“Little boys want to be heroes or scary,” says a Halloween costume expert at Dallas & Co in an NPR interview. “Little girls want to be pretty or cute.” He’s ducking questions about women and girls dressing as “strumpets.” I wonder whether he believes there is an innate distinction between what little boys and little girls want. I wonder if he has children, if he’s paid attention to how people comment or fail to comment on the beauty of females from the moment they pop out of their mothers’ wombs and a nurse wipes off the goop.
I can’t remember anyone commenting positively on my appearance when I was a child. Occasionally, a mean kid would call me fat or ugly, so it’s no surprise that by high school I’d decided I wasn’t good looking and accepted that fact. In retrospect, it must have been liberating to know I wasn’t pretty, to not have to worry about living up to expectations, to not need those compliments.
My sister Rose will be seven in January. I’m not sure what the trajectory of her life will be, if, when she’s thirty, she’ll look back and say, “Yeah, people always said I was so beautiful since I can remember,” or if she’ll say, “People always said I was beautiful, until I was X years old.” I don’t want to think about what might happen to her sense of self if the compliments stop.
By the time she was three, when strangers stopped her to tell her how beautiful she was, Rose would lose patience–“I know”–and try to talk about something more interesting, Legos or unicorns, dinosaurs or balloons.
I turn off my car, silencing the man who owns the costume shop in the town where I live. Back in my apartment, I check Facebook because that’s what we do now. Someone has posted a video of a woman going to the zoo to visit a lion she rescued and nursed back to health. The lion reaches through the cage and grabs her to his chest, nuzzles her face. He is the biggest, happiest kitten I’ve ever seen. He wants nothing more than to cuddle her.
The woman is not attractive. She’s short and pudgy with thinning hair. The lion does not care. The woman did not choose her body. She did choose to take a starving lion home and feed it and care for it and love it. It’s me. I’m spending more time judging her physique than thinking about her act of kindness.
I try to look at the woman with the lion and not think about her appearance. I try to watch her smile, sense the warmth beneath her thin chapped lips and crooked teeth. I know I was trained at an early age to value physical beauty in women over any other characteristic, but can’t I be better than that?
Humans like beautiful things. A beautiful face makes us smile, doses us with dopamine. But we are so much more than our biology. We can decide as a group to not believe that might makes right as it would in the wild. We can stay up all night through the power of coffee and electricity. We can rip the scent of old fish from the air and replace it with a lemony-chemical zing. We can carve out clogged hearts and replace them. We override our biology again and again when we see fit, but when it comes to female beauty, the only biology we want to override are the flaws in the female form that could be fixed with a sharp razor, makeup, carefully designed clothes, and silicone injections.
An ugly girl will get in trouble for being unruly, talking back, not sharing, or not doing her schoolwork much more often than a beautiful girl. Conversely, an ugly girl is more likely to get positive feedback for doing well in school, for being smart, for being nice. It’s only once appearance has been established as lacking that other traits gain more importance.
This is why I have to force myself to not mention my sister’s beauty to her too often, to focus on other traits I can laud, to praise her for being smart and funny and nice. I try to tell her what it is to be a good person because most people don’t care if she’s good or smart or funny. I care, but I’m glad she’s beautiful too. It makes me happy to look at her smooth, heart-shaped face. It makes me think of my own awkward face when I was her age, the too-big cheeks and small, freckled nose, those horrible thick bangs cut straight across my forehead.
I don’t think I ever thought I was flat-out ugly, just not pretty. I was told I was ugly plenty of times, but I never believed that was true, coming as it did from other unattractive kids who were obviously putting me down for the sake of putting someone down. I have no memories of being told I was pretty during the first half of my life. I do have a strong memory of my best friend looking at me in seventh grade Home Ec and saying, “You know, you’d be really pretty if you plucked your eyebrows.”
Done and done. Take that, biology.
By the end of high school, I was just an average-looking girl who cared about being smart and reading books and writing. Then something tragic happened. During my first trimester in college, the boy I liked told me I was beautiful.
I laughed in his face.
I laughed and laughed and laughed. He stiffened and walked away. I laughed all the way back to my dorm. Then I paused. I went into the bathroom I shared with five other girls and looked in the mirror. “Shit,” I said to my reflection, “he’s right. I am beautiful. When did that happen?”
