Out of the Vat with Heather Widdows

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Out of the Vat with Heather Widdows

Podcast: LSE: Public lectures and events
Episode: Out of the Vat with Heather Widdows
Date: January 31, 2020
Host: LSE Film and Audio Team

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Episode Overview

This episode features a wide-ranging conversation with Professor Heather Widdows, John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics at the University of Birmingham. The discussion focuses on her current research into the ethics of beauty, her advocacy work against lookism, and her broader philosophical journey. Widdows reflects on her influential books, new campaigns, and the intersection of ethics, justice, and body image in contemporary life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Current Research: Beauty and Body Positivity

• Focus on Beauty Practices:
  Heather Widdows discusses her continued work on beauty standards, most recently examining body positivity and its limitations:

  "At the moment I'm working on body positivity and why it might not be so positive. So first of all, you feel like a failure because you feel you don't measure up, and then you feel like a failure again because you haven't got the right attitude... this just seems to me the wholly wrong way to go about it." (00:47)

2. Everyday Lookism Campaign

• What Is Everyday Lookism?
  Widdows describes this campaign as a way to confront the social acceptance of body shaming:

  "Instead of saying to people, oh, all bodies are great, when we know and young girls know that that's not true, we are sharing people's lookism stories... to show how deep this cuts." (01:17)

• Historic Parallel:
  She compares today's normalized lookism to the way sexism was once socially acceptable, emphasizing the widespread, often unnoticed harm.
• Campaign Details:
  Stories are shared anonymously to highlight the depth and pervasiveness of look-based discrimination (02:30).

3. Main Arguments from 'Perfect Me'

• Four Central Arguments:
  Widdows summarizes the four key arguments of her book "Perfect Me" (02:51):
  • Beauty as an Ethical Ideal:
    Beauty ideals have become moral demands—people frame behaviors as "good" or "bad" in ethical terms based on adherence to these ideals.

    "It's becoming a moral demand, something that we have to do and something that we feel ashamed of ourselves... when we fail at." (02:51)

  • Globalization of Beauty Standards:
    The widespread nature of current beauty ideals makes modification practices (like body hair removal) appear "natural" when they’re actually constructed, in contrast to older practices like corsetry or foot binding.
  • The Body as Self:
    Today, individuals see their bodies not just as objects but as core to their identity, with beauty being a form of self-actualization distinct from sexual objectification.
  • Old Arguments No Longer Sufficient:
    Traditional feminist or philosophical critiques don't capture the complexity or global reach of contemporary beauty pressures.

4. Finding a Positive Way Forward

• Alternative Futures:
  Widdows insists society is not locked into an increasingly demanding future, but can shape more positive outcomes:

  "We need to find beauty without the beast. The last thing we want is to forget that we're bodies again. We need to inhabit, love and engage... without continuing the critical harmful elements." (05:21)

• Constructive Actions:
  She suggests proactive engagement—using social media for good, reevaluating advertising, and understanding why beauty ideals are powerful, rather than simply telling people (especially girls) to "just resist." (05:21–07:00)

5. Justice and Beauty

• Why Shift from Global Justice to Beauty?
  Widdows explains that body image and beauty are central justice issues, with body anxiety now widespread across demographics:

  "Beauty is utterly full of justice issues. It matters to so many people so much that it is almost defining of identity." (07:09)

• Impact Across Ages and Genders:
  Body image anxiety is now as prevalent among boys and in early childhood, marking beauty as a pressing ethical and justice concern. (07:09–08:11)

6. Philosophical Commitments and Shifts

• Critique of ‘Choice and Consent’ in Ethics:
  Widdows is known for challenging the dominance of individual choice in ethical policy, arguing that “choice is not fairy dust.” (08:15)

  "Nearly every time when we default to choice and consent as the ethical maker, we are failing to do the ethics that we should." (08:15)

• Change in Position:
  She speaks candidly about changing her mind, particularly regarding theories blaming gendered exploitation or stressing individual resistance, having found them inadequate for the complexities of modern beauty standards. (10:00–11:44)

