Bread, Circus & Beauty. Distractions that Keep Women Toeing the Line.
Silvana Karamoko
In ancient Rome, the recipe for control was simple: panem et circenses — bread to quiet hunger, and circuses to distract the mind. But in the modern world, who needs gladiators and arenas when the pressure to achieve the ‘perfect body’ performs the same function?
Today’s circuses are not grand spectacles in crumbling arenas; they are curated Instagram feeds, endless beauty hacks, and the relentless pursuit of unattainable ideals. Beauty culture draws women into an unrelenting cycle of effort and vigilance. The work feels personal, even empowering, but it quietly drains time, focus, and mental energy. This constant preoccupation appears harmless, even ordinary. Yet it redirects attention away from deeper questions — questions that challenge the very structures shaping these demands.
As Naomi Wolf wrote in The Beauty Myth, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one. Distracting women is not difficult; it’s simply a matter of making sure women remain ‘too preoccupied with their weight and body to do much else.” Beauty culture is not just a distraction. It is a system designed with precision, pulling focus away from the forces that benefit from it. The stakes are not just personal — they are political.
Physical appearance has long been one of the most powerful currencies in human history. Its power lies in something far deeper than vanity — it is tied to survival. Throughout history, physical appearance has been used to signal health, fertility, and social standing. For women, these traits often dictated their access to protection, opportunity, and even basic respect. This instinct to assign value based on appearance, rooted in evolution, has been manipulated by society, transforming an intrinsic human behaviour into a rigid system of control.
Beauty, as defined by the dominant culture, is not a frivolous pursuit — it is a means of survival. Like the bread of ancient Rome, it offers just enough sustenance to keep women striving, while the larger system thrives unnoticed in the background. To conform to these shifting ideals is to secure acceptance, visibility, and even safety. To fall outside of them, or reject them entirely, is to risk exclusion, irrelevance, or invisibility.
These standards are not neutral. They impose themselves as a necessity, forcing women to navigate a system that equates their worth with their ability to conform to ever-changing expectations. And this is the trap. The system exploits this primal survival instinct, disguising itself as empowerment. The pursuit of beauty is framed as a path to freedom, power, and respect, but in reality, it consumes. It diverts time, energy, and focus toward endless self-correction, keeping women too preoccupied to question the rules or challenge the system itself. Beauty does not liberate — it distracts.
There was a time when beauty standards were brutally obvious. In Victorian England, the corset was not just a garment — it was a tool of control. Cinched waists were praised as the pinnacle of femininity, but the reality was far from elegant. Corsets caused bruised ribs, dislocated organs, and chronic shortness of breath. Yet beyond the physical pain, their true purpose lay in distraction. A woman laced into a corset could not move freely, let alone breathe deeply enough to think critically. Her world narrowed to managing her discomfort, her focus consumed by the performance of grace while her body silently protested. In imperial China, the tradition of foot-binding followed a similar logic. Girls as young as five were subjected to excruciating pain as their feet were broken and reshaped to create the coveted ‘lotus feet’. These deformed feet were seen as a status symbol, but they left women barely able to walk, tethering them to the domestic sphere. The constant pain was not incidental — it was strategic. By keeping women physically confined and mentally absorbed in their suffering, these practices ensured their attention remained inward. The structure thrived not merely by inflicting pain, but by consuming every ounce of focus and energy it demanded. This link between appearance and suffering did not vanish — it evolved. Today’s beauty standards have abandoned the physical shackles of corsets and foot-binding in favor of more insidious methods, but the principle remains unchanged: distraction through relentless self-surveillance. Social media now functions as a stage where women are subjected to an endless cycle of unattainable ideals. Filters, curated aesthetics, and the ceaseless churn of trends demand constant energy and attention. The tools may be modern, but the underlying distraction remains timeless. What once chained women to physical agony now binds them to mental exhaustion, ensuring that the pursuit of perfection consumes their capacity to resist or rebel. As the physical constraints on women’s bodies have loosened in the West under the guise of progress and liberalism, the control has moved to a more intimate battleground: the mind. Beauty culture infiltrates the psyche with calculated precision, embedding the idea that worth is inseparable from appearance. Women are no longer openly bound by external forces; instead, they are conditioned to become their own enforcers, scrutinizing themselves under the relentless gaze of self-objectification. This psychological shift is not incidental — it is deliberate. Social media amplifies this design, transforming every scroll into an exercise in self-comparison and every like into a fleeting validation. This endless cycle is further reinforced by the rapid churn of trends, each one introducing new standards to chase and new flaws to fix, ensuring that the pursuit of perfection remains an ever-moving target.
The tapeworm diet, a shocking beauty trend from the early 20th century, highlights the extreme lengths women have been pushed to meet societal ideals. Ingesting pills containing tapeworm eggs promised a slim figure but often led to malnutrition, infections, and even death. Similarly, today’s normalization of high-risk procedures like the Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL) reflects the same dangerous pursuit of unattainable beauty standards, with women risking their health to conform to ideals that society imposes.