I couldn’t make much of suddenly being beautiful. I had been maybe ugly, then average, then beautiful, but it was nothing I had done. I couldn’t take it seriously. I sometimes dressed up for special occasions. I sometimes put on makeup, but mostly, I continued to live like I always had, wearing whatever secondhand clothes I had lying around, not getting dressed up for parties on Friday nights, waiting impatiently while my friends tried on a dozen different outfits and worried about how to style their hair.
But now I had a choice. I could still look unremarkable with stains on my shirt and unbrushed hair, but with minimal effort, I could look stunning. Strangers were nicer to me. It was easier to get things I wanted. People wanted to give me jobs, a better view at a concert, or a drink. Everywhere I went, men held open doors for me to walk through.
Would a woman who works hard to be beautiful save a lion? Would she be out in the jungle where her mascara might run and her heels would sink into the wet earth? Would she give up manicures and trips to the salon to have enough money to feed the beast?
By fifth grade I’d given up on hoping to be friends with the cool kids, so of course, Ginger Holt, one of the most popular girls in school, took a special interest in me. She invited me to her birthday party with other popular girls and one hanger-on, Heather, my mom’s friend’s daughter, who wasn’t pretty and wasn’t very popular, but who tried and tried and managed to stay on the fringes. They tolerated her, but did not like her. At one point, we all went upstairs to try on Ginger’s clothes. I didn’t want to try on her clothes because I was too fat. Her house intimidated me with its size and cleanliness, with the giant trampoline and wood staircase to the second floor. She had a closet as big as my half of the bedroom I shared with my little brother. She wouldn’t let Heather try on her clothes because she said Heather was too fat and would stretch them out. Heather was not fat. She wasn’t quite as thin as Ginger, but only by an inch or two. Ginger turned to me and offered the outfit she’d denied Heather. The difference between me and the other girls was easily four sizes.
I did not try on Ginger’s tiny Guess shirt and jean skirt, and I did not hang out with her or any of the other girls after that. The price of admission was too high.
I’m not beautiful anymore. It came and went. I am still pretty, and if I lost thirty pounds, I might be beautiful again. I don’t want to waste time on my appearance that could be spent writing or interacting with loved ones, but I’ve made concessions. I’ve started wearing a little makeup to work. I sometimes style my hair. I sometimes wear nice clothes. I sometimes want to hear I’m pretty.
I can’t go a few hours without a cigarette, and I can’t go a few weeks without being told I’m pretty, verbally or through the way a man’s eyes cut across my body, the way his face warms while looking at mine. It’s like air conditioning. You can live half your life without it, but once you’ve experienced artificial air with regularity, once you’ve felt that cool chill on a hot day, once you have the crisp smell of Freon in your nose, you need it.
I need to know people still think I’m pretty, and that if I try hard enough, I can be beautiful.
I don’t want to care, but I do. It was easier in my twenties, when I still had the glow of youth. Now I’m approaching old-maid-hood, and I packed on pounds I thought I’d left in high school. Now if I put in no effort, most people do not think I’m very pretty. But if I spend thirty minutes in the morning, if I wear the right clothes and makeup and do something with my hair, then I am. If I spend those 3.5 hours a week, 14 hours a month, 168 hours a year, I can still get that boost, that taste, that feeling of worth.
It’s been almost a year since I started this essay because I didn’t know what to say that hasn’t been said or is worth saying or that could change anything or anyone. It’s September now, and candy aisles in grocery stores are already decorated orange and black with pictures of little boy pirates and little girl fairies.
Rose is in second grade. I saw her a month ago, already as tall as a fourth grader, not thin or fat, but big, which is not beautiful. She’s been downgraded to pretty, or maybe cute. I wonder if she knows. I wonder if she’s noticed that strangers no longer stop her on the street, that she’s no longer first picked from a crowd of volunteers at the Science Museum show.
I talked to her last night on the phone. She owed me a story. She’s been working on one about fairies. Do I like fairies? Sure, I like fairies. She’s relieved. She knows I don’t like princesses. Well, there was this beautiful, beautiful fairy, who was so beautiful on the outside, but on the inside, she was horrible and mean. She was a bad person who wanted everything for herself and wouldn’t help anybody—she would never give a poor person so much as a crumb.