7. Life and Career Reflections

• Literature and Pop Culture:
  Recently reread the Twilight series for her daughter and mentions works like Ink and Vanity Fair. Personally enjoyed "The Shock of the Fall" for its exploration of interiority. (11:47–13:00)
• Television Tastes:
  Enjoys a mix of contemporary and historical drama, from "Killing Eve" to "Borgen" and "I, Claudius." (13:17)
• Early Aspirations:
  Dreamed of careers from dance to NGO work, and even floristry, before "accidentally" landing in philosophy. (14:01–14:31)
• Academic Journey:
  Studied Theology at Edinburgh and later completed a PhD in Moral Philosophy. (15:02)
• Love for Philosophy:
  Expresses deep appreciation for her career:

  "I still can't believe that I get paid to think and write and communicate ideas... it's a truly amazing job." (15:17)

• Critique of Academic Culture:
  Widdows dislikes the lingering competitiveness and desires a more collaborative philosophical community. (15:59)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Body Positivity's Paradox:

  "Then you feel like a failure again because you haven't got the right attitude, you're not resilient enough, you're not positive enough..." (00:47)

• On Lookism vs. Sexism:

  "It's still normal to do lookism. So we routinely criticise other people's bodies, make nasty comments all the way from the playground to the workplace." (01:17)

• On Beauty’s Ethical Status:

  “It's becoming a moral demand, something that we have to do and something that we feel ashamed of ourselves... when we fail at." (02:51)

• On Choice in Ethics:

  "Choice is not fairy dust." (08:15)

• On Philosophical Privilege:

  "I just cannot believe that I get paid to do this stuff." (15:17)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Introduction & Research Focus: 00:08–01:17
• Everyday Lookism Campaign: 01:17–02:30
• Main Arguments of "Perfect Me": 02:51–05:12
• Possibilities for the Future: 05:21–07:01
• Justice & Beauty as Ethical Issue: 07:09–08:11
• Controversial Positions in Ethics: 08:15–09:57
• Changing Philosophical Positions: 10:00–11:44
• Personal Reflections (Books, TV): 11:47–13:57
• Career and Philosophy: 14:01–16:43

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Conclusion

Heather Widdows offers a rich and nuanced critique of contemporary beauty culture, connecting philosophical analysis with everyday justice concerns. The episode is both intellectually rigorous and personally revealing, illustrating the deep ethical stakes of how we see—and treat—our bodies and ourselves.

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Transcript

[Podcast Host Intro/Outro]

Out of the Vat.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

Hello. Welcome to out of the Vat, a podcast where we talk to philosophers about their work and about their lives both inside and outside of philosophy. Today we'll be speaking to Heather Widows. Heather is the John Ferguson professor of Global Ethics at the University of Birmingham. Her current research looks at the increasing demands of beauty, which she explores in her latest book, Perfect Beauty Is an Ethical Ideal. Heather also co runs the Beauty Demands blog, a research network addressing the changing requirements of beauty. And she founded the Everyday Lookism campaign. Hello, Heather, thanks for coming.

[Heather Widows]

My pleasure.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

Can you firstly tell us a bit about what you're working on at the moment?

[Heather Widows]

For sure. So, my most recent book is Perfect Beauty is an Ethical Ideal. And I'm still completely obsessed with beauty practices. At the moment I'm working on body positivity and why it might not be so positive. So first of all, you feel like a failure because you feel you don't measure up, and then you feel like a failure again because you haven't got the right attitude, you're not resilient enough, you're not positive enough, and this just seems to me the wholly wrong way to go about it.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

Okay, so what is the right way to go about it?

