Published by: Aliyah Margareth Imbat
Date Published: March 8, 2023
Time Published: 3:22 PM
Category: Prose
Theme: The pretty privileges and the beauty standards
Synopsis: It was ironic how people always said that they should be given equal treatment no matter who they were or no matter what their status was. Funny to see only a few could include the appearance of a person when it comes to equality.
Have you ever seen an ugly person be given the privileges only pretty people could have? What were the standards to even be called “pretty”? Well, according to the book I came across in the bookstore I visited last time, there were tons of signs to know if you were beautiful.
“You are ugly if you draw a lot of people’s attention.” Well, I didn’t. Certainly, I was an outcast even the first time I stepped into Elementary School. Funny enough I considered that our innocence faded way earlier than we all thought. It wasn’t like a battlefield of beauty queens when we were younger or in primary school. Back then we really didn’t care if a snot was hanging loose between our nose and upper lip. We didn’t care if our hair was as crazy-messed as a bird’s nest. We didn’t really care about the dirt on our faces. Well yes, I still know that being clean looking was a part of hygiene. But I was clean and neat in High School, yet people always called me filth. I really wondered about that because my uniform was always ironed neatly, and I didn’t even have dirt anywhere near me.
Why did they point out at me? At my face?
“You are ugly if people contact you out of the blue…”
Haaaa…
Again…I had no friends. But I mean they do contact me out of the blue…to copy my homework.
“You are ugly if men protect you.” Oh, dear. All men did was leave me or bully me non-stop. I wouldn’t even go near them. Except for that boy at the bookstore I frequented. He was quite introverted but I found it cute when he reacted all flustered whenever he was talking to that girl. She was really tall, and her skin was perhaps very smooth. Plus her hair and her scent matched. It was the smell of peaches. Sweet, just like how she looked like. Moving on.
“You are ugly if men gawk at you.” Does this book intend to hurt my pride even more or save me from the suffering of thinking about how to even see the beauty standards? Men…stared at me, yes. But their eyes were full of disdain.
“You are ugly if men compliment you.” They surely did…in the wrong way.
But why did the author mostly involve men here? No matter how much I flipped the pages back and forth, the author involved men. Why? Did the beauty standard revolve around them? Did they make the rules? Were they the ones trying to be beautiful? For all I knew, tons of girls also complimented my appearance but failed to befriend me because of the men who complimented them.
I had heard one man call someone pretty. Although I found it nonsense when it came from his mouth. He said that she was pretty because her waist was almost the same size as the thin flakes I gnawed back at home. He said she was pretty because her chest was not as flat as the chopping board I too used to chop the meat I was about to cook. He said she was pretty because her legs were very long and thin...like a stick. He said she was pretty because she was so white that I even thought she lost blood every now and then. For the record, that was stupid to say. She was not white, she was pale. White…white was paper or paint. She was neither of those.
“You are ugly if men go crazy about you.” How crazy exactly? Crazy like they did to that one woman I saw at the back alley being cornered by men she called her friends? Or was it something like acting all nice and proper in front of her and then stalking her at night? Is the crazy in this book the same crazy as the man who slapped her and grab her hair to teach her a lesson? Is that the crazy the author was saying?
Come to think of it, the police officers I reported to also blamed the woman instead of those men because she was beautiful. So…what did she have to do? Be pretty to fit the standards of those people, or be ugly to be safe from all the danger?
Why did the author entitle her book, “101 Things to Know if You Are Ugly” if she was going to say in the foreword that the book was meant to know if you were pretty or not? It made me even more confused. Was I pretty or ugly? How could a person really know if they were pretty? Why would they say to look inside a person and not just the outside when all people could see at first was the outside? How confusing. Was being neat and clean not a beauty standard? Was having freckles and a skin tone not even close to white paint ugly?
If a woman dressed up, they would call her names unbefitting for a woman to be called, or sometimes they would do the thing called “catcalling”. She was a human…not a cat. If women forgot to prep themselves up, they would still call them names. What if she just wanted to be comfortable? Men could be comfortable with what they wore as the only thing to cover up (for some of them, not all) was their nasty personalities.
Women were just…women. Why did we have to go through a more difficult time than men? Why did the standards were set higher for us when even back in the days when women couldn’t even work yet, expectations were already high?
Well, I guessed people had forgotten that our appearance should also be seen as equal and that it should have its own freedom. It should not be moved by someone else’s preference but ours alone.
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