Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

Thursday, Mar 29, 2012 7:00 PM UTC

The message of Jennifer’s body

The "Hunger Games'" body shape controversy isn't just about curves -- it's about young women's roles in Hollywood

By Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

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Elizabeth Banks and Jennifer Lawrence in "The Hunger Games"

Jennifer Lawrence’s body — her perfectly lovely, slender-but-not-rail-thin, able body — is presenting more complications than it rightfully should. Whether it’s Hollywood blogs referring to her as having “lingering baby fat” or as being “big-boned,” or the New York Times simply stating that she didn’t look “hungry enough” to play Katniss Everdeen, the resilient hardscrabble heroine of “The Hunger Games,” all eyes are on Lawrence’s body. And, predictably, critics of the critics were quick to jump in to point out the ludicrousness of essentially calling Lawrence too hefty to play Katniss.

I’m just as tired as the next film-loving feminist of seeing the beauty myth played out ad nauseam on screens big and small. But the story here is neither Lawrence’s size nor even the Hollywood thin imperative, but rather why Lawrence was cast in the first place.

Why, in an industry that routinely casts underweight women in pretty much everything, would “The Hunger Games” team not pluck from its enormous pool of underfed talent? Katniss’ scrawniness is an actual plot point in the book; one of her recurring concerns before the games is putting on weight after a lifetime of being chronically hungry in order to both feel and appear stronger before entering the arena. (As L.V. Anderson at Slate points out, you can be starving and not be rail-thin, but that’s not how Katniss is described in the book.) In any other circumstance I might be mildly encouraged by seeing an actress cast in a major film who didn’t look emaciated: Lawrence is slender by any standard, but still curvier than many of her peers. Yet I can’t quite cheer this one, because Lawrence’s casting says more about the paucity of rich roles for young actresses than it does about any sort of shifting body standards.

“The Hunger Games” inhabits an unusual space: Not only were the books an enormous commercial success, but between the trilogy’s timing with Occupy Wall Street, a growing sense of unease about income disparity in America, and a greater amount of attention paid to feminist critique, the story is a magnet for critical analysis. Whichever actress was cast in that role was guaranteed to be taken seriously, and the producers also knew they had to cast someone who would be able to assume that guarantee with aplomb. They likely chose Lawrence because of her raw talent and her already burgeoning reputation as a Serious Actress, with her Oscar-nominated performance in “Winter’s Bone.” It was a good bet: Peter Travers says she “reveals a physical and emotional grace that’s astonishing”; Melissa Anderson at the Village Voice comments on her “particular gift for exuding iron determination”; and Salon’s own Andrew O’Hehir notes how Lawrence “commands the screen with effortless magnetism.”

But I can’t help wondering if, in casting Lawrence, they took advantage of the chance to cast someone who oh-so-slightly veered away from the strict template of beauty. It was the perfect opportunity to placate the growing number of moviegoers questioning why only anointed beauties were being cast in major films; the still-present adulation of so-called curvy performers like Kate Winslet and Beyoncé, and Melissa McCarthy’s popular and critical embrace after “Bridesmaids,” showed that audiences were hungry for women who didn’t look like they were starved.

As a feminist moviegoer who is rightfully tired of seeing the beauty imperative stamped across every film I see, I’m the prime target for being placated by this gesture. Lawrence’s body, by being a shade heavier than her contemporaries’, becomes a statement: Her body legitimizes the film, and also legitimizes Katniss. It literally adds more weight to the character. “We can’t have an insubstantial person play [Katniss],” director Gary Ross told Entertainment Weekly. He was speaking of the psychic weight Lawrence brought to the role, not her physical weight. But when Hollywood defaults to rail-thin beauties for every role out there, is it any wonder the two become conflated?

Lawrence’s casting isn’t really the problem; it’s the dearth of complex, layered roles for actresses her age, who are more often cast as flimsy love interests with the barest of personality quirks to make her “relatable.” (“500 Days of Summer,” anyone?) Since most roles for that age group are written to be basically interchangeable, it makes sense that possessing another sort of gravitas — a figure that barely bent the rules of Hollywood norms — would be an asset during casting. (We saw much the same with Kate Winslet, another talented actress who, from a very young age, rarely got to do comedy in part because her womanly figure made it easier for casting agents to see her in roles requiring emotional maturity.)

