During chats at camp, one girl asked the question, "What is beautiful?" She wanted to know how society reached the decision of what is beautiful, and how that translated to magazine covers and actresses and advertisements. At the time, all I said was, "those decisions were made by men who wanted to make money." Which is true, but I would like to expand.
We have all been trained by society and our own smaller portion of it (of friends and family) to understand what beauty is according to our own societal rules. What is beautiful, attractive, or sexy does not usually come from our own understanding. Part of what is especially hard for women is discovering if we think that outfit is cute because men say its cute, or we genuinely think, as women, that its cute. "Do I like the way I look in this, or do I like the attention I'm going to get from boys in this?" And for some girls, it is important to have an outfit that gets them attention from the boys. But I think just having the internal discussion of, "Why do I like this?" is soooooo very important! Is it genuinely that I like it, or that I think others will like it?
There was recently a commercial for the movie, "Crazy Stupid Love." In the commercial, Ryan Gosling's character says that men won the Battle of the Sexes as soon as women started doing pole dancing for exercise. I would completely agree. It feels like men have tricked women into thinking that embracing the male understanding of beautiful and attractive is somehow empowering women... it's not. Women can only be empowered by embracing our own understanding of beautiful! Society's definition of beautiful is hurting teenage girls and young women in our country, which you can see from the rise of eating disorders and the desire for real beauty that is slowly gaining speed. Some girls and women are looking for role models that actually look like them, while others are hurting their bodies and minds trying to look like the wrong role models.
So what is beautiful?
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