Beauty and the Rant*

So I have a rant.**
Kind of a rant.

It's an old one about beauty.
But looking through some photography boards on Pinterest brought it back to mind.

And it is this:
Specifically in regards to women, there are about 4 million standards for beauty.

I know that we think about there being one. The celebrity/model standard.

But if you look at the women who are on t.v. and in magazines - really look - you'll realize they're not carbon copies. Those who are celebrated as extraordinary are, in some part, celebrated for the one thing that COULD be considered disproportionate. Or are striking because of a conjunction of things that might be considered flaws if you wrote the sentence slightly differently.

And I guess I'm not mad about that. I just think that .. with all the diversity and with all the examples of different kinds of beauty... it frustrates me that we as women (all of us, yes, me too) still can't seem to find it in ourselves to decide that we're beautiful.

I mean - okay - I do buy into a certain degree of the hype, in that I think there are things that are NOT beautiful. Like weighing 400 pounds. Or wearing leggings as pants.

But when it comes right down to it - somehow we've taken to looking at the media and seeing it as all the ways that we'll never measure up.  Instead of looking at it and seeing all the different ways that we can define beauty.

Sexy can be stilettos and a sheath dress; or leather and a pushup bra; or ripped jeans, bare feet and a white t-shirt; or cultural dress; or a suit.  Cute can be a fifties dress, or Taylor Swift - any height between 3 feet and 7 ...

And any attitude can be considered sexy (except extreme pessimism or a tendancy towards whining, but that's just my opinion) - bad girl, southern belle, shy asian, sophisticate, city girl, school girl, business woman, record store register attendant...

The mindset of how we define beauty truly gets on my nerves. And we can't fall back on "well,  guys see us in some certain light and think that this is what we need to be to be sexy " - because let's face it, every guy has his own definition too.

It just frustrates me that we have cultivated a mentality that we have to fight so hard against to feel comfortable in our own bodies.

And yeah - I like to categorize things, and that's why I think about things like this when I flip through a magazine. Because there's no formula to be found there, even if the writers tell you that there is one. When someone says "Hey, wear this style of clothes and these colors and do your hair like this and you'll feel confident and sexy." - they're often just trying to sell you something.  You just have to find what confidence and comfort are for you and then it's all about health.

The only things I can think of that should be rules of feeling sexy are - does my body function to the best of it's ability? And do I take good care of it?

If the answers to those questions are yes, then okay - well done. The end.

I'm not even mad at magazines or Hollywood for marketing the way they do. We can blame them all we want - but the truth is that they give us new definitions of beauty all the time and we, instead of interpreting this as having choices and chances, interpret this as the beauty of the moment and despair that we're not like THAT right now - when in two days, a new version will come out and even if we achieved THAT perfection, now we hate ourselves for not living up to a new standard.

We want to be blonde and willowy and blue-eyed Cameron Diaz one day and then curvy, red-headed Scarlett the next, and then angular, bosomy, Angelina, and then tiny, fiesty Lucy Liu and then girl-next-door and then sophisticate and then geek goddess...

Do I think everyone is gorgeous? No.

I think everyone has potential to be beautiful though. And I think that 90% of that is finding the attitude that works. Not necessarily the one that's the easiest, or the one that people like the best... but the one that ... well... I don't know what word to use other than "works".

One of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett - described one of his female book characters in this way:

"Concepts of beauty change over the years, and two hundred years ago Sacharissa's eyes would have made the great painter Caravati bite, his brush in half; three hundred years ago the sculptor Mauvaise would have taken one look at her chin and dropped his chisel on his foot; a thousand years ago the Ephebian poets would have agreed that her nose alone was capable of launching at least forty ships. And she had good medieval ears. "

That, I think, sums it up nicely. Everyone has beauty. And they can make it ALL work for them, right now. If only we accepted the things about ourselves that are beautiful and ... defined beauty that way.

*with thanks to Kate, who was my listening ear when this entire rant took place (on ... Thursday?), and who nodded in all the right places. 

**(Yes, those of you who know me well, know that I have lots of rants.)