The Pretty Girl Trope - The Pitfalls of "Pretty Privilege"

this video is brought to you by movie a curated streaming service that premieres a new film every day that's how men see me i'm not a smart girl or an interesting girl i'm a pretty girl we're told that everyone wants to be the pretty girl but is it really that much fun to be her pretty privilege is the belief that conventionally attractive people are given a leg up in life and sure desirable physical attributes can open doors attract sought after partners and enable some lucrative professions but a lot of what we see on screen and in reality also proves an opposite truth being defined as the pretty one and especially the pretty girl can hold you back that's weird i just wouldn't peg you for mechanical well you know i don't really broadcast it guys don't like it when you know more about cars than they do often when a woman is seen as the pretty girl that's all she's seen as as christina hendricks who played one of tv's most desired pretty girls mad men's joan holloway told the guardian there certainly was a time when we were very critically acclaimed and getting a lot of attention for our very good work and our very hard work and everyone just wanted to ask me about my bra again you should be in the bra business your work of art prettiness can also be associated with various moral failings of character the gold digger trope instructs us to be wary of beautiful women because their beauty must be hiding some materialistic agenda while the dumb blonde trope explicitly equates beauty with stupidity and the beautiful villain or femme fatale is evil precisely because she wields her attractiveness knowingly to exert power over men ultimately when people see you as this pretty girl type they're really seeing preconceived culturally entrenched notions of what your beauty represents and so fail to get to know the real you meanwhile you might diminish parts of yourself that aren't what people expect or want from a pretty girl i can be smart when it's important but most men don't like it here's our take on the pretty girl on screen and how while we're encouraged to worship or try to be her that pursuit can erode a deeper sense of self i'm going to be honest with you i did not hear a word that you just said because i can kind of see your party hats right now [Music] if you're new here be sure to subscribe and click the bell to be notified about all of our new videos beauty has the effect of blinding other people to what someone may be capable of doing in legally blonde l woods is first seen as a vacuous bimbo before she proves everyone wrong as a brilliant student at harvard law but what's striking is that l herself already knew she was smart as we see early on when a boutique employee assumes she's a dumb blonde there's nothing i love more than a dumb blonde with daddy's plastic and elle far from being taken in shows off her sophisticated fashion knowledge it's impossible to use the half loop top stitching on low viscosity rayon and you didn't just get it in i saw it in the junebug a year ago so if you're trying to sell it to me for full price you pick the wrong girl so elle's journey isn't about changing who she is but rather proving herself in traditional arenas of intelligence in order to be taken seriously isn't it the first cardinal rule of per maintenance that you're forbidden to wet your hair for at least 24 hours after getting a perm at the risk of deactivating the ammonium thyglocalate in her book my body emily ratakowski who came to fame primarily renowned for her looks attempts to redefine herself apart from her beauty as an author and more three-dimensional person she discusses an incident in which she was groped by robin thicke on the blurred lines video as a reminder of how limited any woman's power is when she survives and even succeeds in the world as a thing to be looked at there's videos where you know you are topless and they go well what do you expect and to that you say i don't think that women no matter what they're wearing or what they're doing should be treated that way yet even the critical response to the book revealed just how difficult it is for anyone who's been defined as the pretty girl to escape being viewed through that lens on the one hand some praised ratakowski for questioning the patriarchal structures that have exploited and allowed her to capitalize on her beauty but on the other critics argued that by writing almost solely about her body she's still upholding those structures still capitalizing on that beauty and possibly exploiting herself one way to better understand the pretty girl identity is by examining movies and shows that feature multiple attractive actresses but only designate certain characters within the fiction as especially pretty in grey's anatomy female docs izzy stevens meredith gray and christina yang are all beautiful women but christina is known as a prodigious talent and meredith comes from a medical dynasty these attributes supersede how they look in both their reputations and their senses of themselves you're very beautiful oh screw beautiful i'm brilliant if you want to please me compliment my brain but izzy is pigeonholed as the pretty one and that means she's fighting an uphill battle against people's expectations to be taken seriously as a doctor one in doctor model evil spawn [Music] nice tad they are brushed out for the catalogs one reason izzy's viewed this way is that she once capitalized on her beauty as a model paying her way through medical school with lingerie shoots similarly to how ratakowski has sometimes spoken about her career breaks izzy actually talks about her modeling opportunities with a sense of defiant