I represent a woman, who has nothing on her face,
Everything in her mind,
And hides her perfection.
A woman of true beauty.
I learned very early on that to be perfect in this world,
To be accepted and beautiful,
Your hair has to be dyed and curled,
You nails have to be perfect, down to every cuticle,
Your jeans better be tight, unless you’re fat,
And the shirt – you need to show more cleavage than that.
Ladies, success in life
Won’t happen unless you pay up the price:
Just buy all the paint and the shortest dresses you can get,
Also, you've got to be skinny; if throwing up doesn't work, don’t fret,
We've got the perfect diet.
Do this and our guarantees you’ll be prettier than pretty.
What does it mean to be pretty anyway?
It seems to me that exposure is the only way,
Or at least, that’s what the media says:
Make sure you’re showing at least forty percent of skin,
Because that’s the way you’ll catch all the men.
Where are the women who speak for the others?
The ones who survived the rape, the tears, the cries,
Who starved themselves to please the guys,
The sliced wrists, the prostitutes pay,
The babies who had no say,
The demented accusations of being gay.
Where are they?
The only ones I see are those of bright happy Barbies
The ones that get invited to all the parties.
Where are they?
I don’t want to erase my face in powder and cream,
And they do, because you took their self-esteem.
Let’s just stop for a moment and think,
Who the hell decided I was ugly, anyway,
And that for anyone to want me my brain had to shrink?
That to be beautiful all I had to do was obey?
So I’m free to choose to follow your mainstream,
But if I do anything else, I need to be freed,
To be shown how to live the American dream?!
What would you free me from?
A scarf that I happily wear,
Or the dresses that cover me up?
How is it that when I choose to be concealed,
I need to be modernized,
And if I choose to take off my clothes,
My beauty is recognized?
It was decided that someone needed to free me,
That I needed to take off all the layers,
So I could escape being oppressed?
Since when did they define oppression as the hiding of your breasts?
I apologize for not being good enough for you,
For being part of a religion that you accuse
Of discriminating against women,
Because they chose to hide their bodies’ from others views?
I apologize that I cannot be perfect without coloring my hair every trendy hue,
That I am not a lady, because,
When you decided that naked was in and covered was out,
I did not follow you.
But, who are you to render me not pretty?
Who are you to say that to be pretty I had to let go of dignity?
You fooled so many others with the slavery you painted bright pink and shiny blue,
With the degrading that you glittered to convince others of your view.
You stood under the names of feminists, who were interested only in the liberating of the modern woman,
You chose to grant her the freedom of the body, but not of the mind,
And when asked, you simply replied:
“Both women and men are the same; why should they cover when men do not?”
Why should women wear makeup when men do not?
Why should women be playboy bunnies when men are not?
Why is it that the swimsuit of a man covers him more than the bikini of a woman?
Girls, you deserve to know:
This freedom they promise is only the manifestations of a ho,
For they only want your body; do you think they care about your mind?
They want to see you attendants on their planes,
Strippers in their clubs,
Laying on their beaches,
Waitresses in their pubs.
It does not matter to them that you might sink in depression because of their words,
That you might cry when you get your lip pierced because it hurts,
That you might suffer anorexia or bulimia or anemia to get their figures.
They don’t care about the cancer from the big breast endeavor,
The acne from their rouge that lasts forever.
And yet, they still have the nerve
To tell the world that mine is a religion of anti feminism?
That I am a girl oppressed
Because I chose to express my freedom through my mind instead of my chest.
I feel sorry for their followers when they realize that beauty is not in how we look or how we dress,
But beauty is in how we think, in how we act, in how we feel: that is our ultimate finesse.
But then it is too late- for them beauty has already disappeared.