[Heather Widows]

So we have just launched, funny you should ask me that, a big campaign called Everyday Lookism, which mirrors the Everyday sexism campaign. So instead of saying to people, oh, all bodies are great, when we know and young girls know that that's not true, we are sharing people's lookism stories. So people are uploading anonymously their stories of lookism. So things like negative comments about bodies or body parts, things that stuck with them to show how different deep this cuts. So just like 50 years ago, we didn't realise quite how terrible sexism was. It was kind of okay for secretaries to have their bums pinched or whatever sexist behaviour was normalised, it's still normal to do lookism. So we routinely criticise other people's bodies, make nasty comments all the way from the playground to the workplace. Partners, lovers, parents, strangers, and these things cut deeply. So one of my arguments in Perfect Me is, is that in a visual and virtual culture, we really have moved to a place where our bodies are ourselves in a way that was just not true in previous generations. And if I'm even slightly right about this, then those kind of lookist comments, they cut deeply and we should stop them. Hence the Everyday Lookism campaign, which is getting a lot of take up.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

Ok, great. And where can people find out more about this?

[Heather Widows]

Just Google Everyday Lookism and you'll find the site and you can upload your stories. And I promise they absolutely are anonymous. There's no way that anybody can track them back. So. So have no fear about that.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

Okay, thank you. Okay, so this builds upon your work in your recent book, Perfect Me. Can you tell us a bit more about the arguments in this book?

[Heather Widows]

Certainly. So I've got four main arguments in Perfect Me. The first is that in a visual, virtual global culture, the beauty ideal is transforming into an ethical ideal, and that we've never had anything like that before. So it really is the case when people say things like, oh, I was good to, I stuck to my diet, that they do mean that they were morally good and that this is transforming how we think about our bodies and ourselves. And it's becoming a moral demand, something that we have to do and something that we feel ashamed of ourselves, quite literally ashamed of ourselves when we fail at. And we haven't at all understood what this means. And that's the philosophical argument. And then we haven't recognised the damage that can do. And then that's the more practical, policy, applied argument. So that's the first argument. It's ethical. The second is that it's global and that makes a difference. So if you compare, say, demanding beauty practices like corset wearing or foot binding to current practices like complete body hair removal, you might think body hair removal is not that bad compared to foot binding. On the other hand, because it's global, we're now in a moment where body hair removal looks natural. So foot binding, that Victorian. Sorry, not Victorian, sorry. The Victorian woman who wears a corset, she knew that that corset wasn't natural. Her maze didn't wear one. It was obviously artifice. The Chinese woman with the bound foot, she knew that that was not natural or normal. She knew it was about beauty. Again, it was artifact. She saw that her maids didn't have their feet bound. Women in the fields didn't have their feet bound. Women in other cultures didn't have their feet bound. So the difference that a global ideal makes is that it normalizes and naturalizes. So we're now in a moment where we think it's the hairless body that is the normal or natural body, and that's different from our previous beauty ideals. Third argument is about the nature of the selves. So in a very real sense, our bodies have become ourselves. And beauty objectification, I think, is different from sexual objectification. So we locate ourselves in our bodies, but not just the mere body of sexual Objectification. Our body is our actual body, one that we're often dissatisfied with, but it's. It is also a transforming body that we're working on, full of potential and possibility. And then there's our imagined body, the one we'll have at the end of the process, which is our ideal body, our perfect me. And the final argument is about why all the other arguments don't work anymore.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

Okay, thank you very much. Okay, so this all sounds quite negative and a little bit scary. What's the positive way forward?

[Heather Widows]