But there was this other fairy, and she wasn’t much to look at. My sister struggles and struggles for words to describe a good person who is not pretty. She rephrases the other fairy’s looks again and again, bumping into unknown territory, not wanting to call a good person “ugly.” This fairy is beautiful on the inside, even though she’s, uh, um, not so good on the outside.
I know where this story is going. There’s only one place for it to go.
It will be my turn when Rose is done, so I stop listening to her fumble through her morality tale and try to create a new one for her. I make a world where no one thinks a thing about how anybody looks. It never occurs to them to judge a body; instead, they are only interested in what’s inside.
I keep half an ear on Rose. A prince fairy is falling in love with the wrong fairy: the one who is beautiful outside, but cruel and selfish. Rose struggles to find the word for “male fairy” until I tell her he can just be a “fairy” too.
My fairy comes to this world from hers and is surprised to find that people care about appearances. She’s even more shocked to discover that she is beautiful and that means something, more than anything else. Wait, I’ve gone the wrong way. This is the same old story. It’s the same fucking story.
She’s not pretty in this world then, but that’s not right. That’s Rose’s story retold. In these stories, the nerdy or ugly or not pretty girl who is a good or interesting person becomes beautiful. She always becomes beautiful. That is her reward for being good. There is no story of a not-beautiful good girl who stays not beautiful and good. That is not a trajectory an audience could stand.
In Rose’s version, the fairy prince falls in love with the wrong fairy, and she steals his wings. The good fairy gives him her wings.
I look at the time and try to get off the phone. I don’t want to hear the rest, and I don’t have a counter story. Even in my make-believe world where looks shouldn’t matter and girls should be free to be who they are, unbound by appearance, I can’t escape beauty. I have no story to tell. I’ve failed.
I get off the phone, pretending to be very interested in what happens next, but more interested in Rose getting a good night’s sleep. She can tell me the rest tomorrow. I grumble to myself, remembering the movie I’d been watching on mute at the gym the day before. I rode a bike and watched Sandra Bullock play a type: the oddball woman who’s plain looking, but interesting, who eats a lot in front of people because she doesn’t care how she looks (and apparently has the metabolism of a hummingbird), who through circumstance needs a makeover, and then everyone is WOWED by how beautiful she is, and she lives happily ever after now that she gets the guys and her appearance matches her soul.
Except that her appearance doesn’t match her soul. She was happy in jeans and a t-shirt with a sloppy ponytail. And who wants a man who didn’t notice you until after you put on a skin tight dress and six-inch heels? It’s the same bullshit story. It’s the same place my sister’s fairy story was going to end up. It’s the same place I was going with my fairy story. It’s the only place we know.
Tags: beauty, harmony neal
Harmony, this is gorgeous in all the ways that an essay should be. From a girl who was called ugly every day by the dude with the locker next to me in elementary school (who had a BOWL CUT, for god’s sake), thanks.
Yiiiikes and yesssssssssssssssss. So good.
I went from awkward to average to cute and back to average, it’s weird how differently people treat you.
I have to tell my babies that they are beautiful (and not just my girls but my boy as well), because it is true and because I am their mother, but I also tell them they are clever or strong or kind or good at things. And I fervently hope people will stop making a fuss of ONLY my blonde one’s looks by the time they are old enough to notice.
Damn this was a good read. I only planned to skim it a little bit because I’m goofing off at work? and then I was really caught up in reading and going “yeah, yeah, that’s it exactly”.
I try to make a point to not comment on children’s appearances, and instead to ask questions about what they’re reading or doing, or what their favorite thing is to draw, and then praise that. But it’s so hard sometimes because of social conditioning of children are cute! tell them they are cute! and crap. And also, I know how good it feels when someone compliments my choice of clothing or accessories or my haircut or even my stupid handwriting.
if you slip and tell a child they’re cute cover it up by saying it about their outfit! if they’re wearing a tutu and gumboots you know they dressed themselves 😉
I also always try to praise for accomplishments, not smarts.
Ooh, yes, that’s another one I try to do. Partly because it’s a trap I fell into – always praised for being smart, and then I feel like a complete and total loser when things don’t come easy to me.
