Beauty.
October 20th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Plus-size model Katie Halchishick in O Magazine.
“Beauty is not caused. It is.”
-Emily Dickinson
I feel sorry for those of you out there whose idea of beauty has been completely skewed by society and even more sorry for those who change their own image to fit that mould.
I remember back in the fifth grade, there was this girl that I had a crush on for at least three years. A skinny blonde thing who wanted nothing to do with me, but that didn’t stop me from wanting her. Hell, I even whipped up drawings of a couple smokin’ hot Mortal Kombat characters, cause, you know, fifth grade chicks were all about that.
Or so I assumed.
Apparently Kitana and Mileena didn’t do much for her, though, so after three years, I said fuck it and developed this new crush on another girl who was somewhat of an opposite to the blonde one. She wasn’t large, by any means, but she was bigger. Dark, short hair (and I mean short) and unlike the situation with the blonde, this other girl was interested in me, so we became an “item,” which in fifth grade terms didn’t mean much at all. Some empty promises of kisses behind the backstop and complete avoidance of each other.
You know.
The relationship isn’t the point of this story though.
The point is that I still remember a thought that I had when her and I first got into this thing and it went something like this:
“Aren’t I supposed to be with someone blonder? Someone skinnier? This can’t be my future.”
Isn’t that sad?
I mean, first of all, I thought this girl was forever, but second of all, I was 10 years old for Christ’s sake! I somehow already had it ingrained in my mind that I was supposed to park my Pink Cadillac in Barbie’s Dream House.
Not that blonde and skinny are undesirable traits. They are desirable. They just happen to be the most synonymous with this idea of female perfection that had been and continues to be illustrated by companies like Mattel and Playboy, just to name a couple.
Somewhere along the line my idea of the perfect woman changed, though. I’m not sure if it was in that moment or sometime later on as I don’t remember any kind of epiphany. I just know that there was a shift at some point.
I couldn’t tell you how many girls I had some kind of crush on throughout my adolescence, but I can tell you that the majority, if not all of them, weren’t all that concerned with their image and they definitely weren’t trying to walk in Barbie’s footsteps.
In fact, looking back on some of them, I must have been more attracted to their personality than anything because some of them weren’t even all that physically attractive.
But, they were beautiful and they weren’t even trying to be.
Beauty, after all, is accepting who you are and working it.
It is a fact that 80% of women in the US do not like how they look.
80 percent!
The number one desire of young women is to lose weight. Even when there’s not much weight left to lose.
Among children in grades 1 through 3, 48% want to be thinner. 50% of children between the ages of 8 and 10 are unhappy with their body size. Of those 10 year old children, 81% are afraid of becoming fat.
There is absolutely no harm in wanting to look beautiful. Hell, I want to look beautiful, even when I’m hanging around the apartment in my pyjamas.
The problem here is what you are basing your definition of beautiful off of.
If you spend all your time and effort trying to emulate something you saw in a fashion magazine or on a billboard, unless these advertisements are promoting health and wellness and illustrating this with a myriad of body shapes and sizes, you’re never going to be happy because you won’t even have the slightest idea who you are anymore. Not to mention you’ll end up attracting someone who wants you for who you want to be, not who you actually are.
So don’t be a part of that 80%.
Be proud of your image.
Be kind to your body.
Respect yourself and others will respect you.
The ones that matter will respect you.
And hopefully the rest will eventually start to matter as well.
Well written. It’s from a guy’s perspective, that substantiates it to an extent.
P.S: The word “Fat” should be banned from usage when it comes to body image. It’s one word that describes anyone who is not size zero.