Priyanka Chopra talks about societal standards of beauty in a recent video for Allure and we support this narrative.
Priyanka Chopra is on a definite career high. Shuttling between India and USA, the actress has held a lead role on Quantico, which made her the first South Asian actor headlining an American network drama series. This is almost two decades after she became Miss World in 2000. A self-declared feminist who speaks openly about her own struggles with body image, it seems to resonate with a lot of people who can relate to this cross cultural star.
The actress once appeared as a guest co-host on The View and revealed her brush with body shaming early on in her career where she shared that before she became an actor, she met a producer about the possibility of acting. A beauty pageant winner at that time, she was told that everything was wrong about her appearance. From a global pageant winner who’s gone on to achieve much more, it puts her in a particularly interesting place to discuss societal constructs of beauty and her own experiences with them.
The cultural climate has changed slightly since 2000 when she was crowned Miss World, wherein the Miss America Organization has now decided to remove the swimsuit and evening gown segments from the show. This possible consequence of the #MeToo movement and likely awkwardness for some pageant members, including Chopra, will make many feminists happy but there is something else to consider: don’t many women feel like they compete in a beauty contest every single day?
It’s a long struggle to reverse the effects of what advertisers have worked so hard on to create - images that make us feel as if we are lacking somehow so that we want to buy their products. In another effort to be ‘real’, Priyanka Chopra recently shot a digital cover for Allure where the actress appears fresh-faced with her natural wavy hair. In this video that has now gone viral, she talks about how women, unlike men are encouraged to adhere to certain standards of beauty, because they’ve “always been treated as second-class citizens.” She questions why women fight with other women and compete with each other and why everyone should reject mainstream beauty standards.
“We’ve always been told that only one of us can win and only the best one will get the cutest boy and only the best one will get the job, that we spent so much time elbowing each other out of the way, pulling each other down...can we, for a second, love ourselves and say, ‘I do not need all of these magazines to tell me how to lose the weight or how should I starve because I want to please a man?’” she said. “Start with just recognizing what you’re doing. That’s called self-hate, self-doubt, you’re berating yourself. I mean, we have enough people doing that to us anyway. Why do we need to do it to ourselves? Love yourself, ladies. You’re your best friend.”
The pressures and influence of advertising mean that women of all ages are coerced into physical and psychological self-torment trying to achieve an optimum look or image. This is not something that will disappear overnight because businesses make their money through a gap in the market, whether it’s there or they have to create it. It’s like when you go to your neighborhood salon and the girls tell you that your skin isn’t looking so good or your nails are weak in hopes that you’ll come back to them to fix it. What celebrities, influencers and regular folk can do is do their best to shape up a counter narrative. In a world where societal constructs are being dictated to us, every voice counts.
