Interview: Heather Widdows, Applied Ethicist
Written for Pharos, the University of Warwick's philosophy magazine.
This interview was conducted for Pharos, the University of Warwick’s undergraduate philosophy magazine. An abridged version of this interview is published here (archive):
An Interview with Heather Widdows – Pharos
According to Wikipedia:
Heather Widdows (born 29 August 1972) is a British philosopher, specialising in applied ethics. She was at the University of Birmingham for 22 years, beginning as research fellow and finishing as Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research and Knowledge Transfer).[1] She is currently a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick.[2] Her research is in the areas of global ethics, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of health and bioethics. In 2005, she was awarded a visiting fellowship at Harvard University.
Her most recent book, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal (Princeton University Press, 2018), explores how the nature of the beauty ideal is changing - becoming more dominant, demanding and global than ever before.[3] Widdows argues that to address the harms caused by the beauty ideal, we must first understand its ethical nature. Vogue described the book as "groundbreaking",[4] and writer and journalist Bri Lee included Perfect Me in her article Books That Changed Me.[5]
I interview her alongside Amily Clenton, a PPE student at the University of Warwick.
Amily Clenton: I just want to start on a general point about how your journey in philosophy began, because I know you started in theology and you’ve then worked your way from global ethics, bioethics, and then on to lookism. So, I wanted to know: what drew you to your current specialisation?
Heather Widdows: I fell into philosophy by accident. I did a Scottish degree, so my focus was moral philosophy all the way through – it’s a four-year degree. I didn’t go to university; I took a year out because I didn’t want to go to university. And I spent time in Tanzania, and I did quite a lot of teaching and realised that it was an utter privilege to go to university; and at that point we still had grants, so I got to go to university for free – it was a ridiculous privilege.
So I went to university and I fell in love with Plato. And after falling in love with Plato, my supervisor directed me to Iris Murdoch, who just became (here she is, sitting behind me) a complete and utter inspiration. So I kept my love of philosophy – which particularly started with Iris – but then also my Africa trip, my commitment to making a difference in the world, and just figured that I’m better at philosophy than I am at anything else, and so that became the way I would try and make a difference in the world.
Amily Clenton: Do you think that’s what drew you to a bit more of an applied philosophy?
Heather Widdows: Nope. So my PhD was not applied at all, it was about moral realism and non-cognitivism: it was the nature of the relationship between morality and religion in modern Anglophone philosophy. And that's because I was very interested in global ethics and interested in some of those arguments about why we're moral.
It wasn't applied at all. The reason that I ended up in applied philosophy is that after I had finished my PhD, I did that thing that everybody does: I applied for every possible job that you can apply for, and quite a few jobs that I couldn't apply for, because I wasn't qualified; and one of the jobs that I wasn't qualified for was in bioethics, and I got it! I got a job in bioethics – in reproductive ethics, genetic ethics, and research ethics. It was post-doctoral research on a European project, and my partners were medics and lawyers and practitioners, and so I sort of had a baptism of fire into applied ethics.
So never having done anything in my PhD except sit in a library, I suddenly found myself out in the world; and when I started doing genetics, it was just so obvious that all these things were just so wrong. We were promising patients confidentiality when it was impossible with genetic information. We were consenting people to future studies where they couldn't possibly know what their information was going to be used for, and that was implicating their children and their grandchildren, and it was just so heinously wrong that the ethics became so overwhelmingly important that I ended up staying in applied ethics for quite some time. So – again, it was an accident. I found myself doing applied ethics without the training, suddenly realised that there were really important things that shouldn't be happening, and even though I was really junior, I was still the only one saying that.
Amily Clenton: On that point then – I know you were on a few councils; it sounds like they were related to that – so the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the UK Biobank Ethics and Governance Council. I wanted to know the practical elements of that; I know there was a lot of research involved, and a lot of policy and things like that, but to what extent do you think that was applied into practice, and with the intention of changing ...
Heather Widdows: That’s always the case – all of that work is about changing stuff. So obviously I'm only there because of the research I do, and my expertise, but the agenda of those councils is to make change in the world. I was on the Ethics and Governance Council of UK Biobank – again, really, really junior. So for that job I was interviewed by the head of the Wellcome Trust, the head of the Medical Research Council; it's like a panel of ten of the great and the good, and I had only just made Senior Lecturer, and I was in my late twenties, and it was utterly terrifying. But they put me on the ethics and governance council, and again it's that thing, you know: I just have stuff to say, that nobody else would notice, so it was just so important that my voice was there, and some of the rules that came about from that were a direct result of me saying that you cannot promise people things that are not possible in the genetic era. So that's all practical. So, yes, I'm only there because of my research, but it's not research at all. It's all about wanting to change policy and practice to make things better.
Amily Clenton: Can you think then how your experiences there – and what you saw, what you were saying about what people were being promised – feeds into your research and your philosophical outlook today?
Heather Widdows: So I think I have a very – so obviously I didn't start doing philosophy like that. I started doing very much meta-ethics and quite abstract stuff, but once I started doing applied ethics, it became impossible not to do it because the issues were so important. And I think now that philosophy and philosophers really should have a duty to engage, right? I mean, we take taxpayers' money. Only a small amount of what we do is teaching (so for most academics it's 40% of their workload), and I think that academics have a duty to engage in the world. And I think that goes all the way back to Plato, right? You know, the whole point of philosophy is to learn how to live, and I think that we have a duty to share that: we have a duty to profess – you're a professor – you have duties to profess.
Aashish Reddy: Hopefully you don’t meet Socrates’ end.
I want to turn to some questions about your book, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal. I want to start by asking: for any X, what does it actually mean to say that X is an ethical ideal?
Heather Widdows: So an ethical ideal is a value framework we live by; so it's always communal, it's always about the kind of values that are not just prudential or social norms, they're values where you make judgements about other people and yourself globally rather than locally. Importantly, they promise to deliver the goods of the good life: so that will be relationship success, economic success, social success, and they're very different for very different value frameworks. Also – other key indicators are things like the moral emotions that attach to an ethical/value framework, so if you transgress then you experience moral emotions such as shame; you can blame people who transgress and in a very strong way that is mirrored in what counts as virtue and what counts as vice.
