The “Natural” Woman

what does it even mean and who does it really serve?

During my holiday last week, I quite literally devoured Miranda July’s All Fours. Several times during the book I caught myself looking up and spacing out, thinking how lucky I am, we are, to be living in a time where stories like these are not only being told, but are successfully promoted to a wide readership.

How lucky we are to have access to stories that explore desire, gender, vulnerability, aging, love, motherhood, womanhood — all in a brutally truthful, honest, weird, funny, fearless and life-affirming way. It’s the kind of energy that makes me want to put on my craziest outfits, scrunch my hair into the most awkward bun, go out loud into the world and do whatever I want to do; take up space, write, smell the flowers, pet all the dogs, take photos of all the shit left on the streets of Berlin, dive head-first into the lake, eat eat eat, listen to the birds and cicadas, listen to humans, hate the internet, love the internet, be shy, be rude, be sexy, be childish, drink a martini and smash the glass, hai noroc!

I’m not a literary critic, and it frustrates me that I don’t have the tools to eloquently review All Fours, but I guess I can talk about how it made me feel: refreshed, inspired, curious about the world and curious about what my life is yet to bring.

And then I opened Instagram.

I’m only human, so when I wasn’t reading, otter-ing about in the crystal waters, or stuffing my face with fried calamari, I’d, of course, be online.

One of the first things that jumped at me was an IG story from an it girl; it was a reshare of a reshare of a reshare, an endless mirror-in-a-mirror effect, of a quote coming from the said it girl (can you keep up?).

The quote was a sort of value judgement issued by the it girl’s affinity for “discreet women,” which she went on to detail: she preferred it when women either didn’t wear make-up, or only when they knew how to wear it and how much of it to wear. She appreciated when femininity was not understood as styling your hair into big curls, or having your nails done. Finally, she wished more women would proudly wear their natural hair and flaunt their wrinkles. Out of curiosity I went to the original post, which was captioned as “quotes that celebrate women and womanhood.” Of course, it’s Instagram, so the tens of comments on the post are limited to heart and fire emojis.

As you can probably already imagine, the quote professing the proclivity for discrete, preferably natural women, is issued by a conventionally attractive, former model, privileged, white woman.

I sighed, took a screenshot, shared it with my friends and ripped it to shreds in the group chat.

We wondered why, in 2024, after countless waves of feminism, a reckoning with the reality of intersectionality, and with the notion that womanhood and gendered experience can be whatever you want it to be — we still feel the need or entitlement to issue opinions on how we think women should be, how much space they should take, or what would make one human being a better woman than another.

Because, however unintentional, the subtext of the statement reads that exact way. “I like discreet women” — ie., women who take up little space, who are low-key. “I like women who keep it natural or know how to use make up” — this on the one hand accurately defines the obsession with “natural” that the privileged take serious ownership over, from Mallorca linens and minimalism, to investment in prohibitively expensive beauty care products and services that keep that collagen plump. Natural is healthy, natural is tasteful — but only when it is rich. No one cares for a scruffy, bag-eyed, exhausted yet natural working-class mother. Secondly, the opposite value statement here would be, presumably, “wearing too much make up, in a tasteless manner” — which would bring us to a discussion of taste, and social class: more make up, or, make up worn ostentatiously, would be tacky, tasteless, kitsch, therefore discarding the value of the woman wearing it.

In fact, “natural” and “healthy” have been the key selling points in the surge in beauty, self-care and wellness consumerism that is populating our timeline and our headspace. A very specific type of individualist health has become a status symbol, fuelling the Erewhon-ification of everything — because as it turns out, natural and healthy are extremely profitable aspirations to sell. The idea of “natural beauty” in particular, according to a quick review online, is “clear and bright skin” (retinoids, chemical peels, microneedling, red light therapy), “big, white smile” (teeth whitening), “healthy, shinny hair” (you get the idea, etc.), “fit body” (etc.) — clean girl aesthetic, in other words. Historian and artist Nell Irvin Painter talks about how, ultimately, “a lot of the things we consider beautiful are actually just proxies for wealth.”

Natural beauty is also, by and large, understood as youth. Online, we love talking about natural aging and authenticity, but the reality is that Gen Z is already worried about looking old, boosting the proliferation of anti-aging products and procedures like never before. Preventative ageing or, “prejuvenation” routines as they’ve been called, are officially the most popular beauty content on IG and TikTok. The previously unsexy terminology of “skin barrier” used by dermathologists has become a legitimate obsession, with 400% increase in online searches which led to an instant integration of the concept in marketing speak; CeraVe, a brand that jumped on the boundary train early on, is now responsible (as in, paid for) for over 80.9% of its mentions on TikTok. Our skin is healthy, only insofar as it’s plugged in to the consumerist Matrix.

The are a few ironies at hand here. First is the belief that professing alignment with the superiority of the Natural Woman as opposed to any other type of woman that is somehow not natural, is a progressive and enlightened thought. I understand the confusion — there is the sense that everything that is natural is uncompromised,  uncorrupted, pure (cyanide and cancer are, surprise surprise, also natural, but that is a different story). By all means, I think we can all agree that the freedom and ability to carry ourselves “naturally” (read: authentically) into the world is generally something to aim for.

But there are cracks in the aspiration: firstly, its obvious, primary focus on the appearance and appearance only (I see nothing about equitable employment, body ownership, fulfilling experience of life) and secondly, because the natural standard is set by very clear Eurocentric-only criteria.

