weren't lying because they thought I was 'too well-groomed to be intelligent'. There is no way for women to win -- you're always too fat, too thin, too pretty, too ugly. So, you do you, because authenticity is always greater than sh**-takes."
How can the misogynist ideas of 'women can't be pretty and smart' exist in a world of 'it's great she achieved so much but she should focus on grooming' exist in the same world? The same world, by the way, where people shame women for undergoing cosmetic surgery. The hypocrisy writes itself. It’s the idea of a woman having agency over her looks, instead of catering to the male gaze, that has everyone up in arms.
However, the internet wasn't completely horrible – the support for Prachi Nigam has been overwhelming; it drowns out the hate. Several people called trolls out for enforcing unrealistic beauty standards on a young girl and pointed out how damaging ideas like that can be to a child.
People also pointed out trolls' lack of empathy. Netizens pointed out that many women deal with hormonal imbalance (PCOS for example) that leads to more facial hair. That being said, it’s important to remember that Nigam herself hasn’t mentioned any related diagnosis.
And we shouldn’t even have to make that argument – you shouldn’t not troll someone for their appearance just because they have a medical diagnosis. You shouldn’t be making fun of someone’s appearance in general.
There's also an edited version of the student's photo being circulated – someone actually took time out to edit a student's picture to put in on the internet because they didn't like how they looked. Let that sink in.
While having said empathy is important it’s also crucial to point out that the amount of facial hair people have can differ across the world for various reasons. I don’t actually even remember a lot of people in school being mighty concerned about ‘grooming’ – we were just trying to get to tuitions after class. What I do remember is adults telling us our “shoulders”, “open hair”, and “makeup” could be distracting to boys. There’s our best friend ‘hypocrisy’ rearing its head again.
At the same time, men who use skin care or grooming products often face trolling online – people either send transphobic slurs their way or call them 'feminine'. The prevalent beauty standards have divided different aspects of appearance into the masculine and the feminine and anybody who strays from those clearly marked lines faces scrutiny.
Let's circle back to the Barbie monologue for a bit – remember Jo Koy's jokes about "method actors"? Now think about how often we got to see women, or people in general, be represented in cinema by people who looked like them. For decades, people have fought for better representation on screen – people rightfully want to see more women, more people of colour, more queer people, just more diversity in general on screen in meaningful roles.
It isn’t an isolated incident; we have an entire trope related to this phenomenon. The “Beautiful All Along” trope in cinema features a female character who goes from ‘nerd’ to ‘hot’ (remember the pretty or smart idea?) after she takes off her specs and lets her hair down (and essentially starts to follow more ‘feminine’ beauty tropes).
From She’s All That to Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, we’ve watched as people only start to ‘notice’ the women in the story once they’ve had this makeover. They were 'ugly' when they could decide what they wanted to wear and look like but they became absolutely irresistible when they became attractive to the male lead or the 'popular' people.
It’s no secret that a lot of people use grooming or make-up in general because they enjoy the way it makes them feel – but that ‘choice’ is the difference.
People want to see themselves represented on screen because only watching people who match the unrealistic beauty standards had a devastating effect on people's self-esteem. Oftentimes, characters that didn't match Eurocentric beauty standards were ridiculed, often with language we see reflected in comments or tweets from social media trolls.
With better representation on screen, we need to fight for more empathy off of it. Perhaps we should start by asking ourselves how someone looking a certain way is going to remotely affect our lives? Hint: it's really not.
Perhaps we should start respecting women for their achievements regardless of how they look (the 'perhaps' here is purely sarcastic if that wasn't evident). Perhaps we should let people choose how they want to present themselves to the world and how they want to express their individuality.
If having no facial hair is a metric of success, maybe we need to take a hard look at the societal structures we have put in place.
Prachi Nigam scored 98.5% in her boards (definitely not an easy feat as I’m sure everyone knows) and how she looks or decides to present herself in the future is not going to change that cold, hard fact.
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