On body image work and beauty standards across cultures: A Q&A with Elise Hu

"Think about ritual instead of results."

A special extra post this week for ya! I also published this piece: The agony and the ecstasy of weight loss compliments. Thanks for reading!

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Journalist/podcaster/host/does-it-all gal

Elise Hu

reached out to me a few months ago to ask me some questions for her piece in The Atlantic: How to Have A Realistic Conversation About Beauty With Your Kids. It was a terrific conversation, I then inhaled her book in a couple days, and if you like what I write here in Body Type you will love Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital.

Elise was generous enough to answer some questions about body image, beauty standards, “soul-driven vs. ego driven body work” and much more.

This Q&A has been edited and condensed.

MJ: You write in the “Free Size Isn’t Free” chapter of the book that you, at 5’9” and a size 8, had to shop in the “foreign” neighborhood in Seoul, Itaewon, rather than at most boutiques where clothes come in only one size (“free size,” a U.S. size 2). You write, “I would find myself especially conscious of my lumps, admiring women on the subway whose already small clothing seemed to hang off them.” Did you ever find a way to get past this feeling while in South Korea, or was it constant? 

EH: I did get past it by the end of my time there, after I’d expanded and contracted through two pregnancies and grew to appreciate my body so much for all that transformation and capacity. I eventually embraced taking up as much space as I needed, much like I did (or with the similar mental reminders and scripts) when I healed from my early aughts teenage eating disorder. (Aside: Did we ALL suffer from disordered eating around that time and suffered even worse by thinking we were alone? This is so wack!) 

When I go back to Seoul to visit, though, my surroundings can throw me back to my initial feelings about living in Korea. My self-consciousness comes from constant social comparison (both being the source of it and the object of it). Seeing all the size 2 women everywhere just made me feel so comparatively giant. There are full length mirrors EVERYWHERE (especially every elevator I’d step in). People point out what you could fix to be prettier. By the end of a day in Seoul, I’d be back in my room and think, gosh, I am large. Yikes. I have to keep remembering that conventional “good looks” is not virtue. And how grateful I am for my body and all it’s carried me through and produced and provided. The more I really stay in gratitude for how much pleasure and purpose my body provides, the less I get caught up in what it looks like.

In the book you write, “In Korean beauty culture, the body parts that matter most are legs [...] partially because ‘legs function as a marketing tool and branding technique for an enticingly toned and “impeccably executed” Korea.’” What do you feel is the American equivalent when it comes to women’s bodies, and why do you think that is? Have you observed that changing or shifting in any way?

These days, butts! But when we were growing up, it was breasts. And with surgery and other procedures positioning the body as malleable, the trend culture we see for fashion is now reaching into our bodies themselves. So instead of the “cut of the dress,” we talk about the “cut of the breast,” and how you can add or remove filler in your cheeks or lips with the trend of the moment. Brazilian butt lifts became the most popular global surgery in recent years, owing to the melding of beauty standards into a global norm — it’s a mix and match of desirable traits from various parts of the world. A high nose from Northern Europe, a shapely butt and fuller lips from the global South, and so on. Taking certain body traits from various parts of the world into the “ideal body” only creates a more and more impossible ideal, one that can increasingly only be achieved with intervention.

When speaking with Kong Youjin, former lead singer of now-defunct girl group BONUSBaby, who talked about how little she ate to reach 92 pounds at one point in her career, you write that “despite my decades-old, hard-won body satisfaction, somewhere in me a competitiveness cropped up. I thought, ‘I never ate as little as she did when I starved myself.’” What do you feel that competitive spirit is competing for – what were you (and/or what are are women) trying to prove to themselves or others when they engage this way with food?

That moment sucked to admit and write about. I grew up feeling like I had to earn my place, largely because I was the only Asian or one of the only Asians in overwhelmingly white communities. This is a failure of my own childhood imagination but everyone else seemed to have more inherent value, because they looked like what “Americans” looked like (read: white). I wanted to be awesome at what I did — academics, activities, social life — because I suppose I thought it meant some sort of social safety.

After I got scouted to model at age 16, the sense of precarious competition extended to my body. So how I looked became really tangled up with worthiness and being a “successful” girl. Then regimenting my body became part of a formula, which you have also reckoned with and written about: Basically just that I had to work hard physically in order to earn my food. That if I was going to have a soft serve in the afternoon, I’d have to run the extra three miles in the morning to burn off the calories of a soft serve in order to earn it.

The chapter also touches on a beauty standard in the country that is distinctly un-muscular. In Korea, women inject their legs with Botox to slim the calves by weakening the muscle, and inject their trapezius muscles to make them smaller to give the illusion of a longer neck. Meanwhile in the U.S., there’s been a shift toward an appreciation for more muscularity in women; influencers talk about their weight lifting routines and becoming “muscle mommies.” What do you feel about this shift here — are there any other more nuanced considerations about it, beyond how it’s likely positive for many women?

