Maybe You’re Not Beautiful Thank you to Marijke Vonk who gave me permission to repost this pie

Maybe You’re Not Beautiful Thank you to Marijke Vonk who gave me permission to repost this piece in its entirety. “You look beautiful today” the reporter said to the beauty pageant contestant. The little girl started to cry, ran towards her mother and pouted “she said I looked beautiful today. But I’m always beautiful! I’m always beautiful!” As women, we are taught it is pivotal we are beautiful. Our appearance is central to our worth. You’ll notice this when women speak up on tv or in politics, their looks contsantly being evaluated or criticised. An interview with a female politician will have a picture of her shoes or a text-box on her sense of fashion, the Dutch female journalist Asha ten Broeke hears every single day that she is not beautiful enough to open her mouth. And then there’s the other side telling us we’re all beautiful, Dove with their ‘real beauty’ campaign and our friends assuring us that we are gorgeous. But we’re not. I have seen women who are definitely below avarage looking. We all possess some beauty, of course. We all possess some intelligence, and some height. But when we say somebody is tall we mean to say that person is of above avarage height. When we say somebody is smart we mean they are extraordinarily intelligent and when we say a person is beautiful we mean to say the are remarkably beautiful. And by definition, we can’t all be above avarage. And we should’t have to be. A client of mine (I’m a psychologist) had lost a lot of weight in a short period of time. As most people with rapid weight loss she had a lot of excess skin, and she was just devastated by how she looked. Flappy arms, bags of skin hanging over her knees, and don’t even get her started on how her belly and breasts looked. Her kids had been requesting a trip to the swimming pool, but the idea of wearing a bathing suit was mortifying to her. “I know I should love the way I look” she cried. “I know people think I have a beautiful face and I know I shouldn’t think I’m ugly but I just can’t make myself stop thinking that it looks terrible”. “Maybe it does” I said. We made a list of all the things she felt were not exactly pretty. Huge manboobs, that’s a kind of unlucky thing to have. A lot of facial hair on a woman, not her cup of tea. “So what do you think when you see somebody who has manboobs or lots of hair on her face?” I asked. “Ehm. Nothing. Maybe I’ll think “well, that’s unlucky” but really, I don’t care”. She was silent for a moment, then grinned. “My excess skin is not pretty. Maybe it doesn’t have to be pretty!”. Next week she proudly told me she’d taken the kids to go swimming. It’s alright to not like something about your body, but it’s sad how it spirals out of control because we feel beauty is what really matters. Being below avarage when it comes to beauty does not equal being of below avarage worth as a human being. But for women, it’s almost as if we’re told it is. I say we take back the right to be unattractive, just like we have the right to be dumb or weak. I can’t even lift my own body weight, but I don’t have a world pestering me that I can, that I have to be able to, you’re strong truly you are! It’s nice to be beautiful of course, just like it’s great to be smart. They are good things to have. But beautiful is just one of the things we can be. We can be kind or bitchy, we can be smart, we can be tall or short, we can be strong. Maybe we don’t have to be everything. Maybe we can stop saying we’re all beautiful, because we’re not. Maybe we don’t have to be beautiful. Maybe we can just be what we are. -- source link
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