WHO DEFINES BEAUTY?

According to an article written by Brunell and Gold based on research done in Chicago by Oxygen Media Survey, 25% of women would rather win America’s next top model than win a Nobel Prize. 81% of 10 year old are afraid of being fat this is according to National Eating Disorders Association and finally according to Pew Research Center Poll 54% of women would rather be hit by a truck than be fat.

I found this statistics interesting but shocking at the same time. You may be wondering why am I sharing with you statistics on American women? I will tell you why. At this age and time, I am convinced now more than ever that Africa is following the footsteps of the Western culture. We are imitating almost everything that the west does. Obesity is becoming a matter of concern in Africa, anorexia and bulimia, these were unheard of in the African Culture but lo and behold! They are creeping into the African culture very fast.

The African woman has always been considered a beauty in whatever state she is in but over the years the west has showed us that skinny models are the standard for beauty and so for some reason African women are beginning to do everything in their power to achieve this standard of beauty.

A few questions cross my mind at this point. Who defines beauty? What is the standard of deciding who is beautiful and who is not beautiful? Who even came up with those terms beautiful and ugly? What does it even mean when we say beauty lies in the eye of the beholder? Is there anything whatsoever that we can do to make our women appreciate who they are without feeling pressurized to conform to certain standards that Hollywood or the Western culture has set.

Picture Courtesy Google images

A few months ago I was watching a show on TLC called Toddlers and Tiaras. This show is basically about young girls from as young as six year old babies to as old as 12 year old babies competing for different titles. It is actually a pageant of some sort. The girls go through a makeup session where their look is totally transformed you would think they are grown us if you only see their faces, they then catwalk on the run way and they finally showcase their talents, just as it happens in a normal Miss world pageant. Winners are then chosen based on different categories. i.e the most beautiful, the most talented, the most outstanding, the most intelligent and so on. My worry is this, if a young girl form a tender age of 3 or four i.e exposed to this kind of competition and she fails to win the crown for the most beautiful girl, and this happens for say four years, Don’t you think by the time she is eight she will start feeling less beautiful? This is because the standard that has been used to define the most beautiful doesn’t acknowledge her as the most beautiful. Doesn’t this therefore directly affect the young girl’s perception of beauty, pushing her therefore to do whatever it takes to become beautiful as society demands? As I listened to the interviews that the girls went through, I could see feelings of jealousy, disappointment even sadness, some of them even cried. I kept asking myself can’t children just be allowed to grow up and enjoy being pretty?

There are more examples that can be given. For instance, day in day out we see a rise in the number of botched surgeries that have left people more scarred than they were before because of the desire to want to look like someone

Sometime back Cassie, a musician had this hair style where she shaved a part of her hair and left a part of it as well, Rihanna had done the same in the past years and suddenly there was a multitude of girls emulating the same hair cut all over the world a few others going to the extent of updating their face book statuses asking “Do I look like Rihanna?”  Then I ask myself, do you have to look like Rihanna for you to be considered beautiful or for you to feel beautiful?

Having short hair as an African woman did not sound so lucrative until Lupita Nyongo won the Oscars that was when African women boldly came out with their short hair, because society had accepted them and they dint feel the pressure  to be something else. Then the question that comes to mind is do we have to wait for another Lupita to come out and affirm to us that we are beautiful?

Finally the biggest question in my mind is this

Photo Courtesy Google Images

When you look at Mother Teresa and Vera Sidika, Does the definition of beauty change? Well it probably does. Why so? Because in Mother Teresa’s case, we define beauty by her amazing, thoughtful, loving deeds and when we think of Vera Sidika almost times what we see is her physical appearance which is then termed as beautiful.

 However there is something that I have learnt over the years, the physical beauty can only be complete if it is backed up by inner beauty. Without this it is all vanity. (This is not to mean that one that you fail to shower or where good clothes.)  This is what defines beauty, Your Creator and who you are on the inside. So ladies, the physical is good, it is great, but the inward beauty brings a lot more meaning to life.