In general, trends change consistently as a marker of status. When “everyone” is doing something, it’s no longer special enough, it’s no longer a marker of high status, so to keep status you have to change what’s cool. This happens with fashion, and now? With upgrading body parts. On the weightlifting front, Korean celebrity women DO lift weights, but they lift in a way to sculpt their bodies and remain looking really thin but with curves in the “right” places (butt, chest), and don’t want to appear too “masculine” with over-defined muscles. However, if you’ve seen the South Korean body modification/fitness show Physical 100, you’ll find that Korean ideals are shifting toward the more muscular, at least among a certain set, and for men, the “chocolate bar abs” have been aspirational for a generation or more. 

You write about how you “worry that the thinspo images and tips served up to young children [on social media] distort young people’s idea of what constitutes a normal weight.” How do you (or how do you plan/attempt to) manage your own daughters’ social media exposure in this regard?

Gah! The whole reason you and I became friends is because we’re part of a community of millennials who don’t want to pass on to the next generation our own screwy relationships with weight. But we were spared social media silos, which are very real. I’m keeping my kids off social media as much as possible for now, because they are still young enough where there’s not that much social pressure to be on it. My daughters are six, eight, and 10. But my oldest does have an Instagram for lurking, and they do watch YouTube.

What I try to do is make sure they see a lot of bodies and different body types in what they are exposed to. I also challenge them when they seem to think fat is a pejorative. “Why do you think fatness is bad?” for example, because they already seem to absorb the enormous fatphobia in our culture. Getting curious with the girls about where and what they’re absorbing from culture is part of trying, over time, to help them see we’re part of a huge matrix that tells us our worthiness is tied to our looks and it’s a harmful matric that marginalizes people and keeps all of us anxious.

In your piece for The Atlantic, you write that an overarching piece of parenting advice you heard was: “Care less about your own appearance.” You outline some ways you’re trying to do this and model it to your daughters, but what remains a struggle? When and why do you feel like caring less about your own appearance is most difficult? As a media figure (who just did TV appearances for the book), is this particularly difficult sometimes?

The moments “caring less” are trickiest come when I am faced with seeing someone I haven’t seen in awhile, and I worry how they’ll judge how I’ve changed (aging, or weight changes). The other times are when I know I’ll be on “display,” like recently, right before national television appearances for the book. I vacillated over whether I should maybe do something about my body … like lose weight? But then intellectually I know that is such poisonous thinking and it flies in the face of the way I am trying to live and model my life. I have many reasons for caring less that revolve around my wanting my own head space for growing my character, creativity and other non-aesthetic qualities. But if my only reason for not regimenting my body and not even thinking about food is because I want my daughters to see a fulfilled woman who eats what her body wants, then that is reason enough to resist diet culture!  

In the chapter, “The Wisdom of Ajummas,” (which brought me to tears … I want to be them so badly) the older Korean American women you spoke with exhibited some truly radical self-acceptance. One woman described herself as ugly in a very matter-of-fact way, as if she’s saying, “Hey, I’m not pretty and it doesn’t matter.” One said that people in America, compared to in South Korea, “don’t care” or “bother” her about beauty-related pressures. Do you think this is more to do with their age (since, unfortunately, Americans tend to regard older women as pretty much invisible) than with America being less beauty-obsessed? Put another way: Do you think women can age into greater self-acceptance by sheer virtue of becoming too old to care about it (or feel the pressures of beauty culture) anymore?

Some of the freedom to liberate your waistline and beyond does come from being elderly, so I grant that. But I do think there is more of a freedom in America to opt out of beauty practices (than in Korea) simply by virtue of the inherent population diversity in America. In a lot of places in the U.S., everyone is so all over the place in terms of dress that you can't really stand out or fail to fit in. In South Korea, 97 percent of the population is ethnically Korean, and there are obvious rules for fitting in because if you scan a crowd, folks are really dressed the same and have similar skin quality and haircuts, in the aggregate. America obviously is a cornucopia of various ethnicities, sizes, shapes, shades and backgrounds, and the ajummas said they saw that as really liberating because it would be impossible to ask an “average American” to meet the standards of a Korean beauty — there is no “average American,” first of all, and if there were, they’d be far, far, far away from the end point that Korean women are supposed to arrive at.

In that same chapter you say, “These women showed me that to address the paradox of beauty and body work, we should ask ourselves if the labor we’re undertaking is ego-driven or soul-driven (the physical touch of a massage or facial, the joy of movement, maintaining good physical health).” For people who engage in ego-driven beauty/body work (that is to say…most of us), is there any way to make those practices potentially less damaging, or to look at/think about them differently? What are some soul-driven practices for you? 

One way to think about focusing on soul instead of ego is to think about ritual instead of results and cultivating an inside-out appreciation of the body. What makes it FEEL good, and not necessarily look good? So for me, one soul-driven practice lately is learning a new sport — tennis. I love feeling like I’m challenging myself and learning and growing incrementally, in the way gardening is rewarding. The payoffs seem to take awhile but it feels gratifying when I finally get my serve down, or engage in a long cross court rally. Another set of practices where I feel more “me” rather than looking over my shoulder trying to compete are the reciprocal care activities with my daughters. Like if I braid their hair, I’ll let them do my hair in whatever crazy ‘do they want, but just sharing nurturing touch is so lovely and I know these moments will be over in a blink of an eye, so it makes them meaningful to me.

Read more about Elise’s book and work here.