“Natural beauty” is experienced completely different when you are not part of the privileged cohorts, and there are plenty of great pieces by historians and scholars such as Noliwe Rooks who write about the politics of race and beauty. Rooks, for instance, explores how “attempts to decolonize one's beauty routine often lead to pushback from the outside world — especially for black and brown people.” Writers like Ling Ling Huang recently released a novel on the fetishization and appropriation of Asian cultures in beauty wellness fittingly titled, Natural Beauty.

To be Eurocentrically natural is a privilege, and decolonising said perceptions of natural beauty and womanhood come at a cost for those underrepresented, as well as for those not meeting its criteria. In fact, as I’m writing this piece, I’m witnessing the absolutely insanity that is the scandal over Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and the questioning of her natural make as a woman at the Paris Olympics. The (baffling) abusive narrative was ignited by questions of strength and ambiguous discussions of hormones, and instantly fired up to appearance. The tragic part is that it’s not unprecedented and Black and brown women who defeat white opponents are often targeted — Serena Williams has been called a “man” her whole career, Simone Biles too.

To quote Haley Nahman, who wrote a thought-provoking essay two years ago that rings truer than ever: “We need to think bigger than normalizing beauty labor. As a vision for the future, that’s a pretty bleak one…. However comforting we may find beauty practices, however creatively we commune around these traditions, I think we have a responsibility to return again and again to the ideology underpinning this industry: who it targets, who it punishes, who it pays.”

Chloë Sevigny and Michelle Williams meet in a ”dyke” bar in the 1970s, “If These Walls Could Talk 2” (dir. Jane Anderson, Anne Heche, Martha Coolidge, 2000)

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Don’t get me wrong. I, too, am investing stupid amounts of money buying all sorts of AHA & BHA acid exfoliators over which I have but a modicum of real understanding, and asked my friend the other day if she thinks I might have a moustache. I am far from immune to the beauty labor pressure. Moreover, I have benefitted from my conventional “prettiness,” fair skin and lighter hair in ways that skirted xenophobia both in and out of Romanian borders — there’s few things that Romanians adore more than a fair look, contrasting with the darker skins of the “undesirables” (this is super interesting, by the way, as the stereotype of the Eastern European is befitting mostly to north-eastern European/Russian looks: extremely fair, blue eyed, tall, pencil-thin. Central and Southeastern Europeans are, well, different). Coming from a profoundly sexist and misogynist society, it takes a long while to unpack all that internalised misogyny. But some critical distance goes a long way. 

Womanhood and how that ties with external appearance and consumerism, are, needless to say, a collective wound that runs deep. We are confronted with it over and over again, inescapable — we’ve tried to fix it, but as long as appearance is profitable (hello, infinity!), nothing really helps us stitch up the wound and allow it to heal. We applaud natural! But when you look at it it’s a very narrow and misleading understanding of natural. We applaud the destigmatisation of invasive & non-invasive cosmetic procedures! But when you think critically about the real reason behind the urge to make cosmetic modifications and the toxic industries and perceptions you are perpetuating, it’s a bit more complicated. The personal is political, and the personal choice is not always progressive. There’s no win! The sheer concept of femininity is a battlefield.

British art theorist John Berger noted in Ways of Seeing, in his exploration of the imagery of women in European oil painting: “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. (…) From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.”

I was reminded of one of the stories in If These Walls Could Talk 2, featuring the most delicious Chloë Sevingy and Michelle Williams. Michelle Williams plays a hippie, Romanian blouse wearing, committed queer feminist activist in the 1970s, fighting for equal rights for women, and she falls for Chloë Sevigny’s character, a tie-wearing, motorcycle-rider, masc presenting lesbian. The problem, we soon realize, is that Michelle’s and her friends’ idea of feminism, queerness, freedom and equality, was not exactly allowing any space for Chloë’s idea of freedom and equality — namely, for her “butch” appearance. “We fought hard so you don’t have to wear men’s clothes,” one of Michelle’s friends says with disdain. Their inflexible ideas of “femininity” and gender binary representation were actually impeding on the freedom of someone who just dressed however she wanted to dress — which happened to be decoded as more masculine.

In a critical moment, just before storming out to make sweet love to Chloë, Michelle tells her friends: “You want to know why you don’t like her (Chloë)? It’s because you’re scared of anyone who’s not just like you!”

What one woman might identify and celebrate as progressive, might come at the expense of another’s freedom.

Chloë Sevigny and Michelle Williams overcoming limiting beliefs in “If These Walls Could Talk 2” (dir. Jane Anderson, Anne Heche, Martha Coolidge, 2000)

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Ochuko Akpovbovbo noted in one of her recent Substack newsletters, “One of the weird things about the internet is that it can make us feel like content other people make is in direct conversation with our lives.” That’s not far from the truth — in many ways, that’s exactly what the internet sets up to do. We are stuck in filter bubbles online, in the glass dome I mentioned before, where we are relentlessly sold ideas, particularly about womanhood, that might seem enticing in theory, or even comforting. Yet we should not lose the responsibility, as Nahman pointed out, of taking a step back and questioning said ideas: who they target, who they punish, who they pay.

But if one wants to take a break from it all, reading something like All Fours feels like a breathe of fresh air. In such a story, your life as a woman is not bound to your looks — your body, yes, it exists and plays a major role. MA-JOR! The natural experience of womanhood is, across all histories and ethnicities and experiences of life, a truly wild ride. But not in the ways that consumerism makes you think. In profound ways that ultimately, have little to do with external perception and validation, or fitting in external set criteria.

It can be life-affirming to be reminded of that.

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