White Women and the Beauty Hierarchy:
A Somatic Deconstruction
We’re at a moment in this country where many people are doubling down on conventional beauty standards: fake tans, weight loss drugs, the many-billion-dollar anti-aging industry. Nearly every person Trump appointed to his cabinet is either blonde or has a strong jawline.
Beauty is life itself. It’s multifaceted, holistic, and emergent. But that’s not the kind of beauty I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the beauty hierarchy: a socially constructed set of standards designed to divide, disempower, and oppress those of us socialized as women. The more you have of it, the more doors open to you — the more possibilities for power.
Women of all races have beauty privilege, but as a white woman, I have a specific place in this hierarchy. In a society long stratified along the lines of race, my proximity to beauty is inextricably intertwined with my whiteness.
It’s also true that, as women living under 10,000 years of global patriarchy, beauty is a tool long used to control us. We’re taught it will grant us access to love, opportunity, and power — but for many of us, beauty privilege is the carrot-on-a-stick that keeps us striving, performing, fearful, and small. Conforming to conventional pretty standards can work like a drug: it gives us a hit, only to rip the feeling away again and again.
All this begs the question: is beauty privilege really giving us what we want?
Spoiler alert: it’s not giving us what we want.
Many of us have early memories of our bodies being judged and objectified. For me, it started at age nine, standing in line at the grocery store with my mom. The stares of anonymous men scared me as a child and yet, living in poverty, I felt my difference from other kids at school acutely. I wanted to belong, and pretty privilege felt like my ticket to white affluence.
✨ somatic pause: Let your body respond to your own childhood memory — not with your brain, but with your shape. Close your eyes. Let yourself contort into the version of you that needed to be seen. The too-much, too-small, too-soon shape. Hold it. Now, offer it one phrase of tenderness. One hand on your heart. Breathe into whatever’s there.
As a teen, my beauty continued to be celebrated, but I was also slut-shamed, targeted, and hurt when no one was looking. The beauty hierarchy never reflected my values, but when our access to privilege interacts with our core wounding, it can become a survival strategy — eventually even shaping how we understand the world.
There seemed to be no way out of being harassed, groped, objectified, and assaulted — but maybe it was all worth it for the chance of being chosen, admired, and loved.
Privilege and Pain
As white women, it’s particularly important that we tease out how beauty interacts with both our very real trauma and the (also very real) entitlement we carry. Left to fester within us, these structures emerge in toxic behaviors. We must do the work of healing it.
In my worst moments, I forget that the world doesn't revolve around my feelings: my need to be loved and seen. I’m learning to be accountable to this attention-seeking and self-centeredness with my partner and friends, to tend to myself when needed instead of seeking connection and validation from others.
The beauty hierarchy feels like finding yourself in a dream, standing in line for a club for days not knowing if you’re going to get in or not. Why am I even standing here? Did I choose this? Can’t we just go somewhere else?
✨ somatic writing prompt: Set a timer for five minutes. Write without stopping: “Underneath pretty is…” Let it get weird. Let it get soft. Growly. Ferocious. Lazy. Bored. Erotic. Find the creature underneath the mask.
✨ somatic writing prompt: Set a timer for five minutes. Write without stopping: “Underneath pretty is…” Let it get weird. Let it get soft. Growly. Ferocious. Lazy. Bored. Erotic. Find the creature underneath the mask.
Join me for a workshop on Somatically Deconstructing Pretty Privilege. Two sessions will be held on Zoom:
Sunday, May 25th, 2025, 10am-12pm PST and
Monday, June 9th, 2025, 1 - 3pm PST
The cost is $20-75 sliding scale. Please choose the price point that works for you. No one is turned away for lack of funds. The number of participants will cap at 20 to ensure everyone can participate meaningfully.
Subverting and Empowering
It can be empowering to own your beauty, to take it back. In a world that punishes and shames our bodies, it can feel good to beat them at their own game. Yet for white women, the contradiction is that our beauty has already taken up so much space for so long.
In high school, I started experimenting with what I called “flawed beauty”: too much eyeliner, long unbrushed hair to match my unwanted pimples. My first rebellion against the perfection I couldn’t achieve. In my twenties, I sought refuge in punk culture and as a global resistance activist. I was learning that my liberation is not in appropriating other cultures, but in subverting the negative-value of my own, the negative-value of whiteness.
Regardless of your relationship to the beauty hierarchy — whether this form of social power was handed to you, forced on you, or denied you — the beauty hierarchy is another oppressive power structure that becomes hard to slough off on our path to healing and liberation.
