“Beauty”: How did we get trapped in this cage, and how do we break free?
August 17, 2021
Glennon Doyle:
Hi, everybody. Thanks for coming back to We Can Do Hard Things. We recorded this episode before this latest onslaught of pain in the world. Our hearts are breaking for the people of Afghanistan and Haiti. We started our nonprofit Together Rising a decade ago and so many of you have joined us in turning our collective heartbreak and fury and hope into effective service for people in crisis all over the world. Together, we have raised over $30 million dollars of lifesaving, world-changing aide. The day after the most recent Haiti earthquake, we committed $250,000 to Haiti. And through Friday, every penny that Together Rising receives will be deployed to provide urgent relief there. We’re currently also vetting the most responsible ways for serve in Afghanistan and we’ll have ways to help there to share with you soon. We know that being a citizen of this world and pain is hard, but we can and will do hard things. We will never allow that fact that we cannot fix it all to keep us from doing what we can. We will keep showing up for ourselves, for each other, for the world. Thank you for standing with us. You can give at TogetherRising.org/give and you can follow all of the Together Rising stories at @TogetherRising on Instagram.
Hi, everybody. Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. I just want to jump in because I am so freaking excited about this conversation you’re about to hear. It has lit a fire inside of me, and I hope it does for you too. It’s about beauty. It’s about the ideas of beauty that keep us stuck, and keep us caged, and keep us feeling like we are not enough. And it’s about how to see that for what it is and reclaim the idea of beauty not as something that we have to be in order to earn worthiness, but as something that we get to fill ourselves up with every single day. Let’s get started. Hello.
Amanda Doyle:
Hello, Glennon Doyle.
GD:
I am sitting in my pantry right now. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation with you about beauty because it feels like a conversation, we’ve been having for many, lo so many decades. And I want to start by describing what I’ve been thinking about as my relationship to this idea of beauty. Whatever the hell this idea of beauty is. It’s planted in us young and that some of us spend our lives chasing to earn worthiness, right? So I was thinking a lot about myself as a kid and thinking about when you’re a kid you learn. You just start to learn how to be human, and how other people relate to you, and how to make people happy, and how to be pleasing, and how to make your way in the world. And one of the ways I learned very early to make my way in the world was that I was a really cute kid.
AD:
Yup.
GD:
I was a very cute kid. I matched the look of what a cute kid looks like, right? I like long ringlets and… And I remember that cuteness earning me praise and approval from grownups. I could see it on their faces. I could see them open up to me. I could see them reach down and pat me on the head, all the touching, all the… They would light up. And so I learned, oh, this is like a currency. Now obviously, I wouldn’t have had that language as a kid, but I did understand that, which meant adolescence was unbelievably painful to me. When I think about when a lot of my eating disorder started and all of the pain came from me right around 10, 11, when I started to lose all that adorableness, right? When I got serious acne and I got… started to gain weight and my hair went all wiry and I just… I could just start. I remember feeling… oh, I really only remember feelings as a kid, but I remember going from the world adoring me, to the world looking away from me, right? A little girl becoming fully human instead of a doll and becoming greasy, and oily, and chunky, and frizzy, and zitty and that humanness it’s like girls aren’t allowed to become human. It felt like a fall from grace, right? Like I had lost all of my currency and I had no idea how to get it back. And I feel like I spent, and sometimes still spend my life trying to get back to that. Well, whatever the beauty standard is that allows us to all be adored.
AD:
And that it’s so interesting because if you hadn’t had that experience because many, many people go through the awkward middle school, adolescent period. But it’s interesting that yours is the juxtaposition with the adored cute kid. And sometimes I wonder if folks are better off who never had the first period, right?
GD:
Yes!
AD:
Because, if you’re learning that your value is in that. If you’re alerting that the warmth of the world and adoration of the world comes from that, and that’s your… that is where you find your value and then you lose it. It’s this destabilizing force where you know that you are actually worth less than you were before.
GD:
Yes. And that’s why even the positive. I think some people think, well, if you’re saying positive things about little girl’s looks or anyone’s looks, then that’s fine and it’s not.
