14. The power of beauty
You know those days when you catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror or your reflection in a window, and you just think, “Wow! I really am all that today!” Maybe it’s the brightness of your eyes, or maybe your hair looks the way you like it. Maybe it’s the color of the shirt you decided to wear, that goes so well with your skin tone. Maybe it’s the warmth of your smile.
And maybe someone else will compliment you as you go about the world, but that’s not the point. The point is on this day you feel and recognize your beauty, you own its power.
While we might hope this would be an everyday occurrence, it’s not easy for a woman to claim her innate beauty. This power, which should be every woman’s birthright, has instead been taken away from too many of us. Rather than our being able to claim and define our beauty as it exists within us, it has instead been appropriated, sold back to us, parceled out and redistributed inequitably.
Women’s beauty has been defined in terms of external appearance, as “attractiveness,” meaning our ability to attract the attention of others, specifically men. An ideal has been constructed — by fashion, by advertising, by capitalism — that few women can ever attain or which, if they do, comes at great expense of time and money and is impossible to maintain indefinitely.
