A friend made a post on her blog about physical attraction and her relationship to it.
I think she has a little inner war going on about external attraction versus inner value. If she is attracted to someone for external attributes, does that make her shallow? Et cetera.
My 2 cents, which I get to make as lengthy as I want because this is MY blog, are in short, no, it doesn’t.
In long, I think “the external” is too broad a topic. I see two major categories that deserve distinct attention.
1. External beauty that is inborn and lucky trait. The kind that makes me go see every movie with Johnny Depp in it, regardless of whether I think the movie will be good or horrible. The kind that manifests in both of the lovers I’ve had in my life, causing me to go, “zuh? why am I the lucky schmoe who gets hooked up like this?” External beauty of this nature doesn’t say a whole lot about the possessor of it, but hey–I don’t know many who are immune to it.
2. The sort of external beauty that reflects a choice.
Your body (I feel) is one of the most readily available tools of expression that you have. I feel it only makes sense to be attracted to (or unattracted to) the choices that people make with their bodies, and the thing that I like about this is that it’s based in something other than chance. It’s a real reflection of who a person is.
I’m generally attracted to people who do anything off the beaten path with their body-canvas. I’m further attracted to people who bash existing stereotypes and roles with their choices, because I hate stereotypes and roles, and it lets me know that I could definitely like that person. I think it’s really hot that my boyfriend has long hair and sometime’s wears women’s clothing.* Actually, one of the chief things that attracts me to a person is how out-of-line they are with gender norms. It’s just how it is. Gender sucks. You bash gender, you’re in with me. The interesting thing is that I’ve always felt this way, but only in the past year or two have I really explored my feelings on feminism and gender–leading me only recently to my “gender sucks” conclusion.
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I was always a feminist, because I was lucky enough to have a mom who was a feminist, and because of a general pervading feeling of “duh? of course women should have the same rights as men?” I went through a few stages in the relationship between my self-image and my feminism. When all my friends were getting excited about shaving their legs and buying lipstick for the first time, I didn’t think beauty should matter to me at all, and didn’t shave anything or wear any makeup.
I don’t remember when I started shaving and wearing a little bit of makeup, or why. I guess the collective excitement got to me. That, and the fact that I was still reading teen magazines. Why did I ever read those?
My relationship with makeup ran its course from disdain to grudging desire to be attractive to the mere desire to differentiate myself with things like lots of black eyeliner. I don’t feel that the desire to differentiate oneself is childish or antifeminist. I don’t see how I could possibly not feel the desire to differentiate myself. I also acknowledge that I am differentiating myself just as much on the (considerably more frequent) days that I wear no makeup at all, and I enjoy those days as much as the black eyeliner days.
I stopped shaving under my arms about a year ago and initially planned it as an indefinite experiment. I knew that I generally found it attractive when other women did not shave, and that therefore it was quite possible that the only reason I was shaving was because I was afraid of what people would think or something. I decided therefore, to stop for as long as it took to make a decision that would really be my decision. When I became equally comfortable walking around hairily in a tank top, then I would be ready to say “I shave/don’t shave simply because I like it this way.”
And I found out (this is the ending of the story that is obvious to everyone but the person going through it, I guess) that I really do like not shaving better. It’s more comfortable, but I also just really like it. It would be a betrayal of me as a person–not as a woman or as a feminist or as an anything else, just as me**– to start shaving again. So I haven’t. And that makes me like me, externally and internally.
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*I tried my hardest not to get into a feminist dissection of this phrase, but I just couldn’t help it. My boyfriend does not, in all fairness, wear women’s clothing: he wears clothes which were manufactured for women, but which belong to him. He is a man, and since the clothes do belong to him, in the barest of truth I have to conclude that he is wearing a man’s clothing. But y’all know what I mean.
**Which also comes back to feminism, because a large part of my feminism is the belief that a woman should be free to make choices as herself first–before she makes decisions as a mom, as a woman, as a feminist, as a wife, as a sister, as an anything else. That’s part of the freedom that women have been denied: to consider ourselves.
