Beauty Standards: Let Me Be Who I Am!

২১ শে জানুয়ারি, ২০১৭ বিকাল ৪:৫২

She doesn't have a heart-shaped jaw. She has non-plucked thick brows. Her lips aren’t pink/red enough... like rose petals. Her eyes definitely aren’t wide/’doe’ like/potolchera. Her smiles aren’t dimpled. Her hair is not straight enough. She doesn’t wear high heels, so she doesn’t have that ‘sophisticated’ arch of the foot. She doesn't have The 23 Inch Waist. She isn’t curvy/slim enough. She doesn’t have washboard abs. She has a Buddha Belly? Shorbonash, shorbonash!

Her skin is too brown/dark-ish. Her husband or even parents would buy her tubes of Fair and Lovely cream- as if having unfair skin makes her any less lovely! She doesn’t smell like something edible between fruits and vanilla/chocolate? Then she isn’t feminine enough!



She's cute, but certainly isn’t 'beautiful'... enough. Therefore, she's not 'perfect'. But she has other qualities that you never saw in any of your “babes” or “crushes”. She can paint Tagore in three strokes of her charcoal pencil, she can sing like Ritzy Bryan or Konokchapa, she is so smart that she resembles a postmodern version of Marilyn vos Savant or Begum Rokeya or maybe she has an inner J.K.Rowling or Sufia Kamal in her. But none of these matter to you, right? Because at the end of the day, she’s not your first choice when you’re ‘choosing’ your life-partner or your girlfriend- like picking out the prettiest flower from the vase, regardless of how beautiful the ugliest flower smells...

She’s either unlucky enough to be ‘friendzoned’ or is just plainly ‘neglected’. She’s not someone you’d want to hang out with on a daily basis, just sip tea and gossip for hours or stargaze together- because it might downplay your social status. Everyone would assume that you hang out with ‘ugly losers’ and you definitely wouldn’t like that, would ya?
She always comes up short in your endless list of expectations and demandings. And if you’re ‘considerate’ enough, you’d make it crystal clear so she gets that message. You’ll break her heart and stomp on it- all the while pretending you didn’t even knew she likes you in THAT way in the first place! Your shoes will darken, not with blood- but with the tears of her unrequited love...

Beauty standards are like this invisible scale a society uses to decide, to judge what looks attractive and acceptable and what doesn’t. These standards can be so incredibly stupid, (yes, STUPID) unrealistic that it can be downright demeaning! Those who can’t quite live up to these so called ‘standards’, feel ugly, unworthy, unlucky and alien. These make people lose self esteem. They lose faith in themselves. They start to hate their own bodies, their own selves.

We live in a world that is materialistic, capitalistic, patriarchal and so on... Labeling at its finest, huh!
Or sometimes, it’s not even because of all these “ism”, sometimes it’s just pure psychological hegemony. A wife spends thousands of Saudi Rials just to look flawless- just because her Sheikh husband thought she could use some Botox injected on her face to have a smoother skin. Did you know that many Korean girls nowadays would choose to have a chin implantation over buying a new handbag anytime?!***
Girls get Breast Enlargements done or hell, even removing some of their bloody bones from the ribcage to have a Barbie Doll waistline!

She sells her morals and everything to just... “make him like her” or “Love her more” or “make him prouder that she’s his”! And some might say, it’s not the men who is responsible for this, it’s the system. Oh, but - “onnay je kore ar onnay je sohe” - what about that? What a beautiful world we live in, eh?
So, World, please let her be the way she is. Don't tell her to change, change your own attitude, spread kindness and love her the way she is.
She is someone.
I'd like to finish my ramblings with this awesome quote. I freakin' love this woman.

And this, too.


*** Click This Link

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