AD:
Right.
GD:
Because when you are over and over, “Oh, you’re pretty, you’re pretty, you’re…” Then you learn that, that is important. You learn that, that is important to your parents. It’s like freaking purity culture where if you’re… as a woman, if your worth is in never having had sex, then when about when you become a sexual being, you lose all of that worthiness, the beauty and the purity culture are the same bullshit.
AD:
It’s a veiled threat.
GD:
Yes! Yes!
AD:
Every affirmation of, or compliment on how you look is really, I interpret it as a veiled threat of don’t lose that, don’t… not do that anymore because the praise you’re getting right now will be easily and swiftly withdrawn.
GD:
Yes, yes. The positive or negative. It’s still saying your worth is in how you appear. Either good job or bad job, but yeah.
AD:
But we’re paying close attention.
GD:
Right.
AD:
The council is monitoring carefully.
GD:
That’s right. And the idea that there is a council and it gets to monitor and comment is so crazy making. The fact that when you really look at it, when you think about the fact that people can just walk all around all day, commenting on women’s appearance. The entitlement that the world has to just say whatever the hell they want to say about women at any time.
AD:
Right, right. It’s what’s communal property. It’s like when you’re pregnant and just random strangers feel like they can approach you and put their actual hands on your actual body, because you’ve somehow become a part of communal property. For me, that was my first year of college when I went away to school and it was a really tough transition for me to go to school and I gained probably 20 pounds. It was… and I came back and I remember that summer, and I remember just ice faces and just looks of pity and the direct comments. And I remember walking through the mall and some guys said to me, “You used to be so pretty,” just as I was walking through the mall. And then…
GD:
Oh, my God.
AD:
And then my good friend from high school sat me down and ex… and said, “You just really need to not let yourself go.” And that was my moment of understanding that my self was the way that I appeared. That letting my self go was letting my body not be what people wanted it to be.
GD:
Yeah, because I’m sure all those people… Wow, it’s so interesting that idea that the ultimate insult we can offer a woman is to let herself go. And that’s because what women are told to do constantly is control themselves, right? You cannot trust your desire. You cannot trust your skin. You cannot trust your hair. You cannot trust your appetite. You cannot trust. You have to keep a tight rein on all of those things. So success is control yourself. Do not trust yourself, control every bit of yourself. Failure is letting yourself be, letting yourself go. That kind of freedom is intolerable.
AD:
Right, and there’s… we control ourselves for good reason because when you think about a woman and what she does in the world. Never mind that I had gone to college, adjusted to a brand new world and gotten straight A’s. No one was interested in talking about that. That was not relevant if I didn’t also look the way I was supposed to look, and that gets replicated a thousand times over every… in all aspects of life. So you all, anything you do in your family, in your work, in whatever it is that you devote yourself to becomes completely invalidated. You can’t be secure in that because the world always has this nuclear option. We’re always living under threat of that all of that becomes invalidated by, “She’s fat and ugly.”
GD:
That’s right.
AD:
It’s just no matter how secure we get, we’re always subject to that insecurity and that is completely outside of our control. And that is intentional because the whole idea of beauty is all about currency and control. If you look… it’s just not… it’s not an opinion. It is correct that when you look at… Oh, and we should get into this, because when you look at every society, it’s just, as women gain security and independence and gaining currency that’s actually within their control, the backlash is to put us back in a place of constant insecurity in which our power is not based on what we can achieve and build ourselves and keep ourselves. But it is based on external perceptions that are totally out of our control, right?
GD:
Right. So you’re a successful business person. You’re a successful mother. You’re a successful human. You’re doing… You’re making a life. You’re out there. It doesn’t matter because the nuclear option is always, yeah but you’re fat, you’re ugly. And it’s like this way of putting women back into this cage.
AD:
And that’s just for the average woman trying to go about her life. Forget it, if you are a woman. When you look at women who are running for office, women who are in the media, any woman who is… whose ideas are threatening or whose power is threatening. They are 90% of the time the comments about them are about their appearance.