Aashish Reddy: How, if at all, is this distinct from something merely ‘functioning’ as an ethical ideal? You say somewhere in your book that beauty “not only is, but is functioning as an ethical ideal for many people” (and you distinguish this further from the notion that beauty should function as an ethical ideal).
Heather Widdows: Yeah, so part of what I'm mapping in Perfect Me is a new phenomenon, something that other people have not called out: that it might be functioning with this moral edge; and it's not easy to distinguish exactly at what point things flip from prudential and social norms into ethical frameworks, value frameworks, ethical ideals.
So there's a real sense in which, at what point does ‘functioning as’ become ‘is’? And so part of what I was doing then (which I probably wouldn't do now because the debate has moved on), is addressing certain people who were worried about me describing it as an ethical ideal, that was changing values. Actually, now I think that probably if it's functioning as an ethical ideal for those who fall under it, it is an ethical ideal, even if it's not one that looks very familiar to philosophers.
Aashish Reddy: Here’s you in the first chapter of your book: “Despite mantras such as ‘it’s what’s on the inside that counts’ […] at times it is effectively only the outside that counts: what is inner is identified with and determined by the outer.” Now, it seems probable to me that when people meet someone for the first time, they make snap judgements based on appearance because that’s all that’s available and have little else to go on until they get into a conversation. I wanted to know if you had any examples where actual information about ‘what’s on the inside’ is superseded, and the judgement instead determined by raw appearance?
Heather Widdows: Right, so you're definitely right that it's first impressions most, where judgments are made about character, personality, lots of things, based on how somebody presents. But we do have a world in which increasingly more and more relationships are transient and are also mediated in the virtual world rather than the real world. So this became particularly dominant in the pandemic, where we were having almost nothing else other than transient relationships; and also virtual relationships. When you're in a Zoom situation you are even more appearance driven because of the nature of the screen and things. So there's a sense in which, yes, it is absolutely the case that the more you know somebody, the more time you spend with them, the less important this appearance becomes. So if you're born in a small village and you never leave that village, appearance will gradually become much less important.
But in our world it becomes more important both because of the way that screens become more dominant and we live more in the virtual world, but also because of the ever-changing nature of our relationships where very few relationships get past some of that initial stage – very many relationships stay, for all intents and purposes, in quite a transient, quite a superficial appearance-driven context.
Appearance might get you through the door and get you the interview; it might get you higher salaries; but if you can't do the job and you haven't got the skills, you still won't get the job. So beauty delivers something but not as much as we believe it will. One of the nice bits of statistics is that one of the places where beauty doesn't necessarily continue to deliver is that it won't maintain a relationship – but because attractive people are used to the halo effect and ‘pretty privilege’, they can often be quite shocked when that happens. So they'll suddenly find that they're not being treated like they expect, and there's a sort of a tiny little bit of justice in there after all, in that it doesn't necessarily deliver all the things we think it will. So it delivers a lot. The advantages that beauty brings are real, but less than the ideal purports.
Aashish Reddy: It’s interesting that you say there that appearance is more important in the context of Zoom interviews; I was recently reading a book on talent – finding and mobilising talent – and one of the points it made was that an advantage of Zoom interviews is that you’re going to be less influenced by things like how charismatic the person is, how much force of presence they have in person, their height. So the point is that insofar as those things don’t matter for what you’re looking for, you’ll be more fair in the virtual, Zoom world rather than less.
Heather Widdows: Well, that will be an empirical question. So one of the things about talent is that talent is often equated with men; in terms of the global ideal, the only global feature that tracks for men is height, nothing else. So it's absolutely true that Zoom changes people’s perception of height, and sometimes quite dramatically.
I suspect that it’s less true for women, and certainly appearance is more important in a wholly visual, virtual world than in the real world. Other features – I mean, it’s the case that some people do better and some people do less well – but again it does track different character types. So I suspect certain characters do better in Zoom and certain characters do better not in Zoom; but I’m deeply suspicious about some of those claims about talent.
Aashish Reddy: Do you have any thoughts more generally about how the importance of appearance will change with the coming of the metaverse paradigm, and the consequences of most of our interactions taking place there?
Heather Widdows: Yes, since I finished Perfect Me in a long time ago now (like 2016ish – it didn't get published until 2018 because obviously it's Princeton so it had to go through far more rigorous reviews and things) – I talk a little bit in Perfect Me about selfie culture and the virtual world, but it was still really in its infancy. And certainly that changed dramatically in the pandemic. So a lot of what I've been thinking about recently is how the self functions in the virtual world, and looking at the ways in which some of the things I said in Perfect Me extend into the virtual world and others are challenged by increased living in the virtual world. So particularly social media platforms – like Instagram and TikTok particularly, but also Snapchat – very many of the communication platforms that predominantly young people use (but increasingly more people) are fundamentally visual platforms where the image speaks louder than the word in really strong ways. And such that not to engage, not to curate a profile, not to have an identity, increasingly psychologists and sociologists are telling us leads to social isolation. Isolation is excluding – it means that people can't function within education systems and social groups. So it becomes necessary to have an online presence and profile.
I’ve been doing a bit of work with Fiona McCallum (who's currently the deputy head of the Psychology department here at Warwick) - we’ve done some work together over the last few years about the way in which identity connects between the real world and the curated profile of the social media account. And what's quite fascinating there – so when we started working on beauty (which was a long time ago, we started maybe 10+ years ago), we had a project together looking at the demands of beauty. And we were quite involved in a little bit of activism around labelling images – believing at that time that if we labelled images more to make readers more aware of just how doctored they were, that that would reduce some of the pressures that people felt to be perfect. And then France and Australia did enact some laws, and what happened was – it was the opposite of what we expected. So when an image is labelled to tell you how it's been changed, you might expect that then the person looking at it would feel less pressure to look like that image because they know it's not real. It turns out the opposite is true.
