For Women, On Vanity and Criticism by Elizabeth Gilbert
(From a Facebook post on Elizabeth’s Gilbert’s page, January 2015) Dear Ones – Can we talk about something? For the last few months, I’ve been growing uneasy about a phenomenon I’ve seen playing out in the media over women’s bodies and women’s appearances. And no, this is not about the USUAL thing that makes me uneasy in the media (the exploitation and hyper-sexualization of women’s bodies, etc. etc…) That hasn’t changed, and I’m not tackling that today. This is about something new. This is about prominent women publicly criticizing other prominent women about body image questions, and about each other’s private beauty decisions. I don’t want to see this anymore. The history of women’s bodies and women’s beauty is a battlefield of epic (and sometimes violent) proportions. The last thing any of us need to be doing is judging each other and turning on each other. What really frustrates me is the patronizing tone that is sometimes adopted, when a woman who has made a certain set of decisions about her own face and her own body criticizes another woman who has made an entirely different set of decisions about HER own face and HER own body. You know the tone. It goes …
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