Is It Just Me Or… Can One Comment Do A Whole Lot Of Damage?

Someone told my girlfriend she could do better...

“I went to this club night” a friend of my girlfriend’s told her, “and this girl came up to me – blonde, big boobs, big bum, little waist, blue eyes, proper beautiful. And she said to me, ‘you know your friend Char? I’ve got the biggest crush on her. I’m gonna marry her one day’.  And I just thought imagine that, you could be running off into the sunset with a blonde baddie!”

My girlfriend recounted this conversation to me, horrified that her friend would suggest that she would leave me for a “blonde baddie” – knowing how loyal Char is, and how she loves far beyond what’s skin deep. She also happens to tell me everything; she doesn’t believe in keeping secrets and she wanted to reassure me that she was nothing like what this friend had suggested (which I already knew).

At first, I find it difficult to process exactly what’s going on for me as she tells me what this friend had said. There’s immediate disgust for how the woman was being talked about – as if she was just a collection of body parts put together for someone’s consumption. Then there were flashes of insecurity: is this how people still measure desirability? Is that the kind of woman that people think my girlfriend would be better matched with? Have I been kidding myself, feeling confident about my own desirability when I am none of the things she listed?

We both agreed that it was a totally unacceptable comment: misogynistic, disrespectful, unnecessary. Char reassured me (again) that she has no interest in being with someone else who happens to be closer to the current beauty standard, and that for her, I am as beautiful as it gets: soft belly, natural face, squishy parts and all.

Still, the comment lodged itself in the back of my head and ticked away, popping up at inconvenient times over the next few days.

I get ready for an event and wonder whether other people look at us and think that Char should be with someone different.

I take my make-up off and wonder if I should just give in, go get some filler or botox or any of the other things that have become so normalised that it’s hard to find a woman in my industry without them.

I watch a reality dating show and see all of the beauty standards I’ve spent years breaking away from being celebrated and lusted after.

Have I got it wrong? I think. Have I been kidding myself this whole time?

But then, before those thoughts can take hold as reality, something else kicks in. I get really. Fucking. Angry.

10 years. 10 years of unlearning every bullshit beauty standard that used to dictate my entire life. 10 years of making peace with food after years of disordered eating. 10 years of reclaiming my worth outside of my desirability to others. And 10 years of teaching thousands of other people those same lessons. For someone to come along and suggest, to put it simply, that my girlfriend could do better? Absolutely not.

I have worked way too hard to build a life for myself that does not contain that kind of misogyny for it to creep back in now.

There probably are people who look at my relationship and think that Char would be better physically matched to someone closer to the beauty standard. And it is sad that those people can only comprehend a romantic connection that’s built primarily on how someone looks. They probably couldn’t even fathom the kind of love that we have.

I could go out and pay someone to change my body and face in the way that society currently prescribes. But for what? To be accepted and praised by people who don’t share the same values I do? To be forever chasing the next treatment? The next trend? To know that I’ve bought into something that frankly, I wish didn’t exist? How could I betray myself like that?

And sure, I could go back to believing in all of it: that thinness is happiness, that male validation is everything, that desirability is the ultimate value, that life should be spent turning our bodies into never-ending projects that will never be quite good enough.

But I have tried that life before. I know where that life leads: hunger, obsession, disconnection, denial. I know that it’s all an illusion: that there will never be enough people who desire you to balance out hating yourself. I have already spent the money, the energy, the years that I can’t get back chasing an ideal that doesn’t exist.

I don’t want to go back. And I won’t be dragged back by people who haven’t escaped yet.

Logically, I know why that friend made those comments. I know that they are deeply invested in the beauty standard and that they struggle with low self-esteem. I know that they use their own desirability to validate themselves, but never feel like it’s enough. I know that they care too much about how their life looks to others, including everyone else’s opinion of who they date. I know why they said what they said. And it doesn’t make them a bad person. It makes them a person who’s been conditioned into believing the same toxic bullshit that we all have.

I stop being angry, and start to feel sad. Sad because all of this is still going on, and we deserve so, so much better.

I pick myself up.  Take a deep breath. And remember who the fuck I am: the baddest bitch who knows her worth beyond her body and who’s worked too damn hard unlearning every harmful, misogynistic message to turn back now. Time to keep going.

Love,

M