If Anything, Beauty Standards Are Higher

“I Feel Pretty” is based on a pretty little lie: Looks don’t matter. It’s what’s on the inside that counts.

In the film, the down- on-herself Renee (played by Amy Schumer) hits her head in a SoulCycle accident and awakens believing that she has become supermodel-hot. She revels in it — charging into a bikini contest, snagging a promotion and basking in the affections of a beefy corporate scion — only to discover that her looks never changed a bit. The benefits she thought she accrued through beauty were won instead through her newfound self- confidence.

The movie suggests that the only thing holding back regular-looking women is their belief that looking regular holds them back at all. That attitude puts the onus on individual women to improve their self- esteem instead of criticizing societal beauty standards. The reality is that expectations for female appearances have never been higher.

This new beauty-standard denialism courses through cosmetics ads, fitness instructor monologues, Instagram captions and, increasingly, pop feminist principles. In the forthcoming book “Perfect Me,” Heather Widdows, a philosophy professor at the University of Birmingham, England, argues that the pressures on women to appear thinner, younger and firmer are stronger than ever. Keeping up appearances is no longer a superficial pursuit; it’s an ethical one, too.

So now corporate entities are cynically encouraging women to engage in beauty and fitness routines to become better people, not more attractive ones.

The sentiment has become a staple of the beauty, excuse me, “wellness” industry. Weight Watchers has pivoted to offering “lifestyle” solutions instead of “diet” tips, though with the same (now unspoken) goal of becoming thinner. And SoulCycle frames the fitness craze as a moral imperative: “With every pedal stroke, our minds clear and we connect with our true and best selves.”

“Shallow Hal” — the 2001 comedy in which Jack Black falls in love with Gwyneth Paltrow-in-a-fatsuit after being hypnotized into thinking she looks like Gwyneth Paltrow not-ina-fatsuit — located extreme beauty standards in the minds of bad men. “I Feel Pretty” places the blame on women. The truth is that the locus of responsibility is maddeningly elusive. Social media, though, serves as an arbiter of beauty standards.

Along with YouTube makeup tutorials and Instagram fashion influencers, beauty-standard denialism has exploded online. Social media puts ever more pressure on appearances, but also on projecting politically correct politics, including promoting concepts like body positivity, self-acceptance and “expanding” the beauty ideal to incorporate diverse bodies. Women are expected to perform femininity and feminism at once.

Beauty-standard denialism is being pushed by “I Feel Pretty” and by its critics, too. When the trailer was released, a backlash brewed among feminist commentators who rejected the idea that the white, blond, ultrafeminine Ms. Schumer had been cast as somehow less than gorgeous.

It’s become taboo to admit that the societal ideal is a highly specific standard that hardly anybody can live up to.

Watching the controversy around “I Feel Pretty” unfold, I was reminded of a document on the website Vulture that charts how female characters are described in the screenplays of famous films. Many of the women hailed as “strong fe- male characters” are nevertheless required to hew to the same physical requirements — beautiful, young and small. For example, the “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” protagonist Lisbeth Salander is specified as “a small, pale, anorexic-looking waif in her early 20s.”

What’s more, these women are meant to be naïve to their own looks, like the heroine of “Brooklyn”: “open-faced pretty without knowing it.” These descriptors poke at another lie in “I Feel Pretty”: that all regular women need to succeed is a healthy dose of confidence. That new beauty mantra mirrors corporate messaging around “impostor syndrome” and “leaning in” — the idea that women’s lack of confidence is holding them back from professional success, not discrimination. In fact, our culture’s ideal woman is beautiful modest.

Striving for beauty is ultimately a rational choice in a world that values it so highly. The amount of brainpower I spend every day thinking about how I look is a monumental waste. The sheer accumulation of images of celebrity bodies in my browser history feels psychopathic.

The only way I’ve found to banish momentarily that shadow of the idealized self is to pay for it to go away — with a Sephora shopping spree or a spin class.

Being pretty is still expected, only now it’s called wellness.