Aashish Reddy: They figure out how to doctor their images to curate their profile to look more like that?
Heather Widdows: It might be to do with how the words help you look at an image longer. So if you say, this model’s legs have been lengthened and the cellulite removed, it might draw attention so you look longer at the legs. But we’re increasingly seeing in the recent work that psychologists are doing that even though people know that nobody looks like their Instagram profile, they’re finding the same thing about people’s relationship to their own Instagram profile (so not just other peoples’). So they feel that the bigger the gap between their profile and themselves, the more they feel inadequate. So plastic surgeons are now telling me, anecdotally, that people, instead of bringing them pictures of celebrities, are bringing them pictures of their own altered profiles.
And that gap between the ideal and the real self seems to be something – even though you would think the more you know, the less pressure you feel, the opposite is true: the more you know, the more pressure you feel. And psychologists are now talking about this as the ‘boomerang effect’; and it’s absolutely fascinating and not at all what we thought, and counteracts very many things that we think about knowledge.
There’s been loads of programs that the government has put in schools, in PSH [Physical & Social Health] classes, to help people cope with the pressures of the virtual world and the pressures to be perfect in the virtual world, and they’re all about digital literacy. Now if all of these things that we’re learning are true, then knowledge – text-based knowledge – and image-based knowledge somehow cuts through, ignores, doesn’t compute with your text-based knowledge, and adds to this pressure.
And it’s something about moving to a visual culture where we really don’t have a very good grasp of how different that’s going to be in terms of shaping our identities, shaping what we think should be; and what we see is this huge gap that leads to all kinds of negative emotions and lots of distressing outcomes. Part of what we’re looking at is the level body image anxiety and mental health in this demographic, and some of it does seem to be about the way that images function and the pressures to be perfect that come from those images.
Amily Clenton: I wonder if, on the point of body image editing – I don't have anything to back this up, but just from personal experience – I wonder if because a lot of people accept that these pictures that we see online aren't realistic, but when they're labelled and signalled that these have been edited they aspire more to that because they think well if I can achieve that unrealistic standard then that somehow elevates you.
Heather Widdows: Yeah, there's a possibility there – but when I was talking about the labelling, that was very early days. It's now the case that people don't have to have the labels on them to feel that. Your own edited image can seem to you something that you should aspire to even though you know that you've done the editing. So that seems quite counterintuitive – certainly counterintuitive to the digital literacy programs and the assumption that knowing things will change how you feel. So there is something about the perfection of images... So what I argued in Perfect Me was about the nature of the self; that, the self that moves through the actual body, the transforming body and the imagined self. So, at that point I thought, well maybe part of what's going to happen with the virtual world is that you get that kind of imagined self, you make it concrete.
And I don't know – for so many of these things, we need psychologists to test out what's real and what are just things that I, as a philosopher, am hypothesizing about. But if you don't have the hypothesis, you can't do the testing – you have to have both happening together. But I'm beginning to think that the selfie self, because it's an object in the world, doesn't have the positive and subjective aspects of the imagined self.
But also, it may just be that as we move more into the social media world, where more and more interactions happen on the phones such that when often even when people are together they will communicate through the phones rather than in conversation. So it may be that as – I don't know, it's a kind of mass global experiment, so we've been now getting calls to take phones off young children. But at the moment we still are experimenting – phones have become almost part of people's bodies in a strange way and we don't know how that's going to go. But I'm interested.
Aashish Reddy: I personally spend much time on Twitter, which is obviously a text-based platform, and I spend very little time looking at images. What inference do you draw – or, do you recognise a distinction – about someone who wastes away all this time (and in extreme cases, presumably brings on the same mental issues) through Twitter?
Heather Widdows: I don't know, it's not my research – so I guess that I'm really interested in the way that aspiring to certain images and the way we're curating ourselves and our bodies and our images as ways of presenting ourselves, creating identity. That seems to me something that – that's just the focus of my research. I'm sure that there are people working on – so Twitter is also somewhere that you curate and present an identity through the tweets that you show; these aren’t random bits that you’re saying, you only tweet the things that you want other people to know. I'm sure there are parallel things about identity creation and curation in Twitter, but I suspect it's somewhat different just because it's more familiar to us from other forms of identity creation. And maybe different, so yeah, I can't really answer. It's not my own research.
Aashish Reddy: I'll nevertheless push one last time. I'm curious which way the intuition goes: if you feel like it's more likely (and this is question about the nature of the self) it's more likely to be healthy, because the kind of identity I'm curating is about me retweeting things that relate to my sense of humour, relate to my particular political views, and things that mesh with the traditional view of the self as to do with the mind rather than the body.
Heather Widdows: Again, I don't know because I don't have any research – but I don't think the text-based nature on its own will just somehow make that more healthy. So if you think about some of the alt-right platforms that are almost all text-based and things, or some of the incel stuff that's a lot of that is text-based, on text-based platforms; there are other more visual ones, but a lot of that's text-based, and that's pretty unhealthy. So I don't know.
Aashish Reddy: I have another quote from you here. I want to know firstly how this relates to some of the questions we were just asking you – as you say, this book was written before much of the virtual selfie concert took off. And then I have a separate question. So you say, “While images of beautiful women might have represented the virtues, actual flesh and blood, particularly beautiful, women were regarded suspiciously and potentially as morally corrupting; the devil’s gateway”. So first, I'd just like to relate to the thing that we were just talking about. And secondly, the context in which you say this is as a variation on the way that goodness and beauty are often equated. And I'm just curious why this isn’t simply a counter example to the claims you’re making in that chapter.
Heather Widdows: So when I'm making that example, I'm really talking about some of the ways that philosophy has generally treated bodies. So lots of feminist philosophers have written about the dualism between mind and body, reason and emotion, male and female; and that, almost neglect of the body, which many, many philosophers have written about, and the focus on the mind, the ghost in the machine, the lack of attention to embodiedness and this being fundamental to who people are. So that's all I'm talking about there is this kind of long-standing, well-recognised lack of attention to embodiedness in philosophy.
