Celebrate women? We don't know how

In Hollywood movies (and ads like the John Lewis one) the ‘perfect’ female life is laid out for young girls to aspire to: You are a sweet little girl who wears pink gingham dresses, you grow into a bright happy teenager and rebel by climbing out of your window to visit your boyfriend, you have a bunch of friends including a ‘best friend’, you study hard and graduate from college, get married to your dream man, have a baby with no complications nor weight gain, become a grandmother who bakes cakes then eventually die of old age and everyone is really sad.

Is it any wonder that reality TV shows such as Four Weddings, Wife Swap and Americas Next Top Model, that focus on the more relatable competitive and so called ‘bitchy’ sides of women are growing so much in popularity? Women everywhere seem to be lapping up these programmes. Yet we’re not all sitting on our sofas marvelling at how endearing these fellow women are but, more often than not, we’re laughing at what nightmares they are and feeling relieved we’re not them – while deep down we all know we have behaved in a similar way ourselves and probably will again in the future.

It was reported in a newspaper last week that one in four women admit lying to their female friends about how they look; telling their friends they look good when they don’t in the hope that they themselves will look better in comparison. It has also been reported recently that teenage girls in the US are taking photos of their mums into their plastic surgeons in order to get preventative work done in exactly the right places to stop them looking like their mum’s one day. (Hardly suprising then that women have been confessing jealousy towards their daughters.) And isn’t it ironic that while there is no woman in this world who does not have a flaw worthy of one of a ‘circle of shame’ that so many of us buy magazines with front page photos of celebries’ cellulite?

History tells us that women have been repressed in the past and anyone living in the real world knows that the female role in society is still in a continuous state of flux as we struggle to express ourselves in a world run by men’s rules that don’t come naturally to us. OK, we have the vote now and we are no longer burnt at the stake for voicing our opinions but women are still too easily branded ‘psychos’, women’s movements such as the Women’s Institute or predominantly female readership publications such as the Daily Mail are still ridiculed (both by men and women), and the terms ‘feminism’ and ‘lesbian’ are still used disparagingly too often in society.

Perhaps if we all stop pandering to stifling feminine labels such as ‘nice’ and ‘lovely’, that none of us really deserve or really want in any case, we’ll be able to celebrate each other properly; to appreciate all aspects of being a woman of any age – our competitive yet empathetic nature, the ride our cycles take us on, the lines on our faces and lumps on our thighs, the silly and idiotic things we do, the negative comments we regret making but all make from time to time; to be proud to celebrate each other for who we really are and not what Hollywood or anyone else tells us we should be.

Posted 06:09 PM on Mon May 31 2010

By Newbie76

940 views, 2 comments

Tweet