Why Beauty Matters

Karly Randolph Pitman is a writer, speaker, and mother of four, as well as the founder of First Ourselves, an organization dedicated to encouraging women and mothers. http://www.firstourselves.com/first_ourselves/

Feeling beautiful, I've found, has very little to do with the reflection in the mirror, and everything to do with the inner landscape. In my work, I've talked with countless stunning women who can neither see nor accept their beauty. I've also spoken with size four women who aren't comfortable wearing a bathing suit in public; who bemoan their hips, butt, or thighs. Conversely, I know women who are at the heaviest they've ever been, and yet go swimming and clothes shopping with ease.

I'll save answering why some women are at home in their bodies, and some chastise every flaw, for another day. I think a more interesting question is why beauty matters at all. Why should we care what we look like? Why does feeling beautiful matter so much to women?

The two aspects of beauty

Beauty is tricky, because it does, and doesn't matter. No, in the grand scheme of things, our appearance isn't important. On our deathbeds, we won't lament the time we spent dieting or berating ourselves for being a size 10. We are ultimately spiritual beings; our true essence is not our physical self. Our beauty will change, and fade; our spirit, by contrast, grows and evolves.

Yet we are not only spirit; we are also human. And our humanity brings all the challenges and blessings of living in a physical universe. Our bodies are a gift: the vehicle for experiencing the world through our senses. Our beauty is also a gift, something to be honored and appreciated and used, just as we honor, appreciate, and use our other earthly talents. For everything, there is a season. There is a season to relish your beauty, a season to enjoy your body, and that time is now.

Overfocusing on the body

The key to understanding beauty is to accept both aspects of ourselves, body and spirit. Each has its place. We become unbalanced and suffer pain when we lean too strongly towards one or the other. When we're too focused on our physical selves, we become rigid, perfectionistic, holding our bodies to impossible standards. We bemoan the onset of wrinkles, cellulite, gray hairs; we denigrate any wiggle or jiggle. We live for someday ("I'll take that dancing class when I lose fifteen pounds") and worship our youthful past. We white knuckle our sensuality, shame our natural human desire for sexual pleasure, satiating food, and physical comfort.

Even worse is when we hate our bodies for unconforming to our impossible expectations. We think that somehow we can love ourselves while hating our bodies. But this is impossible. How you feel about your physical self influences your feelings about every part of you. Your physical body is in the house in which the rest of you---your spirit, mind, and emotions---resides. Hating the vessel pollutes every part. If you loathe your body, you loathe yourself.

This is slavery to beauty; being in bondage. Bondage is when your self worth, how you feel about yourself as a person, is defined by your appearance. Your physical self will fluctuate. Some days, you'll look smashing. Some days, you won't. This is where your spirit comes in. If you appreciate your spirit, your being-ness, then you can accept the changes in your humanity without fear, knowing that wrinkles and cellulite don't change who you are.

Overfocusing on the spirit

However, this doesn't mean we should ignore our bodies' needs. Sometimes we feel guilty for caring about our appearance at all, especially women who are focused on their spirituality. We feel unholy for wearing make-up or desiring pretty clothes. We feel egoic because we feel better when we look better. When we take time for a massage or a pedicure, we feel like we're indulging in something slightly sinful. This is shame talking; not your spirit. Shame is simply another form of slavery; another form of bondage.

Focusing solely on the spirit, and ignoring the body's needs for rest, proper nutrition, exercise, and, yes, beauty, is just as harmful as overfocusing on the body. Devalueing your body is as painful as overvalueing your body (vanity): they are opposite sides of the same coin.

It's human and natural to have a need for beauty, just as it's human and natural to have a need for rest, solitude, and peace. It's normal to want to feel pretty; to enjoy a new outfit; to pamper your body so that it can look its best. It's okay to indulge the body.

Balancing body and spirit

But how do we acknowledge our need for beauty without become trapped by vanity? How do we navigate a world that defines beauty in narrow terms? How do we balance our humanity with our spirituality?

The answer is twofold: self love, and self care. It takes both. Self care is what motivates you to exercise, eat food that makes you feel good, and rest when you're tired. It's also what inspires you to find a dress that makes you feel sexy, style your hair, and paint your toes lavender. Self care is treating yourself to a yoga class, silk sheets, and a makeover. Self love, by contrast, is what enables you to completely and deeply love and accept yourself at all times, when your toes aren't painted; when you're grungy and sweaty or camping in the woods. Self love is accepting the loss of your beauty with grace and levity. Self love is embracing the abundance of the universe, letting other women feel beautiful, too.