Definitely. I was praised for being smart as a child, not for working hard or being persistent. Things just came easily for me. It’s not the only reason I am the way I am today, but it certainly didn’t help. I’ve had to learn the value of perseverance and hard work at a shockingly old age. Oh, and patience. Still working on that one.
Yes, but part of not commenting on children’s appearance, for me, is not focussing on clothing and stuff for girls. Since I mostly encounter children at work (art museum!), there are LOADS of better things to talk to the kiddos about. It’s just a whole mess of pink aisle vs. blue aisle in the toy store, yanno?
(One of my absolutely favorite things to do is talk to kids about modern & contemporary art – a lot of them really love using their imaginations and creating stories about it, especially the abstract stuff. And then I can honestly say “wow, I never thought of that before! you’re amazing!” )
My sister is quite hot on making sure people do this with her daughter. Thankfully I don’t find kids particularly cute so it’s not all that hard for me! She’s 7 so I suppose she has all this to come a bit, but at the moment she wants to be the Incredible Hulk when she grows up.
A spectacular exploration of the space that beauty takes in a girl’s/woman’s life.
I was told I was beautiful since I was little, by my mom, who in another conversation with my dad or other women would talk about how attractive people were idiots, or assholes, or whatever. So, ok, cool – I’ll take beautiful, but I ended up taking the “I’m an idiot/asshole/whatever” with it. I worked my way through that headspace somehow, but I still feel a real sting with the label of beauty – such a double edged sword. Lacking it feels awful, but having it feels awful too. I find that I kind of “self-other” with my look (short short hair, tattoos, etc) – a habit I started when I shaved my head in college and grew more tenacious about being unpretty with each ignorant comment (“but you were soooo prettty with long hair! you could be so cute if you grew your hair out!”)
So… beauty. Women. A work in progress I suppose.
yes! I didn’t grow up with the refrain about attractive people that you did, but (maybe because I’m blonde and it can really make you stick out in a crowd if you’re the only one) I very, very often feel a twinge of fear and threat when people, particularly strangers, have told me that I’m beautiful. As though they’re about to do something violent to me next, and I had better be alert to elude them. Because I’m too conspicuous. So the compliment has always been very double-edged for me, too.
(And yes, I’ve experienced actual violence from strangers, so it’s definitely a learned reaction).
Really excellent writing. Thank you.
Oh man – I love that lion video so much! It’s my go to video when Im feeling down, and hearing someone describe the lady that way gives me a huge case of the sads.
Sorry, I know this is not your point (or totally is your point?)
Edited to add: On a more positive note, the reason why I think the video is amazing is how that look of love on the lions face just illuminates her as the object of its affection. Its the same sort of feeling as when you see a baby smiling at its mother. Suddenly everyone and everything looks more beautiful.
but what happens at the end of the fairy story??
What a wonderfully written essay!
I’ve sometimes struggled with self-esteem but it wasn’t until a female friend of mine told me that I was beautiful a few years ago that I really started to believe it. And because I believed it, I started to become more confident and I would get more and more unsolicited positive comments. Throughout high school and college I always thought I was pretty decent looking, but for some reason when my friend said that I just *knew*. There’s something special about someone telling you you’re beautiful without the pretense of wanting to get something out of it.
“Halloween costume expert”
I really want to see this person’s CV. Is it more or less impressive than someone who, say, studies badgers for 35 years?
Chris Cheeseman: saint.
I am tempted to send him a request for an autographed photo.
Harmony killing it, as expected!
Ok stop it already with the “pretty people is stupid or being pretty is overrated argument” or whatever that was. I am damn pretty and smart and takes me 15 fucking minutes to get ready (soft make up and 3-4 inch heels included)
Why don’t woman use beauty as part of their power? What happen to the relationship between a mini skirt and feminism? and I want to make clear that I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT THE PINK + BLOND + VICTORIA SECRET SPLASH BULLSHIT kind of woman if that is what you are thinking.
You are just plain mad because people treated you like crap, like I am plain mad because people like you think being ugly or not taking care of yourself is the only way to a. read a book b. be smart c. go to work d. get rewards. Want to know something? Sometimes, woman like you react with hate and try to downgrade whoever is just as smart and a million times prettier, is called competition and resentment because some pretty asshole mistreated you when you were a teen my dear. Do not forget humans are visual creatures.