Aashish Reddy: Okay. Here’s you further: “Indeed, beautifying is one of the ways in which women are made women.” What does that mean?
Heather Widdows: So that's Simone de Beauvoir’s quote about femininity being something that is created, it's not natural, it's not psychological, it's something that we make. One of the things that I'm lecturing on next week actually is whether or not, as we see men engaging in more and more beauty practices, more unrealistic ideals, meaning some of the traditional feminist arguments break down. But also then there becomes, well, what is a man in that instance? Are men no longer born but made? And some of that relates to some of these things we were just talking about – like the manosphere. And again, this is all very, very new, so I haven't done any research on this yet, but as I start working on the virtual world and selfie culture, I will be looking at some of those manosphere spaces.
In traditional feminist arguments – you know, Simone de Beauvoir being one, but very many feminist philosophers like Andrea Dworkin and Sandra Bartky – would argue that it's learning the feminine practices that make women women. And in that traditional critique, they would argue that those also trivialize women, that beauty practices are a way to subordinate and demarcate women from men, they subordinate women both by marking them as different but also making them engage in practices that are trivial, and that men do not have to. So the classic quote from Sandra Bartky: " Soap and water [...] may be enough for him; for her they are not.” And of course that's beginning to break down.
Aashish Reddy: Now I want to push further into the meat of your argument, so I’m quoting you again: “The beauty ideal is not a single model, but a (relatively narrow) range of acceptable models. […] you must be some version of slim; hair style and hair colour can vary but some evidence of grooming is required; breast size can vary, but pertness is desirable across sizes; and so the list goes on.” So, as I read this, I wanted to think about some alternative archetypes, which again seemed to me to be counterexamples: for instance, the sweet-old grandmotherly type of woman who doesn't conform to the description that you've given, but doesn't seem in practice to be thereby judged as an ethical failure. So, would you claim that some women, for instance, in old age, can become extricated by their circumstance from the influence of the beauty ideal, or what's going on here?
Heather Widdows: So as I say in later chapters, I think the beauty ideal is spreading to more demographics, including older women, so that the pressure to attain thinness, smoothness, firmness, and youth, extends to demographics where it didn't, and that includes very many older women now that didn't used to be like that. So if you look at some of the stats in the book, so there's one about studies of about women over 60 who still feel inadequate because of their weight or their shape; it's increasingly the case sociologists are talking about a ‘stretched middle-age'– that the pressure not to age in certain demographics is already really high, and that may extend as the ideal extends. So we’re in a moment where we're watching the ideal extend, and part of what I’m doing is trying to call it out so we can see it and we can make a note, and then perhaps do things to address it. So I talk about it as both ‘stealthy’ and ‘greedy’; it's not a claim that absolutely everybody falls under it and nobody can resist it, but it is a claim that this is growing and it's becoming more dominant and more are falling under it.
And as it's a global ideal, the more dominant it becomes, and the more it normalises the harder it is to see it, and once it becomes invisible; the strongest ideals are ones that people see as more normal or natural, and then it's harder and harder to call those out. So my claim is not some kind of grandiose claim, it's a claim that these things are happening in society and philosophers are the kind of people that should be well placed to spot changing values, and therefore should be the kind of people that are going, “Hang on, this is really different”; and even if we are not very good at tracking causal results and implications, and we need the help of medics and sociologists and psychologists to do that, we should be the people that are good at recognising when values are changing and that this is fundamentally changing what human beings are and how they relate. So I'm really not making huge sweeping claims or trying to present a global view of the world, such that everybody falls exactly in.
What I'm trying to say is that “this is changing”, and “these are the trends going in this way”, and “the global ideal seems to be happening in places where it didn't used to”. So some of the examples I use are times of illness where we now have cancer charities with the tagline, I think, “WarPaint4Life”. It was about using makeup and beautification to – on some of the posters, the tagline was – “You use makeup to face the day, we use it to face cancer”, and underpinning this are all kinds of changes in values about what it is to have a good and successful life. And these are things that we weren't talking about, we're still telling our children things like, “Oh no, appearance doesn't matter”, we still don't want to believe that people get treated better by teachers or get less harsh prison sentences if they're attractive. So part of what I'm doing is just trying to say that this is an absolutely dramatic value change that seems to be sweeping. The younger you are, the more you fall into selfie culture, the more you're going to feel it. It's not a claim that absolutely everybody feels it, or that there aren't individuals to whom this doesn't apply – you know, there are, and often they're in more protected demographics. But as it becomes more dominant and demanding, the likelihood it will apply to more people, more of the time, and will become invisible, will change from beauty practices to health and hygiene practices, and then it will be so normal, it's hard to do anything about it – is what I'm worried about in the future.
Amily Clenton: A quick divergence from your book, but hopefully still on the same topic: you published an article in Psychology Today and you're talking about the emerging diversity and celebrating of different skin colours might actually be counteractive in that it obscures the reality of current beauty standards that are still very unachievable and still very exclusive. So do you think this is an inherent quality about beauty standards, or do you think they're likely to become more inclusive at times, or go on?
Heather Widdows: I don't know which article you're talking about because I have a column in Psychology Today, so I publish very, very many; but one of the things that I've claimed – and I've done some work with various bits of fashion industry – is often claims to diversity aren't very diverse. So they will usually focus on one feature of the beauty ideal (thinness, firmness, smoothness and youth) – so you'll have a magazine where the magazine cover has one older model, for instance, but you'll still be thin and firm and smooth; and then you'll have, you know, a couple of bigger models, but they'll still have curves in the right places, right? So you'll do diversity in one, but not very many, and in a way that reinforces, rather than challenges, the ideal, because it still makes the body really important. It's still all visual, and it's rarely something where you challenge on more than one of the dimensions so, you know, fashion companies can claim, “Ooh look, we’re doing diversity on this axis”, but then you'll look at the images, and they'll all fall into that range, while pretending diversity. So, you know, if you're fat and you're hairy and you're old, it can make you feel even further away from the ideal; so they're diverse, but they're diverse within a much smaller range than they pretend to be, so I'm quite suspicious about claims to diversity when they throw back models that are thin, firm, smooth and young.