feminist empowerment you want to call me dr model that's fine just remember that while you're sitting on 200 grand of student loans [Music] i'm out of debt and the plot is revealing about how beauty can intersect with class izzy's beauty allowed her to achieve a social mobility that otherwise may have been difficult for a child who grew up in a trailer park with a single mom at the same time arguably it's exactly her class background that means her beauty is treated differently to that of her colleagues i grew up in a trailer park and i am not above kicking your pampered little beverly hills ass characters who are allowed to be pretty but not be defined by that come from comfortable enough backgrounds that they didn't have to commodify their beauty but those who have to sell their beauty in some form may find that their looks and even they themselves are implicitly viewed as less than in erin brockovich aaron is aware of how her appearance gets her noticed and can open doors you know it would probably be easiest if i just squeezed back there and poked around myself would that be all right with you but this hasn't materialized in the future she expected her beauty might enable i was miss wichita for christ's sake and i thought it meant i was going to do something important with my life that it meant i was someone erin has to prove to those in the privileged law world that she's smart resourceful and hardworking very much in spite of how she looks more specifically she's constantly underestimated because of how she dresses which is read by those around her as a tell-tale sign of her class background numerous culturally agreed-upon signifiers of beauty are really proxies for class in recent eras upper class women have largely been associated with thinness high fashion and a more conservative look so to be given respect for one's beauty it's often important to be pretty in the right way matching these elite class markers in mad men we see two very different examples of women who are defined in their society by their looks in betty draper and joan holloway betty's sense of her identity has been formed by everyone treating her as beautiful and by her own mother's emphasis on beauty as the pinnacle of womanly achievement she wanted me to be beautiful so i could find a man but while betty's beauty gets her the upper middle class housewife status she wanted i'm a housewife over time her narrow vision of herself holds betty back and she's unable to unlock a deeper agency or self-understanding joan is valued by the men of sterling cooper for her eye-catching curves and sex appeal a form of beauty that's highly desired but not given the same class status as betty's more marriageable beauty and frequently leads to her being disrespected i don't need some madam from a shanghai whorehouse to show me the ropes i know what men think of you that you're looking for a husband and you're fun and not in that order for a while joan accepts the supposed rules of this whole game and is focused on finding a man but when she finally gets a version of her domestic ideal she finds it unfulfilling and she's increasingly frustrated that people at work overlook her considerable talents what do you do around here besides walking around like you're trying to get raped joan gradually stops catering as much to male validation and leans into being an independent mother and career woman her ultimate rise to partnership as sterling cooper explicitly entails her capitalizing on her beauty as sterling cooper trade sex with her as part of a business deal but while this leads some men in the office to resent or pity her she gets to where she does not only by leveraging this situation smartly tell them i want a partnership not silent comprising five percent of the business but also primarily due to all the intelligence hard work and drive she shows before and after this event the pretty girl struggles because there's so much more to her than meets the eye and the same is true of the protagonist of but i'm a cheerleader this cult classic about a cheerleader sent to a conversion therapy program for queer youth is just one gem streaming on movie this month as a special gift to our viewers movie is offering 30 days free just click the link in the description below to start streaming now if you're anything like me these days you may be totally uninspired and stuck when it comes to figuring out what to watch next subscribing to movie completely fixes that their team of curators handpicks every film they show so there's always something new to discover they seriously love movies as much as we do so their recommendations are always top notch click the link in the description below to get 30 days of movie now in countless stories where beautiful actors looks are downplayed with makeup and costuming or certain characters are singled out by the writing as pretty we can more easily see how the pretty identity is in large part a received social cue stories featuring drastic makeovers suggest most of us wouldn't even notice if someone's pretty unless that person is displaying all the signifiers and shorthands we associate with beauty like makeup or form-fitting outfits is that you i'm in a dress i have gel in my hair many of what most people agree upon as pretty has a degree of arbitrariness or is less about aesthetics than connotations of class money and race features like blonde hair have long been prized due to cultural factors like the rarity of blonde hair and its association with a white western beauty ideal to this day our society is highly colorist glamorizing lighter-skinned people of color across film and tv while offering far fewer roles to darker skinned people of color even