Okay, so for sure it's scary, but this is only one possible future. So we are moving, if trends continue, to a world where the very heavily modified body becomes natural or normal. But that's only one possible future. There are very many possible futures. And in Perfect Me, while I track the increasing demands and that is harmful, I also track the significant positive features of the beauty ideal. So philosophy has been particularly guilty of worrying about the mind and ignoring the body. That's far worse than over worrying about the body. So I spend time emphasizing that the positive features, the social bonding features, the caring features, the nurturing features of the beauty ideal, it is a mixed ideal. It is empowering and it is demanding and it's critical and it's encouraging. So you have to understand the whole of the piece. And going forward, there are very many positive things that we can do. So. So one is things like everyday lookism. Why are we using social media only to emphasise the bad as opposed to using it to emphasise the good? There's lots that we can all do to engage in that space. There's also all kinds of things that we can do about the adverts we use, the expectations we have. And the first thing we can do is to recognise why it has such power. It's not enough to tell our girls just to resist. That's too much. And then going forward, we need to find, as my last chapter of Perfect may suggest, we need to find beauty without the beast. The last thing we want is to forget that we're bodies again. We need to inhabit, love and engage with and between our bodies as part of ourselves without continuing the critical harmful elements.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

Okay, so I understand most of your work up until recently was on global justice, so why the change to working on beauty?

[Heather Widows]

That's a really interesting question. And quite a number of people who work in global ethics have said to me, how can you go from all these serious issues about poverty and gender justice and now be working on beauty? And, you know, I just say, have a look at how important beauty is. Beauty is utterly full of justice issues. It matters to so many people so much that it is almost defining of identity. So I think there's no real transition in my work. It seems to me that beauty is one of the justice issues. We literally have an epidemic of body image anxiety that is now affecting boys as well as girls across demographics, irrespective of age range. As young as three, we start worrying about this and it changes what human beings can be and do in really profound ways. So my view is this is still a justice issue. It's one of the most important issues to a address in the current visual and virtual culture, and we should be doing more work on it, not thinking it's trivial.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

What is the most controversial philosophical position you've ever held?

[Heather Widows]

So that's a really difficult one. So only just having looked at the questions, I'm sure I'll come up with a better answer tomorrow. But I guess one of the things that I guess I've argued for in almost every debate that I've entered, from genetics to, to women's rights to the beauty debate, is how much, especially in applied ethics and policy, we over emphasise choice and consent that we let choice do the work that we should be doing with better ethical practices that choice is not. So, as I said in my inaugural lecture, which is quite a number of years ago now, choice is not fairy dust. And at the time, my daughter, who's now 11, I think was two. So the only reason I said that was so I could have a four flashing picture of Tinkerbell on the screen who she was particularly into at that point. So I think that nearly every time when we default to choice and consent as the ethical maker, we are failing to do the ethics that we should that far too often that allows us to avoid addressing the structural injustices and the wider critiques of context. So my first book was about Iris Murdoch and I think I would still endorse Iris view that far more in ethics is about habits and about practices, and much is not about choice. That often, by the point at which you get to where you feel you're making a choice that has already been conditioned by the context, the wider structural injustices and the habits and practices that have led you there. And if we want to do ethics properly, we need to stop looking at choice.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

Which position have you changed your mind about?

[Heather Widows]

I've changed my mind about very, very many positions and I think one should. Right. If you learn more stuff, you should be willing to change your mind, to move back and Forwards. So in my recent work, when I started writing Perfect Me, I really thought that, that I would be able to use some of the old arguments like that beauty is about gendered exploitation or adaptive preference and I'd be able to make these work, refresh them, revive them. But they don't, they just don't work. So that was really frustrating. I remember at one point saying to Anne Phillips was just like, oh my goodness, none of them work. Well, just write that. So I did just write that in the end. So I changed my mind about those arguments. I guess I've changed my mind, but particularly about where we should be focusing in changing what we do about beauty. So when I started writing this I think I had a bit of a kind of split personality. So on the one hand I really wanted to revive those arguments about gender exploitation. At the other hand, as somebody from a particular background I have always recognized that beauty is not all this terrible, horrible stuff and that you should just resist it. And I've kind of managed to come to terms with that through writing this book. And I now recognise just how context dependent of course one's beauty norms are too and that claims just to resist tend to fall much harder on those lower down the race in the class hierarchies and they're over individual and that's not what we should be doing at all. So I changed my mind about all of that stuff. Stuff.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

And what is the most recent work of fiction you've read?

