When I was 13, I had a regular babysitting gig at a house where the mom subscribed to all the women’s magazines.
Lemme tell you, I learned so much after I put the kid to bed about what it meant to be a woman.
Behind the makeup tips, hairstyle advice, and fashion photography, I saw two secret messages written on these pages:
- Women should always feel ashamed of how they look, smell, taste, and exist.
- We are inherently devoted to the power of beauty, and beauty lives in the realm of the feminine.
While both messages exist in women’s mags, the first is the one that causes most of us to suffer.
It’s the reason my clients feel uncomfortable accepting a compliment. It’s why they hate the way their waistline rolls over their pants. Message #1 is the shadow in the mirror that highlights the wrinkles and red marks and tells us our “imperfections” define how others see us.
But you know all about that game. So I’m here to tell you about #2.
Look, if beauty weren’t a really big deal, we wouldn’t drop millions on skincare each year.
If beauty were just a superficial game, we wouldn’t carefully enhance and accentuate each of our sense organs before we attended weddings, parties, and other rites of passage.
If beauty were just *whatever,* we wouldn’t have rituals devoted to it whose traditions have stuck around for centuries despite the way we’ve stripped all the holiness from them.
So what is this beauty thing all about then?
I’ll give you the short answer: beauty is a way to bring balance.
Balance to a world that is violent and ugly.
Balance to a culture that is strong and impulsive.
Balance to what is unstructured. Balance to what is overly organized.
And it’s a force that we have to reclaim if we’re going to create a new vision for the world and stop being trampled by the old.