GD:
Absolutely. I’ve always thought when men put work out into the world, the world asks is this man’s work worthy. Okay? And when a woman puts work out into the world, the world asks is this woman worthy of even putting out work. So all of the attention and response and feedback doesn’t even go to the work. I see this all the time. It goes to the woman. We look at her appearance, we look at her relationships, we look at her personality, we look at all of the things and we decide we attack her, not even the work.
AD:
And I think it’s subtle and people don’t even realize they’re doing it. When anyone indicates through… It’s an audacious thing to walk around, just booking what you look like and daring to use your voice. And if you say anything controversial or anything powerful. It’s just, when you indicate through your words or through your appearance, that you are actually having priorities that are other than pleasing men.
GD:
Yes.
AD:
Other than kicking your own ass to look hot, then the people who want to maintain those traditional gender roles in which all of your time, and all of your priorities are looking hot, punish you.
GD:
Yeah, that’s how I feel now about what’s inspiring to me and what’s not, it’s like not… People… I think what we… We put up these… One of the ways we keep women trapped in this body and beauty standard is that we put out examples and ideals, right? In the form of human beings. Look at this woman, look at this woman. Feel like crap, because you don’t look like this woman. And there is the kind of human woman you see where it is apparent that most of their time and energy is spent on beauty, right? You can see it in the appearance. And that is okay, and a choice, and understandable because my god, this world does offer pretty privilege to people. And it is understandable that some women are just wanting to play the game.
I get that. I do that. But there’s this other woman who’s emerging more and more now. Who you can see, doesn’t spend all of their time trying to conform to a beauty standard, right? You can see through their body and their clothes and their face and whatever that they have some different priorities that often look like they include joy and savoring things. And being the subject of their life, instead of the object of everyone else’s lives. Caring more about their gaze at the world than the world’s gaze at them. And that is so inspiring to me right now. When I see a woman who doesn’t look like she’s kicking her own ass to get the pretty privileged that the world offers.
AD:
Well, she’s not participating in the standard. And what’s so interesting to me, just look at the beauty standard. The actual word standard, means an idea that is used to measure in comparative evaluations. Okay. It’s an idea. And to be used in comparative evaluation. So in order to evaluate women against one another, it is… it doesn’t even exist as a thing. It’s just an idea.
GD:
It’s an idea.
AD:
It’s an idea. Beauty, and I really want to talk about this, but beauty is a made up thing. It is not fixed. It is not universal. It is very much related to whatever political, economic situation of a culture is, which we should talk about. So it’s just this idea that is very intentionally placed, but I just feel like running around and screaming, we’re in Oz, okay? And I want to scream, “There is no wizard, it’s just an old man pulling knobs.” If we all decided not to participate in the standard, it would go away because there would be no comparative analysis.
If every woman just decided, “I’m going to stop trying to fix what isn’t broken, because nothing about me is broken.” And we all set it down. There would actually not be a beauty standard because it only exists because we’re all striving to meet it.
GD:
Yeah, that’s so good. And also the reason to not participate is number one, so it goes away and so we break that bondage that like that terrible job that we keep passing down to other generations. But also because you can’t win it, there’s no winning it. So I experienced this when I first started dating Abby. Somebody sent me, one of my friends sent me this link to all of these horrible things that people were saying about me…
AD:
We have to just… that cannot… what is that about? What is this thing about where people report to you? Things that people say bad about you and it’s never reporting of it. They’re saying I don’t agree with it, but it’s as if they’re bringing a huge pile of dog shit and laying it on your front porch.
GD:
Yes.
AD:
And saying, I also don’t like the smell of this dog shit, but it’s still on your front porch and you weren’t going out looking for it.
GD:
That’s exactly right.
AD:
People need to stop doing that. Just please stop.
GD:
It’s a little bit… it’s comparable people to the beauty standard. All right? It’s like, I didn’t know I had a problem until you told me I was shit and now I’m upset. So thank you.
