In Twilight Regalia

I have a way of dealing with this problem of feeling too ugly, too old, never having been a pretty enough girl to land the guys I wanted, never having been a star, never having been enough of a popular type, never having had bevies of beautiful and connected friends, never having had narrow hips, never having had full enough hair, never having looked like so many things I wished….. while others envied even little me….

I try to tune myself out of my Hollywood-spawned media-mutuant aspirations and I look around me on the streets in downtown and try to get some perspective on things. You can do it too, anywhere, in any town for that matter, or if you have other people in it, even in your own house.

Just look at EVERYone you see. IMAGINE underneath the faces of the next, say, five or six people you see, IMAGINE a caption reading “Sexy”.

The fat guy across the hall: “Sexy.”

That dumpy mom with her hair up in those stupid clip things: “Sexy.”

That homeless guy at the gas station terrorizing people with window-washing: “Sexy.”

Your worker in the next cubicle: “Sexy.”

That little Asian chick with the dopey hat and the book bag: “Sexy.”

That old Indian guy who sits on the porch at 80-something: “Sexy.”

Your Mom or Dad or Sister or Brother: “Sexy.”

Because you have to realize who Hollywood taught us to believe we must become, and what unreasonable yardsticks of perfection (and sometimes questionable taste) they subject us to in the way of standards.

Think about how short a period of time it’s been in overall history that the media even existed as it does today. And what a small percentage of life on this planet actually gets anywhere near its ideas in demonstration. And, what that small percentage of life deemed “ideal” actually contributes to this planet, in contrast to the rest.

There is something fun and dream-inspiring about being or having eye-candy, yes. But it’s like candy. It shouldn’t be a steady diet.

Really, we are being ridiculous in our modern society. Think of the times when we lived in villages, say the times of William Wallace or even as late as the 1800s. We lived together in smaller quantities and beauty was more balanced because everyone got more “air time”. Travel was harder, and you saw fewer people. The value of an individual wasn’t strictly their image, because everyone else knew all about everything everyone did, adding substance to every rumour. There were family connections. There was nowhere to hide insincerity or maintain too much of a facade. You couldn’t be a bitch or a liar and not be pinned for it. And you didn’t see airbrushed perfection, you saw face-to-face.

In village times, we knew everyone in our community. We knew three generations out (as they still do in many third world and even second world places). We knew all our families’ friends. We knew their friends. We knew our town-regulars. We knew more about each beauty there was in the village, because it was “realtime” right before your eyes, and there was first-hand gossip to be had, which took away mystique. People were more forgiving because everyone knew someone with flaws, including themselves. Validity ruled the day. Visual and physical truth was just more readily accessible then.

Sure that lassie was lovely, but you could probably meet her rolley polley mom and see her future body shape predicted physically in front of you within the next couple days of meeting her.

(Unless you wanted to meet royalty, but let’s face it, royalty has on the whole not been famous for producing many attractive specimens.)

Beauty has always been sung about and valued, but back then we had enough time and space and experience to run into more real people around us to see the true beauty in each of them too. We weren’t pelted with perfection on billboards and television screens at every five paces. It wasn’t thrown in our face constantly while eating dinner. And food being scarce and hard-won, we would never have thought to toss our cookies to get more like an ideal we saw. To be “fat and fair” in those days was to show prosperity. Rosiness. Health. Someone who wasn’t going to die on you before age 25.

Now we plan on dying before our 30s of a wasting addiction (we all say that at 15) or plan on dying together in some fabulous daring suicide (we say that before our 20s) or we stuff ourselves out of depression and hopelessness into supertripleX-Large (we do that anytime) or are annihilating ourselves in small bits with plastic surgery or implanting objects in our bodies (we do that in our 30s and up).

All this because we’ve lost perspective and become deeply discouraged with our valuable, rosey, fat, healthy lives.

So really look at everyone in the next ten minutes. Give them all captions:
“Beautiful.” “Sexy.” And turn to yourself and see “Famous.” “Hot.” “Rich.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 27th, 2005 at 7:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.