You don’t have to be pretty

My absolute favorite thing to read lately was this:

http://www.dressaday.com/2006/10/you-dont-have-to-be-pretty.html

My grandmother always told me that being popular was not important. She said “You are beautiful and talented instead.” I like that she was able to reconcile talent, which inherently implies Action, with Beauty, which implies inheritance (though beauty takes many forms).

What I love MOST about this post is that it addresses backlash as well. She states we do not owe prettiness to Anyone, not anyone we know personally or complete strangers either. I agree wholeheartedly with that! She goes on to assert that we do not owe UN-prettiness to feminism either.

This view makes me supremely happy. I have felt frustrated on hearing women say they cannot accept feminism, because if they [live in support of women having equal rights] then they “have to” act a certain way and dress a certain way. Do you see how I replaced “live as feminist” in that sentence with a definition? Please feel free to use my definition as your own, if the one you have been using does not make you happy. Feminism -as I see it- does not mandate what a woman chooses to wear, nor where she chooses to work, nor her personality. The message of feminism is, I believe, to be myself exactly as I am.

And in the wise words of ‘a dress a day’s author “You get there by traveling the route you find most interesting.”