Beautiful women.

I was born on a land that historically has seen women as the second sex. In this collective narrative, woman as a sub-creature has excessive emotions and scanty intellect. Either they are not enough or too much, they are always wrong thus should be fixed and improved (Garland, 8). To complicate the issue, women are incapable of being whole on their own. An alternative solution for them is to attach to a man who can save their livelihood in a world that demands more emotional stability and cerebral capacity than they are capable of mustering. But heroes don't work for free so to be saved, a woman's job is to stay pretty and agreeable. The pursuit of beauty will forever be a woman's existential and life-long project. Her femaleness condemns her to the race for aesthetic qualities.

The paragraph above may sound like an old rant by a frustrated feminist in a bored dinner table. The whole table may have been well-versed in those socio-historical facts by now, but once they leave the safety of theoretical discourse and resume living, they still must face a world that persists on the axis of sexism. They must compromise their humanities knowledge to live in a society where the cosmetic industry has escalated dramatically more than ever before (Naomi). They must practice subtle yet pervasive denial within a culture where dieting, depression that's related to body-image, anorexia, agoraphobia, etc. is a burgeoning pandemic.

To be vulnerably specific, knowing and yet still following the beauty prescriptions damage my integrity. In the far reaches of my mind, I question why I fuss over how much calorie there is in each food; why I am obsessed with weighing myself and toning my belly; why my confidence is associated with how aesthetic I look on each day; etc. Perhaps knowing alone is not the answer to cure this beauty pandemic, perhaps personal revolutions take more than a person to wage.

In Re-shaping, Re-thinking, Re-defining: Feminist Disability Studies, Garland wrote:

While women have been liberated from many restrictions, they have not been freed from the social mandate to pursue beauty.

Our sexist structure may be a theoretical and historical fact to some people, but to me and many others, it is a daily reality of control and oppression, of disciplining our body and expressions to earn love, acceptance, and financial wellness.

Beautiful women are not effortless. That is a myth constructed by those who didn't want to burden themselves with understanding the struggles that their oppressed subjects were facing. There is much calculation, maintenance, and practice behind the soft baby-like skin and toned, squeezable buttocks.