I don’t understand it. I just can’t understand it. How can a beautiful woman look in the mirror and tell herself she’s not beautiful? How could society have ingrained itself so firmly in the back of her mind that she refuses to believe — no matter how many times she’s told — she is crazy-beautiful?
I have to note here that I’m not addressing any specific girl based on anything that’s happened to me recently. This is just something I’ve been thinking about for a while and had a conversation with a friend about.
We have known some gorgeous — and I mean G-O-R-G-E-O-U-S — girls who treat themselves like dirt. They won’t allow themselves to build up any amount of self-confidence or self-worth because they’re too busy staring in the mirror looking for imperfections to amplify and hammer themselves over.
What the hegemony of supermodel narratives of beauty in our culture has done is create an unreachable standard of false beauty that poisons everyone with its consequences.
Girls tear themselves to shreds wishing for perfect skin, perfect bodies, perfect everything.
Guys think it’s OK for them to take one look at a girl and decide based on some arbitrary criterion — some dudes are legs men, etc. — whether they’ll even consider her as a possible mate. (It works the other way, too, obviously, but I do have a character limit.)
Both sides of the cycle continue to reinforce each other, and we all spin down further and further into what W. B. Yeats described by saying simply, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”
The most wonderfully beautiful women I know — beautiful not just in the face but in words, intelligence and grace — will never know how beautiful they are. They lack all conviction in themselves.
They cannot see how they could be beautiful when women like Bar Refaeli and Kate Upton are out there with their sleek hair and curves for days.
I’m not stupid. I’m not gonna try and deny that Bar Refaeli and Kate Upton are beautiful.
But beautiful is not like heaven where only a certain number of people can fit its qualifications. And beautiful is not like that “Face Lift” minigame in Mario Party where you get points based on how well you stretch the guy’s face to replicate the center image. Beautiful denies the qualities of conformity and exclusion. I’ve heard girls say, “I’ll never be beautiful, I’ll never look like her.” Excuse my French, but that’s f-----g exactly why you are beautiful. Difference is beauty. That has wider implications than just physical beauty. I’m talking about poetry. I’m talking about music. I’m talking about the exotic reaches of aesthetic beauty.
Yeah, we, as a human race, could continue to create the same guitar-driven rock music for the next hundred years, or we could continue to press on into new exciting musical frontiers like rap, hip-hop and electronica. Yeah, we could rewrite Sylvia Plath and the confessional poets a million more times (note: poetry on the Internet is the embodiment of this), or we could write silly poems about coke-snorting ostriches and talking watermelons to make ourselves laugh.
Our generation could continue to copy what past generations have done and base our ideas of beauty on what we’ve seen or been told, but where’s the fun in that? Why not be different?
Yes, men and women are still going to objectify each other. We’re human. We can’t help it. And yes, critics — especially on the Internet — are still going to tear down music they don’t like and other art they don’t understand. But that doesn’t mean we have to listen to them. That doesn’t mean they’re right.
Dallin Kelson is an English major at UF. His columns run on Mondays. You can contact him via opinions@alligator.org.