The parade of romantic comedies, “quirky girl” roles, and male-fantasy ciphers (sorry, Lisbeth Salander, I’m looking at you) offers types, not characters. Even actresses once deemed “serious” are too often offered paltry material: Kristen Stewart’s talent shone even in child-actor roles like “Panic Room,” but it is largely wasted on Bella, who could be played by essentially any actress able to stand upright. And when one of the best roles for young actresses is a Muggle, we’re in a sorry state of affairs. If we had meatier roles for women, the search to find the most “substantial” actress to fill the role might not feel as urgent. And perhaps that would have allowed a similarly talented actress who fit Collins’ physical description of Katniss (including the dark hair and “olive skin” that made some question why the role went to a white actress) to inhabit the role.

The meaty roles for women have become concentrated among a handful of actresses. We see this most clearly in niche roles, like sexy-lady-over-60 — I mean, name two who aren’t Helen Mirren. It’s a little more diffuse for midcareer actresses (think Rachel Weisz and Cate Blanchett) but actresses under 25 are more likely to be cast as a talking cream puff than anything that allows for nuance.

In the end, I do think Lawrence was an excellent choice for the role, and I’m not trying to nitpick her casting or performance; books-to-films are rarely known for their fidelity to the original, and “The Hunger Games” got it right more often than not. Most important, I’m not trying to nitpick her figure, which, in a normal world, would be understood as a tool a talented actress plays to embody a character who, despite her impoverished hunger, never lapses into frailty. More than that, I’d like for her body to be beside the point. But in the climate we currently have for roles for young actresses, that’s an impossibility.

Monday, Feb 27, 2012 8:28 PM UTC

The mainstream myth about eating disorders

A new awareness campaign once again ties eating disorders directly to body image. The reality is much more complex

By Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

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The mainstream myth about eating disorders

(Credit: The Renfrew Center)

A longer version of this piece originally appeared on Autumn Whitefield-Madrano's Open Salon blog.

For National Eating Disorders Awareness Week—which starts today—the Renfrew Center, one of the best-known eating disorder treatment facilities in the United States,is sponsoring a new campaign. Called “Barefaced and Beautiful,” it’s encouraging women to post photos of themselves on various social media without any makeup. The point is to … well, they sort of lost me on that. I think the idea is to display pride in one’s natural, unadorned self, the idea being that … you don’t need to … adorn yourself … with an eating disorder?

I’m being intentionally dense here. Obviously the idea was to touch on the role of appearance dissatisfaction in eating disorders, using something plenty of people wear — makeup — as an entry point for talking about the larger issue. (Certainly it’s more on target than cryptically posting the color of your bra on Facebook for breast cancer awareness.) And for something like a week designed to raise awareness about eating disorders, you need a campaign that’s simple, accessible and attention-grabbing. But not only does the no-makeup rally willfully ignore the myriad reasons women wear makeup in favor of a one-dimensional shame-based explanation, it treats bodily dissatisfaction as the cause, not a symptom, of eating disorders. And if we keep the focus of eating disorder conversations on women’s bodies, we’re doing exactly what women with eating disorders do to themselves.

We should be wary of conflating body image and eating disorders, because they’re not nearly as connected as they’re made out to be. It’s not like she who has the worst body image develops the worst eating disorder, or that people whose body image is average are immune from eating disorders. (I have yet to meet a woman with an active eating disorder who has a good body image, but then again, I don’t know tons of women with a good body image to begin with.) I’m baffled that Renfrew chose the makeup hook for its NEDA campaign, unless the idea really was just to raise awareness of the existence of eating disorders. (“Anorexic” has been a coverline of enough celebrity magazines that I don’t think we need any more awareness of that elementary sort.) Yes, makeup is deeply tied to our ideas of self-presentation. It’s also a method of controlling the way you’re seen, and eating disorders are rooted in control. But none of that shows up in the Renfrew campaign; instead, it’s all about appearance dissatisfaction, as though that alone can set off a disease that ravages one’s life.

