Unnatural

What do you see in the mirror?

According to the What I See project, a lot more and a lot less than a twenty seven year old with not quite brushed hair and a blood shot eye from doing too much computer work all in one go.

The self style 'online platform for women's voices' has spent months asking the above question of women around the world and they have had responses that range from the affirmative 'I see me' to the hurting 'I see flaws that need covering up' to the one that sums up the entire problem 'I see a society obsessed with appearances.

Coupled with the Dove 'Real Beauty Sketches' and The Daily Mail 'silhouette test' they underline just how many women have been indoctrinated from birth to find flaws with the way we look.  Women are not allowed to be content with how we look.  We are too fat, too thin, too short, too tall, too young, too old.

This can be seen every time we walk down the 'beauty produce' aisle in the supermarkets.  Compare the number of beauty produces on sale for women and the number on sale for men.  Without getting out a tape measure and measuring it I'm pretty sure that four fifths of the shelf space is for women and only a fifth for men.

Women are not allowed to believe that we can be naturally beautiful.  We must have a beauty routine, we must have thing we buy and use to make ourselves look better.

In short the female body is an unnatural thing that must be washed, powered, painted, scented, coloured and splashed to be acceptable.  A whole industry has grown up around this obsession that women cannot be proud of who and what they are.

Being passive and modest are the tradition female attributes and part of that is the belief that you must be continually striving to improve yourself to be acceptable.  What is more while you try and reach the bar of what society believes you must do to make yourself acceptable to it you will be accused of crimes as varied as supporting feminism ("If women have such bad judgement, why should we let them become board directors?") and existing in the first place. (See the comments from the Mail readership on the response page to the silhouette test on Mail Online.)

And yet if you try and break the model and say 'I am a women who is comfortable with her beauty and I don't need all that stuff' you will receive a torrent of abuse for being , among other things, vain, selfish and not feminine.  Is it me or can we not seem to win either way?

If we feed into society's demands that we aren't comfortable with ourselves we are abused for having poor judgement but if we take the stand and say that we are comfortable with ourselves and don't need all that crap we are slayed for being 'unfeminine'.

It seems that we have been fed this idea that only 'women who aren't like women' or 'women who don't like women' succeed.  In other words, the only women who is comfortable with her appearance and is therefore not distracted from her chosen path in life by it, is a ball breaker who is an unnatural woman.

Why can't we be women who are comfortable in our own skin and feminine?  After all, men can be comfortable in their own skin and be considered masculine.

I'd say it's about time we stopped listening to all those voices that say that we aren't 'natural' and start supporting each other to enjoy who and what we are exactly as we are.  And to Hell with the commercials!