Liz Lemoning: the Media's Beautiful "Ugly" Women

It should come as no surprise that the media promotes unattainable beauty standards.  Magazines, advertisements, movies and television shows all portray models and celebrities with beyond-perfect pilates-sculpted and airbrushed bodies.  As the beauty ideal becomes less and less achievable (though cosmetic and fitness companies will tell you otherwise), even the most beautiful of actresses cannot compare to her two-dimensional counterpart.  Despite our culture's obsession with beauty, the role of the ugly woman still exists.  But what happens when even the ugly woman is exceedingly beautiful?

An article on Feministing coins the term "Liz Lemoning" to describe the practice of casting a beautiful woman as an ugly person (Chloe).  While I am unfamiliar with the character Liz Lemon (I don’t watch 30 Rock), the article mentions two other examples that I would like to examine: Rachel Berry from Glee and Betty Suarez from Ugly Betty.

Rachel Berry, Glee

Rachel Berry, of the musical dramedy Glee is the show's resident ugly girl.  She is a nerd who dresses in clothes more appropriate for a third-grader, but aside from that, Ms. Berry is pretty representative of the idealized beauty.  She is white and slender with long, shiny hair and full lips.  Still, Rachel Berry is called various names that disparage her looks such as Stubbles and Man-hands.  In episode 15 of Glee's first season, "The Power of Madonna," one of the first scenes involves another character drawing a highly distorted sketch of Rachel:

In last week's episode, "The Rocky Horror Glee Show," Rachel is quoted as saying " I don’t look like Brittany or Santana, but you still think I look hot right?"  The problem, of course, is that Rachel does look like Brittany and Santana- they are all conventionally beautiful.  

Betty Suarez, Ugly Betty

Betty Suarez is an interesting character because the actress who portrays her, America Ferrera, did have to alter her appearance (through glasses, fake bushy eyebrows, a wig and fake braces) during filming to play the role, even if the alterations only lasted until the end of the day on set.  Whereas the others simply don frumpy outfits and/or rely on jokes to build the perception that that character is ugly, Betty Suarez is farther from the beauty ideal.  Still, as the series progresses, Betty gets slimmer, experiments with make-up, and while her outfits remain garish, they do become more figure flattering.  Despite Betty’s transformation, however, the jokes about her appearance do not stop.  In season four, episode 18 of Ugly Betty (the third to last episode of the series), for example, Betty is about to tip the bellhop at a hotel in London.  She tells him to hold on while she looks for a few extra pounds in her purse and her coworker, Amanda, starts pointing to all the places on Betty’s body where she may carry a few “extra pounds”.  

Aside from the jokes disparaging her appearance, it is consistently emphasized that Betty is only beautiful on the inside.  In the episode “Queens For A Day” in the series’ first season, when Betty feels insecure due to her looks, her father tells her that her “big heart” is what matters.  In an episode in season three, Amanda confides in Betty that “when someone falls in love with [Betty], it's real,” while Amanda is never sure if she is loved for who she is or “because [she’s] so pretty.”

Why does this all matter?

    If the media’s job is to sell “a particular body aesthetic,” (Wykes 97) or beauty ideal, it seems obvious why actual ugly women would not be cast in ugly women’s roles.  Then why write roles based on ugly women at all?  Perhaps these so-called “ugly” characters are meant to be relatable or representational.  This is problematic for two reasons.

In his book History of Beauty, Umberto Eco describes how different women came to represent different ideals of beauty.  Eco says that

“in the same years the cinema offered the model of the ‘femme fatale’ as represented by

Greta Garbo and Rita Hayworth, and that of the ‘girl next door’ as played by Claudette

Colbert or Doris Day... the svelte Audrey Hepburn constituted a model for those women

who could not compete with the full-bosomed Anita Ekberg,” (Eco 425).  

    Thus, in the same way that Audrey Hepburn was supposed to represent thin women or Kate Moss is supposed to represent women who are not supermodel tall, the characters Rachel Berry and Betty Suarez are supposed to represent the ugly girls.  However, it is important to note that these images are not meant to be purely representational but are also supposed to be aspirational.  Virginia L. Blum says that these images “represent for us both what we are and what... we long to be,” (Blum 147).  In the Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf describes how “advertising aimed at women works by lowering our self-esteem,” (Wolf 276) to sell the products advertised.  By buying the products advertised at the commercial break, women believe they may be able to achieve the beauty of the stars they see on television.  Maggie Wykes elaborates that a woman “attempts to make herself in the image of womanhood presented by billboards, newspapers, magazines and television,” (Wykes 72) and that this practice is “the means of signifying self-worth, identity and subjectivity,” (Wykes 73).  That is to say that a woman’s self-worth is based on her ability to achieve the beauty ideals put forth by the media.  

This cycle of lowering women’s self esteem by promoting certain beauty ideals to encourage them to buy products (quite a mouthful, isn’t it?) leads to the second problem with using beautiful women to portray ugly women: media images are never attainable.  In her essay “Untouchable Bodies,” Virginia L. Blum warns that women identify two much with perfect media images, “thereby narrowing (at times even disrupting) the distinction between the human and the two-dimensional,” (Blum 61).  Women actually believe that it is possible to look like the heavily made-up, photoshopped and airbrushed women idealized by the media.  Since the photoshopped woman has become the new ideal and any woman whose features stray even ever-so-slightly from this such as Liz Lemon’s scar on her face, Rachel Berry’s larger nose or Betty Suarez’s extra weight is now considered “ugly.”  However, “in reality, those ‘ugly’ women look an awful lot like the beautiful ones,” (Chloe), so labeling beautiful women as “ugly” sets the beauty ideal higher still.  These types of representations set women up to fail because they cannot even achieve ugliness.  

Conclusion

It is worth noting that these shows are not entirely harmful in their representations of women.  After all, Ugly Betty told the story of a confident young woman whose greatest motivation was not love but instead a successful career.  Similarly, Rachel Berry’s motivation on Glee is to be recognized as a great singer.  Media representations of women are complicated and tied up in conflicting ideas of how women should look or act or what they should aspire to be.  Even without ugly beautiful women, aspirational images of women are damaging.  However, they become even more damaging when even what these shows portray as undesirable is unattainable.

Works Cited

Blum, Virginia L. Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery. Berkeley: University of California, 2003. Print.

Chloe. "Pretty Ugly: Can We Please Stop Pretending That Beautiful Women Aren’t Beautiful?" Feministing | Young Feminists Blogging, Organizing, Kicking Ass. 19 Mar. 2010. Web. 29 Oct. 2010.

Eco, Umberto, and Alastair McEwen. History of Beauty. New York: Rizzoli, 2004. Print.

Glee. Television.

Ugly Betty. Television.

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. New York: W. Morrow, 1991. Print.

Wykes, Maggie. "Print: Selling Sex and Slenderness." The Media and Body Image: If Looks Could Kill. London [u.a.: SAGE, 2005. Print.

Wykes, Maggie. "Print: Selling Sex and Slenderness." The Media and Body Image: If Looks Could Kill. London [u.a.: SAGE, 2005. Print.