It seems to me that, succumbing or not succumbing to the charm of the cult of thinness, beauty and eternal youth, we lose sight of one important point. And it’s about competition. But not about the competition between women in the market of eternal beauties. About the competition between mother and daughter, the toughest intra-family drama that can only happen.
Freud was a male from a patriarchal community, and it makes perfect sense that his focus was on the competition between father and son. However, believe the female therapist: neither fathers nor sons dreamed of the intensity of passions unfolding in the “female half”.
In fact, there is nothing wrong with competition, it is a natural and necessary part of the identification process. To agree to become a woman, you need to compare yourself with your mother. And, strictly speaking, a competitive skirmish occurs twice in every woman’s life. At first, the gentle oedipal five-year plan hopelessly loses this competition. She must lose it, because this is her only chance, firstly, to understand what kind of girl she needs and wants to be — beautiful, skillful, gentle, strong, like a mother, and secondly, to form in herself the ability to build relationships not only with her father but also with other men in the future.
There are such girls, from very “happy” families, who in this phase won the competition with their mother and won over their father. We are not talking about literal incest, of course, but about a strong, stable father-daughter bond, deeper and more intense than the father-mother relationship. Sometimes this is due to a conflict in the relationship between mother and father, which no one wants to recognize, sometimes it is due to the fact that the mother voluntarily steps aside, giving up the championship to her daughter.
It is not right. A girl has to lose to become a woman. Winning the first round means losing her adult life. Such girls are unable to build a relationship with a man and start a family — how can a real relationship, with its knots and hitches, compare with a fantasy ideal relationship with a male father?
But this fight has a second round. And here in it the daughter certainly wins. It happens when a girl is ready to become a woman, enter the adult world, get married, or simply separate from her parents. She walks, shining with the beauty of youth, and the mother steps back, recognizing that the time has come for her to move into a different phase of life, that they no longer play with her daughter on the same field. This enables the daughter to become a mother herself.
In fact, this is still the case in most functional families. However, the beauty industry is now intensively interfering with the natural dynamics of a woman’s development, dictating: you should not grow old! You can stay forever young! You may never enter the dormant phase, you must continue to bloom! 40 is the new 20, 70 is the new 30! Be forever young!
What’s wrong with this message? Is it bad to stay forever young and attractive? The problem is that it is difficult and sometimes impossible for a daughter to compete with the beauty created by the experienced hands of plastic surgeons, cosmetologists and makeup artists. Natural, natural beauty is rarely bright and perfect — it always has small «flaws» that make it alive, real. It is difficult to compete with eyebrows tattooed in the right place on the face in order to create the most harmonious look, with a neat “Greek” nose lined, lips, breasts, buttocks enlarged with silicone, with skin perfectly smoothed with Botox injections and BB cream …
For a narcissistic mother, competition is unbearable, the idea that someone can be «sweeter, rosier and whiter» is intolerable.
In addition, on the side of the young mother is the experience of interacting with her body, the knowledge of what suits her, which advantageously emphasizes her appearance. The young daughter still has a long way to go through the phase of experimentation with her appearance (remember: “if a woman has not learned to be beautiful before the age of 30, then she is a fool” — until 30!).
There is another, no less important, aspect. «Made» beauty is expensive. Money, time and suffering are invested in it. A huge number of procedures that rejuvenate the face and body are traumatic and painful. This makes you feel your value in a special way — the value as an object of effort, investment. An investment in beauty is an investment in your own narcissism.
For a narcissistic mother, competition is intolerable, the idea that someone can be «sweeter, rosier and whiter» is intolerable. She refuses to retreat into the shadows, to give her daughter the opportunity to shine. The most stupid ones flirt with their daughter’s fans and emphasize the flaws in her appearance. The more complex ones—simply letting self-doubt about attractiveness and mirror questions that are natural for a female teenager growing up in today’s culture—to flourish—are not supportive.
Actually this is enough. Being a teenager is already categorically difficult. Being an awkward, angular, fast-growing, pimply teenager with a mother who looks like your beautiful sister is many times harder.
And of course, this is not at all about the need to stop taking care of your body as soon as your daughter turns 16 (18, 21 and so on). Rather, it is about not interrupting the natural flow of things in efforts to maintain one’s own youth and beauty. Does it seem to us that a daughter, looking at a mother who refuses to grow up and grow old, constantly “watching herself”, will learn to be beautiful? No, rather she will learn to be insecure about her own attractiveness. She will learn to compare. She will be convinced that only by constantly reworking and improving her appearance can she get closer to the “ideal”. Because where a complete and crushing victory was programmed for her — the victory of youth — there was a gaping black hole called «imperfection».