All about Love, Life, Relationships

Did it ever cross your mind that we women may be accursed or something? How else can we explain this almost irrational fixation with our bodies, looks and age? Consider our never-ending litany of lamentations: dark armpits, wavy hair, jowls, neck wattles, laugh lines, warts, crow’s feet, varicose veins…

I don’t hear men obsessing about them or about flatter bellies, hairless legs, and whiter skin. Nor do they fret about whether they look older or younger than their age. So unless I’m mistaken, I believe it’s definitely a girl thing.

Whether it’s a case of vanity or low self-esteem or both, I really can’t say except we women seem to be afflicted with this malady in varying degrees. We agonize over the most trifle of beauty imperfections even when they’re visible only to our overly critical eye. And it is utterly mind boggling the lengths we go to just to make ourselves over and the money we splurge on all kinds of beauty treatments, aids and procedures – botox, liposuction, bleaching, cosmetic surgery, breast implants, nose and face lifts.

We’ve spawned a whole new industry that feeds on our weakness and brainwashes us into buying the illusion of hope and beauty. With media upping the ante by flooding magazines and our TV screens with beauty icons that magnify our “plainness”, morphing ourselves into becoming their clones is now almost an imperative.

Even screen goddesses themselves aren’t spared.  Celebrities too feel the pressure to be even more beautiful and to preserve their looks, body and youth. If even celebrities are susceptible to insecurity despite all the beauty potions and ammunitions in their arsenal, what more for us mere mortals?

We sure don’t stand a chance. Not against Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie or Julia Roberts. Ah, we don’t even need to go that far. Let’s just take Lucy Torres-Gomez. Blest with a Madonna-like face, an enviable figure, impeccable style and manners, innocent sophistication, a flourishing career and what appears to be a good marriage, she makes me acutely conscious of my “inadequacies”: my moon shaped face, the pimples that have marred and scarred it, the lines that shout my age, and that other chin that seems to second the motion when I nod.

But the more staggering wallop on my self-esteem came when I discovered that aside from beauty, she has brains and loads of talent too! How, I thought can anyone have it all?! Isn’t that the height of injustice?

Perhaps if we were angels, we wouldn’t be affected by these punches to our self-esteem that come from nowhere and without warning. But human as we are we can’t just banish these feelings of inadequacy with the flick of a wrist. Society makes it doubly difficult for us when it feeds and reinforces this collective obsession for youth and beauty with its bias towards the young and the beautiful. As door after door opens effortlessly for them, beautiful people land themselves the choicest parts, the most-coveted deals and the best seats in the house – be it in love, at social gatherings or at work.

Only a woman so sure of her self, with a very strong self-image and a heightened sense of awareness can rise above the tide. But can we afford not to? How will we ever have a moment’s peace if we don’t? You see, in the end we really have only two choices: make peace with what we have or keep on bemoaning our “lack” while piling on the creams, resorting to nips and cuts, insertions, additions, and subtractions…But even if we’d opt for the second alternative, we cannot win the war against age or nature.

So, the sanest thing for us to do according to writer Martha Beck is not to look different or to change one’s looks but to look differently, that is, to change one’s perspective. Spiritual master Eckhart Tolle further says, “Illusion will never satisfy. Only the truth of who you are will ever set you free.”

Deep inside, there in the deepest recess where true beauty resides, those words resonate with me. But until that day when I can fully unearth it and be truly awake, I’d still be lapsing into unconsciousness every so often and doing all the insane things women do in the name of youth and beauty. Hopefully, that day would come pretty soon.