Anyway, yes. So I started reading these freaking things people were saying and the overall feeling of it. And I know you remember these days sister, was, she’s ugly. She’s old. She’s… she shouldn’t be with Abby. It was just very terrible mean things, okay? It was I… how shall we say triggering to me? It was a bit triggering to me. And I first subconsciously, and then just because I don’t know how to do anything with moderation, I spent the next months just… I don’t know how to… just transforming myself into a… what I now see as… Perhaps I could have been on the real housewives. I froze my face. I bleached my hair more. I added extension. I did eyelashes. I did all of the things, which I understand now I give myself… I feel sad for myself because it is like I was putting on armor, right?
I felt deeply like, “Oh, I’m coming… this is a time when I’m going to be more exposed because of Abby, because of all the things. And I am a public woman in the world, and now I cannot be human because of the nuclear option, because no matter what I do, they can say…” But if I make myself plastic. If I make myself into a barbie. If I do the thing where I match the ideal, then I’m safe, okay? And so I did that and I turned myself into as close as a barbie, as a 5’2, 45 year old woman can do. And I got pretty close. And then this article was written and came out and somebody sent it to me about how the only reason that I had any success with my books is because I was blonde and pretty and thin, okay? Because I was palatable to the world because I matched the beauty standard.
So, see what happened there is that at first I was not allowed to be out in the world as a human being… woman, because I was too ugly and old. And then, when I went the other direction, I was not allowed to be out in the world and have any success because I was too pretty and young looking.
AD:
Well, no, you were allowed to have success, but your success became not based on anything from inside of you. It became based on your beauty. So anything that you build, if you’re able to build it to break through, then your breaking through is attributed to your looks.
GD:
Yes.
AD:
To be fair. There is some truth in that. The fact there is pretty privileged. It is a very specifically white supremacist structure.
GD:
An aside, everybody go to get One Drop by Yaba Blay. Dr. Yaba Blay talks about this so beautifully. Sorry, go ahead sister.
AD:
Yes. Everyone read Dr. Yaba Blay. And in our everyday lives, women who are deemed attractive, get more job offers. They earn 20% more than what 20% more dollars for the same work.
GD:
Currency.
AD:
As women who are deemed average looking. But then, it’s this double bind that you’re talking about because then women who are deemed too beautiful, they are perceived as not worthy of trust and they are perceived as being deserving of getting fired. So you have exactly a two-inch window. You have to be pretty enough, but not too pretty because then your success is attributed to your beauty and people don’t trust you and you need to get fired. So it’s all just…
GD:
It’s horseshit. And if this is confusing to you. If this has been a burden on your life. If you spend a lot of time feeling not good enough or not beautiful enough or not. That’s not because you’re crazy, right?
That’s not because you have any deficiency in yourself. That’s not because you’re not meeting a standard. It’s because the world is designed this way to do this to you so that you spend your one wild and precious life not creating, not feeling, not loving, not whatever, but chasing this uncatchable what we call dirty pink bunny, right?
AD:
That is correct. That is correct. And that is what it is. For me, I think it is crazy that we all think we are crazy. This is what I want every person to understand is that they… when they take polls of America, the number one most often cited goal of any goal in a woman’s life is to lose weight, okay. That is her number one goal. It is not economic independence. It is not job security and advancement. It is not some goal for justice or deeper more fulfilling relationships. It is to lose weight, okay?
When we think about… You have to go back historically and see. In the 1910s, okay? Women started joining the workforce for the first time because of World War I, right? They needed us because all the men were at war. We came into the workforce, got more independence. In the 1920s women earned the right to vote, okay? It is not a coincidence that for the… just as women won more independence and started having, making their way into these forbidden territories, into elected office, into universities, into professions. That is exactly the time when the standard of female beauty as thinness started to prevail in America, okay? That requirement just as we are becoming a threat to power is the ideal female body looks like a malnourished pre-adolescent girl who is utterly non-threatening. It’s intentional and it totally depends… I just feel like we wake up. We think that is pretty, Oz, the wizard told us. And so we should keep doing this. The wizard is trying to establish and reestablish norms that work for the power structure.
GD:
That’s right.
AD:
And it isn’t even it.
GD:
So, the beauty, the idea of beauty is a tool of oppression.
AD:
I’m just saying that standards or beauty are not static.