Amily Clenton: Given that we've talked a little bit about the increase in visual culture and the emphasis that we put on images and things like that, don't you think it's more likely to become worse in that sort of trajectory, or do you think it's a bit too early to say?
Heather Widdows: So I really hope not, but unless we start taking it seriously and recognising the pressure that young women feel, and start thinking about how to respond communally and regulatorily, then I feel it will just get worse, as we treat it as trivial and unimportant, and worst of all, don't hear what people are saying about just how bad the pressure is and how much they feel like failures. Then I do worry that this will continue to extend, that we’ll continue to extend body image anxiety. And I think that the rise in the crisis of mental health is very connected to the rise in body image anxiety, and the rise in feeling that you have to have a perfect image on social media and be ‘camera ready’ all the time. I think these are deeply connected, and I think if we did more to address this, we might find that very many aspects of the mental health crisis will be addressed.
Aashish Reddy: I want to ask about the importance, or rather the unimportant of sex. So you say in your book that a person can be “judged according to the beauty ideal without the primary consideration being sexual”, and I agree; and I also don't think your analysis is actually any worse for lack of attention than you pay to sex. What's your best theory for why it turns out to be so unimportant? We are an evolved species; sexual desires are a fundamental driver of many of our actions, and shapes much of human behaviour; many aspects of society are closely tied to sexual competition; beauty is related to sex in pretty obvious ways. So why is it that it turns out to be so unimportant in the theoretical/philosophical analysis?
Heather Widdows: So when I first put together my book proposal, I thought I would have at least one chapter about sex, and particularly about some of the tension – I think my original proposal has a chapter called Looking Hot and Feeling Sexy or something. I think that was what the original chapter title was, and of course the book ended up being very different, because once we do the research and go on the journey, the arguments go the way the arguments go, the way that you can prove them, not the way you might imagine you wanted them to go. And it turns out that the more this ideal becomes dominant, the less in many ways it has to do with sexual attractiveness. So beauty, as it is emerging in this global ideal, is quite different from just physical attractiveness that you feel in real relationship to a real human body. So part of what's happening in the move to this slim, firm, smooth and young body is a move to a body that is predominantly a looked-at body. So I talk a little bit about plastic perfection; the firmness is an almost untouchable firmness. So gradually sexual attraction and beauty objectification, I think, begin to come apart – in a way thankfully, because the kind of bodies that we're creating, bodies that are unrealistic, and that very few people have...
So, I thought there would be a lot more about sex in it than there turned out to be, but I do think that the beauty ideal is becoming separate in very many ways from sexual attraction – so it might be looked-at in a sexual way, but it doesn't have to be at all, and I just think the arguments begin to separate. Certainly, they separate in the sense of some of the evolutionary arguments about beauty relating to sex start to come apart when the kind of bodies we're creating, bodies that are less able to reproduce, for instance, and that's true both in male bodies and female bodies, so I was recently talking to a medic who works in reproductive health. So very many of the exercises in drugs involved in having the “right” kind of body reduce fertility for both men and women, and when told that they need to change appearance in order to be more likely to be fertile, often people don't want to do that. So, the perception of virility becomes more important than the virility itself, and I wonder if that's part of what's going on, the perception of being attractive is more important than actually being sexually attractive; that was why the original title was Looking Hot and Feeling Sexy. But it turns out it happens in other instances too: a good example, for instance, is that you're more likely to conceive if you're in the normal to slightly overweight range, and yet the ideal that we're adopting is not that. And also people are increasingly choosing not to reproduce if they have options, because they don't want to "damage” their perfect bodies. I do think they're coming apart in quite odd ways, and as you say in ways that you don't – until you start looking at it – you really don't expect beauty and sexual attractiveness to come apart in the way that I really think it is doing in many, many ways.
Aashish Reddy: Yeah, this point about appearing virile versus being virile was kind of what I was getting at; like this meta-reason why it might be the case that a society or a social culture would evolve in a direction that caused these things to diverge rather than converge.
Heather Widdows: Claire Chambers’ new book (maybe not so new now, maybe a year or so old), Intact – she does an investigation about bodybuilding, which of course is in many ways quite virile. Part of their purpose is to look virile, but of course what all the drugs do is, for a start, it doesn't take that long before you become in fertile; they shrink sexual organs and they make you impotent, but they also gradually produce what's become known as a ‘roid gut’, which is a slightly feminised gut. And yet people don't want to stop once they start. So, it's more obvious I think with the bodybuilding community because of those feminised appearances that happen quite quickly than it is with the female ideal, because we're sort more used to appearance being so dominant. But she does a really, really interesting chapter on that; she has that as her first chapter of this book. It's really interesting.
Aashish Reddy: This nicely anticipates my next question. So I’ve got another quote from the book: “Many people judge themselves according to their success and failure in beauty terms. [...] We feel good about ourselves if we have made it to the gym, stuck to the diet, or undergone (suffered through) some procedure.” And here’s another: “’No pain, no gain’ applies across practices: whether pumping iron, feeling the burn, plucking stray hairs or undergoing cosmetic surgery.”
Now, among my own friend groups or subculture, it’s definitely the case that working out consistently, eating according to one’s goals, is perceived as good. The converse is perceived as a failure, which seems to be in accordance with your thesis. But the notion that undergoing some procedure or surgery for the purpose of looking good, being placed in that same category seems kind of alien. So for instance –
Heather Widdows: I would say that that is a very classed view. I'm sure that will be true – obviously that will be true, because that's what you're telling me – of your demographic. But if you look at different demographics – so some of the classed nature of this is that people who have the time and money for expensive gym memberships and things can be quite critical of people who attain that ideal body in another way. So there's lots of works – sociologist Debra Gimlin is brilliant on this – talk about cheating. Like, you know, if you diet properly and go to the gym, then you're good. But if you cheat and have a gastric band or something – and usually she tracks this very much as about a kind of a very class analysis. But if you read the testimonies of very many people that have saved up to have that kind of surgery, there's a new book about predominantly working-class women that go to Turkey for cosmetic surgery. And very much of it is saving up to have that persona, doing the work. And lots of the narratives that people tell are very similar. They're narratives about, “Oh, I needed to do this for me”, pride in having saved the money, but not at the expense of their children. Lots and lots of those narratives.
