I'm fed up with conventional beauty standards, are you?
Conventional attractiveness or beauty standards are basically what you see as the leading characters in most TV shows or movies.
Patriarchy demands that we submit to be ornaments for other people and the male gaze. We internalized this objectification and get tied to an external look as the only way to affirm ourselves.
I have never looked like what conventional attractive beauty standards say I should look like. Measuring myself against these standards is always going to leave me feeling un-cute. I also have internalized the need to be liked according to these standards. But now I want to be liberated from them. Conventional beauty standards are rooted in white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, transphobia, classism, homophobia and ageism. Here's how it hurts us:
- It gives us a narrow definition of what's hot and what's not.
- It disconnects from our body.
- It teaches us to see our value as the sum of our "good bits and bad bits".
- It gives power to those definitions to measure our worth.
- It gives us an internalized obsession with chasing perfection as defined by these systems.
- It invalidates what it actually feels like to live and love in our bodies in so many diverse ways.
Moving beyond mainstream beauty standards means freeing ourselves from them, their power and healing from their harm. I asked my Instagram followers what beauty standards have to go, and here's what so many of them shared:
