The Patriarchy & Beauty Standards ft. Dr. Anna Tubbs
Naked Beauty
The Naked Beauty Podcast
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2025
⏱️ 66 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs knows that the power of women’s activism can change the course of history. In Three Women she explored how Berdis Baldwin, Alberta King, and Louise Little’s motherly love prepared their sons to become renowned activists. This week, we’re chatting about her new book, Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden from Us. In it, Dr. Tubbs explores how our Founding Fathers enshrined patriarchy into law, with the intention of building a nation for men. During our conversation, we discussed how American patriarchy extends into every part of our lives, including our beauty choices.
Dr. Tubbs was raised as a confident globetrotter. Her time spent traveling the world informed how she viewed herself and how beauty standards varied across cultures. She shared that despite positive affirmations from her family about her intelligence and beauty, self-confidence wasn’t always modeled. She regained a strong sense of confidence in college and began to consider why patriarchal beauty standards rely on us hating ourselves. She would come to explore how American culture shapes meaning about women and the limited choices that women have been offered historically in Erased. Her curiosity and knowledge led us seamlessly through conversations about how she models confidence for her children, why technology reproduces existing beauty standards, and why weight loss trends tell us very little about health. Dr. Tubbs reminds us that while we should be aware of patriarchy’s influence on our choices, we are not powerless.
Tune in as we discuss:
- The book that helped shape her understanding of patriarchy in the U.S.
- Who tried to prevent the Founding Fathers from excluding women from the Constitution
- What history tells us about women beautifying themselves without male input
- The relationship between facial dysmorphia and ageism
- Imagining a better future for ourselves and our children
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, hello, this is Brooke DeVard, and you're listening to the naked beauty podcast. |
| 0:12.2 | In today's episode, we are really privileged to be joined by Dr. Anna Malika Tubbs. |
| 0:17.0 | Before I get more into Anna's backgrounds, I just have to say how much I have been craving |
| 0:21.5 | this conversation. I have felt that as a society, as a beauty culture, we are becoming more and |
| 0:27.7 | more regressive. Beauty standards have swung back all the way to the other side of the pendulum, |
| 0:31.3 | and we are seeing more and more conversation around being small, specifically being skinny. |
| 0:37.4 | And it's like I came of age |
| 0:39.7 | in like the early 2000s. I remember all of the tabloid magazines that were calling Jessica Simpson, |
| 0:45.1 | like huge and so overweight. And she was like literally a size six. I can remember this obsession |
| 0:50.1 | with diet culture. I can remember seeing commercials on TV for like trim spa diet pills. Like |
| 0:56.6 | I remember it all. I remember people really focusing on like the number of the scale and really |
| 1:01.6 | wanting to be like a certain size. And then in the 2010s, I feel like we had this incredible |
| 1:05.8 | revolution and it was like body diversity and body positivity. And we got to this like really great place where it was like it's not about, you know, your weight or being super skinny. It's about being healthy. Now in 2025, it does feel like we're going back to with the, you know, the rise of GLP1s, which, again, if you take a GLP1 and it makes you feel great and it makes you feel happy. That is your choice. That is your |
| 1:27.6 | journey. But I think we also, again, need to acknowledge that we are slipping into regressive |
| 1:32.8 | conversation about what beauty is when we're only seeing a certain size. And that kind of picture of |
| 1:37.8 | body diversity is being limited to just fit a few sizes that fit within the beauty standard. |
| 1:46.3 | I'm also seeing more and more filler Botox. I saw a girl on my 4U page on TikTok the other day who was like, I'm 35 and I just |
| 1:53.8 | got a facelift. And she talked about why she got a facelift. She's like, you know, I've always felt like |
| 1:58.6 | I wanted my jaw to be more snatched. It's like everyone wants to have like a snatched jaw. It's like some people have beautiful round faces and like they look angelic and beautiful. And like I think that's so precious. Like I love diversity of faces. Some people are meant to have thinner lips. Maybe not everyone is meant to have these like very full lips that people are getting now by injecting like syringes |
| 2:18.7 | of filler into their lips. Everyone can do what they want. Obviously, you all know me. I'm like |
| 2:23.3 | the biggest proponent of like doing what you want, express yourself with beauty, but we have to again |
| 2:27.9 | ground all of these conversations and understanding what are the outside influences that are |
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