So it's definitely the case that in certain demographics that will be looked down on. In other demographics it won't, and it's very, very cultural. So what kind of practices are okay? And the language we talk about them in is very different from place to place demographic to demographic. But what all the practices do is lead to that body of the same type: thin, firm, smooth and young. So dieting for instance isn't something that in many places in India (there's some sociology work on this) that's okay, because of links, various cultural links. But purging and other things are; nonetheless the practices that people engage in are very similar. So I think it's definitely the case, and there's some work that suggests that it's still the case that Britain can be a bit more snobby about cosmetic surgery than say America or Brazil, where often it will be seen as something that you've spent time saving up to, and therefore it's good to do and “well done, you” for achieving it. There's also very many places in the world where cosmetic surgery isn't about individual achievement, but it's about respecting of the family. And you have cosmetic surgery in order to show family wealth and also to respect the family. And again, different narratives, but the same procedures. So some people certainly do feel that saving up and suffering through the procedure is a good thing to do and it's helped them to attain themselves. And here language differs: sometimes in some places it's the true self, sometimes it's the best self.
One of the things that complicates some of that is the relationship between health and beauty. So Kate Manne’s new book Unshrinking has just come out and just been awarded prizes that really critiques that “Oh, the practices that somehow are about health are okay, and the criticism of other practices and fatphobia are not.” And I'm deeply suspicious of putting practices like diet and exercise into the “okay category”. Very little of that – I've just talked a little bit about steroids and roid gut, but so much of that is I suspect not about health, but actually about attaining bodies of a certain acceptable type.
Aashish Reddy: This seems like it's a plausible response to some of what I'm describing. But there are other aspects of this where it feels less applicable. If I consider for instance the language used about actors when they're trying to make a shape for a movie, say. Sometimes they have to eat a lot to get into shape because you want to get big; sometimes they have to cut down in order to become ripped and thin. In both of these cases I see praise for the actor doing it. And most of these actors are taking PEDs, or they're taking steroids of some sort. But when I see accusations about this, it's always in negative light; it's always “accusations” that such-and-such a person is on steroids. I never see anyone say, “The Rock’s on steroids, and he looks great, and you should do it too because we're aspiring to this”, right? Whereas the work ethic and so on of The Rock for example, is seen as being a good thing. So it seems again here that...
Heather Widdows: So steroids are interesting because of course it's a case of, that's what we see in the public language. But when you look at what men say to each other in gyms and how people get onto it, you see very, very different languages and aspirations. And certainly when it comes to cosmetic surgery, you do see more and more; particularly, if you look at interviews in America or in Brazil, or places that are very open about cosmetic surgery, many more very positive narratives. In fact, I was preparing teaching for next week and I was using some narratives about the ways in which learned narratives around cosmetic surgery change from place to place. And some examples are ones about doctors telling them, “Of course you should do it now, why should you wait?” And they say, “Oh no, I couldn't do that. And why would an old lady like me ...”, and the doctors say, “No, you've got 40 years left. If that's going to make you happy, it would be a great thing for you to do. It would make you have the life you want.” These narratives are all very, very similar. And there's a sense in which if somewhere like Brazil is at the top of the cosmetic surgery curve, and then we can envisage that our narratives are going to go more towards that direction.
And if we think that the narratives over how much we do to our bodies and how much we care about our bodies – so the exercising and the dieting are things that might well have been looked down on not that long ago, right? This kind of like, “Why would you –”, you know... And in that instance, the class reasons – it’s the working-class men that do the boxing and things, and they’re far too concerned with their body, because we should be concerned with our mind. And as visual culture and bodies become more important, now that's more okay. So, you know, to upper-class women: stay out of the sun, do not exercise, don't have muscles. So if you're speaking about actresses, if you look to – is it January Jones who played the wife [Betty Draper] in Mad Men? So she had to lose her muscles for the part; she wanted to look like a middle-class woman in the 1960s, and the director was quite firm about making sure that all the women looked their classes, and the woman at that class at that point would not have had muscles and would have not aspired to have muscles. So you might think that the diet and the exercise is the kind of first acceptable bit of a more body changing-obsessed culture.
Aashish Reddy: So would you predict that over the next few years/decades, I will see more and more people saying, “Yes, that actor is on PEDs, and that’s fine, that’s great...”?
Heather Widdows: I don't know, I don't know exactly – I mean, I'm not that concerned about what we’ll say about the actors, I'm more concerned about what individuals – most of us, normal individuals – feel that we have to do ourselves, and I suspect unless we get a handle on this, we will see... Like we're already seeing more and more and more people doing dangerous and risky things, whether it's taking steroids or 12-year-olds buying the TikTok beauty projects that are aimed at aging skin and burning their faces with retinal. So I am absolutely convinced that we're all going to do more: so more time, more money, and more effort on our appearance and our images in the virtual world, and feel more pressure to do that. And we certainly see what's normal rising – so in different demographics it's different, but everywhere what is normal is rising, so I think I've got a line in the book that the footballer's wife might still be doing more than the footballer's mother and the footballer; everybody's doing more than they would have been doing in the previous generation, and are more concerned with their bodies than they used to be, so that the rise is continuing, and I have a chapter in the book where I look at how we might demarcate practices – so, people talk about routine and extreme practices, and there's various ways that you might demarcate them, whether it be the harmfulness, how risky they are, the time they take, whether you need third-party engagement; and the conclusion of the chapter is that actually, none of those things that people use to demarcate practices actually demarcate them: what people think are normal, the practices that they themselves do, those in their close communities and demographics do, or those that they want to do. So for some people, normal is putting on moisturiser, no makeup, nothing else. For other people, it might be right at the other extreme in having routine cosmetic surgeries. And you can see this change in demographics, so there's many, many demographics where teeth whitening, for instance, has now become necessary to be normal. Botox, so Dana Berkowitz talks about Botox in the United States, as in many demographics becoming as routine as teeth cleaning.
