A Crucial Message To All Brown Women and Girls
By Kshyama
“Stop admiring yourself!”
Though those words weren’t aimed at me, I heard my mother’s voice echo in this stranger’s mouth. It landed like a slap. The three of us, a desi mom who was around my age, her daughter who couldn’t have been more than 8, and I were standing in an elevator. It was one of those fancy affairs with mirrors and gold lining instead of wood panels. The little girl had been smiling at herself in the mirror, making different poses and grinning. Selfies without a camera, I thought. But when the mother snapped at her young daughter, the child’s eyes immediately fell tothe floor. She shuffled sideways and stood beside her mother. The smile on her face was completely erased.
I could feel the muscle tighten in my jaw. We were both headed in the same direction, only a couple floors. How do you intervene in moments like that? I still haven’t figured it out. I stared. Rudely. Pointedly. Directly. I stared at the child’s mother, my fingers digging into the long cardboard tube that carried a poster that had just won third prize at a research conference — a competition that I attended only in my mid-twenties once I had built up enough confidence after years of remarks like “stop admiring yourself’ from adults I had trusted, looked up to, and wanted to impress.
Stop admiring yourself.
My mother said the same thing to me when I was posing in front of our dresser in New Delhi, over 20 years ago. I was a six-year-old child, playing with Ponds Cream (of all things) in front of a mirror. I know now as an adult, what this mom — and what my mom — were trying to say: don’t base the entirety of your worth on your looks.
But saying “Stop admiring yourself” does not teach a young child about complex beauty norms she may feel pressured into following. “Stop admiring yourself” is not an analytical statement about aspiring or not aspiring to Eurocentric beauty standards, using or not using skin-lightening Fair and Lovely products, meeting or not meeting beauty standards in our own culture prioritising thick black hair in braids, “sharp features,” and smooth acne-free skin.
“Stop admiring yourself” is a command. It is an order. It tells us not to look up to ourselves. It teaches us we don’t deserve to have a sense of self worth, and in so doing, it is a phrase in alignment with every sexist, racist politic that teaches brown girls that other people decide our worth.
Once when I was younger, my grandmother said “You cannot say you are beautiful! It’s only nice if other people say that about you.” I wonder where she got that idea from, but I realise this attitude about beauty is socially produced, culturally mediated, and that we are all swimming in these norms.
Take for example: Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches. Dove’s “Real Beauty” Sketches. This was a documentary-style short advertisement that ostensibly supports women in our “quest to be/feel beautiful.” There was a lot going on in those 6 minutes and 36 seconds. Various people, mostly white women, describe their physical features to Gil Zamora, a forensic composite artist who worked with the San Jose Police Department as their police artist from 1995–2011. Next, they are asked to meet one other person participating in the project, for a simple chat. They are then asked to describe the physical features of the person they’d met to Zamora in a ‘second description.’ Zamora thus ends up drawing two different pictures of the people in the project: one is a description based on how the women viewed themselves. The second is a description based on how other people viewed the women. Finally, the women are told to compare the sketches, and are all amazed at how much more beautiful others found them as compared to how they see themselves.
I suppose the goal was to make the audience feel a warm, happy glow; clearly the superficial message was: “You are beautiful! Yes you are! And you are lovely! More than you think!” But the underlying message was clearly: “…because other people think you are.” Similarly, mainstream attitudes to women taking selfies often reduce the act to women pandering for sexual attention and validation from men; rarely are selfies seen as a photographic art form or valid means of self-expression and self-love. But men painting self-portraits for decades is somehow high art? Ok.
Apparently, to tell a woman she is beautiful is to offer her a compliment — whether she wants to hear it or not. But any woman proudly saying “I am beautiful” or “I know my worth” is arrogant, vain, or has an ego. Everywhere we are told that women are not allowed to celebrate, name, or enjoy our own beauty, features, or what we like about ourselves. We are taught from such a young age that in order to like ourselves, we must be named as worthy of being liked by others. And while this phenomenon is not unique to brown cultures, there is something extremely South Asian about that phrase: “Stop admiring yourself.”
Internalising the notion that I couldn’t like myself or admire myself “too much” decimated my sense of self for an incredibly long time. Though I did well in school, I felt that my grades were in the hands of my teachers. I learned to seek approval and praise, rather than learning to be confident in my sense of self and what I could accomplish. I learned failure was a sin, a deep defect. Teachers often wrote “She loves to learn!” but this was a lie: I loved learning from age 0 to age 6, and then again from age 24 onwards. Between the ages of 6 and 24, I loved to do well, and the measure of how well I was doing was determined by everyone but me — usually those in authority, like teachers and parents.
