Challenging Beauty Standards for Women

Maybe you're not pretty. So what? I'm a horrible woman,

and I make content for

other horrible women, and my objective is not to convince you that you

are in fact

pretty or to reassure you that you're attractive or to try

and expand the

definition of beauty to include you.

My end game is to hopefully get you to care less about whether

you're attractive or not, and to hopefully make you angry about how

much mental space and emotional energy you've been

conditioned to put into the

topic. I don't know if you guys understand how serious I am

about being a horrible,

mean woman, but I really am, because when women talk to me about feeling like

they're ugly, I have the same impulse to assure them

that they're not.

But my preferred response is, "Maybe you are ugly, so what?"

And even for a

self-described horrible woman, I know this seems really harsh,

but the truth is

that I don't think the solution to us as women being overly preoccupied with

whether or not we're attractive is to constantly be reassuring ourselves

and each

other that we are attractive. It's to stop caring about whether

or not we're

attractive. And I know this is a lot easier said than done,

but like a lot of

things, it gets easier if you get mad about it.

We're not born with an innate predisposition to being overly concerned

with

superficial things or obsessing over the minute details of

our appearance.

Most men, when they have a breakout, are not reaching for the concealer to

cover it

up, and that's mostly not because they've gone

on a self-help journey where they've

learned how to love their acne. And if they even thought about it,

they probably

don't like it very much, but they don't feel the need to do

anything about it

because it's not taking up a bunch of space in their heads.

And the reason that it's not is not because men

are more high-minded than women,

it's because they haven't been conditioned into the idea that this is of supreme

importance to them. They're allowed to just be in whatever

state they're in.

And that's what I want for women. I want us to be free to be and

to be not so burdened by concerns about our appearance.

And I think a solution that involves learning to love the way you

look or

learning to see yourself as beautiful is kind of unachievable for a lot of

people, and then when we struggle with it, it just deepens the feelings of

inadequacy that we have. And also, it kind of gives credibility to the

idea that beauty is important, and I think that it would be more helpful

to

us to think about whether or not we're beautiful less.

Being preoccupied with our looks because we think they're not good enough to

being preoccupied with our looks because we're trying to reinterpret them as good

enough is still just being preoccupied with our looks.

I think what might be more productive and achievable is recognizing that you

are living in a rigged system that has had to condition you into seeing

how you look as a matter of supreme importance so that you will put mental

space, emotional energy, and material resources into the matter,

and get pissed off about it. Because getting to a place of self-love

might be

really difficult, but getting angry at a system set up to

screw you

over and refusing to think the way it wants you to think can be really

motivating,

or at least I found it to be. You don't have to love yourself in order

to

stubbornly refuse to hate yourself.

And I know, again, all of this is so much easier said than done, but it's

definitely helped me because I spent most of my adolescence

and young adult life refusing to wear shorts because I thought there was

something wrong with the way my legs looked.

And I live in a really hot part of the world as well, so I was unnecessarily

uncomfortable and hindered for a lot of my life over a really

superficial thing. And the thing that ultimately helped me get free of this

was

not deciding that actually my legs were beautiful or expanding the definition

of

beauty to include them. It was confronting the possibility

that I might have

really unsightly, unattractive legs that don't fit the beauty standard, but so

what? Even if there is something wrong with my legs,

I still have as much right as

anybody else to move around the world dressed for comfort and to be

free of the burden of obsessing over them.

The path to freedom for me was not learning to think more positively

or more kindly

about my legs, it was getting really annoyed at how much I

was burdened by

thinking about my legs and deciding on principle to try not to

think about my

legs. And now I'm in my thirties, and it's just normal for me to not think

about my

legs, and I live in shorts.