attributes of beauty that we tend to view as objective aren't truly studies show that if you have between 104 degree or 108 degree um nasal tip rotation those are the ones that are considered the most beautiful and hers is a hunt characteristics like symmetrical faces or curves were once agreed on as beautiful because of their associations with fertility but since today these things are hardly correlated with an individual's level of fertility they can be seen as ultimately random and again culturally received a person's beauty might easily be overlooked if they're not well-off enough to be dressed in the right clothes or if they're perceived as smart since our society is so primed to view women as either brainy or beautiful in the queen's gambit at first beth is only defined through her intellect and in the original novel is explicitly described as ugly despite being played by the classically beautiful ania taylor joy the show defines her early on not by how she looks x plus y is a binomial very good let's turn to page 24. [Music] as her prodigious chess talent begins to reveal itself she begins to be styled in more high fashion outfits carries herself with greater confidence and is desired by numerous men around her what happened that gawky kid who kicked my ass five years ago apparently she grew up it's beth's confidence and success that allow people to see her as beautiful this mirrors the reality that often we only recognize beauty when it's framed by wealth and beautiful clothes or is first recognized by others beauty standards are always changing she certainly has the symmetry and low body fat that western culture deems desirable it's noteworthy at other points in history heavier women were the standard for beauty whereas a key marker of elite beauty has long been the aura of not having to try or being born with it just like aristocratic status in general recently we're seeing a rise of the concept of more effortful american rags to riches beauty a change embodied in modern beauty role models like the kardashians the contemporary ideal body type is only achievable through a great deal of work and money but the ideal type right now is particularly a particularly tricky feat of engineering simultaneously kirby and toned voluptuous and meager the protestant work ethic writ onto flesh and today's beauty influencers make big money through explicitly turning being the pretty girl into a clear-cut job as these professionals emphasize the beauty process showing the how to and the before and after by doing so in a sense they demystify the pretty girl as yet another enterprise that's chosen worked at and constructed [Music] beautiful people can be viewed as a fantasy hollywood actress rita hayworth famously said every man i knew went to bed with gilda and woke up with me it's the part i really like just when she does that what i have oh yeah i know i've seen it three times this month ah gilda are you decent me while actual beauty can take many forms our society's classic ideal of beauty is rather specific manufactured by the male imagination in 1895 life magazine illustrator charles dana gibson invented gibson girls drawings of well-endowed full-lipped women who embodied beauty ideals of the time gibson girls were one guy's interpretation of feminine beauty but their huge circulation within the pages of life magazine gave these fake women an outsized influence savannah cox writes for the first time in the united states men had an easily attainable source of feminine fantasy at their fingertips pin-up girls and glamour models to follow have continued this feeling of being a blank slate more than a fleshed out individual leaving space for the viewer to project onto them creating a successful pin-up means putting on canvas a dream girl who will appeal to countless people in all walks of life one of the biggest pinups of the 20th century isn't a person at all but cartoon character jessica rabbit i'm not bad i'm just drawn that way literally described by director robert zemeckis as the ultimate male fantasy jessica in her opening scene deliberately evokes rita hayworth's put the blame on maimscene from gilda jessica rabbit's heightened unrealistic proportions and her highly eroticized dancing are so extreme they're almost mocking the absurdity of male expectations for female bodies but ironically this cartoon has continued to be a blueprint in the mask cameron diaz's entrance as gina carlisle at the coco bongo club feels indebted to jessica rabbit and her choice of a song about serving a man again plays into this ultimate male fantasy while fantasy may be prized over reality initially or in the abstract in the end there's a hollowness to it not seeing someone as they really are prevents any true intimacy this tension between male fantasy and real woman is explored in la confidential through the criminal pierce patchett's business of selling sex with women who've had cosmetic surgery to look like movie stars there's gardner russell monroe turner then bracken is my veronica lake i use girls that look like movie stars straddling the line between fantasy and reality is lynn bracken who didn't get cosmetic surgery and her deeper romance with detective bud white is built on how white is able to see beyond the fantasy image to the real person she is i see bud because he makes me feel like lynn bracken and nuts and veronica like look alike the seeing of beautiful women as an unreal fantasy is often linked to any profession that involves feminine beauty or a woman capitalizing on her body when supermodel l mcpherson guest stars as joey's roommate and friends the fact that she's a dancer is immediately fetishized by joey right in front of her i'm a dancer