On today, the Nerdy Nonconformist is going to step back and let another Nerdy Nonconformist (who so happens to be your friendly neighborhood Irish Republican) to handle this week's blog. It's actually a Facebook note she posted, but I was moved. I really was, mainly because I agree with so much of the post. Without further adieu, Madame Brittany Edwards and her take on beauty, love, and society that we called "Beast".
The first time I heard someone refer to women as the weaker sex, I was appalled. Even at a young age, I remember thinking that I was capable of doing anything a man could do, and honestly, I could probably do it better. But the older I get, I realize that maybe we are weaker; not because we aren’t capable of matching a man’s accomplishments, but because we continue to let everyone else define us-what makes us beautiful, what makes us successful, what makes us worthy.
My entire life if you had asked me to write down five words that described me, I could have listed 100 different options, but the one word I never would have written down was beautiful. I always considered myself fat. Some years, I was legitimately overweight, I know that. But looking back, most of the time it was more just a case of me having big hips and a (really) big butt. My waist, if gone straight down, would have fit in a size 8 pair of jeans. That never mattered to me. Until I could borrow my thin, pretty friends’ pants, I would never be considered beautiful. Even now, every week I go to the gym 5 times, meet with my trainer twice, and walk/run with my best friend around the city three nights- all so I can fit back in my “skinny jeans,” which are a size 10, still considered big by societal standards.
When I weighed myself this morning I almost cried. I’ve lost two pounds in a month. I felt so frustrated. I keep doing all this work and the rewards are so low. Then I asked myself why getting back to that magic number was so important.
The answer is that it isn’t important. No one is going to love me more because I’m 25 pounds lighter, and if they do, then they aren’t someone I need in my life anyway. All it will do is maybe make me feel better about myself because I’d be closer to what society deems perfection. In reality, I have a lot of things going for me: I’m smart; I’m funny and witty; I make killer long islands and sangria; I’m fiercely loyal; I’m driven; I’m a great NERTS partner; and, obviously, I’m also extremely modest.
I’m not pretending men don’t have societal forces focused on them too. They have to deal with Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Alec Baldwin, etc., but in no way do they as a whole let it influence them the way women do. Men don’t sit around wondering how they can have it all-they just take it and go with it. They don’t judge other men on what age they get married, what age they have kids, what they look like. After a certain age, they really don’t judge women either; we keep doing that to ourselves. We know that the pictures of the models in Cosmo aren’t real, but that doesn’t stop us from buying over 14 million copies of it a year, just so we can get tips on how to look like them, or spending over $9.9 billion on plastic surgery in 2012 (men only spent $1 billion). We know that we don’t need a boyfriend or husband, but that doesn’t stop us from feeling like there must be something wrong with us if we are single. When my guy friends first hear my views on marriage and children, they may be shocked but it is not a huge deal, some even agree with me. It’s my female friends that give me hell about it. “Do you want to be alone forever?” “You’ll change your mind one day.” “A career isn’t everything you know.” “How could you not want to be a mom? It’s the best feeling in the world!” I admit, I judge them too, and so do the rest of my “career-oriented” friends. I think my stay at home mom friends are wasting their talents, that my friends who got married before graduating college will be hiring me for their divorces in the next 10 years, and that my friends who have already had children are missing out on the most exciting years of their life.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be healthy, happy, and loved; it is this obsession with perfection, with having it all, that is the problem. We as a whole need to realize that terms like beauty, happiness, and success are relative to the individual. Only when we stop tearing each other down or holding ourselves to impossible standards, can we truly claim to be the stronger sex.
