Why do we want to keep women from valuing beauty?
I once saw a blog post in which a woman stated that she would no longer comment to a little girl on her beauty, whether it was in regard to an outfit or the girl’s beautiful appearance. Instead, she would ask the little girl something more related to intelligence, like what she’s been reading recently. I get that. We should be conversing with little girls in more ways than merely “you’re pretty,” if only because little girls are always more than just pretty. But that doesn’t mean we should stop telling them the truth. Little girls are beautiful. They can light up a room with unrestrained joy. They can be loving to people whom some adults can’t be bothered to love. And yeah, no matter what they look like, they are physically beautiful too.
An article about Verizon’s recent ad regarding a relative dearth of women entering STEM fields is also representative of this idea that’s been taken too far. The title, “Powerful Ad Shows What a Little Girl Hears When You Tell Her She’s Pretty” made me want to scream, so naturally I’m ranting about it in writing. We all know that the value of beauty can be taken too far, and people can become obsessive over looking beautiful. That’s not good; we can all agree on that. But in fighting that obsession, people tend to go way too far toward the other direction: Let’s make girls not think about whether they’re beautiful!
That is NEVER GOING TO WORK. Why? Because femininity and beauty go hand in hand. (Notice I didn’t say that ‘women’ and beauty go hand in hand. Some women don’t care. That’s cool. Most women, however, do care.) Women have used their feminine characteristics for the entire history of the world to make the Earth more beautiful, from decorating homes, to looking beautiful, to smiling at friends and strangers alike, to being warm and kind to others. Stop trying to ignore the feminine striving for beauty.
I don’t remember ever being told that I was beautiful when I was a child. And you know what that made me think? That people wouldn’t say that because they didn’t believe it. That nothing about my appearance was beautiful. I’m not the only one who reached this conclusion; my best friend told me she had a similar experience. Things changed in the eighth grade when a girl I barely knew told me that I was beautiful. She’s the first person I remember telling me so. Yet when people did start telling me that I was beautiful, I didn’t suddenly decide to throw away all my interests and only care about my appearance. What I did was continue on in my life with considerably better self-esteem, and later went on to study Nutrition and Dietetics because I discovered my love of science. Apparently, girls can like and choose to study science despite being told they’re pretty.
Take that, Huffington Post.
The title of that article seems to imply, too, that people who value science don’t value beauty. I.e., girl hears “you’re pretty!” and then thinks “Oh darn, I won’t be able to be a scientist because ‘science’ and ‘pretty’ are two mutually exclusive ideas!”
Really?
Look at the world around you and try to tell me how scientists don’t value beauty. Look at animals and plants and waterfalls. Look at the sky at night. Look at the human body. Scientists love to study the beauty of this world and its surroundings. I’d even go so far as to say that scientists can see beauty in things that other people never see. Like the human digestive process. It’s pretty cool.
(There are other things wrong with the Verizon ad, like the cleverly stated statistics that don’t actually say that not enough women are in STEM majors. E.g., “Only 18% of college engineering majors are female!!!!!111!!!” to which I say…um, ever noticed that there are more science and math majors than engineering? Like, I don’t know, nutrition? Or biology? Or math? Also, maybe no more than a certain percentage of women are interested in engineering and maybe that’s okay because maybe we should let people choose the major they’re most interested in and not expect equal amounts of males and females in each major? But that’s a subject for another rant.)
I, for one, am eagerly anticipating looking totally beautiful in my lab coat while on my rotations next school year. Let’s start celebrating the beauty that exists in this world, like the important thing that it is.
philomathy 