Even if you try to hide your boobs and hair so people can see your brain, they are just obsessed about how pretty you are and downgrade your talents by putting more weight in the “horrible fact” that you just change your nail polish.
So, when you say “It’s the same bullshit story. It’s the same place my sister’s fairy story was going to end up. It’s the same place I was going with my fairy story. It’s the only place we know.” let me tell you something, YOUR COMPLAINT is also the same bullshit. Get over it, stop smoking cigarettes, exercise and you will probably have even more energy to focus and ABSORB all the amazing books you must read 😉
I don’t think you understood the point she was trying to make.
Edited, sorry: I don’t think she was trying to make the point you seem to think she was trying to make, and I think you’re being unnecessarily rude about it.
cont’d: “pretty people is stupid or being pretty is overrated argument” She certainly is not saying that pretty people are stupid. She says she was pretty for a time and can be with a little effort. I think what she is saying is that she wishes society didn’t place so high a value on physical appearance, and that despite that fact, she still finds herself making an effort she doesn’t personally really care to make because of the approving response she gets when she does so.
It’s nice that you’re pretty with minimal effort. That is not an option that everyone has.
I don’t make people see my brain by hiding my boobs and hair, I make people see it by installing a tiny glass window on the back of my skull
also how does it take you only 15 minutes to put on heels it takes me like three days because I have 34,000 feet and am therefore 17,000 times prettier than other women with feet
I had a friend who only takes 14.5 minutes to get dressed and wore flats but was stilll the prettiest of them all. I was so jealous! Because all I have is my big old brain.
One day, I said, “Sally, you might be the fairest of them all, but you’re STUPID! Look at my book! You don’t have a book! You’re too pretty to read! You just have your speed-dressing!”
Sally replied, “You’re just jealous because you can’t stop smoking. Also, my IQ is 200.”
So I chopped off her feet. But she was still pretty. And somehow, she had a job, even though she brushed her hair.
But this advice…now I understand! She is truly superior. I put her feet in gold relic cases and worship her as the Goddess of Smart and Pretty that she is.
Thank you. I am going to relate this cautionary fairy tale to all the maidens in my village.
…do you even go here?
That was way unnecessarily mean-spirited. She isn’t hating on women who are beautiful with no effort. She is hating on the fact that beauty is how women are too often valued.
judging (harshly perhaps) by your grammar and syntax errors in this rant, I’m guessing you aren’t as “damn smart” as you think you are… I mean, rule #1 in writing a rant about how pretty and smart can and should coexist should be: make sure your rant makes you look smart, right?
You’re not a very kind or perceptive person, are you?
Yeah, personally, I am so beautiful that people literally die if they look at me when I’ve got makeup on. I have to register my lipstick as a deadly weapon. But I turn down pleas for dates from Ryan Gosling on the regs because I am far too busy completing my second PhD in particle physics I HATE THIS ARTICLE TOO GOD.
wat.
It only takes me 12 minutes to get ready I WIN
Because of my hair, it takes me at least 30 minutes to get ready. I AM A JEALOUS MONSTER.
I want to make an Idiot Bingo card with that comment as a basis.
My husband’s reaction to my desire to name our future daughter Audrey was, “But what if she’s not cute?” Then won’t everyone compare her to Aubrey Hepburn, and she will grow to hate her name? Ugh. I don’t know. Is that a valid reason not to choose a name? Because maybe people will be horrible and stupid? Because maybe our child won’t be beautiful? She could be a charitable and loving and compassionate Audrey, and that would fit too.
“They’ll call him Pooey Louie!”
I think your husband is crazy for that one! Audrey Hepburn was beautiful, but she was also extremely talented, kind, graceful and stylish, so even if there really is only one other Audrey that anyone can ever think of and they do go ahead and compare her, there are plenty of traits to choose from!
Audrey is a wonderful name and anyone who would make that comparison is a butthead! I had an Audrey in my year at school and nooo one ever made that comparison. I thought that she was a friendly, bubbly girl who was always smiley, and she made me feel more smiley just by being around! No Audrey Hepburn connections made. (Also your daughter’s peers might be young enough that Audrey Hepburn isn’t as big an icon or name to them? Possibly. I dunno she’s timeless but these kiddos will also be born in 2013-2014 [AHHHHHHH])
I’d be more concerned that she might be a man-eating plant.
One of my old coworkers was named Audrey and she is Korean, so looks nothing like Ms. Hepburn. I never actually thought about correlating the two in any way until now.
Anyway, I don’t think you have anything to worry about, I also do not get compared to Nicole Kidman or Nicole Richie or Nicole Scherzinger or Snooki (all the iconic Nicoles in history)
Gonna put it out there that Audrey Hepburn was incredibly loving and compassionate – she quit a highly successful acting career to do charity work for the rest of her life. Couldn’t think of a better comparison for beauty on the inside, regardless of the outside. 🙂
Oh, this. This this this. Yes. There are a couple nieces kicking around, one who’s interested in black holes and the other who’s interested in fringed dresses, and how to be a good example without saying the wrong thing or nothing or the same thing.
Great essay.
this is a beautiful piece of writing, but the ending is so sad to me. it’s NOT the only place we know. it’s just a pattern that’s been set up in our heads. but, being our heads, they are under OUR care. how we think about this stuff is OUR responsibility. we don’t have to just accept that it’s fucked and try to find a way to live with it.
i believe we do have the ability to find and/or construct a new place. not in an instant, no … but in a generation? hell yes. if our foremothers could battle external reality and gain the right to vote and have lives and be independent people, then surely we can find a way to transform our internal realities to let go of this patriarchal BS and find a new way to be.
jesus, the first time someone you’re attracted to you looks at you and says, “you’re beautiful” – that’s like a punch to the gut. you suddenly feel so vulnerable, because you realize it’s horrifyingly important to you that they think that. i think i cried (though laughing is a viable alternative and that may also have happened).
Even with the “traditional” femme effort I don’t think I reach pretty or beautiful. I think the pinnacle I reached in my youth was “striking”, which is a fun reaction to get from men but a bit tiring after awhile. Nowadays I’m aiming for “presentable” which is a pretty onerous expectation in its own right.
I wonder why fairy tales have to have a prince at all, but I wonder that as a plain girl who did meet her “prince” (but then again he’s not really a prince, just a regular human being with ugly bits and pretty bits, both inside and outside).
I end this disjointed comment with this: Ted Chiang explored a bit of this in his short story “Liking What You See: A Documentary.” It doesn’t answer any questions but it’s interesting anyway.
There were parts of this I loved, and parts of this I strongly disagreed with. Maybe this is just because, it’s, well, me, but I find the idea of beauty as a narrow fixed ironclad thing just so patently false that some parts of this didn’t make sense to me.
Harmony, what a brilliant and thought-provoking piece. A few memories came to mind from my college days in the 80s. The Bruce Springsteen lyric “You ain’t a beauty, but hey, you’re all right.” A photographer telling me, “If you wore makeup, you’d be beautiful,” and me looking at him with contempt. The way I see it: the face I wake up with is the face I present to the world.
This is very powerful, thank you.
Harmony (lovely name!): wonderful piece. It’s funny you write this now, because my daughter and I recently finished reading The School for Good and Evil, by Soman Chainani. It’s an amazing book, because it challenges traditional notions of fairy tales, beauty, good and evil, and happily ever after. It very specifically challenges the idea that being beautiful on the outside means you’re good on the inside.
As a moderately attractive woman, I’ve struggled with the whole beauty thing all my life, alternately wishing I was pretty or not giving a crap depending on age and life stage. I try (and often fail) to think of everyone as worthy of respect and love because they are here, not because of how they look. And I’m trying (and often failing) to instill that same value in my daughter. At the risk of pissing Mallory off, a relevant quote from C.S. Lewis:
“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – These are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
Apparently, I used to state that I had naturally curly hair to whichever adult I was being introduced to, because in my experience they would inevitably point out that it was curly, and ask me if it was natural, and I just wanted to get that out of the way so people wouldn’t ask me dumb questions (for real though which five-year-old’s curly hair is not naturally curly?). They did this to my little brother too, though, until he got a buzz cut.