Eating disorders are complex beasts, with not-great recovery prospects and the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. We don’t entirely know what causes eating disorders, but last year when I interviewed Sunny Sea Gold, author of “Food, the Good Girl’s Drug“ and a recovered binge eater herself, she broke it down nicely:

Therapists pretty much agree that there are three main causes of eating disorders, and most of us who get them have a combination of the three. One is your genetics. Second is your physiology, like the biology of your actual brain — your personality…. The third thing is environment. Environment is broken into two parts: the environment of your home, what your mom and dad said to you, the behaviors they modeled. The other part of environment is culture. So about one-sixth of eating disorders can be blamed on cultural environment, like the pictures we’re shown… If we magically were able to suddenly change the images we see in order to be diverse in all ways, gradually that part of the pressure would relieve itself. But it wouldn’t relieve that need of a girl to control her food intake because she can’t control her life.

It’s that last part that continues to get short shrift in the popular media. I get why the press might latch onto the thin imperative as the root cause of eating disorders: Media outlets love nothing more than to generically critique themselves (what women’s magazine hasn’t covered the problem of unrealistic body ideals formed by… the media?). Less cynically, poor body image is something most of us have experienced at some point; using this as a hook for readers to empathize with eating disorder patients works beautifully. Plenty of people have dieted to lose weight for aesthetic reasons, and the disordered thought loop that makes a satisfying eating disorder story — I was obsessed with food! — is mimicked in the dieting mind-set. So the average reader may think she’s identifying with the subject, not realizing that what she’s identifying with are the symptoms of an eating disorder: the restriction of food, or the overconsumption of it, the vigilant attention paid. But the eating disorder doesn’t lie within its symptoms. It lies within its causes.

Listen, I’m not saying that there’s no connection between appearance and eating disorders. Of course there is. And body image is an essential topic to so many women’s lives — including women who have never exhibited a single eating disorder symptom in their life. Do I even need to point out the ways in which having poor body image is a drain of our reserves? Of enormous intellectual and psychic energy? Of time, of money, of already precious resources? Of emotion? Do I need to ask how many times women have asked “Do I look fat in this?” because we lack the words to ask for support and tenderness? As long as we have poor body image, we walk through this world ashamed. So, yes, we need body image work, and we’ve needed it for a long time. And a week devoted to eating disorder education is a good time to reinvigorate that conversation.

But eating disorders do not run parallel alongside a track of bodily dissatisfaction, and the more we conflate the two, the less we’re tackling the true complexity of eating disorders, and the less we’re looking at the threads that unite patients more deeply than hating their thighs. We’re not looking at perfectionism, or the twin sisters of compliance and rebellion, and how all of these play out in the lifetime of an eating disorder. We’re not looking at biology, or heredity, or giving proper diligence to plain old depression and anxiety. Hell, we’re not looking at stress. We’re not looking at choice, autonomy or modernity. We’re not looking at the role of trauma, or sex, or comorbidity with addiction. And it is impossible to treat eating disorders without treating all of these as seriously — no, more seriously than — body image.

It’s one thing for the media to treat body image with greater weight than, say, family dynamics in eating disorders. It’s quite another for a treatment clinic to do the same. The Renfrew Center certainly doesn’t take this approach in treating its patients. When I was treated at Renfrew for my own eating disorder a few years ago, I was repeatedly struck by how little body image came up as a topic, both from the counselors and my fellow patients. That’s not to say it wasn’t important; it was more that we’d all thought about our bodies so much by the time we landed in treatment that we were chomping at the bit to give voice to the things that we truly needed to be able to talk about. I could deconstruct body standards before treatment as fluently as I can now. But before entering Renfrew I had no words to tell you about the factors that took me 25 years deep into an eating disorder before I committed to getting help.

The link between appearance and eating disorders isn’t that one causes the other; it’s that they’re both partly rooted in expectations of properly gendered behavior. (It’s worth noting here that while plenty of straight men develop eating disorders, gay men are at higher risk.) To untangle the social angle of eating disorders, we need to look beyond the mere existence of the thin imperative and look at what it says about the role of women: that we are to be perfect, controlled, managed and compliant — themes that come up repeatedly with eating disorder patients, themes that get to the crux of the matter more directly, without taking the meandering detour through our bodies.

