IMAGE
Nothing compares to the sheer terror a twelve-year-old feels when hot wax raises above their line of vision, connected to the hand attached to a woman they momentarily hate, despite the fact that the intentions of the wax holder are pure. They only want to make the twelve-year-old more beautiful. Most likely, the young girl will scream once the wax is pulled from her eyebrow, and the mother or beauty salon worker will console her as quickly as possible. Seeing her eyebrows, the girl will agree the results lay in accordance with Teen Vogue and Cosmo Girl, and without even knowing it her life will forever be committed to wax: wax on her eyebrows, wax on her chin and upper lip, armpits, and wax on all kind of unmentionables the lower her body gets to the floor. Moreover, this twelve-year-old wax victim resigns herself to the idea of perfection, forgetting to love herself for who she is as she focuses more on her exterior than her interior.
Two hundred years ago, people did not have all their teeth, and the teeth they did have waved together in various shades of yellow and brown, the color every American woman now wants, but for her hair or skin—never her teeth. Over the summer, I encountered a woman with missing teeth. Though at twenty-one I should have been mature enough not to judge, I tried not to talk to her. In fact, I went completely out of my way to avoid her. Despite my age, the woman terrified me. She looked like a scarier real life version of the Snow White’s evil stepmother in hag form.
A sighting of a woman with missing teeth would have been common in the days of Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet died of love for one another, but if either were seen by today’s society they would be classified as dirty, unwashed, and unclean. Though women had their own beauty trends in centuries preceding the twentieth century, no pain compares to the lengths women will now go to in order to receive the perfect image they see in magazines, regardless of the fact that everyone knows that Cosmopolitan airbrushes the women on the front cover and reporters can easily change the weight of a celebrity interviewed.
In 2008, the movie “Penelope” was released. Produced by Reese Witherspoon and starring Christina Ricci and James McAvoy, the film tells a sweet story about a girl born with a cursed pig nose. She spends her entire life within the confines of her home, never allowed to go outside the front door or play in the backyard. Convinced that the love of a social elite will break the curse on her daughter’s face, Penelope’s mother pours herself into countless matchmaking attempts, breaking Penelope’s heart a little at a time. The pain Penelope expresses in this modern day fairy tale is not uncommon among women of all ages in the United States.
Due to media images, comparisons to other women, the rush to find a soul mate and low self-esteem, American women do not believe simply in beauty. They believe in beauty as perfection. According to the viewpoint of Patricia Hampl’s female relatives:
“A woman was not ‘beautiful’, not even ‘pretty’. It was more complicated than that. She had perfect skin, but her hands were bad; she had lovely brown eyes, but she was fat; her legs were good but what were legs if her teeth were crooked? The body was a collection of unfederated states, constantly at odds with each other, recognizing no sovereign to sort out the endless clan fueds,” (3).
When a woman is obsessed with an idea of unobtainable perfection, she automatically grants herself unnecessary pain with every look in the mirror and step on the scale.
In September, my friend and I searched low and high for “Penelope”. We could not find it anywhere. It did not stand on the shelves at the local Blockbuster, Wal-Mart, or Best Buy. On our fourth attempt, we found Penelope on the shelves of an entertainment store, but we almost did not find it there. Stacked among ten-dollar best-selling movies, “Penelope” lurked in the background of the shelves. Unlike its neighbors, only three copies of “Penelope” were available and instead of costing ten dollars, it cost thirty—on sale. My birthday was the next day, so I bought it as a present to myself.
My friend and I were ecstatic to watch “Penelope” but we could not find the time. Eventually, we wound up watching it late at night with a group of boys. The boys hated it. They called it the weirdest movie they had ever seen, and that no man would ever love a woman with a snout. They wanted to turn it off the second it started. Much to my chagrin, my friend agreed with them. Though she wanted to keep watching it, she agreed that the movie steered a little far from the norm and that it was a tad bit too ridiculous. As soon as they left, however, she wanted to watch it again. We watched it four times in the next week, loving every second of it. We loved to watch the grief-stricken Penelope change throughout the movie into an independent, self-loving woman, despite her snout. And the best part? When she proclaimed that she liked the way she was, her curse was broken. Her snout vanished, replaced by a cute and normal human button nose.
Ironically, Penelope did not regret the pain she felt throughout her entire life. If she had not experienced self depreciation, she would not have realized how wonderful it was to be herself, inside and out. The message of the movie is wonderful for girls of all age, from toddlers to women pushing one hundred and twenty.
“Penelope” shows an evolution of beauty. As far as history shows, women have always lusted after beauty. As a general rule of thumb, beauty leads to acceptance, and all people long for acceptance. Though the initial curse in “Penelope” is granted hundred of years before Penelope’s birth, plastic surgery had been set in motion by the time she came into being. Nonetheless, plastic surgery could not fix Penelope’s nose. Only the acceptance of herself by herself could do that—and it did. The exact opposite theory of this philosophy is showed in magazines and reality TV shows. As a general rule of thumb, it does not matter what your insides are like so long as a woman is willing to painfully stake out her beauty regimen. Obviously, beauty comes easier to some than others, but if an American woman is born less than lucky in looks, she should be able to set extra time aside to heighten her appearance.
In her life, every woman is going to burn her forehead with a curling iron, most women are going to over pluck their eyebrows, and more women than not are going to bawl over a bad haircut. Most will also experience pain through life experience, usually from some type of rejection that they can trace back to wide hips or flat hair. History shows that beauty is pain, inward and outward, but that is not what matters. What matters is the evolution women go through to accept themselves, and to love how their image, both in and out.
