the natural woman (a discussion)

Photography by Julia Hetta

Currently my school is going on a rampage to stop girls from wearing ‘too much make-up’ and wearing short skirts. They are doing this by publicly shaming girls infront of their peers and considering anyone who wears a lot of make up/a short skirt to be an unintelligent, dumb slut who is not worth employing. My evidence for this? Well firstly, they completely overlook girls such as myself who they would never expect to even try to look beautiful (even though I contour and wear glittery eye shadow every single day) but focus on those they expect to conform to the stereotypes they are looking for and unfairly target them instead. Which shows that their search is biased and does not comply with the school’s ethos of equality. They don’t seem to think of make up as an art form of self empowerment, but only a way to attract boys. They say that we have no pride, but what exactly is pride? Your definition of pride is different from mine and you should not be able to define my values and ethics, as I should not be able to define yours.

I understand that my school wants to prepare us for the adult world. They want to make us look like mini business women who are ready to employed; but if a company judges someone on their appearance over their skill set, doesn’t that reflect society itself? How do we expect to make changes when we shove these ideas of being a ‘slut’ down girls throats? How do we expect to create an equal society, when in adolescence we  watch girls being publicly shamed for the lengths of the skirts and the make up on their faces? Makeup has nothing to do with education, it should be part of a personal philosophy and pride to present oneself the way one wants to be seen. Make up is not separate from someone, it is part of them entirely if they wish for it to be. The way a man or a woman does their make-up or wears their clothes is part of their identity and it shouldn’t be stripped away from them in the name of the oversexualization of the human body. High School should be a time for self expression and self discovery and I believe that suppressing this can be detrimental to a teenager’s mental health.

A girl in my year has really bad acne and thus wears a lot of makeup, but she was forced to take it off. One of the male teachers told her she looks more ‘natural’ without it. Does he mean she was less natural before? Was she impure? Dirty? Was she too far away from his own definition of a woman? Did she make him feel uncomfortable? If she does make him feel this way, then that  is still irrelevant, because the only person who should be able to define one’s beauty is oneself.

What are your opinions on this? I have been talking (maybe ranting) about this a lot recently so I would love to hear some different/similar points of views/ideas.

Thank you so much for reading,

Alex

 

(really super sorry for being so infrequent posting and for not reading your posts as often as I should. I’m super busy right now and I just haven’t had time. I hope you are all well though and I hope you enjoyed this little post. I’m going to go back on catching up with posts/revising)