Growing up, I became obsessive about my weight after one of the biggest box office hits for teenages of my time, Clueless. I started dieting at I don't even know how old I was, and even let it get to diet pills and bullemia. Makeup was something that I had been using since middle school, and my mom even had a bunch of money stashed away so that I could get my nose fixed for my eighteenth birthday.
My mom had always bought me makeup in an attempt to get me to "highlight my features" and crap like that. I had gone wearing it so much, that my face looked unfamiliar when I didn't have any on. Some days when I would try liberating myself from makeup and not wear any to school, I would always end up coming home early in tears because a few people had asked if i was sick.
But since a few weeks ago, i just stopped. It's my face, and i'm not going to let some fucking white men in suits and ties tell me what my face should or shouldn't look like. I'm the only person in this world who is going to unconditionally love me, so why should i torture myself. My only wish is that more girls could see themselves as beautiful without all the crap that they are being told that they need in order to be beautiful. As if beautiful is all that we're good for. Besides, whose definition of beautiful are we using anyways? Our standards of beauty today are totally fucked, and need to be stopped. Long lashes, anorexic, yet with big breasts and ass, full lips, long hair. Also, beauty standards today also mean white, and we were supposed to be past this a long time ago.
From Listen Up: Voices From the Next Feminist Generation, Veronica Chambers writes, "Another major obstable among feminists of my generation is how black women are still expected to fit white standards of beauty and how little white women acknowledge or understand this. While white women are also held to unreasonable beauty standards, it is frustrating how often many women try to skirt around the reality that racism adds another potent strain to the standards of beauty that black women are held to. To say simply,"I don't look like Cindy Crawford either," or "I think Whitney Houston is really beautiful," doesn't address the real pain that many black women have experianced. We are still acculturated to hate our dark skin, our kinky hair, our full figures. "What are you going to do? You can't dye your skin," African American model Veronica Webb said in a recent interview. What are you going to do? You're not going to talk to your white sisters because they're so busy being defensive, assuring you that they aren't racist, that they rarely hear what you're saying at all."
She also goes on to say: "Black women are instructed to look as "white" as possible, especially with regard to their hair. She doesn't mention the African American flight attendant who brought a famous suit against her employers, who had fired her because she wore braids. She doesn't mention how often braids, dreads, and even afros are strictly prohibited in many workplaces, forcing many black women to straighten their hair and wear styles that are more "mainstream"."
Beauty standards today are fucking ridiculous, and I hope that more women start to realize this, so that it can stop having harmful affects on girls today.