Amy Schumer, Greta Lee, and Abby Elliot play a group of modest friends on an “Inside Amy Schumer” sketch. Photograph by Matt Peyton / Comedy Central

“I tried to look like Kate Hudson but ended up looking like a golden retriever’s dingleberry,” a woman who recently dyed her hair blond says in “Compliments,” a sketch from the first season of the Comedy Central series “Inside Amy Schumer_._” Several female friends have bumped into one another on the street, where they perform an exaggerated version of a ritual that many women will find familiar: one remarks on a particularly pleasing element of her friend’s appearance, only to have the friend explain why that outfit or hair style is in fact bad or ugly. The above quote is the only sentence from that sketch that feels appropriate to reference here, so that should give an idea of what the rest of the dialogue is like. The scene ends when one woman, upon receiving a compliment about her red plaid coat, simply says thank you, with genuine gratitude. In response, all of her friends kill themselves.

I grew up watching the adult women I adored playing out a less extreme version of this same routine, and I see it now, sometimes, when my friends and I are out playing grownups. When someone tells us we’re beautiful, we respond with some variation of “Ew.” It is feminine denial as etiquette, manners so counterintuitive they become comedy. We dole out nice words to our friends or sisters or colleagues while handing back the ones given to us.

Amy Schumer’s humor revolves, too often for my taste, around ideas of beauty and desirability in a world coded for young, white straight men and women. Her best barbs are reserved for the men who have or might yet reject her for her appearance. “Compliments,” by contrast, is a bit about women and for women. I imagine it as a response to a mostly reasonable question: Can’t we just learn to take a compliment? Well, no, the sketch replies, not if we grow up, as many of us do, learning that openly accepting any pleasure, ego-related or otherwise, is, quite literally, social suicide.

In her recently released book, “Face Value: The Hidden Ways Beauty Shapes Women’s Lives,” Autumn Whitefield-Madrano provides an intriguingly different take on the same issue. A journalist and copy editor who spent more than a decade working for mainstream women’s magazines, such as _Glamour _and Marie Claire, Whitefield-Madrano warns us that “beauty invites gaps in our thinking,” bound as it is to concepts and customs rarely given a second glance, and she wants us to pause and reëxamine our learned responses to inherited beliefs. Whitefield-Madrano interviewed men and women about how their ideas of beauty affect their relationships, and she marshals a wide array of research and statistical data to explore the ways beauty is expressed in, or determined by, conventions of language, art, media, sex, and friendship. Seemingly destructive dynamics, like the one skewered by Schumer, are given extensive context and measured consideration, and the conclusions that Whitefield-Madrano reaches are often refreshingly non-alarmist.

In her chapter on how beauty is portrayed by the media, for example, Whitefield-Madrano concludes that women who have decided that the media harms self-image will behave in a manner consistent with that belief, rather than with the objective harmfulness of the media itself: “Once you’re steeped in messages about how damaging those images are, you just might believe you should feel differently.” Most monthly fashion magazines include stories about loving our bodies at any size, or making peace with our imperfections, laid out next to the very images readers are supposed to know better than to look at. The more time we spend feeling disturbed by this kind of dissonant messaging, Whitefield-Madrano argues, “the more we entrench the idea that our response to media images should be one of injury.” “Face Value” keeps asking: Why does beauty have to be something we’re at the mercy of, rather than something we simply experience?

In a chapter devoted to the role that beauty plays in friendships among women, Whitefield-Madrano suggests that we have constructed a world in which we let women have “far more space to talk about the ways they don’t like their looks than to talk about the ways they do.” This beauty taboo creates a paradox: “We must strive toward beauty while never being able to comfortably, openly claim it as our own.” In Whitefield-Madrano’s reading, compliments exchanged among women are often dismissed or disavowed, just as in Schumer’s sketch. “We _expect _a woman to downgrade, qualify, or reassign a compliment,” she writes. “What we don’t expect her to do is simply accept it.” But in Whitefield-Madrano’s view this process of deflection is not merely the result of a lack of self-esteem or destructive social habits. Compliments between women, she explains, are also “a convenient linguistic tool” that women use as a “gateway to connection.” Rejecting or deflecting an admiring comment, rather than acting as simple self-effacement, also serves a very basic and useful social function: it keeps the conversation going. Where a clipped “thank you” would end the dialogue, a joke or confession—“This haircut is ruining my life!”—keeps the exchange in flux. In so doing, it allows for casual exchanges to turn into moments of significant bonding.

In investigating the phenomenon of beauty-related exchanges among female friends, Whitefield-Madrano found that the majority of her interview subjects recognized the prevalence of this type of interaction, even as they remained defensive about its role in their lives. “A number of women I talked with about the ways they used beauty as a method of bonding with other women took pains to say that though they did it, they found it silly,” she writes. “Disowning the possibility of beauty bonding’s importance seemed essential to many women, even those who could readily articulate the ways such chatter had provided inroads to friendships and professional connections.” It seems better to laugh at these reflexive gestures—to mock them, rather than accept their importance. Connecting with other women through discussions of appearance is something that other women do, just as beauty is something we must never acknowledge in ourselves. I was struck by Whitefield-Madrano’s conclusion on this matter: in rejecting the more damaging clichés and conventions of womanhood, we should also be willing to acknowledge that friendships tend to be “formed conventionally.” Friendships, in other words, are more intuitive and emotional than deliberately political, and women need not fret about how theirs are formed.

After reading “Face Value,” I found myself regarding my own social behaviors in a more generous light. Recently, at work, a beautiful colleague passed by my desk in a stunning outfit, and I stopped her to tell her how good she looked. In a moment that could have been scripted, she graciously accepted and returned the compliment in kind before saying, “Have you noticed that we’re fucking geniuses, and we almost only talk about what we’re wearing?” I laughed; indeed, I had noticed, and I liked thinking that both parts of her sentences could be true simultaneously. We can be thoughtful people, and also use our intelligence to craft thoughtful and sincere compliments about each other’s outfits by the office coffeemaker. Maybe that’s just fine. Thinking of both Schumer and Whitefield-Madrano, I am of two minds about it, as befits a subject as slyly two-faced as beauty.