GD:
It’s not an untamed idea. It’s a taming. It’s a conditioning. It’s why when anyone says, ever says to me. I don’t know if you have this thought, but when someone says “You’re pretty” what that means to me is it doesn’t feel like a deep, true compliment to me. I always feel a little bit of shame in it because what that means to me is, I see what you’ve done there. You have kicked your own ass to match very closely. The beauty standard that’s been put out for us in this particular culture in this particular time.
AD:
And another way to say that is, “very good, you are meeting the function we require of women in this society.”
GD:
So, it makes me feel just obedient. It makes me feel like, oh, good, you’re a good little soldier for the patriarchy, good job.
AD:
Right.
GD:
That’s why I feel so empowered by and inspired by. And I feel like a fire lights inside of me when I see a woman who looks like they are doing work in the world this way or that way but they’re not being a good little soldier.
AD:
And I feel it’s just important to acknowledge it because I’m talking about all of this. I know I was a women’s studies major. I know all this stuff, and it’s still completely screws me up a hundred times a day. I just… it is. I feel like it’s important, just collective acknowledgement that we have been… It’s like, we’re in one of those cults, but we’re all inside of it. And so we can’t see it. And I just think we’re not going to solve this problem. The universe of the world is not going to opt out of the beauty standard and make it obsolete, although we could, and we should try. But just acknowledging that we are in a beauty cult and it’s so hard for us to see. And we live in a culture where we have been reared from the very beginning that this is our universally, God-put-it-into-the-world standard. And so we should have some compassion for ourselves truly.
GD:
Absolutely. But we should give a mantra over and over again. The world says, this is what’s beautiful. And then we just try to claim over and over again. What’s beautiful is not… is caring less.
AD:
And it has a… and calling it out when we see it. All of this has a very… it’s a personal impact to our life the way that they are. Women being called out for their beauty makes them not run for office. As we are desperately trying to control our faces in our bodies, we are losing utter control of our bodies.
GD:
Amen, say that, retweet. Say it again. Say more.
AD:
All of the legislation in Texas and Mississippi in every… We literally have lost control of our bodies while we’re spending our lives obsessing about controlling our bodies.
GD:
That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. Let’s come back with some hard questions.
Okay, hard questions. First is a write-in. Actually this was some… a bunch of people on Instagram asked us. Sister, Amanda, to talk about makeup. What are our makeup takes?
I have to say, I’ve had every take under the sun about makeup. I started wearing a lot of makeup in adolescents when I became very, very zitty. So I used to just cover my face with whatever it is. Foundation? And then I wore a lot of makeup my whole life up until probably five years ago. Every day, foundation, eyeshadow, mascara, all of it, all of it every single day. And then I started feeling like, “What am I doing?” I think I just… When you start looking at, are the guys doing it, right? Which is not always a good way to analyze feminist issues but it is almost always a good way to analyze issues. So the question being like, “Okay, wait, this makeup thing are the guys doing it?” And then you start thinking about like, what? This is so weird, that half the population, their face is cool. They’re good. Right?
Their face is okay. Their face is fit for public consumption, but the other half women, their faces, so inadequate or jacked up or ugly or not fit for public consumption that they have to plaster and cover themselves every morning with colors. Isn’t that weird?
AD:
Yes.
GD:
When you actually think about it.
AD:
It’s so weird.
GD:
I would just be looking at the guys like, what… yours is so great. I feel the boldness to just walk around, showing your face without all these bubbles.
AD:
Your raggedy, raggedy face is acceptable to the world, but the rest, but rest of the world…
GD:
Yes.
AD:
It’s fascinating. Isn’t it? It’s just one set of faces. Just the world must adapt to accept. And then the other set of faces, the faces must adapt for the world to accept.
GD:
Exactly, so weird. So there’s Chad over there, just hanging out with his face hanging out, right?
AD:
Just his face all over his face.
GD:
He got an hour this morning that I didn’t get. He got $100 this morning that I didn’t get because of all of these various bottles that I’m constantly convinced are going to change my life. I don’t know. And I remember holding up this bottle of concealer. Okay, so there’s this stuff that you dab, that someone convinced me along the line that I had to not only do the foundation, but I had to dab this white liquid underneath my eyeballs so that the lines or dark circles under my eyes from tiredness would not show to the world. Okay, that’s important.
