The problem with effortless perfection is talking about effortless perfection

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that one of the worst things Duke has done for itself this millennium is to run the Women’s Initiative which studies that ever established “effortless perfection” as a term. It’s not that the study wasn’t redeemable for its findings; it gave us a hard look at how women undergraduates at Duke are pressured to act and feel about themselves under the stresses of the social context. It’s that the term was ever established. Well, even that isn’t completely true. Like any good study, it coined its own terminology to, one, precisely and succinctly express a set of conditions (in this case the compulsion for women to be “smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful and popular” without visible effort) and, two, to make itself quotable (presumably for furthering itself in serious writing).

And oh, it’s made itself oh so quotable. Quotable to a fault. Effortless perfection is itself the perfect term. Perfect at least, I posit, for conversation and endless unsuccessful denunciation.

Just think about what contexts you’ve heard it in. Me? Everywhere and to describe everything. It’s linguistically addictive not because it’s necessarily pleasing to the ear but because we can make ourselves dependent on it. Like the word “awesome,” it’s all-encompassing, lending itself to many dissimilar situations that only carry a similar connotation. And like “awesome,” it’s so overused because it’s the low-hanging fruit to describe your Duke problems of what you perceive as inadequacy to your surrounding students.

The problem I’m trying to describe is that perfection comes on a huge spectrum. True, look perfection up in the dictionary and its bound by an absolute definition. But for the sake of conversation and ever being able to apply it to people, we refer to it in constant relativity, in hyperbole—even when talking about it seriously. So what do we really mean when we say effortless perfection?

Let’s start with perfection. Since perfection in absolute form rarely ever comes across our gaze at Duke, the closest we ever see it is the perception of perfection, which is to say the lack of discernible flaw. Go a rung lower on our standard for perfection, and we’ll see it simply applied to greatness, even if only for one isolated aspect. Even lower, and it could simply mean good, though in the eyes of someone who is mediocre at recognizing something’s position in the gradient between great and nearly flawless (e.g. a beginner), it truly is nearly perfect if only for the awe-factor or some objectively meaningless metric of popularity. What this creates is a system of usage where when I say perfect I may very well refer to something merely average that passes itself as something more, yet you may understand it as its highest reasonable standard: near flawlessness. And then we’re not speaking the same language, are we.

But why stop there? What’s even worse is that the standard for perfection is further compromised by personal comparison. Just last week another Chronicle column remarked upon how effortless perfection has become so “imbibed in the culture of Duke’s campus” and as an example provided, “you can’t be the girl who weighs too much or the guy who weighs too little.” Weigh too much or too little compared to the students around you, that is, and that’s hardly perfection by any standard. Maybe you think this is too much already, that by now our watered-down effortless perfection become comparative flawlessness has turned into someone’s inadequacies constantly reflected to them, and certainly no one would dare call Duke a culture of effortless perfection for that alone.

Oh, but just wait till rush season comes along. What will come out of the lips of women who have been denied acceptance to their top-choice sororities is “effortless perfection”—the perfect fallback excuse. And what it means, of course, is that they didn’t meet the exceedingly narrow standards to be accepted to such and such sorority. Does that mean that the ones who did are perfect or nearly perfect? Hardly. They’re just good enough to meet standards. But when for an entire week you’re at your most vulnerable and you’re nervous and you surround yourself with women who seem funnier and prettier and smarter and more accomplished than you, you can’t help but see around you perfection, perfection, perfection.

And so this year, the notion of effortless perfection is diluted a little more. And the next year the same. And this is how we end up with a term which does not at all represent what linguistically it claims to be but still passes itself off in speech as perfectly serious, dressed up to the nines and everything and ready to trick some more undergraduates into believing that what started out as the Women’s Initiative to describe how women feel pressured to act is what women at Duke actually see as reality on campus. It’s ridiculous.