
InMemoriam
Tribute account for miWatch432 pioneer of lurking
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AN INTRODUCTION
“You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.” – Erin McKean
This quote changed my life and inspired the title of this book.
Throughout feminist history, women have expanded on the concept of prettiness as a currency from their different standpoints, and there are a lot of variations on this idea out there. For example, Naomi Wolf’s book The Beauty Myth unpacks in-depth how our beauty standards are linked to capitalism; Chidera Eggerue touches on prettiness in her book What a Time to Be Alone and in her #SaggyBoobsMatter movement to promote a message of anti-perfection; and trans activist Janet Mock speaks on how she felt she gained pretty privilege as she began her transition.
This book – Women Don’t Owe You Pretty – is my interpretation.
This phrase sent me on a journey of unpacking my identity, forcing me to properly examine myself for the first time and ask why the hell I was carrying out these invasive, expensive, time-consuming and at times painful beauty rituals.
I realized how much of my self-worth was determined by whether or not I appeared desirable to men, and whether that prettiness would be enough to encourage them to treat me with respect. But most of the time the attention that my “prettiness” garnered meant that men viewed me as an object, and men don’t respect objects. After all, objects are something we view to be used
without reciprocity – it’s a one-sided relationship. It’s why they didn’t handle my rejection well and called me names like “frigid”, because objects aren’t supposed to be empowered. They’re objects. Acknowledging this was both uncomfortable and liberating – exactly what growth is supposed to feel like.
This phrase also forced me to examine the kinds of standards against which someone’s “prettiness” is measured, and what “pretty” constitutes. Our collective idea of what makes someone pretty in society is based on their proximity to whiteness, thinness, being non-disabled and being cisgender.
This helped me to see how my own prettiness has enabled me opportunities, opportunities that women who fall outside of what society deems as pretty have to work harder for.
Whether I thought I was attractive or not, for the first time I had to acknowledge the objective fact that I sit high on society’s scale of desirability, by being slim, non-disabled and white.
As women we don’t want to admit that we have “pretty privilege” because we have been taught that we should be unaware of our beauty, and to respond to compliments with self-deprecation and remarks such as “No I’m not, look at my...[points to ‘flaws’]!” In order to acknowledge that we have this privilege, we must first call ourselves pretty. Which, due to insecurity, is near impossible for most women.
This is how our desirability privilege is silently maintained, and how as a society we continue to go about de-politicizing our dating preferences as if they aren’t problematic and heavily loaded with racist, fatphobic and sexist bias.
There’s a discussion about whether desirability really is a privilege, since its benefits are rooted in the objectification of our bodies, not respecting them. My prettiness is both the thing that allows people to treat me better, and also the thing that has led to the most traumatic experiences of my life. Men don’t look at pretty women on the street and think “She’s pretty, so I won’t sexually harass her or follow her home.” It’s
the opposite. I walk about life with constant vigilance – anxious for the next man to stick his head out his car window and shout something at me, spike the drink that my “prettiness” encouraged him to buy for me – and stop in a shop before I go home to check I’m not being followed.
Keys between my fingers, heart racing, checking over my shoulder, strategizing my safest route home even if it means spending money on a taxi – this is what navigating public spaces looks like for a lot of women.
I can’t tell you the amount of times I have contemplated shaving my head to rid me of male attention and sexual harassment almost entirely overnight. But I realized that to do so would imply that it’s my responsibility to prevent this harassment, not theirs.
I was taught how to count calories, have boundaries with and say “no” to food as a young girl, before I learned about the importance of having boundaries and saying “no” to other people. What do you think that taught me about being a woman in this world? I learned that it was more important for me to be an object of desire, than it was to have my own needs met and be respected as a person.
These harmful belief systems and low self-esteem landed me in abusive relationships as my boundaries were non-existent and I didn’t believe I deserved better. I was just happy that someone wanted me.
I often wonder what my life would look like if I had learned that my body belongs to me, and me alone, first; that the way my body looks and its purpose is not to please others. I wonder what my life would look like if I had understood that I do not owe anybody “nice”, “perfect”, “petite” or “pretty”; that the best version of myself is not the one that is broken down in order to fit into the room afforded for women in a man’s world, but is the version that stays whole in spite of other people’s reactions – whether there is space for me or not.
Instead, I killed, squashed and minimized parts of who I really was in favour of the validation I craved, living to please everyone but myself – and I don’t want you to feel as though you have to do the same.
This is the book I wish I could have whacked myself over the head with before the world’s toxicity permeated its way into my life.
TL;DR we don't owe subhumans pretty; we sexually objectify ourselves for chadu cocku onry JFL
This entire book screams entitlement, condescension, pretty privilege and feminist dogmas