And then, of course, you've got the places in the world – and I mentioned Brazil as a cosmetic surgery capital – but places like South Korea, where it's something like 50% of students have surgery before they graduate, and almost everyone has an operation to get a crease in the eye, they don't naturally have one. So, the sense that this is going to rise – I think it's going to rise, and as things normalize, and then of course, we think they're okay. So, you know, go back to Victorian times and the only people who had rouged cheeks were prostitutes, so that's where you get all the cheek pinching and lip biting in Victorian novels, to get some colour in your cheeks and lips.
Aashish Reddy: It’s possible our positions are the same here, and we’re just using different language, but I’m not sure. You describe the global beauty ideal as being characterised by thinness, firmness, smoothness and youth; but that the evidence most strongly supports thinness as being global. To me – just on the level of personal incentives – this seems pretty reasonable, because when I’m overweight relative to my normal, I feel less energetic, I sleep less well, and so on. So given modern conditions, our desire to be thin (or rather, not to be fat) seems rational in the sense that when food is abundant in a society like ours, where we have excess food and obesity is more common than starvation, I would expect thinness to be associated with higher social status; and in food-scarce societies, I would expect being fat to indicate high status, signifying that you have sufficient food. And, as you were talking about, there are other things like this: another might be tanning, which in contemporary societies is seen as desirable, perhaps because it signals that you can afford holidays, but in some past societies, instead signals something negative, like that you’ve had to work outside all day or something. So when I reconfigure it in this way, it feels less problematic to me, and suggests that the social pressures are generally adaptive rather than maladaptive, and there are concerns we should definitely have at the tails, and that’s mostly what you’re concerned about. And you worry that the tail behaviour will naturally spread into the median, but in general these trends are basically adaptive.
Heather Widdows: So I guess where I differ from you there is that because it's global – if that was just true of a society like our Western society, where we've got kind of rich foods easily available... So my worry about it being global is the things that I've spoken about before, that it makes it easy to normalise, it's homogenising, it then becomes transformed from beauty and adornment practice into health and hygiene, and then required just to be normal. So gradually the bar of what you have to do just to be normal, rises. But it's not the case that it's only in those environments. So there's evidence in the book about the way that it's changed in places where fuller figures used to be more valuable, places where food is still scarce, and – it’s absolutely fascinating – in places where (in sub-Saharan Africa) it used to be fuller figures that are valued. Gradually it's not.
At the same time of course, as ‘slim disease’ was really moving people away from the bus routes at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic (and I think I detail this in my book... or maybe I don't?), but when I was thinking about working on beauty, because obviously I spent decades on global ethics before that, I was having chats about, you know, “Can I do this? Should I do this?”. And, a development worker told me at a global ethics conference – started talking to me about the use of skin lightening cream and other beauty products in some of the poorest townships in South Africa, and to the extent where people swap in their anti-retrovirals for skin lightening cream. So I think even if there are instances that you can find, where you think it just makes complete sense and is adaptive, I guess I think that the global move isn't, and the knock-on implications are about body-image anxiety, really hitting people's concepts of themselves, their identity, and not at all are just about, “Well in a society like ours, you would expect that to be valued” – I'm not sure you would. The evolutionary argument comes under real pressure by the kind of bodies that we're valuing, bodies that – as we've talked about already – are not bodies that are best placed to reproduce, are not necessarily the healthiest bodies. So, while at the surface level it might look like that, I think the more you can research what's actually going on and the knock-on effects and implications, it becomes harder and harder to take that line. If it weren't global, and if the knock-on effects weren't so devastating, then maybe we wouldn't be worrying about it and maybe I wouldn't be writing about it.
Aashish Reddy: But as you write in your book, it’s not that it’s homogenising all at once, right? It’s just a trend towards this global ideal, as you say in your answer there too. So if, in fact, my position were true, then it seems to me that as those societies that you’re talking about become more and more like ours, in the sense that food becomes less scarce (for instance), then we would expect the shift to be as you describe. And again as you say, it’s not that they immediately catch up: as you say, Brazil is ahead of the curve in some ways, others are behind in some ways... but it’s just the direction you’re concerned about. But the direction seems to accord with my explanation. And then if I also consider the fact that culture in general is becoming more globalised and homogenised – you might have concerns about that, but I don’t think they’re the concerns that you’re explicating.
Heather Widdows: So I think that what concerns me about the global beauty ideal is the homogenization and then the normalization that follows. So we're seeing that already with certain procedures - like, teeth straightening and whitening, is a really obvious one... the pinning back of protruding ears... So, when those things become normal, we start doing more things to our bodies and then we can't see them because we regard them as health and hygiene and required to be normal. And that seems to be different from other areas of globalisation. So those are the things that I'm concerned about. I don't know if that answers your question.
Amily Clenton: Changing tack slightly, then. This is another article (this one was in ABC) and you say: “Very few of us have absolutely no concern for being thin, firm, smooth, and young”. But where does our own desire begin and end? How can we tell the difference between what we want and what we have been shaped to want?
Heather Widdows: I have a lot in all of my work about choice, I think very much less is about choice than we often think. I have a line about, ethical ideals not being things that we can individually choose. I don't focus on what individuals do or don't choose to do to their bodies, I do focus on how we collectively respond, and that's why I'm so interested in pushing back on body shaming as a response to the ideal. I don't think there's any mileage in dividing people from each other by telling people that certain procedures are wrong. And I think the whole – I've talked a bit about the ‘learned narrative’, but part of the learned narrative is about the fact that you have to say that you've chosen these practices for it to be legitimate. So I just don't think any of that sort of individual focus is helpful. I say that quite clearly in Perfect Me, but I've gone much more, much more, strongly since, given the extra work I've been doing. This is where the kind of lookism projects come from, to say what we could do – and what we could do quite quickly – because a lot of this looks impossible: how do you change global norms? One thing that we could do, and transform quite quickly, is how we treat people. And we could make it as unacceptable to make negative comments about the people's bodies as we do for many other negative comments.
