I. Introduction

In Dar Williams’ popular folk song “As Cool as I Am,” the female narrator addresses a male lover who consistently gapes and gawks at other women. The narrator and her lover go out dancing, and he cannot keep his eyes off other women, describing them in romantic, poetic terms. He asks, “Is it how she moves or how she looks?” She responds by saying that “it” is neither. She criticizes his judgment based solely on her appearance and not on how this “beautiful” woman feels inside, namely “lonely” just like everyone else.

Because she, too, is a woman, the narrator can identify and empathize with the feelings of the other woman in the bar. She realizes that the relentless conformity to the patriarchy’s standard of beauty is useless. Both she and the other woman feel lonely and isolated from fulfilling relationships. However, they cannot have fulfilling relationships with men because ideals of beauty and femininity are so culturally entrenched that they end up resenting not only men, but also themselves, and more importantly, other women.

At the end of the song, the narrator decides to leave her lover. Even as she gathers her things together, he stares out the kitchen window, overtly remarking that a woman he can see outside is as beautiful as an angel. By choosing to leave her lover, the narrator refuses to participate in the societal construction of ideal femininity which controls many of the social choices both men and women make, and which divides women’s bodies from women’s selves. The narrator ends questioning what her lover saw in her in the first place, but stating her preference for a partner who sees her self, not just her body. In leaving him, she refuses to let him judge her by her appearance alone.

Williams’ song is not only about the importance of fidelity in male/female romantic relationships; the narrative rejects the dominant cultural ideology, and calls for a reexamination of the value American culture places on appearance. Williams’ sharpest criticism is of the fact that beauty thinking not only weakens relationships between men and women, but also makes women competitive with each other to the point of resentment. As her chorus states, “[she] will not be afraid of women.” Instead of staying in the destructive relationship with the ‘look-ist,’ instead, the narrator chooses not to be involved in a relationship with a man at all; she “go[es] outside to join the others. [she is] the others.” Instead of submitting to her lover’s pressure on her to conform to the ideal of feminine beauty, the narrator recognizes the similarities between her own experience and that of other women, and decides to join them instead of fear them. By equating herself with the other, the narrator breaks down the stereotype her lover has set up for her, and the fear of other women dissolves.

Unfortunately, not all women are as strong as the narrator in Williams’ song, and fear the judgments of men, other women, and themselves so severely they are debilitated with obsession. Although the song calls for a change in attitudes toward beauty standards, many women take serious, sometimes even fatal, risks to attempt to live up to the ideal of femininity. Because of recent advances in technology, bodily alteration in the pursuit of perfection becomes increasingly feasible, and as the industry improves, procedures become more and more exotic. The newest trend in elective cosmetic procedures is the surgical alteration of external female genitalia, or labioplasty. While this surgery may seem quite extreme at first, upon closer examination it makes as much sense in the realm of destructive beauty thinking as does the “improvement” of a “misshapen” nose, a pair of breasts that are simply “too small,” or a stomach which is “not flat enough.”

Upon closer examination of the function of this type of surgery and how its fits into the cultuarl matrix, we notice a startling similarity between the appearances which satisfy women after surgery and the way their original anatomy looked before surgery. This similarity points to the notion that greater social pressures on women force them to respond with the desire to alter their bodies surgically, instead of learning to love their own bodies and the bodies of other women. Women’s bodies are not abnormal, they are culturally constructed. This essay will attempt to further illustrate this point.