The Mary Sue shared this short video. It’s Dustin Hoffman getting emotional about the epiphany he had after dressing up as a woman for Tootsie (1982). This is an interview from 2012, so I find it really interesting that the experience of dressing like a woman still affects him emotionally after all those years.
I’m reminded of the discussion we had at book club last month. I am the youngest at our book club by a long shot: every other woman was somewhere between 50 and 83. I find it fascinating to regularly attend a group outside my own generation.
We got to talking about beauty, and I argued that expectations to be beautiful have probably gotten a lot worse in the last few decades, especially for young women, and increasingly so for young men.
And then one of the older women pointed something out which I had not considered before: In the early part of last century, any woman could be pretty. Beauty hinged on your dress, your make-up, in short, how much money you had. Since the democratization of fashion, in which almost anyone can afford a cheap imitation of a luxury item, beauty has turned to the body itself. We have now been brainwashed into thinking that beauty depends on our ability to sculpt and mould our flesh like Plasticine. And if we don’t look like a supermodel it’s because we haven’t tried hard enough, or exercised enough, or eaten the right food. If we have wrinkles it’s because we’ve spent too much time frowning, or in the sun, or because we need some botox. In short, the beautification process has moved inwards, and is directly to do with our bodies, not with our accouterments. Beauty has become very personal, and it’s not a meritocracy, if it ever was.
I’m not looking forward to the day when our five-year-old daughter realises that only a select few get to be Beautiful. Whether she fits that description or not is irrelevant: it’s a harsh lesson either way. At the moment she has her own idea of beauty, and it’s the old-fashioned view: In order to feel beautiful, all she needs to do is put on a pink dress and, ideally, a plastic tiara.
Did Dustin Hoffman share this view of beauty before he actually tried it for himself, realising instead that there’s a limit to how pretty he could become with feminine accouterments and make-up? I wonder if a younger actor would have those same expectations.