[Heather Widows]

Okay, so if I'm brutally honest, the most recent work of fiction I've read is rereading Twilight series to see if there was, you know, if it was, if my 11 year old daughter could read it or if there was too much sex in it, that would be my most recent work of fiction. I let her read it and I let her watch the films. But I did explain to her that you, Even though she's 11, that really the whole of vampire fiction is all about whether or not one can have sex. So that's my most recent work of fiction.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

Okay, I guess I'm before that.

[Heather Widows]

Oh my goodness. So before Twilight I think I probably read some other 11 year old fiction. So I've been really reading things like Ink that I've been told it's my daughter's favourite, I have to read it and then next week there's a different favourite. So I've now limited her to only one book every month. Must I have to read so that she can read it? I recently reread Vanity Fair because she wanted to read that. So that was actually quite good fun. And I guess the most recent bit of fiction that I've read that was just for me, not for my daughter, was the Shock of the Fall, which I very much enjoyed.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

Can you tell us a bit about it?

[Heather Widows]

I guess it's about the interior of a particular individual's mind, coming to terms with some of his past and how different it is on the inside than on the outside.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

What is your favourite TV show?

[Heather Widows]

Oh, this is another difficult question. I don't know if I have a favorite TV show. At the moment I'm binge watching Killing Eve. But I. I don't know if I like it or if I hate it for all kinds of feminist reasons. Programs that I've absolutely loved. So Borgn absolutely love, definitely recommend everybody watches that. I'm also a bit of a sucker for certain types of historical drama, so I love Anne Boleyn. So I would watch and re watch the Tudors. I quite like even programs like Rome. And recently I rewatch the whole of I, Claudius. And the sets do shake, right? Yeah, yeah.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

What did you want to be when you grew up?

[Heather Widows]

It's another hard. It's really hard to remember. So I wanted to be all kinds of things. I wanted to be a dancer. I wanted to do contemporary dance. Summer school at one point with Phoenix. And then I think my dad said, go do your A levels instead of that silliness. At times I've wanted to be an NGO worker. At times I've thought, oh, I'll just give it all up and be a florist kind of. Yeah, all kinds of things.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

And what led you to philosophy in the end?

[Heather Widows]

I think I fell into it by accident. I think happens to very many people. I turned out to be quite good at it. And then so I fell into a PhD and then I applied for any job that I could get and I got a job that happened to be in applied ethics, Even though my PhD wasn't applied at all. And then I got captivated by how much stuff is wrong with the world and how you want to make a better world. And ethics is one way to try and do that.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

Okay. So was your first degree in philosophy?

[Heather Widows]

Yeah, so my first degree is in. Was at Edinburgh. My undergraduate is in theology and then my PhD was moral philosophy.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

What do you like about being a philosopher?

[Heather Widows]

I like everything about being a philosopher. I mean, I still can't believe that I get paid to think and write and communicate ideas. I mean, I think academics in general are incredibly privileged. And if I look at some of the jobs that my friends are doing. I just cannot believe that I get paid to do this stuff. So I'm not saying there's nothing terrible about my job. Sometimes it can be hard, sometimes you're overworked. But in comparison to almost any job, it's a truly amazing job. And I still feel incredibly privileged to be a philosopher.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

And what don't you like being?

[Heather Widows]

There's very little I don't like about my job. I guess I don't like the competitiveness that goes with some of this. I think we're getting better, but I still think that we are too competitive. We confuse good arguments with being argumentative. And there's an edginess and a nastiness that I feel is growing less, but that is still there in some philosophy context. And I would like us to move to much more collaborative ways of doing philosophy, where we are collectively searching for better ways to understand and explain the world rather than trying to destroy how somebody else has done it.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

Okay, Heather, thank you very much.

[Heather Widows]

My absolute pleasure. Thank you.

[Podcast Host Intro/Outro]

You've been listening to out of the Vat, a podcast brought to you by the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, the Forum for Philosophy, and the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, all based at the London School of Economics and Political Science.