The Somatic Inner Gaze
For many women, the story is “I’m not beautiful.” For me it’s “I’m alright, but I’ll never be beautiful enough to truly let my guard down.”
As I age, I feel that fear and insecurity creeping back in, interrupting the embodied experience of ease I’ve been cultivating. Losing our status on the beauty hierarchy can literally feel life-threatening because, for humans, belonging is safety. Belonging is survival.
Anything that lives in our bodies as a survival strategy, especially if it was formed under conditions of hardship, scarcity, or violence, must be countered somatically through corrective experiences. Your actual neurons must believe it can be different.
✨ somatic pause: If you feel up for it, grab a scrap of paper. Trace a rough outline of your body. Inside it, write down or sketch what you’re carrying today — tight jaw, achy back, restless thighs, a longing in your belly. Color or scribble in the parts that feel most alive.
It’s important not to shrink. As a white woman, subverting the beauty hierarchy doesn't have to mean playing small, being a martyr, or depriving ourselves of expression — you can’t fight shame with more shame.
We are building a world where every woman, femme, and non-binary person can enjoy the sway of their hips without fear, but we must not think of our individual path in isolation. We must find our liberation within the web of relationships we exist in.
Beauty and Accountability
We need to get smarter, more resonant with one another. In order to stay ahead of these interlocking systems of domination we must be discerning of our positionality within them.
As much as we might like it to, our personal power as a white woman doesn't automatically translate to collective liberation for women of color. We can’t beat patriarchy by tending to our wounds alone; we also have to embrace being uncomfortable, which for white women often means expanding our awareness of our impact on women and girls of color.
This can mean taking up space differently, asking ourselves what a space needs — not just what we need — and tending to our defensiveness when given feedback. The more I heal through somatics, the deeper I learn how to listen to and join with my body as it is. To notice when my inner critic gets too loud — and seek rest and retreat instead of external validation.
The power of solidarity between women increasing by 5 or 10 percent would literally change the conditions of the world as we know it. This is something we are doing as a group. It's generational, cross-racial, and our allies play an important role as well.
✨ somatic pause: Say out loud to yourself, even if it feels dumb: How I look is the least interesting thing about me. Feel the resistance. Where does it live? Throat? Chest? Belly? Keep saying it while you stay with that sensation for one full minute. Then let that sensation go — shake it out.
Let’s Be Messy as Hell
At 46, I’m no longer standing in line to get in the beauty club. My confidence comes from the quality of my relationships, my accomplishments, and what I contribute to movements for justice.
But these are our bodies — dammit. We get to enjoy them, to inhabit them fully, and experience love, joy, and grief. We get to experience the discomfort of not getting our needs met, and the abundance of our needs being met differently than we ever dreamed they could be. This is the form we get to play in. Under these masks, layers, and constructs is the source of our aliveness, life force, our vitality and our collective power to make change.
Someday this body will crumble to dust. In the meantime I seek liberation in the body I’m in, unapologetically — with all the other bodies I have the privilege to tangle with. I hear a rumbling on the horizon — a messier, more flawed, more liberated beauty for all of us.
✨ closing somatic check-in: Ask your body: What do you want right now? A stretch? A shake? A snack? A laugh? A nap? Follow one impulse, even if it makes no sense. Especially if it makes no sense.
I’m Sarah Shourd, Somatic Healer, Social Justice Movement-Strategy Coach and Narrative Change Leader. My experiences — surviving solitary confinement, leading social justice movements, and healing from personal, systemic and intergenerational trauma — have equipped me with the tools to support you on your unique healing and empowerment journey. In 2009, I was living in Syria when I was captured near the unmarked Iran-Iraq border and imprisoned by the Iranian government incommunicado in solitary confinement for 410 days. This experience has been a springboard for my work for healing, justice, and collective liberation over the last 15 years.
Want to deepen your practice? I currently have space for three new clients. I am a certified Somatic Practitioner and an Embodiment Coach trained in trauma transformation. I can guide you towards the fulfillment of your professional and personal goals. I see the majority of my clients online but also work in-person in Oakland, CA. To explore our fit, you can sign up for a free discovery call and learn more at shourdsomatics.com.
“Sarah has done the needed alchemy to make her life an offering, to use the challenges she has faced to make beauty in the world. I trust her capacity as a guide, knowing that she has, and continues to do the work of transformation, both personal and cultural.” — Aninha Livingstone, Ph.D., Psychotherapy and Soul Activism