And, I'm particularly concerned about the shame aspect. So it wouldn't necessarily stop, but if you knew that you were going to go out and you were not going to be fat-shamed in the street or not ridiculed for, you know, having a disfigurement or for otherwise not conforming. And if you look at the Everyday Lookism stories, you can be body-shamed for absolutely anything. There's really horrific stuff on there, and if you start reading them collectively, really quite overwhelming. So it wouldn't stop people feeling that they're not good enough, it wouldn't stop very much attention, but it would reduce the pressure, if you knew that it was really unlikely that you were going to be body-shamed in public.
Amily Clenton: You've mentioned a little bit, I think in the beginning, about wanting to have an impact as it were, given that a lot of philosophy is perhaps – you know, with it being a bit of an armchair discipline, that sort of thing. How optimistic are you about government involvement in a lot of these things?
Heather Widdows: I mean, I don't think philosophy is naturally an armchair discipline. I think it's naturally concerned with how people should live and that makes it an active, really active discipline, because it's asking fundamental questions about “How should I live?” and “How should we structure society?”. And I think that's what very many philosophers have been engaged with, and how many of us still are. So you've got me and Quassim [Cassam], two really good examples of engaged philosophers. I think policymakers have been more aware of this than academics; I think academics have really let down policymakers here. Often, academics are calling things out first, but whether it's because academia is still resistant to thinking that appearance might matter, we have not been at the forefront of this, so I was talking earlier about lots of the failed digital literacy classes. As a result, we're rolling out policy interventions that are untested, counterproductive, and in some places don't work at all.
So I think there is huge appetite in policymaking and in activism and in practice: I've been doing work with an anti-bullying charity, the Anti-Bullying Alliance, rolling out some of the first appearance discrimination material for schools. Appearance bullying is the most prevalent form of bullying in schools. It comes back time after time, much more prevalent than any other form. And yet there aren't training programs because it's not a protected characteristic. We rolled out the pilot for that in the spring, and it's been taken by hundreds of teachers, and the response has been overwhelming. I don't think it takes long for some of that low-level stuff to start to change how we think and talk about appearance and take it seriously.
Likewise, I've done work across parliamentary divide. So I did a Facebook Live series with politicians of all stripes. I've been doing done work with various MPs, with various members of the House of Lords. I think there's huge appetite. There's a real worry about the rise in body-image anxiety. Very few people don't have friends or family members that have suffered from eating disorders or suffered from body image anxiety, or otherwise are concerned about how this impacts on their lives and impacts really profoundly. So I think there’s a huge appetite. But what matters is that academics get into the right places and talk in languages that people can understand. Another example is that I gave evidence to a recent parliamentary group. There were three of us experts there: So there was me, there was a psychologist, and I think there was an expert in eating disorders. Jeremy Hunt was talking about calories on menus and all three of us went “Don't do that. That is not going to make it worse. It's not going to help. It's going to be counterproductive.” Nonetheless, we have calories on menus.
Amily Clenton: Given that then, how in your experience do you find members of government to make changes in that area? Do you feel that they see that it's necessary, especially with the rising changes to mental health policy?
Heather Widdows: As soon as you get alongside people and you work with them, they were just like, “Oh my goodness, I have no idea how to do this. I'm not an ethicist. I need some help. I'm not a philosopher. I need to understand this.” So I find extreme willingness, assuming that you get out there and communicate and don't just try and browbeat people to your vision, but you try and work with people.
Recently, I was invited by the Advertising Standards Commission and there were various different representatives there, different politicians, different social media representatives. There was me and one other academic. I have never found people don't want help when you have knowledge that they need to try and do something. It's a matter of being humble and being giving too and recognizing what it is that you bring to the table. Philosophy does not bring everything to the table and that's sometimes something philosophers forget.
Aashish Reddy: Do you have any views on the work of Elinor Ostrom, of Governing the Commons?
Heather Widdows: No.
Aashish Reddy: Amily for the last question!
Amily Clenton: We've talked about this a little bit already, but I wanted to ask you where you think the issue of visual culture and body image are headed – especially with social media clearly not stopping anytime soon, and the sphere of influences growing exponentially. And it kind of seems like all these issues are becoming increasingly more widespread, but at the same time as you say, there was work to try and minimize some of the negative impacts of this. So I do realize there's a lot of factors involved in that...
Heather Widdows: I think this is why it's so important to get this work ,out there because I think they're very, very connected. And I think if you try and piecemeal address symptoms without having a real sense that this is connected to moving into a visual culture and that changes our relationship to the tech – to the tech in terms of the hardware, the phone in our hands – but also to the changing way in which tech changes bodies. Yeah, I do think that we haven't begun to get to grips with what it might be if we move into a full-on visual culture. But the image does not function like the word. It is powerful in a way the word is not. And as academics, we're steeped in the word and we just haven't really begun to take that on board. But of course we can. These are all human creations. So this isn't stuff that is out of our hands. It's all quite literally in our hands. So part of what we need to do is just be much more open about talking and thinking about these things.
Because what I find is the difference in how what I say is received is primarily coloured by the place from which it comes – from the assumptions and presumptions that people have and that different demographics have. So it's almost always the case if I go into a school with ten- and eleven-year-olds, they absolutely get it, no question. It's just immediate – and then suddenly they start telling me their stories. Without a doubt, the more highbrow and the older the audience, the more they don't want to believe it’s true. So recognising that however much we wish this wasn't important, it is important.
And then thinking about how we make the world. It’s the same old philosophical question of moral philosophy, “What is it for people to flourish?”. These are the questions, and that's why I do the work I do.