What the world needs now…a little more grace and poise and a little less…what’s the word…
Why I’m still proud to promote grace and poise.
I could not have said it better myself. Thanks, Clare, for putting into words what I’ve been feeling for a long time. Ladies young, old, and in-between, don’t be afraid to swim against the tide!
And while I’m on an opinion-expressing roll, here’s an insightful post on deliberate self-uglification from one of my favorite bloggers, grerp at The Lost Art of Self-Preservation. A delicate tattoo or piercing, tastefully placed, is one thing. But at no time in history, to my knowledge, have ladies deliberately sought to make themselves frightening-looking, except at Halloween.
Here’s another perspective on The Cult of Ugly, from the thoughtful blog Under the Gables.
Obviously, being overly appearance-conscious is a bad thing, twisted up with gnarly sins like pride and vanity. But isn’t deliberate uglification another form of being appearance-conscious, just in a reverse way? Dressing to shock and repel, rather than attract?
4 Responses to What the world needs now…a little more grace and poise and a little less…what’s the word…
Excellent.
Obviously, being overly appearance-conscious is a bad thing, twisted up with gnarly sins like pride and vanity. But isn’t deliberate uglification another form of being appearance-conscious, just in a reverse way? Dressing to shock and repel, rather than attract?
The answer to your question is yes. Another form of pride and vanity. Striking the balance isn’t always easy, but we have to try.
Sad to say, the situation wasn’t much better back in my day (the 1920s). We (I mean my generation, not me personally, of course) cut off our hair and flattened our curves and rolled down our stockings and painted our faces white and our eyelids black. “Ghoulish,” our mothers said. We pretty much turned anything that was conventionally pretty on its head. We did it to get attention and to shock and bewilder our elders, much like today. But most of us dressed that way on Saturday night at the jazz club–not at church, or at school, or at our weekday office jobs. It was a costume, not an entire way of life.
Okay, so I DID bob my hair, flatten my curves, and roll down my stockings. But the white-powder-and-kohl thing never worked for me. I was too fresh-faced and freckly to pull off the exotic look, darn it.
Both extremes have their roots in pride…and the attention-mongering ways are both wrong.