Theres something utterly devastating to my soul about the idea that women measure their standards of beauty against a bar set by industries that have a vested interest in their not meeting it. Its sad for several reasons: its literally unrealistic, because it requires going through hours of makeup and wardrobe to prep for the pictures / videos . What have you, then undergoing real-life Photoshop (surgery) because its literally the only way to get the look. Its also not actually beautiful. Its ideal but ideal is actually not beautiful by default. Sure, theres some men out there who find women on magazine covers hot but why do they even get a voice in the conversation? Theyre not interested in beauty, and theyre certainly not interested in you. They just want to touch a shiny and thats a hollow, transient desire at best. Its certainly not something to measure your self worth against. But hell, the same thing can be said about my opinion too. And thats really the point: measuring how you feel about yourself against the opinions and standards of anyone else is a recipe for failure and pain. Because opinions on beauty are like opinions on anything else - theyre based on taste, and tastes only narrow and exclude. Anyway, I wrote this a long time ago and it came up in a discussion tonight so I thought I would share it again.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 00:13:23 +0000