Makeup, too, can say a lot about those issues. It’s not the worst motif Renfrew could have chosen for its campaign. Nor is it the best. I’m no P.R. expert; I have no idea how the clinic could have better channeled its extraordinary work into a simple campaign for the public to engage with. I just know that by the time I was discharged from Renfrew, I’d finally begun to learn that my dissatisfaction with my body wasn’t causing my eating disorder; it was merely a symptom of my disease, like restricting my food intake or binge eating. I’d begun to take the focus off my body and put it into understanding the roots of my perfectionism, my people-pleasing, my family history, my silent shrieks of rebellion.

I’d begun to understand that loving my body wasn’t the point. The point wasn’t even to like it. The point was to learn how to eat.

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Wednesday, Feb 1, 2012 8:30 PM UTC

In defense of ladyblogs

Yes, they've turned the Internet into an adult slumber party -- but that's a good thing

By Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

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wisiel via Shutterstock

A longer version of this piece originally appeared on Autumn Whitefield-Madrano's Open Salon blog.

As a feminist who started my career at Ms. and wound my way through Glamour and Playboy before winding up at CosmoGIRL! — the exclamation point was part of the name — finding Jezebel shortly after its 2007 launch was delicious. I enjoyed it as a reader, and I enjoyed it even more as a worker in the industry they frequently critiqued, especially as I learned that some of their writers had been in my position: simultaneously excited and dismayed to be in the “pink ghetto,” eager to up the feminist content in glossy lady mags but frustrated by the conditions that Gloria Steinem labeled a “velvet steamroller.”

So it’s not surprising that I’m more kindly disposed to ladyblogs than n+1’s Molly Fischer appears to be. I was 30 when Jezebel launched, and still eager for what blogs of any sort provided; Fischer, at 20, had gone through adolescence with public critique a click away. I’ve also contributed to two of the four sites Fischer critiques (Jezebel and the Hairpin), undoubtedly coloring my attitude toward them. I cannot pretend impartiality.

I admit to being both excited by and uneasy about the n+1 piece. The whole article is worth a read, but in a nutshell, she looks at the evolution of ladyblogs, sites that give traditional women’s topics signature treatment. (Seventeen assures you that masturbating is totally normal; Rookie tells you how to do it.) The bigger the sites get, the more they adhere to what Fischer frames as a particular form of triteness endemic to ladyblogs, in which Zooey Deschanel is shunned but eco-friendly cat bonnets are squeal-worthy. Drained of the gravitas of other alternative women’s media, like explicitly feminist spaces, the potential for ladyblogs to become a true alternative to women’s glossies becomes watered down; the tool for revolution is rendered in scratch ‘n’ sniff. “The Internet, it turned out, was a place to make people like you: the world’s biggest slumber party, and the best place to trade tokens of slumber party intimacy—makeup tips, girl crushes, endless inside jokes,” Fischer writes. “The notion that women might share some fundamental experience and interests, a notion on which women’s websites would seem to depend—’sisterhood,’ let’s call it—has curdled into BFF-ship.”

What this argument overlooks is that a slumber party is sisterhood. Junior high slumber parties might have brought anything from makeovers to pained sobs over family dysfunction to raging tear-downs of pervy gym teachers. The adult slumber party touches on these, with our adult wisdom added to the mix. The voices of women online have brought me my birth control (“Ask Me About My Mirena!”), lessened my shame about my belly bulge, shined an uncomfortable light on the way social and personal notions of beauty can collide, and opened my mind to what I, as a biological woman, can learn about my own position in society from trans women. There’s fluff, of course (“Watch Kristen Bell Adorably Lose Her Shit Over a Sloth”), but just as silliness coexists alongside our more meaningful concerns, fluffy pieces can comfortably coexist alongside essays on healing from sexual assault. (In fact, for some of us, the fluff was a way to heal.) The slumber party goes all night, after all.

By talking about issues particular to women and treating them as though they matter, we create sisterhood. Ladyblogs do that in tones earnest, flip and everywhere in between; the “Women Laughing Alone With Salad” Hairpin post Fischer mentions is downright effervescent, and it went viral because it brilliantly encapsulated the way women are painted into a corner where if we’re happy to be eating, it must be because we’re being guilt-free. The post caught on because we all got it, and because we were all fed up with it too. Women laughing alone with salad was, in its own way, sisterhood, and to dismiss it as mere quirk is to dismiss the day-to-day stuff that makes up the particulars of a woman’s life.

