I, like many women, buy into patriarchal standards of beauty every day. I very rarely leave the house without make-up. I dye my hair. I wear clothes that I choose carefully for how they make me look to the outside world.
Interpretation
Many women conform to societal beauty standards and feel pressured to alter their appearance.
Stella Young's quote highlights the internalized pressure women experience to adhere to patriarchal beauty standards. She openly acknowledges her own participation in this system, which reflects a broader societal expectation for women to modify their appearance through makeup, hair dye, and carefully chosen clothing, ultimately emphasizing how these standards influence self-perception and social acceptance.
In practice
In a discussion about societal expectations of women, this quote can underscore the pressure to conform to beauty standards.
We often hear that people mean well: that so many just don't how to interact with people with disabilities. They're unsure of the 'right' reaction, so they default to condescension that makes them feel better in the face of their discomfort.
In my own home, where I've been able to create an environment that works for me, I'm hardly disabled at all. I still have an impairment, and there are obviously some very restrictive things about that, but the impact of disability is less.
We fill our lives with all sorts of things that make it easier for us to get along in the world: wheelchairs, crutches, grabber sticks, hearing aids, canes, guide dogs, modified vehicles, ramps, as well as other kinds of services and supports. Disability does not necessarily mean dependence on other people.
For me, disability is a physical experience, but it's also a cultural experience and a social experience, and for me, the word 'crip' is the one that best encapsulated all of that.
We are a society that treats people with disabilities with condescension and pity, not dignity and respect.
In many ways, I'm incredibly lucky to have been born with my impairment and that it's visible. It means my path has been predictable.
For my peculiar face, I look best when I look as though I'm not wearing make-up.
I wear make-up, and it gets a little bit thicker every year.
Because you are beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence
Girls see enough of this body that we can't imitate, that we'll never be able to obtain, these unrealistic expectations...it's better to look strong and healthy...
Everything is beautiful. We have all this beauty in the world and all we have to do is reach out and touch it, it is all there and all ours for the taking." -- Cecilia to Henry Chinaski, liberty taken changing past tense to present tense (173)
I know a girl who just looks at her face in the medicine cabinet mirror and never looks below her shoulders, and she's four or five hundred pounds but she doesn't see all that, she just sees a beautiful face and therefore she thinks she's a beauty. And therefore, I think she's a beauty, too, because I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do.
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