I once said “The concept of beauty is the straight jacket of the soul”. While others disagreed at that time I am returning to the idea suggesting that beauty chains us to the limitations of our insecurity. It makes us slaves. Never good enough. Never reaching perfection.
A few years back Olympic competitor and world champion athlete Jessica Ennis was called fat. Other female Olympic competitors have been judged prior to competitions on how good they look in a swimsuit. In the non-athletic world, another Gothic woman had her face used as a trampoline by a hate filled male stranger. More recently the US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was ridiculed for her pant suits.
I met a woman who was wandering aimlessly in the back streets of my home town. She stopped me to ask about the arts festival taking place. I described some of the wonderful things I'd seen and pointed to the nearest galleries and events. She blushed and said she wouldn’t go. She claimed she was too hideously fat to walk around in public. I felt horrified that someone could be made to feel worthless due to their physical appearance not living up to an unrealistic ideal. In this, is suppose I am privileged. As soon as I escaped my teens I rarely, if ever, felt I wasn’t attractive enough to be seen.
Is beauty evil? I believe beauty can have a place in our lives. We can reclaim the concept from the body fascists and find joy in a pair of ice blue eyes, a head full of curls, the glistening of skin, a lovely smile. We can stop caring about homogeny and celebrate true beauty in diversity. Beauty magazines have no place in this. No one should dictate to us who and what we may find beautiful. Just as beauty should not be a way to measure success, but an escape from the drudgery of existence.
If we are strong enough to survive in this unforgiving society are we not also strong enough to fight back against the erosion of our achievements by people who care how a person looks rather than who they are?