Ladies: you wakeup in the morning and hop in the shower. You rub in your Olay stress-free acne cleanser, special shampoo and conditioner that makes your hair smell fruity, and a couple other top of the line quality products that make you fresh and dainty as a flower. After the shower, you stand in front of your closet with a towel wrapped around your hair tapping your foot while searching for the perfect outfit. Although you know the outfits in your closet aren't from the Vogue closet, you want to be able to walk out of our house and stop traffic with your perfect style. After at least 30 minutes of finding your almost perfect outfit, you start to blow dry and straighten your hair, applying 10 different hair products along the way. The final step is perfecting the money maker: the face. You apply your base cream, cover up, blush, eye shadow, eye liner, and mascara until its perfect. Just throw on your shoes and you are ready to go!
Why is this hour and a half process so necessary for women to do just to go to CVS and back? The truth of it is scary. We want to be seen as the perfect woman at all times. We want to be the ultimate feminine woman that can change the oil in a car and not get any grime or dirt on our flowy, white sundresses. What do we say when people tell us, "Wow you look so beautiful today!"? "Really? Thanks I just rolled out of bed.", we say cutely as we sell the superwoman act to everyone.
Women get this urge to look and be the perfect and ideal feminine woman from things that we think are harmless and fun like watching the latest fashion shows or reading magazines like Cosmopolitan.
We obsess and surround our way of living based on these "guidelines to being the best you". The secret behind the perfect feminine woman is that she doesn't exist! It's hard to accept and I haven't yet completely myself, but there is no way to always have your hair, makeup, body and even personality traits perfect all the time. How do you think the models get to look they way they look? There is an entire special ops force behind the curtain prepping those girls like they are science experiments. Those models don't even really look like the cover photos they are on! Even hearing this though, women are pressured to look and act in the pleasing manner that will give them a gold star by their peers. It's tragic that the word "feminine" has become a seemingly unreachable thing that we girls strive for everyday.
Both men and women force this impossible perfection challenge upon ourselves everyday though. Men have the challenge of being confident, successful, intelligent, athletic, handsome and charismatic. Women have the challenge of being confident but not too confident, successful but not overbearing, intelligent but not nerdy, athletic but not too muscular, beautiful and innocently sexy.
Our peers even enforce this crazy perfection ideal. When with our friends, we want to show that we have it all put together, and when we don't we feel embarrassed. Of course there are those friends that will accept you for who you are, flaws and all, but we always have the need to fulfill the checklist ourselves based on other people's pressures. This perfection drives us to spend obscene amounts of money of products we don't need just to impress virtually no one. America is all about being the best at everything and dominating the world, but at what cost? We have lost sight of reality and that everyone is beautiful in their own way. It sounds corny, but we are our own perfect just by being our true selves. Why can't we all see that and stop feeding the obsession?
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