For Fuck’s Sake, Let’s Stop Pretending All Women Are Beautiful

We act like we’ve made strides. We act like we’ve come so far, like we don’t care what the world thinks. And as we crop and filter and take eighteen more photos of the same pose, we pretend we just #wokeuplikethis.

The cognitive dissonance remains staggering. And most all of us women buy into such inconsistency, and we buy it like it’s a miracle face cream that’s conveniently 20% off retail value.

It is this cognitive dissonance, of course, that maintains the stigma, the pressure, and all the covert expectations that come with womanhood. It is this cognitive dissonance that deludes us into thinking our progress is good enough.

Because even though we think we live outside of boxes, we’ve just created different boxes. Boxes that imprison us, boxes that keep us in line, keep us in check, keep us in a perpetual haze of insecurity.

Because we still live in a world where men are called brave when they fight in wars and women are called brave when they forgo makeup. And while we deem men as assertive for speaking their minds, we call women bitchy. And while men praise each other for the women they have sex with, women label each other as whores.

We don’t judge ourselves based on our character traits. We judge ourselves in numbers. In bust size, waist size, weight.

Did you know the average woman spends a quarter-million dollars on her appearance over the course of her lifetime? That’s an entire college tuition. That’s a house. That’s years of salaries.

Have no delusion. Despite the associations, sex isn’t vulnerable. You can always have sex with the lights off and fuck in the shadows of the night. You can always get drunk enough to stop caring. Letting yourself “go gray” is vulnerable. Avoiding Botox is vulnerable. Wearing a bikini, when you don’t have visible abs, is vulnerable. Vulnerable is what the world sees when the lights are on.

But is vulnerability the word? Or are people just using it as a euphemism for ugly? For disgusting? For the retched, “going against the grain.” Because, as a woman, we must question the integrity of every compliment, right? Because even the most sincere compliments simply reveal the gaps in what it means to be a human being in 2020.

If we women spend $225,360 on our appearance, how many hours do we spend trying to fix, enhance, or conceal ourselves? That same amount?

Why do people complain that they can’t “dress my son up” in the cutest of outfits? And why do they talk about him as “so strong” and “so big,” but his female counterparts are “so sweet” and “so cute?”

When I was pregnant, I didn’t want to know the sex. But how will we know what clothes to buy?!??! As if it was a cardinal sin for a boy to wear pink and a girl to wear blue. As if this was the pertinent issue associated with raising children in modern society.

We sexualize from birth, and we always have. We pretend like everyone is equal, but the starting points are football stadiums apart. We still insist that privilege doesn’t exist. We still act like appearance doesn’t matter.

So, why do I know the calorie count of every morsel of every food and have since I was eleven years old? And why was I eleven years old, standing in front of my mirror, pulling my thighs unhappily? What were the boys doing when they were eleven? Were they inspecting their granola bar labels?

My doctor, a self-defined feminist, told me that she was so impressed by how quickly I lost my “baby weight.” She wasn’t dazzled by my ability to take care of my child. She was dazzled by my ability to wear my old jeans.

And you know what? Her “compliment” made me feel powerful. It made me feel worthy and beautiful. At that moment, it didn’t matter that I was sleep-deprived and anxious and questioning my entire existence. All that mattered was that I was supposedly doing my womanly duty.

What lies within the vast space of wanting to be a feminist and wanting to be what my society expects me to be? What lies within the fear that beauty is all that matters?

Am I the problem? Or is my society the problem? Where does change start? Where does change end?

Because if we mark progress by the number of women embracing their cellulite or acne scars, is that really the kind of progress we want to make? Is that the kind of progress we were destined to achieve? Is that really what it means to be brave or strong? Is that really what it means to be inclusive, to be a woman in 2020?