
My sister shared this article on Facebook a couple of weeks ago. Lisa Bloom suggests that we should not use the “standard icebreaker” of a compliment on appearance when we greet young girls. I found myself nodding as I read the article, yet something in me held back from wholeheartedly jumping on the bandwagon.
When my sister came to visit a week later, we got to talking about it. “I don’t know,” I said. “We all like to be complimented, adult or child. We all like to be recognized when we make the effort to look nice.”
“Because we’ve been taught to,” she emphasized.
We didn’t have time to dig into the subject, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It seems a no-brainer for me, who has railed on the objectification of women and unreasonable standards of beauty.
But here’s the thing. Beauty is not a bad thing. As human persons, we long for it. Our eyes seek it out. We try to surround ourselves with it, in the home, in museums, in flower beds and formal gardens and parks. We seek it in artwork and in music, and yes, in people, too.
Beauty is not a universal standard, of course. I remember being roundly taken down a few pegs by a composition student who objected to the words I used when talking about Schoenberg’s serial works, and people are always bickering within religious circles about what constitutes beauty, some holding firmly that only the oldest forms of art and music can be called beautiful, and others finding it in every time and culture. And I’m sure everyone has experienced the transformation when someone you meet and find to be repulsively unattractive mysteriously becomes beautiful or handsome when you get to know them. We’re prone to define beauty with far too narrow a lens.
And yet, beauty is a natural longing of our hearts. It’s how we are put together. The search for beauty, and the fulfillment of that search, is what gives life richness.
So I can’t buy into the notion that we must stop talking about beauty altogether. The problems Lisa Bloom sees are real, and they need solutions. We do need to be conscious of what we teach the next generation about appearance. But another unfortunate tendency of the human condition is to see a problem and react by going to the opposite extreme, which causes at least as many problems as the original did.
Your turn: what do you think we can and should do to achieve a proper balance for our children?
Related articles
- Thoughtful or Beautiful? Must We Choose? (beautyskew.com)
- You’re So Pretty… (salonjuleen.wordpress.com)
- The Botox Controversy and Children Beauty Pageants (socyberty.com)
- Weekend Observations: Should We Compliment Little Girls for Their Beauty? (beautyskew.com)
As a feminist grad student, I couldn’t agree with Bloom’s article more–and yet, like you, something about it didn’t set quite right with me. I was born and raised in an Amish Mennonite community where personal complements were far and few between. There were other kinds of affirmation, of course (the highest of which was “Someday you’ll make some man a good cook!”), but I was always intensely aware of my painfully plain clothing and dreamed of wearing pretty things. In that context, outward appearance was deemphasized NOT to empower young girls as Bloom is advocating, but to keep us humble, to disempower us–we couldn’t even use our attractiveness to our advantage as women have done for centuries.
I tell my two-year-old daughter that I love her, that I am proud of her, that she is beautiful at the same time that I encourage her interest in the moon, rocks, and monkey bars. As you frame it here, those things are not mutually exclusive. Chances are there are some young boys who may need to hear a compliment too!
In their book Captivating, John and Stasi Eldgredge claim all women have this innate desire to be beautiful because God created women to represent God’s beauty and men to represent His strength. It’s an interesting read on the subject of beauty. It made me feel less vain.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on a couple of posts I wrote about beauty last year which consistently get hits every week.
http://tamiboesiger.blogspot.com/2010/03/outer-beauty-is-important-to-god.html
http://tamiboesiger.blogspot.com/2010/03/more-talk-on-beauty.html
I totally agree. I think where the problem lays is when we insist that beauty can only be one thing or one way. Beauty can be found anywhere and in anything.