So, one day I was looking at this concealer and I was like, “What the hell?” So now, as a woman, I have to hold up 80% of the sky. So I’m… I think tired. I’m tired because I’m working so hard. But now my job in the morning is to cover up that tiredness so that I don’t inconvenience the world that I’m saving constantly by showing the world that I am tired from having to save it. I’m protecting the world from my experience of that world.
AD:
Yes. Yes. You’re saving the world from the evidence of the fact that you were saving the world. So that they don’t have to be like, “Oh, that’s not sweet.” I don’t want to look that bad.
GD:
That’s right. So the world doesn’t say, “Oh Glennon, you look so tired today.” Which people like to say. So I find makeup baffling and confusing when I had this Chad’s face versus my face, concealer, no concealer. I promised myself, I had this experiment where I was going to wear no makeup forever. And then I decided that, that hurt my feelings.
AD:
That’s when you decided that tinted moisturizer wasn’t makeup.
GD:
No, it’s medicine.
AD:
Medicine.
GD:
Yeah. Tinted moisturizer is medicine. It’s medicinal. So I now wear tinted moisturizer on my face, which is really just foundation. And I also use an eyebrow brush and eyebrow pencil because I had a very unfortunate over tweezing tragedy in the early 90s. So I have a hole in my eyebrow, which I find unacceptable. So anyway I’m… that’s where I am in the place, but I just want to say overall that I think it’s freaking weird that women have to… or suggested that we cover our faces with crap and men are not called.
AD:
Men are not so called. As you know I have purchased two sets of makeup in my life. One for my first wedding and the second for my second wedding. So I better stay married because I think that three sets of makeup in a lifetime is probably a bridge too far for me. It’s just interesting to me because some people love makeup. I will watch an IG makeup tutorial.
GD:
Same.
AD:
For seven minutes. I will watch people watching makeup tutorial. I don’t know how to do any of it, but there is something so fascinating. So there’s nothing inherently wrong with makeup. It’s just the fact that we’ve stumbled into that it’s an expectation of us and none of other people.
GD:
Exactly.
AD:
I made it so an intentional thing.
GD:
When people are… say, “Well, I just like makeup.” I do too. I just like makeup, but I am aware that I have been conditioned.
AD:
Yes.
GD:
To like makeup. It’s not like I was born. I just can’t wait to paint my face, right? Okay, so now we have a call-in, sister.
Sarah:
Hi. My name is Sarah. So I just had my first child, a daughter almost a year ago now. And as she’s growing up, I’ve noticed that in the toddler section, in the girls’ sections at stores, every shirt is, girls are smart. Girls can do anything. Girls can do this. And I’ve been struggling with the idea that girls shouldn’t have to plaster that they are awesome and smart and strong on all of their clothing to prove to the world. But at the same time, understanding that maybe seeing it there and reading it on clothes and wearing it will instill these ideas at them.
So, I was just curious on the thoughts on how to approach dressing my daughter. To help her understand that she is going to be strong and smart and that she can do anything she sets her mind to. So that’s my question and… or topic idea because there’s nothing I want more in this world than to raise a strong woman who will challenge the world with her thought and grace. So thank you so much for your podcast. We love listening every day. I’ll talk to you.
GD:
I love these people. I know I say that every time, I’ll stop. But I just… every time I listen to one of these questions, I’m like the people who listened to these podcasts. These podcast are so my kind of people. I just want to sit with that woman and talk about all of these things for an hour.
AD:
Speaking of your kind of people. I love at the end she said, “Talk to you later.” It reminds me of how you always say at the end, whatever you used to say at the end. Remember when you got at you’re so used to saying at the end of every call, and you got off the first sign with the publisher of your first book and at the end of the call, the first time you met. Then you said, “Okay, I love you, bye.”
GD:
Oh my God. I said I love you to 10 exact fancy ass. I love you.