When I was 5 or so, I used to sleep with those pink foam curlers in my hair almost every night…so I was the kid with curly hair that was not naturally curly. I can totally explain what compelled me to sleep with those in though: my slightly younger sister was born with a full head of ringlets. She got all of the attention when we were little. (she would later go on to be jealous of my naturally straight hair, circa middle school)
I can remember a discussion on Facebook about what *not* to say to someone who has lost weight started by someone who was getting a lot of these “compliments”. No one should say, “You look great since you lost so much weight” since it has that back-handed quality that (as Miss Manners once pointed out) an aunt saying to a seventeen year old , “You look great since your skin cleared up.” “You look great,” full stop, nothing more is the right thing to say. The older I get the more I realize that this is what we need to say to little girls and women, “You look great,” and leave it at that Not, “You look like a princess.” “You look so pretty.” “You’re such a little doll.” “You look great” also works with little boys or children who are gender-nonconforming. “Great” can mean healthy, happy, well-rested, like you’re in love, a little thinner or a little fatter. Of course all of us want our partners to tell us we are beautiful (men too, I think, though most won’t admit it) but for everyone else, “great” works out…great. I still tell my cat she’s pretty though.
All of my children are beautiful.
All of my children are beautiful.
I’ve totally been through this. I got braces my senior year of high school, so I had braces and nerdy black plastic glasses my first year of college (before those glasses were cool). Then that summer, my braces were removed, I got contacts, and I realized I could wear a spaghetti-strap summer dress without being ridiculed. I experienced being approached by men for the first time, and once I realized what was going on…I hated it. I knew I was the same person I’d been three months before, when no one noticed me or had a reason to talk to me, but suddenly, with a little dress and contacts, I was worth their time and attention. I didn’t want it then, not for that reason. Now I’m like you, I guess. Average, but comfortable, in jeans and a t-shirt, but I clean up okay. I just don’t want to be approached simply because I bothered to put on makeup and brush my hair, though.
I've totally been through this. I got braces my senior year of high school, so I had braces and nerdy black plastic glasses my first year of college (before those glasses were cool). Then that summer, my braces were removed, I got contacts, and I realized I could wear a spaghetti-strap summer dress without being ridiculed. I experienced being approached by men for the first time, and once I realized what was going on…I hated it. I knew I was the same person I'd been three months before, when no one noticed me or had a reason to talk to me, but suddenly, with a little dress and contacts, I was worth their time and attention. I didn't want it then, not for that reason. Now I'm like you, I guess. Average, but comfortable, in jeans and a t-shirt, but I clean up okay. I just don't want to be approached simply because I bothered to put on makeup and brush my hair, though.
Thank you all for such lovely comments and for sharing your experiences and stories.
Rose just played her first baseball game last night as the only girl on her team. So now that’s a whole new thing with the weird gender stuff from all angles and her preoccupation about not being “too girlie” on her team. I will say that overall, people are very supportive and proud of her playing with the boys, which is nice.
How does the fairy story end? Obviously I couldn’t come up with anything then or while writing and revising this piece. After reading some of your comments, I think that perhaps the story needs to veer away entirely from the prince fairy and probably the beautiful, but mean fairy too. Perhaps the good fairy works at a rehabilitation clinic for fairies who have lost their wings, and she finds her work fulfilling. Perhaps she becomes a lawyer who sues the evil, wing-stealing fairy. I suppose the story could go in any number directions away away away from that narrative we’re all so used to. Thanks for helping me see my way out of that box.
I had the same fluctuations of pretty/not-pretty. I felt so duped after the years of mockery. I won’t even describe my years as an “ugly model” here, as I’ve already gone there many times before, as a lesson in perspective. I will say that I just read patti smith’s memoir, just kids, and was floored when I realized that not once did she mention her own looks: just her style. Style is a wonderful thing. One professor I knew told me that style is what is left after you fail to imitate someone else perfectly. It’s what makes you different. It’s what makes you an artist or a poet, or a groundbreaker.
All that just to say that as I grow older and wrinklier, I try to forget about beauty. Beauty was such an elusive, treacherous thing all my life. It was handy, when I had it, but it was also poisonous. We all need to concentrate on our desires, our work, our abilities, our magic tricks. My favorite story of a little girl is The Amazing Bone, by Steig. It’s a fairy tale about magic and cleverness. I sent it to my best friend for his daughter after he started telling her princess stories.