John Legend’s “You and I” is the latest in a tradition of songs by men that assume women’s beauty is all for them.
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Last week, John Legend released the video for his single "You and I," and full disclosure: It made me cry. The video is a unique case in which a song about the natural beauty of women is paired with truly diverse images, and it's uplifting to see these women — of all ages, sizes, ethnicities — in the spotlight. But the song itself rubs the wrong way from the beginning, with opening lines to a woman who, wouldn't you know, doesn't realize she's beautiful:
You fix your makeup just so / Guess you don't know that you're beautiful / Try on every dress that you own / You were fine in my eyes a half hour ago / If your mirror won't make it any clearer I'll be the one to let you know
If it sounds familiar, it's because it's a pretty tired motif: the woman who is beautiful, but doesn't know she's beautiful, and who absolutely needs to be told that she can be liberated from her makeup and mirrors. In "The Way You Are," Bruno Mars knows that when he compliments the object of his affection, she "won't believe [him]," insisting, as the title suggests, that she's beautiful just the way she is. In "She Will Be Loved," Adam Levine's girl's got "a broken smile" and he just "want[s] to make her feel beautiful." Sammy Kershaw's titular woman in "She Don't Know She's Beautiful" is ignorant to her allure — even though, "time and time [he's] told her so" — because she's "not that kind." And then, of course, the worst offenders: the One Direction moppets who, in "What Makes You Beautiful," assured an audience of "insecure" girls — whose beauty is apparent to "everyone else in the room" but lost on them — that they "don't need makeup to cover up."
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The men who are cooing reassurances to women that they're beautiful just as they are is the equivalent of a paternalistic pat on the head, and it assumes, requires, and reinforces the idea that those women don't know this already. So let's say for the moment that this is true. Probably many women listening to the song don't believe they are beautiful, and another 10,000 words could be written on the many and varied ways that that's the fault of our mass media.
Am I mad at John Legend (and those in his camp) for writing a song attempting to undo the damages of years of his own industry's sins? No. Of course not. But I'd still rather he didn't, and here's why: These songs, which presume to assure women that they are attractive (and, by extension, worthwhile), assume that the singer's relationship to our bodies overrules our relationship with them. All of our primping — our "fixing makeup, just so" — has a pointed objective, namely to be found attractive by men. And allegedly, what a relief to find out we don't need to be doing any of it at all!
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