Objectification Theory, as explained by Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts, is particularly relevant here. The pressure to conform trains women to internalize an external gaze, viewing their bodies as objects requiring constant assessment and alteration. This dynamic, magnified by social media, compels women to see their worth through the lens of modification and perfection. Whether through the tapeworm diet or modern procedures, the result is the same: a cycle of self-surveillance and distraction. Instead of channelling time and energy into hobbies, passions, or collective action, women are left fixated on their appearances, ensuring that their potential remains tethered to a mirror rather than a more fulfilling pursuit.
Not all women are merely spectators. Some have managed to flip the script, using social media platforms to turn beauty into power. Influencers have built empires by monetizing the performance of perfection, transforming every post, tutorial, and product placement into currency. These women have not only learned the rules of the game but have used them to their advantage, creating independence in an economy that profits from commodifying appearances. Yet, even as they achieve success, their influence inevitably reinforces the same system. Whether intentionally or not, beauty influencers uphold the ideals that keep millions of women trapped in cycles of comparison and self-correction. Their curated lives act as the new bread handed to the masses: alluring, aspirational, and ultimately, distracting. The spectacle thrives not only because of the spectators but because the performers play their parts so well. This duality is nothing new. Centuries ago, Elizabeth I also stepped into the arena.
She understood the power of appearances, but instead of being confined by them, she weaponized them. Elizabeth’s image was no accident. Pale skin dusted with white lead, vibrant red hair, and gowns adorned with jewels — every detail was deliberate. She transformed herself into a symbol of divine authority, an almost mythical figure who stood above the politics of men. The softness of her beauty masked the sharpness of her intellect, distracting detractors while solidifying her place as a ruler. Her decision to remain unmarried only amplified her control. While society expected her to seek a husband, she declared herself wedded to her nation. The absence of a king was not a flaw — it was a calculated move. Elizabeth turned societal expectations on their head, ensuring that her authority was singular, unshared, and untouchable. This was not compliance — it was a strategy. Elizabeth did not submit to beauty standards — she manipulated them. She understood the system and bent it to her will, using beauty as both armor and weapon. While others sought to control her through her appearance, she used it to disarm them. Her legacy demonstrates how even the tools designed to subjugate can be repurposed for dominance.
A woman can embrace beauty standards and still be politically active, passionate and driven — it is not an either/or proposition. But the structure feeds on women’s energy, draining it in imperceptible, relentless streams. Imagining what could happen if this energy were unraveled from its grip and redirected elsewhere is a powerful thought. This is not about abandoning beauty altogether. It is about breaking the cycle that ties it to control. In that redirection lies the first spark of transformation.
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed — it can only be redirected. The immense energy that women have historically poured into compliance - into conforming to beauty standards, into seeking approval, into silence - must now be channelled into something intentional, something transformative. As feminist theorist Audre Lorde reminds us, anger and energy are not forces to be feared but tools for revolution. Women’s social acceptance has long been tethered to their physical appearance, to their ability to fit into restrictive moulds.
But there is an alternative: redirecting that energy away from compliance and toward empowerment, growth, and collective resistance. This redirection is not merely a personal act of self-care — it is a political statement. Reclaiming one’s energy from forces that profit off subjugation is an act of defiance. When women prioritize their own needs and desires, they challenge the cycle of exploitation that demands their silence and compliance. They begin to wield the very mechanisms of control, beauty, sexuality, and desirability — not as tools of submission but as weapons of autonomy. True empowerment is not about conforming to an image dictated by external forces. It is about reclaiming the space to define it on one’s own terms. The idea of women as ‘selfish’ has long been vilified.
If we accept that energy is finite and must be reclaimed from systems that demand endless sacrifice, then selfishness becomes a necessary tool for survival and resistance. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir critiques the ways in which women have been conditioned to be selfless, to live in the service of others, particularly men. The notion that women should “give” constantly, whether in relationships, in family life, or in the workforce, has stripped them of their agency. To redirect energy away from others’ demands and towards one’s own goals is not only empowering but subversive. It’s a rejection of the patriarchal framework that forces women to subjugate their desires and needs to maintain peace and order.
This redirection of energy must be understood in the context of a collective feminist awakening. When one woman reclaims her energy, she creates space for others to do the same. This is not just about individual liberation. It is about igniting a movement that dismantles control from the inside out.
Credit: Rosa Crossley (@cantcreateathing)
“Elizabeth’s image was no accident. Pale skin dusted with white lead, vibrant red hair, and gowns adorned with jewels—every detail was deliberate. She transformed herself into a symbol of divine authority, an almost mythical figure who stood above the politics of men”