Womanhood is Violence

The phrase on the poster reads “You don’t get if you don’t ask,” atop which sits Gandhiji, spinning khadi on the charkha. Now, the waxing room of a salon is indeed a very obscure place to put up a poster such as this, but regardless, it makes me think...

It couldn’t be more wrong

As women, we tend to ‘get’ regardless of whether we ‘ask.’ And, when we do ask, I wonder if it comes from free will or deep patriarchal conditioning. You see, when it comes to beauty, womanhood is violence. Specifically, normalized violence towards the self.

We are violent in the way we want to minimize ethnic features; the world wants tiny noses, high cheekbones and light eyes. We are violent when we make ourselves uncomfortable, wearing clothes that don’t allow us to move freely and shoes that make our feet hurt. We are violent when we give into subliminal messaging about beauty standards that tell us that it is normal to pull out every hair on our bodies, it is normal to shrink to the smallest size that we can, it is normal to squeeze our feet into four inch heels, all to feel pretty. We are violent because despite the ill effects, we still long for these things to make us feel wanted and beautiful.

We manage to convince ourselves that these are things that we want out of our own free will. We want to wear clothes that make us anxious. We are okay with our feet hurting after a long night. We want to get our bodies waxed because it makes us feel ‘clean.’ We begin associating comfort and our natural bodies with ugliness and laziness, and with that comes deep shame about existing as we are.

Isn’t the desire to alter and hurt the very body that keeps us functioning, the deepest kind of violence?

“You don’t get if you don’t ask”

We did not ask for the discomfort. We did not ask for shame. We did not ask for pain.

Yet, we got it regardless.

And so, to dismantle this shame, we must dissect our motivations behind beauty.

So I sit there, as the esthetician spreads hot wax on my arm, staring up at Gandhiji spinning his charkha.

Who is beauty really for?