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I Am More than My Looks
But still, I’m beautiful, right?
In an episode of Burn Notice, which I watch while I exercise, a man hires Mike (or, in our house, Burn Notice) to find the guy who beat up his sister and put her in the hospital.
The guy and Burn Notice stand at the sister’s hospital bed. She has tubes in her face and she’s unconscious.
“She used to be beautiful,” her brother says. “Look at her now.”
Now, just in case this doesn’t strike you as something that should induce a confused sputter, imagine someone walking up to a ravaged man in a hospital bed — from a car accident, say — with tubes in his nose and a machine tracking his oxygen levels and saying at his bedside, “He used to be so good looking. Now look at him.”
Implied: Now he’s nothing.
But we don’t talk about men like that in this country, do we.
I haven’t lived anywhere but the US since I was 19, so I can’t say how much or how little, or in what way, other countries emphasize/obsess over female beauty and whether or how those countries’ women are dealing with it.
All I know is this country. And I must say, this country’s women are trying to combat The Beauty Imperative in mind-bogglingly counterproductive ways, both little and big.