Fischer ends her piece with a rallying cry for sites that stem from “the notion that women might share some fundamental experience and interests,” but I’m not convinced that the sites in question aren’t doing exactly that. They’re doing them in a more lightweight fashion than Fischer might desire, but the things that constitute gravitas (formality, for example) are frequently structures that purposefully omit the validity of the personal, that look to an “objective” viewpoint (as if there is any such thing) as the end-all, be-all. That is, they’re structures that dismiss the ways plenty of women have written for centuries. Here it comes, that clichéd rallying cry we feminists say over and over: The personal is political.

So it’s unclear what Fischer wants the reader to do — what, when I worked in women’s glossy magazines, we called “the takeaway.” Are we to eschew the Hairpin in favor of today’s equivalent of the Bimonthly Period, the newsletter of the women’s resource center Fischer’s mother founded during her college years? Sites like Feministing, Pandagon and Feministe play a crucial role in feminism, and therefore in women’s lives, even for women who have never heard of these sites, as they keep the activist fires burning. They can also occasionally feel alienating. I greatly enjoyed my guest blogging stint at Feministe last summer, but I also walked away from it understanding, for the first time, why some people whose politics roughly parallel mine refuse to call themselves feminists. For every commenter who thoughtfully critiqued my message, there would be one who’d say I was a tool of the patriarchy, and another who’d accuse me of abusing my class privilege. It’s a vibrant, razor-sharp community and I was honored to be a part of it, but my point is, if explicitly feminist blogs are the only acceptable online outlet for feminists to inhabit, we’d get exhausted mighty quickly.

Fischer hits plenty of nails on the head (you know, my opinions being the bed of nails), especially her questioning of the age-appropriateness of ladyblogs’ tone. I enjoy Rookie, helmed by 15-year-old Tavi Gevinson; in fact, I enjoy Rookie so much at age 35 that I began to wonder how many teenagers actually read it. I’ll happily cheer unabashed femininity, but like Fischer I’m wary of mass numbers of adult women inhabiting teen spaces. In fact, many of my feelings on this topic can be neatly summed up by an excellent Julie Klausner piece that — oops! — ran in Jezebel.

Still, despite finding aspects of adult-girl culture downright creepy (Hello Kitty?), I see other aspects as liberating. Where women’s magazines place readers on a trajectory of traditional womanhood — teenager to single woman to mommy to retiree — ladyblogs generally treat their readers as though they’re child-free adult women. Ladyblogs don’t mommy-track their readers, and that’s part of why “lady” makes so much sense in describing them. Classically speaking, ladies were put into a somewhat separate class. Ladies of recent centuries had social status; earlier, they had feudal privileges. The ladyblogs don’t use lady in that sense, but it carries a separatist air: We needn’t be quite as serious as we might when using the broader term “women,” but we don’t want to be girls. Fischer asserts that “On the ladyblogs, adult womanhood is a source of discomfort, and so when we write posts or comments, we tend to call ourselves ladies.” I’d argue the opposite: On the ladyblogs, adult womanhood is a given, and within our shared womanhood we carve out a comfortable space we can all inhabit. Within ladyblogs, we all become ladies.

The lingo may be why the presumably adult women on the ladyblogs (Rookie excluded, as it is aimed at teenagers) might seem to be clinging to girlhood. Fischer questions both the hallmarks of ladyblog style and the way its commenters pick up on it. In my own writing I rilly rilly try to avoid the clichés of the ladysphere (amirite, ladies?), because I don’t want to rely on those methods to convey my point. But as Emily Gould points out, it’s not like “commenter sycophancy” is particular to the ladyblogs. Still, it’s particularly easy to slip into ladysphere lingo, for the very reasons these clichés evolved in the first place: When skillfully employed, lady mags’ “endemic verbal tics” connote personality. Instead of the self-seriousness of magazines, lady lingo gives a tilt to the voice, one that implies we’re all in it together (which, again, is why it’s contagious). The tics serve as a friendly politesse, a way of conveying that you’re typing with a smile.

