The Ugly Truth of Beauty

Got this article from The Female Network. Read on and I'll post my comments on my next entry since it's long as it is already...

The Ugly Truth of Beauty

Despite what we’ve learned, it’s somehow too easy to fall into the traps that society has set for us. For example, we immediately assume Beauty is dumb, “just a pretty face.” It’s easier to think that a gorgeous girl is self-involved, shallow, or boy-crazy. If she’s successful, we figure she charmed her way into it, as though it were inconceivable that she just might have a brain like the rest of us. Hopefully, we know how irrational that is, but we do it anyway.

And don’t think she doesn’t know it. Supermodel Christy Turlington was
once quoted in Esquire magazine: “I’m constantly being told, ‘Haha, she’s going to school. Maybe she’ll learn to spell.’ There are negative associations…(including) assumptions that you are just completely worthless.”

Says a retired commercial and print model, now the manager of her own business, “I would be introduced to other women and just feel the raise eyebrows: Oh a model. As in, Oh, an airhead.”

On the other hand, there is another no less ugly side to the issue. We women are also guilty of using our looks basically to one-up other women and perhaps give ourselves an ego-boost. It’s unfair particularly when you realize that your beauty or the lack of it was basically handed down to you from a particular gene pool, something you had nothing to do with. When a good-looking guy is walking through the mall with his so-so looking girlfriend, we wonder what he sees in her…as though her looks are all that matters. And to cover up our own weaknesses, how many times have we said to ourselves in a stupid and irrational manner, “Well, at least, I’m prettier, thinner, more fit…than so-and-so.” What’s worse is we actually feel better doing it. When a women succeeds in making the most of her appearance, it’s only other women, and not men, who will undermine her with the utmost cruelty, saying: “She’s special, really” or even, “Mas maganda pa ako diyan eh.”

It must spring from some primal instinct in us, this ugly drive to quell or undermine the beauty of others because somehow it threatens us. For all the flak a girl can get from testosterone, when it comes to narrow vision or downright prejudice, women can be even more hostile, petty and vicious than men, and sadly, very often, the are.