Combining self love with self care is treating your body as well as, but not more importantly as, your spirit. It's embracing your humanity and your spirituality with equal measure. It's letting your inner beauty match your outer beauty, and apologizing for neither. It's expanding your definition of beauty to include you at your best, your worst, and everywhere in between.

It is, in a word, freedom.

Women We Love # 4: Tara Beteille

Tara Beteille is a dear friend of mine, and is currently pursuing her Ph.D at Stanford University, Palo Alto.


At this point, I’m in the fourth year of a PhD program in the Economics of Education at Stanford. Many things brought me to this university and program, but two things stand out. First, my work experience at ICICI Bank, India’s largest private sector bank, where I managed their non-profit funding in elementary education for four years. Second, the fact that I grew up in India, still a “developing” economy today, but also a large democracy — one that must contend with a deeply hierarchical, complex and changing social structure. Growth projections have been impressive, but these must be viewed against the fact that large sections of the population are deprived of basic health and education – and thereby the opportunity to participate and contribute to such growth – and potentially even jeopardize it.

I joined ICICI Bank within days of finishing my masters in economics from the Delhi School of Economics. This was 2000, I was 22 years old – and by most accounts, I had landed myself a pretty good job. I was going to head the bank’s non-profit funding in elementary education. ICICI Bank already had a long history in development sector assistance; now I would be helping them rethink their strategy, focus areas and terms of assistance. This was a very challenging job for a number of reasons, but mainly because there was no guarantee our new approach would make the kind of difference we were hoping for; unlike commercial work, social-sector work takes a while to show returns, and even then, many of these cannot be measured. Much of this would have been really intimidating had it not been for my coworkers, my immediate boss, who used to head the treasury mid-office operations and was a constant source of strength, and the big boss, who trusted our judgment and was always ready to stand by us.

As very young people, working on some very fundamental social problems, I think we achieved quite a bit. One of our initial battles was to be taken seriously by the people we wanted to work with: government groups, other non-profits, academia and multilateral agencies – they usually thought we’d come to sell credit cards. Nobody quite believed that an aggressive bank like ICICI Bank had any real interest in these matters. I think that changed very quickly; in fact, people began to come to us, not just for our money, but for help with strategy and thinking – and these were some of the best people in the field, people who had spent their lives working in the social sector. For me, one of the most rewarding moments was when my team was invited by the state government of a newly-formed state to coordinate setting up their educational systems. Related to being taken seriously was also the need to change corporate-sector participation in the social-sector in general, from being a publicity gimmick to a serious endeavor. I was nominated to the Confederation of Indian Industry’s National Committee on Primary Education and Literacy, where I would interact with different industry players regularly. I had a one-point agenda: to emphasize the importance of making real changes versus cosmetic ones. One of the other things my team and I did was build a research agenda, both for the work we funded and broader issues in elementary education. There was practically no rigorous impact evaluation of programs, but a lot of money going into whatever seemed like a good idea. I think we changed the culture on that quite a bit.

One of the main reasons for doing a PhD was my dissatisfaction with the kind of research proposals coming our way; policy research is very important, but it needs to be long-term, and we were not able to find good, long-term researchers. You know what they say about making numbers lie, right? That’s how most practitioner feel, and unfortunately, they are usually right. I’d like to change some of that. Being able to do serious policy-relevant research, stick with a research site, and use such research to improve the functioning of educational systems — that’s what motivates me. And Stanford is anyone’s paradise for learning such work.

Crowd the hillsides: Caroline Roga, '04

Little boxes, sweep against the green firs and strut among each other.
In the middle wires reach, drawing me onward towards Tokyo, and
Away from the peaceful tourist-trap of Kyoto.
My contribution is several pieces of paper and a fan.
The machines take my ticket. There are three shots left on the roll.
Five bags, I think. Like a metamorphosis,
I have come undone.
The sparse traveller grows, my hair is shorter, my group
Has swollen by one, there are presents, books, new shoes,
The outline of a pavilion that was lost.
To me Japan is rice fields, wild flowers gently tweaked to submission.
The soft circling of birds of prey against the noontime sky. Ramen. Hot mochi.
I will take you to my izakaya for sashimi that will have you throwing out cooking pots in wild abandon.
Nama beer-u onegaishimas
Japan is the first, long draught to quench this thirst.