In fact, that seems to be Fischer’s larger point, and one I’m ambivalent on: Ladybloggers and their commenters are typing with a smile. “They bake pies with low-hanging fruit: they are helpful, agreeable, relatable, and above all likable,” Fischer writes. “Surely one can’t, and shouldn’t, strive to like and be liked all the time. But how else can one be?” (I couldn’t help but wonder how much time Fischer spent actually wading around in comments sections. The culture of “like” looms large, but ladyblog commenters can get vicious, and they’re certainly not afraid to disagree.)

The point is an excellent one, but two key points give me pause. First: What’s so wrong about wanting to be liked? I want to be liked; I want my writing to be liked. When I started the Beheld I repeatedly said that all I wanted was to be a part of the conversation. Some writers become a part of the conversation by being controversial, but that’s not my style. I’m a good girl from birth, and it’s built into me to want to be liked. But being liked isn’t my goal in writing; likability is a tool I use to pave my way toward the larger goal of being a part of the conversation, and occasionally hosting it too. There’s plenty to critique about women having a compulsive need to be liked, and it’s something I’ve wrestled with a good deal on a personal level. But I’m not going to apologize for couching arguments in a softer way than I would if my goal were to win.

But the larger issue here about likability is this: Maybe if more women writers were published in gender-neutral publications, writing stories that treat “women’s issues” as people issues, we wouldn’t be paranoid about being so fucking likable. This is a much deeper issue than I’m able to address here, and since most of my bylines have been in explicitly female-oriented spaces, I’m not particularly credible on this front. What I’ll say is that I’m not alone in being a female writer who writes about women’s issues who would be happy to publish in more gender-neutral spaces — and that I rarely pitch those spaces because there’s still a little voice inside me telling me that what I write about is just girl stuff. And people, this is what I do, every day: I write about girl stuff, and I treat it with the gravitas it has in my own life. But that voice is still there, and it’s a result of all sorts of things: internalized oppression, the realities of the “pink ghetto” of women’s issues, fear that if I did start writing more for gender-neutral outlets I’d have to face harsher criticisms than I usually do (the only time I’ve been forthrightly called stupid is from self-identified male commenters, and never on ladyblogs).

Despite my misgivings, I liked Fischer’s piece. I like the questions it asks, and I just like that it exists. Recent discussions about women writers and where our bylines ought to be need to continue, and they can’t continue in an authentic manner if we’re afraid of critiquing one another. Ladyblogs aren’t above reproach or critique, and given that some of them serve as watchdogs to traditional women’s media, if we become lax in watching the watchdogs we’re perpetuating the problem. I just don’t want the conversation to be a ping-pong of should we or shouldn’t we, of ladyblogs versus the rest of the Internet. I want the sentiment behind Fischer’s piece to be explored so that whatever these spaces look like in five years, they’re serving women’s needs even more.

Perhaps it’s the women’s magazine veteran in me, but I want a “takeaway” from Fischer’s piece, and I want it to be something like this: We’re in an interesting time as far as gender and access to the public, and we’re also at a time when “voice” is a prime asset for online visibility — “voice” being something women writers have traditionally been told they excel at. We’re also living in a time of fragmented, personally curated information streams, one in which a person could read a handful of sites — even ladyblogs, depending on the blog — and have a reasonable handle on what’s going on in the world. So we’re at the era, and if the proliferation of ladyblogs is any indication, we’ve got the talent. Now what are we going to do with it?

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Saturday, Oct 29, 2011 5:00 PM UTC

After I left my abusive boyfriend

I transformed myself when we split, but it wasn't just about reclaiming my self-worth. It was about becoming normal

By Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

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The author (Credit: Photo courtesy of the author)

A longer version of this piece originally appeared on Autumn Whitefield-Madrano's Open Salon blog.

This isn’t a story about an abusive relationship. This is a story about what happened next.

I decided to leave my boyfriend not because he had hurt me, but because I was turning 30. He had hurt me, but by the time I left him, it had been four years since he’d harmed me. Our first year together was violent; eventually he was arrested for domestic assault, and he became one of the small percentage of men to go through a batterer intervention program and never attack their partner again. For the years that followed his arrest, I stayed with him because I needed to prove to myself that there was a reason I’d stayed in the first place. The relationship was never a good one, but by the end, it was tolerable. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in a passable relationship. That is why I left.