Devastatingly, I sought to be liked, rather than being respected — and the impact this had on my experiences with bullying, my own toxic neediness, and worst of all, my romantic interactions left me in an incredibly powerless place. “Stop admiring yourself” taught me that other people had the power to admire me — or not. Other people had the power to name if I was worthy — or not. Other people had the power to say if I belonged, deserved respect, or was admirable — or not.
Looking back, I can now see how growing up, I was taught at every stage that my self worth, desirability, and sense of place in the world belonged to people around me. No wonder I wanted so badly to be seen by male partners I loved. No wonder I confused men’s sexual desire of me as an A+ red rubber stamp validating my body as worthy and as desirable. No wonder I confused love with validation.
Frighteningly, I know I have subconsciously and regularly placed romantic partners in positions of authority over me — I have let them deem me as worthy or unworthy of their time. While the worst men I’ve met used this vulnerability to exploit me and set the terms of our sexual encounters, the best men I have loved realized that was I was doing was making them super uncomfortable.
Earlier this year, a partner joked in bed “I’m a catch!” And I smiled at him the way I’ve only smiled when falling in love, with what an ex described as “soft eyes.”
“Yeah,” I said, quietly. “You are.”
He turned to me seriously and said “You are too. You know that right?”
And something shifted. I almost couldn’t hear the validation. It didn’t make sense to me. Something between us evened out. Somewhere, a fear inside me blossomed. It was better if he didn’t think that well of me, I thought, panicking. What if he finds out soon I’m not that awesome?!
“No, I’m not that awesome,” I blurted out. “I’m — really not. You are though,” but the words tripped over my tongue as he stared at me silently. Because it didn’t make sense. Why was I so convinced of his Goodness, and my Badness? “I just… think you’re better than me. But that’s ok. Maybe. I know it doesn’t make any sense,” I said, swallowing hard. “I’m just on my journey, but in a lot of ways you’re already academically, life-stage wise where I want to be. And I can learn from you!”
And this is the real tragedy: we broke up because he was a good man who saw a more self-reliant woman in me than I really was at the time. We broke up because he wanted a partner that could say ‘no’ to him and assert herself. We broke up because he quickly realised I was vulnerable with him and trusted him not from a place of self worth where I chose him as a full person, but from a place of lack of self worth. I wanted to be approved of, more than I wanted to be loved. I wanted to know my love had a place to land in him, more than actually doing the hard work of loving him through his flaws.
And most tragically, I think he knew before I did that my experiences with men had shaped this reality. Many months after we had ended, I asked him, voice trembling: “I am always afraid that because of my experiences with men, I am unkind to the ones I want to get to know. Was I good to you?”
“Yeah,” he said immediately. “Yeah you were great to me.”
“Oh ok,” I breathed a sigh of relief. My trembling voice calmed down a bit, and I said, “That’s good, yeah I’m glad I — ”
“But, you’re not good to yourself,” he said cutting in gently. Something again shifted in that conversation. It felt like a wormhole was twisting the space around us; we were back in bed, and he was looking at me and calling me a catch. I felt something catch in my throat. I had missed something about partnership — I had missed the fact that I needed to be there fully present in my own sense of who I was — and to do that, I needed a much more robust sense of self worth all these years.
And I know I’m not alone: women and young girls are robbed of this agency to name, define, and assert our own worth.
And while I count myself among those women who do learn to reclaim this agency as we age, there are moments that still leave us speechless:
To my shame, I was utterly silent in the elevator. All I could do was hold the mother’s gaze — she must have been about as old as me. All I could think was a jumble of thoughts, blood pounding in my ears. I knew I wanted to call my mom right away. And yell, and scream: How dare she? How could you?
When I did finally call my mom, I asked her why she had told me to stop admiring myself. All she had to say was, “I don’t know. I just thought it… was not right to look in the mirror so often.”
“Great,” I said, sarcastically. “Great, yeah, and now here is another woman, an adult my age, who is teaching her daughter the same bullshit.”
“You don’t know that,” my mother said, her voice trembling. “Her daughter could be like you and fight her mother on that idea…on many ideas.”
Underneath my rage and frustration, I felt my own helpless realization that my mother had done her very best in the circumstances she had found herself in — she really had done her level best — and it wasn’t all bad.
In my house, makeup was neither actively discouraged or encouraged. I never had a lot of access to it, but there was never any shaming about using makeup. When I eventually, in my teens, expressed an interest in some eyeliner and lipstick, mom helped me select a brand that worked well. As a result, I grew up loving my face with it and without it.
