My mother has always had a gift for aphorisms. I am grateful she has this talent as I’ve been able to simply repackage her wisdom and look much more talented than I actually am at delivering pull quotes. Brevity is the soul of wit and my mother is very witty.
One of the pithy witticisms I believe I learned from her is a classic take on beauty and class being more fungible than we are led to believe.
Pretty is a skill set
Me and/or my mother
If you’ve ever hung out with a bunch of rich girls and wondered why they are all hot consider the dilemma solved. It’s a skill that is cultivated. Like any skill you cultivate or with time but also money. And if you are rich and white the path to beauty is a lot shorter than you might realize. It’s pretty fucked.
I’ve been lucky enough to cultivate this skill set over time. I’ve come to rely on it as part of my arsenal. But I’ve also got a bit of a cranky body so I’ve not always been able to consistently practice the various skills required.
And sometimes life just gets in the way. I look like a fucking mess today. After a week cooped up in an air conditioned room in Mexico with trips outside for slightly traumatic family emotional bonding, I look like shit.
My hair is unsettled and popping off static electricity. I’ve got small pimples all across my forehead. I’ve got patches of eczema on my right chin. I do not appear to have the skill set for pretty today.
Normally I do my best to hide in these circumstances. Especially if I don’t trust someone. I don’t like looking like I lack skill when it comes to presentation. And it is often a sign of respect to look well groomed and beautiful.
In fact, today we’ve got a houseguest that normally I’d feel required to be at full skill set capacity around. And I just didn’t feel like it was necessary. And that’s a skill set worth cultivating too.
2 replies on “Day 793 and Pretty Skills”
“And if you are rich and white the path to beauty is a lot shorter than you might realize.”
Are you saying that it’s harder to be pretty if you’re not white? The only thing “fucked” here is your casual racism…
I am saying that because of the racism of our classist, not fully decolonized, system of oppression, it makes it much easier for white cis female faces to be classed and coded as pretty. This is a function of how distorted “pretty” as a concept is, as it’s simply a set of skills we perform to adhere to an ever shifting set of conditional whiteness over layers of financial and social inequality. It’s a fairly basic gatekeeping of the female body to keep the standards of the white colonial bodies.