Be Careful What You Ask For, You Might Just Get It.

Moushumi Khan, a proud Graduate of Mount Holyoke College.

My law school application essay was entitled, “Bridge over Troubled Waters.” Fourteen years ago I wrote that the three things closest to my heart were Islam, Bangladesh and the necessity for individual critical thought. I defined myself as a bridge, as someone who tries her best to transcend barriers, to reach out to opposing camps. I ended by saying that I wanted to develop the skills of a mediator as well as a litigator, to bridge conflict as well as to engage in it. During interviews I went on about how I wanted to ‘serve my community,’ without really understanding what this meant.

As I come to end of my legal career and prepare to study public policy, and I reflect on these goals, I find that I am still passionate about Islam, Bangladesh and critical thought. Over the last six years in my private practice I have learned what it means to ‘serve my community’ in a post 9/11 America. I have started a consulting company, “Jisir (‘bridge’ in Arabic) Consulting” which seeks to help companies and organizations bridge relations with the Muslim community. I have been humbled by seeing my Muslim, Bangladeshi and other immigrant clients try to realize their American Dream. I have become frustrated at the state of international and interfaith relations. I have gone into debt paying tuition at the school of hard knocks trying to establish my legal practice. I am grateful to all those who took the time to mentor and provoke me into becoming a better lawyer and activist.

The biggest lesson that I have learned is that if you sincerely want something, you will get it. Perhaps it won’t be in the form that you expected or take longer than you hoped, but it will come. So be careful what you ask for. When I asked for the opportunity to serve my community, I did not think that would entail my learning how to do residential closings in Queens because my Bangladeshi cab driver clients were buying real estate, nor appealing deportation cases resulting from Special Registration since I had no interest or experience in real estate or immigration law; I could not have imagined that so-called Muslims would attack my country seven months after I started my solo legal practice and change the nature of my advocacy forever. I did not anticipate that I would become a spokesperson for those things that I held closest to my heart and speak out against my fellow Americans’ lack of critical thinking about the War on Terror. I have become a lawyer who is wary of the ways in which laws, such as the Patriot Act, are used for political ends. I am a lawyer who still believes that our legal system works and can protect all of our civil liberties. In the end, I have become a person who believes that no law can save us from the ravages of bigotry, that building community is the ultimate defense to terrorism. As the water underneath me gets more troubled, I continue to believe in the power of bridges in mediating conflict.

Mexico: HK

I just took a trip to Mexico with my sisters and would like to share some pictures with you. I have a lot going on and will soon share my stories from Mexico, truly a splendid nation.

Branching Out: Caroline Slama

I recently felt this rush to write down all my thoughts, feelings, and ideas for this world before my passage into scholarship at Bryn Mawr College would alter them. But minutes into taking inventory of my mind, the realization came that my thoughts were not the unadulterated “me” I had assumed they were. Finding the origin of even one thought I have would be comparable to tracing the lineage of topics in one of those late night conversations you have with a friend you haven’t seen for months. It’s impossible, as connections are made— between you and that old friend, or you and your mind—that you are not aware of, and that just slip by your consciousness. In sophomore year of high school, my English teacher dropped a faded pearl of wisdom on my class: he told us there were no connections. Without knowing exactly why, I found his words strangely empowering.

“But it’s so true,” I would later explain to doubting friends, “Nothing is connected outside the human mind. Everything we perceive, we perceive as ourselves, and each of us is an individual. So we can’t be sure that things that one person sees as connected are connected in every other individual mind.” Connections truly are gossamer-thin, wending their way through our minds, taking as peculiar a route as we wish them to take. It is a tribute to the power of our minds that we can forge bonds between so many discrete topics and objects, and that we sense these bonds as being so real. And if things are not inherently connected to each other, that means only thatwe have no time to waste in creating new ties and strengthening old ones, anchoring experiences in some sort of knit reality. Such connections give my life meaning. So, for my own sake, and for yours, I want to make bonds, connections, links, ties, anything that will harness everything we can lose and love into a network of humanity. This might sound like an enormous dream, but don’t be daunted. In reality, it’s just many little, connected ideas in the mind of a new freshwoman.