Here’s a topic that’s been stirred up a bit lately. Faces. What we look like. And the bodies that come with it.
I’d like to discuss it.
This subject gets a bit tricky but let me start at the beginning. My beginning.
When I started this business 12 years ago I would walk around San Diego on busy nights and put up my bumper stickers where they’d be seen.
Then I’d walk back through the streets & listen to the comments of the partiers.
What I almost always heard was, “I’ll bet some fat, ugly bitch put that sticker up.”
So here we are.
People do expect someone who takes on the “feminist” topics of beauty, self-acceptance & perfection standards to be a large, dowdy, homely woman. One who’s embittered for being visually unappealing and therefore nudged to the outskirts of society. With her cats.
Well, I’m not. (Despite the lonely visual of my former sticker nights!)
I don’t have a weight problem nor do I find myself homely. But I do have my share of insecurities. Just like everyone, EVERYONE else.
Every woman I have ever known whether she is short, tall, heavy, thin, dark, medium, light-skinned, buxom or flat-chested has her share of insecurities. Physical insecurities.
Almost every one are silly. Silly, I say! “My lips are too thin.” “I wish I were a D cup instead of a C”. “My hair is too flat/frizzy/dark/mousy.” “Look at these laugh/frown lines!”
We kvetch about cellulite, jiggly arms, thick thighs, big hips, wide butts, spider veins, gray hair, wrinkles and saggy skin. We buy Spanx to hold us in & Wonder Bras to push us out. If we have straight hair we curl it, curly hair we straighten it. If we are thin we aren’t curvy enough and the curvy girls feel fat. See what I mean?
Very recently model Cameron Russell even said, “Models are the most physically insecure women on the planet.”
So who’s actually enjoying their body? Celebrating it?
Well we are, that’s who! Those of us here at Imperfect Pearls have made a commitment to embrace & laugh about our imperfections, not put our power in someone else’s hands to “fix” them. And it is our bold intention to blaze a trail that YOU can follow.
The trail starts here: [now look into a mirror and say...]
Real women are strong women, independent & wise,
We are beauty regardless of the size of our thighs.
We are what we choose & some choose to peruse
From waitress, to artist, to corporate tycoon -
We don’t need to be Barbie, that chick’s a cartoon!
We’re not to be tied up in some pretty package,
Nipped, tucked & implanted if in boobage we lackage.
Imperfect Pearls deals in real-ness, in slogan-sized doses,
Questions the logic & fears the prognosis
Of a society steeped in a form of neurosis,
Where perfection’s required from our heads to our toes-es!
On a further note, the fact that beautiful, famous women (Paulina Porizkova, Kate Winslet, Crystal Renn, Emma Thompson, Rachel Weisz…) are becoming vocal on the subjects of perfection &/or plastic surgery means that this pressure affects them, too. Maybe more so! But more on that later.
In the meantime can we learn to be a little nicer to each other regardless of what we look like? Perhaps start listening to the content of ones message without ‘deface’-ing the messenger.
That seems like the best place to start.
I’ve been pondering this question for quite some time.