you're a dancer she's a dancer but ultimately joey's interest in this character is far more fleeting than his feelings for the female friends in his life that he sees as real people similarly in new girl cece's job as a model means she is immediately objectified by the three guys in the loft it's only as the friends begin to get to know cece not as the supermodel fantasy but as jess's friend that they begin to see who she is and can build real relationships including platonic friendships with her and as we talked about in our cc video being appreciated for her friend qualities helped cece see herself as more than just pretty and unlock the confidence to start a high-powered career as a talent agent we saw you on the phone with that photographer and you have a gift because the pretty girl character in stories has forever been the prize for the male main character seeking to become this creates a strange situation for a woman striving to be an ideal love interest or an actualization of someone else's fantasy instead of living in your own point of view and while it's not just women who are constrained by all these factors it's striking that in many situations still today women often don't have the privilege of not looking pretty where men are just not routinely held to the same standards or expected to put so much effort into their presentation it looks like they just fell out of bed and put on some baggy pants and take their greasy hair oh and cover it up with a backwards cap and like we're expected to swoon [Music] there has always existed a fear around beauty as if pretty people have the power to corrupt or lead impressionable people down the wrong path socrates warned that a kiss from a beautiful woman was deadlier than spiders venom saying whenever you see someone beautiful flee without looking back and on screen the duplicitous pretty girl can tempt a protagonist male or female away from the right path using her beauty to disguise the bad values she truly espouses building on the way that we've seen characters judged for selling their beauty the femme fatale or beautiful villain goes further to weaponize their beauty femme fatales know full well how powerful their attractiveness is and in addition to their lack of deference to domestic ideals it's their sexual confidence that makes them so threatening would you tell us the nature of your relationship with mr baz he gave me a lot of pleasure in recent years horror films have sometimes used the femme fatale figure to make more complex points in jordan peel's get out rose presents as the sweet liberal girlfriend of the protagonist chris like a classic femme fatale she's weaponizing her appeal to bring a man down in this case in service of white supremacy where are those keys rose you know i can't give you the case right babe but with her pretend goodness and faux progressive values she's proving how the fake prettiness of a certain easy to copy liberal performance can serve to hide a person's true outlook and intentions megan fox and jennifer's body personifies the sexy psychotic femme fatale who's lusted over by the entire student body to a degree that they willingly let her lure them to their deaths but it's revealed that jennifer only becomes a man eating succubus after being sacrificed by a group of men so the story is really exposing how this character is a victim ever since then i just knew what i had to do to be strong jennifer's body also played on fox's own burgeoning reputation as a star and sex symbol and the way in which she had been over sexualized from a young age his solution to that problem was to then have me dancing underneath the waterfall getting soaking wet and that perfectly whole 15 i was in 10th grade through fox's experience we see in microcosm just how beauty can be used to elevate and diminish at the same time it was her status as a sex symbol in transformers that helped build her career but when she criticized director michael bay she was punished and called trailer trash who should have been grateful to bae again illustrating how class and beauty intersect in the public eye whether the beautiful villain is played as a straight bad girl a more nuanced misunderstood character or a sympathetic casualty of her society one thing that underpins all beautiful villains is that they're aware of the power of their looks and then try in some way to wrestle back control over that power this in the eyes of their society is their fundamental sin even if pretty privilege is real it's fleeting in both professional and personal spheres the pretty identity is always in tension with the aging process duh i'm a 31 year old model and in a wider cultural sense what's considered pretty is always shifting so this isn't a firm foundation on which to base an identity it's important to develop a sense of self that's grounded in a sense of one's own lasting inner beauty he doesn't make me feel like i'm a pretty girl he makes me feel like like me this is the take on your favorite movie shows and culture subscribe so you can watch all of our videos [Music] you

Channel: The Take

Views: 524,010

Keywords: cece, new girl, greys anatomy, izzie, man men, betty, the babysitters, jennifer's body, megan fox, gentlemen prefer blondes, marilyn monroe, gilda, femme fatale, trope, erin brockovich, jessica rabbit, rachel, friends, mean girls, regina, queens gambit, christina yang, la confidential, legally blonde, elle woods, helen of troy, esmerelda, mad max, jesse, neon demon, jules, euphoria, kamala, never have i ever, sansa, serena, gossip girl, hilary banks, naomi campbell, pretty girl

Id: aIBv2necbhU

Length: 21min 14sec (1274 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 22 2022