Beauty Is Broken
It’s always been a man’s possession — and that’s why it failed.
I was 11 years old when I first recognized that men’s perception of beauty revolves around possession. I was walking home from school when a group of teenage boys started following me in their car. They were catcalling me, so I ran into a bank until they drove off. If that experience taught me anything, it was that beauty is about power: the pursuit of it and the consequence of it. Those boys might’ve thought I was cute, sure, but more enticing was the thought of control over someone else, someone obviously fragile: a pre-teen girl.
Beauty, like monstrous ugliness, comes with a hunt. Of course I wanted to be beautiful. But not followed on the walk home, not threatened to be pulled into a car. I don’t legislate beauty’s boundaries — (white) men do. They define it; they dictate; they own it, asking us to see ourselves in their eyes. When I’m getting ready to go out, determining how to look good, but not vulnerable, I think about the fact that men so rarely have this issue: how to be beautiful, but not breakable; something easily pursued.
