I'm a stranger here myself: I feel pretty...

Well it's that time of year again. All the ladies magazines are running the articles on which swimsuit you should wear for your body type. If you wait til fall they will run the ones about which jeans work for your pear shaped body or your stick shaped body or your old lady shaped body.

Now I don't know anything about your body. And I'm not posting again today about what you should eat or whether you should exercise. I could, I guess, but what else is there really to say about it? We all know what we should do and we will or we won't. That's nothing to worry over. I'm a little tired of those articles anyway and especially tired now that I've gone from skimming articles about how to look good to skimming articles about how to look good "for your age."

But at the same time I'm worrying about my own sagging neck and ass, I'm frantically trying to communicate to my own daughter that her beauty is not something for the internet community to determine. Frequent articles on how young girls are constantly baiting their Instagram and Facebook communities for reassurances of their attractiveness come across my newsfeed. I'm trying to convince her that she's the greatest judge of her worth (because we all confuse BEAUTY with WORTH - we've talked about this before in this post: I Wanna Be Like the Big Girls) and yet I'm doing just the opposite if I fall for the latest Dove Beauty Bar commercial. It's as moving as a Kodak and Folger's commercial COMBINED because it appeals to that same miserable part of women that buys the bathing suit guide. We believe if people think we are pretty we will be worth loving. You can watch it on YouTube if you haven't seen it. We are relieved because Dove marketers are right about one thing: we are much harder on ourselves than others would be. But they are terribly wrong in placing the determination of worth/beauty on an external view still. As Erin Keane says in her Salon article, "The only interesting thing Dove has done since it began this campaign to sell soap in 2004 is overtly shift the emphasis from sexual attraction to peer approval. The real take-away is still that women should care whether a stranger thinks she is beautiful. That’s not radical — it’s the thesis of every beauty product ad campaign ever." Here's the link to the article: Stop Posting that Dove Ad.

Now you can say all that stuff about looking at the inner selves and such to determine worth, and you'd be right, but if there's anything a young woman can tell you it's that beauty absolutely boils down to the currency of worth in their world. This narrow view of beauty shouldn't, but it certainly can determine opportunity for young people. IT JUST DOES. I've seen about a million articles on how psychologically and biologically we are engineered to respond more positively to attractive people. That certainly means open doors. Of course, I've also seen the articles on how people who are TOO attractive are not seen as capable, dependable employees. I suppose that's attributed to jealousy or perhaps those hiring think you must have some deficiencies because it just wouldn't be fair for someone to be lovely AND capable. God help you if you are beautiful and unemployed then. Boy are we screwed because either way we are shortchanging every one in the game. I think this is because of that mixed up belief we keep investing in that if we could just be thinner, more toned, perfectly skinned, we would be worth loving. See how beauty becomes entangled with worth?

When we confuse our level of attractiveness with our real worth, however, we become a slave to any boy who says, "Baby, baby, baby, you're so hot" or, conversely, any little bratty girl who calls us ugly on the internet. We become dependent on the external evaluation of people whom we may not even know personally. What I want is to help create a young woman who can hear and accept that she's beautiful and add (in her head, please), "AND I am good at swimming" or "AND I rock at math" or "AND I'm great with a shotgun." And I want to raise a young woman who can hear, "Your nose is too big" and push back with, "Funny, I don't remember asking you." I'm not sure I can raise that girl if the same child is subject to frequent despairing rants about the unfairness of my saggy parts - if I'm still associating my value with my appearance. In other words, when it comes to our thoughts about beauty and worth, it's time to walk the walk friends, and expand our own experience of beauty beyond the basic biological symmetry that your mind categorizes as attractive. Perhaps it's unfortunate, but there is no more powerful influence on your child's life and beliefs than your own example. And if you don't think that God is capable of delivering beauty to you in something besides perky, upturned noses and thin thighs, why would you expect your daughter to? Maybe it's also time for our WORTH to drive what we think is beautiful.

So I want to clarify a thing or two about this very narrow current understanding of beauty: First, physical attractiveness is truly in the eye of the beholder and it never, ever determines worth. There's someone who thinks just about any other someone is just gorgeous. So everyone can truly achieve feeling physically attractive at some point. Just look at this site (awkwardfamilyphotos.com) and you will see that there's truly someone for everyone. I can assure you that if being adored for your appearance is your pursuit you will never have enough of it and that's fine with me if you're cool with that. But your daughter isn't cool with that.

And the other thing is this: If you can quit thinking that your worth is exclusively about anyone else's approval of your physicality, you will see that there is beauty in the ugliest of human situations, in the commonness of a crooked nose shared by a parent and child, in the simple will of survival in a baby with deformities. You will see sheer and brilliant splendor in the love between two broken people who's best garments include a tuxedo t-shirt and in the old, weather-worn, cracked hands and gray hair of a person who hums while he does honest work. If you can expand your thinking you will be stunned by beauty in the vulnerability of victims and in the strength of the sickly pallored. It will come to you in the awkward, obese and large pored just as surely as it does in long legs and your images of toned perfection. You will be impressed by the astounding loveliness in the committed mother who will stand in lines and scrub floors in a scratchy polyester uniform to feed her children. You will witness beauty unfolding in the addict's hourly struggle and the worried eyes of his desperate family and you will miss it, miss it, miss it if you limit your concepts of the beautiful to the magazine covers. I do not want you to miss it.

I read this quote over 20 years ago in a book and managed to dig it up to share with you today:

"For I had no doubt that I had seen God, that is, had seen all there is to see; yet it turned out to be the world that I looked at every day. Everything was urgent with life and exceedingly beautiful. I experienced a complete certainty that at that moment I saw things as they really were, and I was filled with grief at the realization of the real situation of human beings, living continuously in the midst of all this without being aware of it. This thought filled my mind and I wept. But I also wept over the things themselves which we never saw and which we made ugly in our ignorance and I saw that all ugliness was a wounding of life."