Dont you feel so ugly when you are being surrounded by these tall, gorgeous, beautiful, slim and everything that defines beauty girls? i f you answer Yes, then you are punishing yourself for beauty envy. Read on some tips i got from Cosmopolitan in coping and understanding this kind of feelings, how to manage them and keeping them at the bay.
You’re strolling through the mall, walking into a meeting, maybe you’re even on a date. You’ve got on your goddess gear, your lipstick brings out your tan, and you look great. More important, you feel great.
More… Then you see HER. A dewy-fresh teenager who makes you feel like a painted prune, or a sophisticated, self-assured babe who makes you feel young and awkward. She’s in the same room as you, but she’s from a different planet. The very air around her seems to vibrate with the best possibilities, and you’re prosaic and mundane.
Whatever it is, she’s perfect. You don’t even know her, but you hate her.
Beauty envy is the not-so-secret underside to our cult of appearances. Don’t even pretend you haven’t felt it. Even in this supposedly enlightened age, the sight of a gorgeous girl can turn smart, funny women who should know better into a pathetic bunch of insecure wrecks. Like any sick feeling, beauty envy has clearly defined symptoms: a clutching burn in the pit of your stomach; in your ears, the sound of your crashing self-esteem; in your mind, the panicked rush to deny that you’re feeling it. In her trash classic novel Princess Daisy, Judith Krantz described is as “sh_t straight through the heart.”
Here’s the deal: we hate gorgeous girls, because they make us feel like dirt.
Of course this is dumb, not to mention wrong, and we know it. In the first place, it has very little to do with the woman herself—the subject of our envy. What we feel about her has nothing to do with who she is, what she thinks and feels but everything to do with our own feelings and our own projections. Besides, we hate it when men make snap judgments about women because of the way they look—how dare we do the same? Finally, don’t we prove, every single day, that being a woman is infinitely, gloriously more than what meets the eye? Don’t we know by now the very essence of life is what we bring to it, our work, our contributions, how we are with the people we love? It’s already dawned upon us, hasn’t it, that apart from a body, we all have a mind, heart, and spirit to offer the world, and all of these buoy our bodies, infusing the energy that can, in fact, make us more beautiful that we are?
We shouldn’t be so quick to forget this. In fact, we should know this by heart and most days, we believe it. Why do we backslide so easily?
The Ugly Truth of Beauty
Despite what we’ve learned, it’s somehow too easy to fall into the traps that society has set for us. For example, we immediately assume Beauty is dumb, “just a pretty face.” It’s easier to think that a gorgeous girl is self-involved, shallow, or boy-crazy. If she’s successful, we figure she charmed her way into it, as though it were inconceivable that she just might have a brain like the rest of us. Hopefully, we know how irrational that is, but we do it anyway.
And don’t think she doesn’t know it. Supermodel Christy Turlington was once quoted in Esquire magazine: “I’m constantly being told, ‘Haha, she’s going to school. Maybe she’ll learn to spell.’ There are negative associations…(including) assumptions that you are just completely worthless.”
Says a retired commercial and print model, now the manager of her own business, “I would be introduced to other women and just feel the raise eyebrows: Oh a model. As in, Oh, an airhead.”
On the other hand, there is another no less ugly side to the issue. We women are also guilty of using our looks basically to one-up other women and perhaps give ourselves an ego-boost. It’s unfair particularly when you realize that your beauty or the lack of it was basically handed down to you from a particular gene pool, something you had nothing to do with. When a good-looking guy is walking through the mall with his so-so looking girlfriend, we wonder what he sees in her…as though her looks are all that matters. And to cover up our own weaknesses, how many times have we said to ourselves in a stupid and irrational manner, “Well, at least, I’m prettier, thinner, more fit…than so-and-so.” What’s worse is we actually feel better doing it. When a women succeeds in making the most of her appearance, it’s only other women, and not men, who will undermine her with the utmost cruelty, saying: “She’s special, really” or even, “Mas maganda pa ako diyan eh.”
It must spring from some primal instinct in us, this ugly drive to quell or undermine the beauty of others because somehow it threatens us. For all the flak a girl can get from testosterone, when it comes to narrow vision or downright prejudice, women can be even more hostile, petty and vicious than men, and sadly, very often, the are.