A few things happened around the time I decided to leave. First, I lost a lot of weight. Then I bought new clothes, clothes that were a far cry from the jeans-and-hoodies gear I’d adopted to avoid attracting attention. I started wearing skirts and cute little dresses with cute little heels. I got a shorter, more daring haircut; with my diminished size I began to look nearly gamine. Exercising made my skin glow. I discovered liquid eyeliner. “When did you become such a babe?” a co-worker asked. “You’ve been an undercover hottie all this time,” said another. I would remember this as I’d go to the gym or plop down sums of money on the sorts of clothes that had been unimaginable only months before.

You might think, as I did at the time, that my self-guided makeover was about rediscovering my self-worth. It was partly that, yes: When your “emergency contact” is the same person at whose hands you have suffered an emergency, your sense of self-worth isn’t exactly at its healthiest. But this physical transformation wasn’t just about restoring my self-esteem.

When you’re in an abusive relationship, or at least when you are me in an abusive relationship, you don’t recognize how standard your story is. You think that you’re special. That he’s special, that he needs your help and that’s why you can’t leave; that you’re special for recognizing what a great gift you’ve been given, despite its dubious disguise. I never bought into the “he hits me because he loves me” cliche, but I came close: I stayed because I truly believed I alone was special enough to see through the abuse to see him, and us, for what was really there. It was an isolating belief — another characteristic of abuse, one I didn’t recognize at the time — but moreover, it was a combustible mixture of arrogance and piss-poor self-esteem, and one that made me feel unqualified to ever play the role of Just Another Person.

After I left the relationship I’d finally recognized as anything but special, I wanted nothing more than to be unremarkable. Striving to be conventionally pretty was my way of reentering the world of, well, convention. It was no accident that the first post-breakup date I accepted was with the most conventional man I’ve ever gone out with: a hockey-loving lawyer with a tribal armband tattoo who used the term “bro” without irony. I needed to prove that the “special” men weren’t the only ones who would see me and want to see more. So I put on a pretty little dress with pretty little lingerie underneath, and I let him buy me dinner. I showed little of my inner self to him — I wasn’t ready for that, and I knew he wasn’t the one to show myself to anyway. But eagerly, and with every convention a pretty girl might use on a good-looking bro, I showed him the rest.

Beauty became a tool that allowed me to begin to believe that I was worth being seen. After years of longing for even a single day when the first thought that entered my mind in the morning would have nothing to do with him, after years of exhausting my every resource to try to convince my family and friends and boss and above all myself that I could handle it, the stream of assurance I got from looking pretty in an everyday, pedestrian, stock-photo, conventional sort of way was a lifeline. I let the slow drip of looking unremarkably pretty sustain me while I began the real work of rebuilding. Beauty — or rather, giving myself the tools of banal, run-of-the-mill, utterly ordinary prettiness — allowed me to reconstruct a part of myself that had gone mute for years. And then I constructed another, and another, and another.

Eventually, I abandoned my strict adherence to this new style. The cute little dresses, the high heels, the smart haircut: In embracing that part of myself to the exclusion of all others, I was still reacting to a desperately unhappy time of my life. I wore red nail polish because my ex hated it; I wore heels because he liked me so much in sneakers. I wore dresses because, for the first time in years, I truly wanted to be seen. I embraced a conventionally feminine look for a time because I needed to radically alter how I presented myself to the world.

People who are recovering from difficult situations are often told to draw from their “inner strength” — good advice that forgets that sometimes, every gram of inner strength is going toward just holding yourself together. And with abuse, which is known for its power to erase the victim’s identity, the concept of “inner strength” is particularly questionable: You can’t draw from inner strength when you feel like nothing is there. I needed to draw from outer strength; I needed a routine that would help me reconstruct. I eventually got to reconstructing the inside. But I needed the framework first.

Attention to one’s appearance cannot be the end point of becoming our richest selves. But for some — for me — it can be a beginning.

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Autumn Whitefield-Madrano examines beauty at The Beheld. Her essays have appeared in Glamour, Marie Claire, and Jezebel, and she is a contributing editor at The New Inquiry.