From a young age, women are
(unfortunately) taught to judge each other based on appearance. Starting
in elementary school, social status is often determined by physical
beauty and cliques are formed accordingly.
While men are also divided into different
social strata based on their attributes, the criteria for determining
who’s cool and who isn’t has far less to do with looks for them, and
much more to do with intelligence, ability and teamwork.
While measuring a person’s worth by their
external beauty might sound childish, and it very well is, these
attitudes simply don’t evaporate once we grow up.
This week, musical powerhouse Beyonce
walked the red carpet at the MTV Video Music Awards with her daughter
Blue Ivy. Since Blue Ivy’s birth, the child has been subjected to harsh
criticism about her appearance. And reactions to her recent VMA
appearance on Twitter and other social media were beyond embarrassing.
“So are we all just supposed to pretend
that Blue Ivy isn’t ugly as hell forever?” asked Twitter user
@keltheyrich who also went on to write “...Blue Ivy is ugly as sin and
there’s no way around it.”
What do these and thousands of other posts have in
common? They were written by women. Think about that for a second. These
are grown women talking about a 4 year-old girl, who will grow up to
see this on the internet and be exposed to this type of attack many
times over by the time she is in her teens. What are we, as a society,
teaching this girl at such a young age, and every other girl who is
exposed to this? That her looks are what matter. That other’s opinions
of her looks, are what she should be concerned about.
She is just a girl spending an evening
with her parents, having a great time, and women are at home sitting
safely behind their computers spewing insults and ugliness towards a
little girl. Yes, she is on TV, and her parents happen to be Beyonce and
Jay Z, but that shouldn’t matter. And on the flip-side, if these adults
were subject to the same types of comments, they would be feeling
anything from hurt and sad to angry, or on a mission to tear down the
women who made such comments. Why is it they can’t see how this would
affect themselves?
While criticizing a 4-year-old’s
appearance takes female cattiness to a whole other level, women have
been judging each other based on appearance for centuries. This kind of
behavior leads to feelings of insecurity and inadequacy, but women cling
to the social norms they are taught as children and adapt this behavior
as they move into adulthood. And some even mimic this behavior later in
life, due to a feeling of, ‘well, women treated me that way, why should
I be nice in return’, which only keeps the viscous cycle going.
In a CNN article,
writer Kelly Wallace talks to Sophia Nelson, author of a new self-help
book for women called “The Woman Code” about this topic.
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