Why Women Should Not Live Under the Beauty Standards of Men

By Jonna Lindawan

From the past few decades, many things have changed. The changes were not only confined to education, culture, trends, and fashion among many others. The changes include the way men look at women and vice versa. Perspectives changed, too, with the rise of media and technology. People began looking at the status quo more seriously than before.

Women have suffered most from many of these changes. The double standards set by this modern world have made them vulnerable to discrimination and emotional stress.

In the past, women were household helpers to their husbands and their families. They maintain the house and take care of stuff like cooking, laundry, and cleaning the house. When they get married, more household chores are added to their to-do list like babysitting and becoming their husbands’ “servant” in a way.

In other cultures, women are not allowed to talk back to their husbands nor are they allowed to study. Mothers were to teach their daughters to work inside the house while the sons get all the education and maybe even the attention and pampering that most young girls in the family are so much hungry of. But despite that treatment in the culture, women were not judged as beautiful or ugly by the color of their skin, color of their eyes, length of their hair, shape of their bodies, or even the way they dress. They were beautiful just by becoming faithful and obedient household helpers to their families.

This is not the case these days. From shampoo advertisements to vitamins, they all point out that beauty is when you are white, tall, and you have a 24-inch waistline. This kind of “beauty labeling”, as I may call it, has stressed and depressed women from different parts of the world. Why? Because they’ve become standards by which women get to marry or to earn love and attention.

As a woman, you no longer have to live under these standards…

I believe that those women who rose into power and became CEOs or turned out to be great working moms, or whatever their chosen careers are, have understood this part. They were not driven by the attention they could get from men and other women. They have been driven by their desires to succeed. And now that they’re on top of their industry, no one’s telling them what is in and what’s not in for them. That’s obviously because there is nothing else to argue about or argue with a woman who is already successful. That’s the real beauty of women – to succeed in what they are really good at and not by what men tell them they should be good at.

We cannot really measure a woman’s beauty in terms of color, height, weight and body features. That is because, as I want to stress again, women are born with different genes and in different circumstances. If you tell a woman from Asia that beautiful women are naturally tall, what would you call them then since most Asian women are petite? In the same way, if you say that being light-skinned is the only way you can be beautiful, how about those living in Africa who have great body features but are dark-skinned?

So, if you are a woman reading this, remind yourself of who you are – you were born to a perfect time and place with a purpose no matter the circumstance may be, you were given the chance to live and test your limits, and most of all, you are a woman and you have got more to do than be men’s beauty material.

I am a woman and I love being me! I want to see more and more women out there becoming what they really want to be rather than trying hard to meet the standards set by society.