‘How come your friends are so pretty, and you’re so ugly?’
It was said to me when I was a teen-ager. And I believed it. In fact, I was used to everyone telling me it was a fortunate thing that I had a good mind, since I wasn’t very pretty. I would need that to survive throughout life, I was counseled.
My father always told anyone who would listen that he was proud of my ‘good mind,’ that I was very even tempered and never got mad without a reason, but look out if I did. (I have my grandfather’s famous ‘Idlout temper,’ and I know all my cousins share this trait with me.)
As a young adult, I was pummeled by this society’s idea of beauty. I was told by men that I was ‘pretty for an Eskimo.’ Did that mean I was hideous anyway? I received mixed messages from men that I met. On the one hand, they wanted to get to ‘know’ me. On the other hand, I wasn’t their female ideal, that which they considered desirable.
I was even further confused by the fact that everyone told me I looked more Japanese than Inuit. And when I hung out with other non-white ethnicities, they told me I looked ‘mulatto.’ Was that good or bad?
Fortunately, I was involved in athletics enough to keep in reasonable shape, so my self-image did not suffer from a sense of being overweight. I held on to this source of pride, taking my sense of identity from athleticism alone. My body was a well-functioning tool for what I needed.
If I was lacking aesthetically, I would simply have to make do. Cosmetics for white people frankly didn’t suit me. I ended up looking more like a hooker when wearing the garish pinks and reds that were available at the time. Revlon eventually invented darker shades, but they weren’t much better. I wasn’t merely dark, I was sort of a weird coffee color. And even though my hair was technically black, it was never truly the raven black of my ancestry. I had freckles in the summer. So it became confusing, later, when women at cosmetics counters would tell me, ‘This would suit your color.’
What color was that? Inevitably, they would drag out the bronzes and golds, magentas and deep purples ? which was fine, I thought, if you performed in Chinese opera. Even the dark or golden ‘flesh’ colors were merely simulations of tanned Caucasian skin. My skin color literally neutralized them, so that they were invisible, rather than complementing me as intended. Invariably, I was left with old stand-bys, like simple black eyeliner. Oh well, at least it looked sultry and artistic.
As I got older, I realized that the mixed message was not coming from within, but from without. Obviously I didn’t fit the North American (or even European, now that I think of it) ideal of beauty. I would have to develop my own sense of what was beautiful, and look for signs of it in myself. I began to realize, with time, that there were other worlds than the one presented by my own society. There existed different cultures, each of which varied in its respective vision of what could be considered beautiful.
Popular society, it began to seem, tended to push its own perceptions upon others. Media and commercialism were the tools by which this was accomplished. It did wonders for my outlook to realize that in old Hawaii, a thin woman used to be considered homely, while a heavy woman ? the fatter the better ? was absolutely radiant.
It occurred to me that there were whole nations, populations that equaled or exceeded those of the West, whose skin colors were much closer to my own. The women of such countries had worn cosmetics, suited to their own colorations, since before the time when iron was considered a novelty in Europe.
It was liberating to find that my society’s definition of beauty was a single opinion only, that the trend setters of the commercial world were not truly concerned with beauty anyway ? but were simply engineering it to make as much money as possible.
Beauty had become a mere weapon in commercial warfare, and my ego had nearly become collateral damage ? an unnoticed casualty amidst the conflict.
Pijariiqpunga.