We also never had Fair and Lovely in the house — a cosmetic cream filled with chemicals to bleach skin, marketed to brown and black people the world over with the aim of exploiting our insecurities around not having light skin. My mother has lighter skin than me, and I knew on some level as I grew up that she had worked really hard to never make me feel insecure about being darker than her. Yet, I noticed that with the discourse of feminism and shadeism intersecting with beauty norms, so many girls and women I knew used Fair and Lovely secretly, but openly declared their abhorrence of the skin-lightening product.
In many ways, we don’t have the room to discuss the challenges of enacting a fully realised feminist praxis. Roxanne Gay in Bad Feminist writes about this very tension, and I’m inclined to agree: there is no such thing as a perfect feminism. And perfection isn’t what I seek these days.
What do I seek these days? Room. Space. Hope. Opportunities for those conversations that are never had because there is no social script to have them. My mother tried to build that room in the conversation I had with her. Through my anger and frustration, my mother was trying to give me hope: Other girls will be like you. Other daughters will fight back against these norms and challenge these norms. Have hope that things are changing in the direction you want them to change.
In that elevator, there was no room. Physically, we were trapped in the same space. And emotionally, intellectually, in the minute we shared on our vertical descent, I found myself totally silent. In fact, I am still not sure if I would intervene the next time I see someone with authority in my community undermine a young person.
I wonder how much of my own conditioning is organized such that I instinctively never want to undermine a parent in front of their child. I wonder too about the misogyny inherent to correcting a woman’s parenting in front of her child, thereby implicitly insisting on a high standard of parental responsibility for women, when men are never held to the same standards of parenting, teaching, and coaching children. I wonder about my own rage and despair that this same vicious cycle of undermining girls’ sense of selves so often comes from the women we look up to as models: our mothers, grandmothers, and other women in our family whom we respect.
So I’m writing this for all the little brown girls, and for the brown moms who just didn’t know better and are passing on the toxic legacies of our notions of beauty to their daughters.
To the brown moms: stop telling your daughters to stop admiring themselves. The world will teach us all to not admire ourselves. Your job is to ensure that your daughter admires herself, loves herself, has herself no matter what, because all she is likely to be able to rely on in this world is herself. Robbing your daughter of her ability to find pride, sense of self worth, and admiration for herself will rob your daughter of all the opportunities you want for her.
And for the brown daughters (some of whom are moms already who perhaps need to hear this the most):
Admire yourself. Admire yourself and love yourself so deeply that no one else can ever define what you are worth. Admire yourself and love yourself so unfailingly, that when the world tries to name who you are or what you can do or sets limits on you, you are strong enough to push back against it.
Admire yourself through your failures, disappointments, because failure does not have to define you if you do not want it to — admire yourself so much that your wants and desires for your life dictate how you live your life more than anyone else’s wishes. Admire yourself so much that you will never ever think “Does my crush like me” is the same question as “Am I worth liking?”
Admire yourself so much that you find the mentors and peers that you need in your life, lock out the people that undermine you. Admire yourself so much that you will never enjoy chasing after people who do not admire you for validation. Admire how you look, how you feel, how you do everything that you do so deeply that no one can take that away from you or define what beauty or worth is for you.
Admire yourself so you cannot help but hold yourself to the highest standards for what you want from your own life; admire yourself so deeply and so fully that settling for anything less than what you want never becomes an option — you are just too good for settling. Admire yourself so that you can look to yourself as an example of how to live and move through this world.
Keep taking that selfie, keep looking in the mirror, but most importantly, keep looking inside for your own sense of validation and self worth. Admire yourself so deeply and so unflinchingly that you build your own sense of who you are, stone by stone, brick by brick. You are allowed to have your inner self made of stone, that part of you that should be a monument to who you are.
Admire yourself like this, and do it with love too, so that when your mom with good intentions says “Stop admiring yourself” in that condescending way, you can immediately say “No. No I will not stop admiring myself. I will be my number 1 admirer, actually. I am my top admirer.” You will be able to say this without rage; rage is the emotional manifestation of a boundary that has been crossed, violated, and undefended. So defend yourself. Say “No, I deserve to admire myself.”
Admire yourself so deeply that when people run past your kindness hoping to run into your vulnerabilities and insecurities, they will run headfirst into a statue of you instead.
One day, I know I will have enough extra stone and bricks lying around this statue inside myself, a skeleton that is unbreakable, unshakable, rooted with the deep purpose of what it means to be me. When I have enough admiration and love for myself, and enough to give, I will turn to my mother with a smile. It will be time for me to offer her what she likely never had: encouragement to believe so deeply in herself that it will be the ultimate truth of her life.
On that day, I will say: “Mom, I hope you admire yourself too. You should. Because you’re pretty badass. Did you know that? I hope you love yourself because you deserve that.”
Admire yourself.
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