AD:
Most hilarious awkward thing. Love you, bye. And they just look like… anyway, talk to you soon friend.
GD:
Talk to you soon. I love it. Well, I just… I want you to answer this one because you do such a… I think you do a really cool job of this with Alice, your daughter. I am with this color, in terms of, I think it’s weird all of these t-shirts. Every time I see a little girl wearing a t-shirt that says, “Girls can do anything.” I just think… but she didn’t know they couldn’t until you put that t-shirt on her, right? When you’re saying something positive, there’s often a negative implied. When someone’s wearing a shirt that says, “Save the earth.” What that makes me understand is the earth is in trouble, right? If you apply the like, are the boys, is there a bunch of boys t-shirts that say, “Boys are smart.” “Boys can do anything.” No, because it’s already implied that they can, right?
So, to me, it’s like… it’s giving girls an extra job. Now I’m part of this effort to make this thing I’m wearing true as opposed to trying to bring them into the world, not even knowing that there’s anyone who thinks that they can’t do anything when they’re that young.
AD:
Yeah, I think I’m agnostic on the shirts because I just feel if people have… It’s a little bit… there’s some… I could see how people would get value and encouragement from that. I see both sides of that. If you’re in many cases seeing a Black Lives Matter sign is important because you’re showing that you are allied with that message and that value.
So I see it either way. I think for me, we don’t… it is just… it’s not going to solve anything, certainly. So I think it’s just for what we do in our house. It’s ironic to be answering this question about Alice’s clothes because when Alice walks out into the world, I’m pretty sure that people feel like no one loves her because she wears whatever the hell she wants and it is obvious. But I think it… we just focus less on clothes at all, not giving them a power at all. And we really try not to comment on clothes or body or beauty negative or positive but we do a lot of other things. We will read a book and notice the pronouns. We will change them to she just to have that be the case. Alice will ask, why do they… why did they say he, that doesn’t… She says, why…
GD:
She asks that all the time.
AD:
I think it’s just little things. What do you think they’re trying to say about girls and boys in that she came home the other day and she was like, “Oh my gosh, something at school. Joshua is so confused.” And I was like, “What is it?” He thinks there are boy colors and girl colors. Bless her. So we talk about a lot of these things so that… so she thinks other people are confused about phase.
GD:
Amen.
AD:
And I think we just try to see the setup. It’s easy to focus on mantra that everyone can get behind, but I think just interpreting the world and noticing things and talking about those that don’t relate to clothes and body and beauty are the way they try to do it.
GD:
And like everything it’s, we can obsess about what our kids are wearing. But I think they also watch us, right? I noticed the clothes thing early on as a speaker. I used to think that I had to have a fancy costume on stage. I’d put on fancy clothes right on stage, and I’d put on cool shoes and designer dress and whatever, and then I’d speak. And then what I’d notice because I used to do these hugging lines, which now post-COVID feels so weird. But anyway, 50% of what women would say to me in those lines was, I love that dress. I love those shoes, or I love those or where did you get the whatever. And it was driving me bonkers for a little while. And then I realized, oh no, no, that’s what I’m asking them to do. By putting all of this focus on what I’m wearing, I am requesting that of them.
I’m saying to them, this is what I want you to notice. This is what I want you to talk about. And because of that, with most of these women, I might have 10 seconds for our entire lives. And I have set this up so that during those 10 seconds where we are connecting, that’s what they’re asking me. And when I figured that out, that’s when I switched to my uniform of jeans, sweaters, or tank tops and just because… When I stopped doing that, nobody. People would say things like… in those lines, people would start saying things like, “Oh, I loved what you said about, or thank you for talking about.” And nobody would be like, I really liked that grey cardigan.
AD:
I really liked that black tank top that you wear eight days a week.
GD:
Right. I do. I’m wearing my pajamas right now, so I’m not wearing right now, but I wear… I have 30 black tank tops. They’re all from the same store. I wear them every day because I don’t have to think about… it’s a uniform. Again, what are the guys doing? Why do they have their four outfits? Whereas women have 49,000 different choices. It’s because it’s to keep our minds occupied on what we’re wearing and what we’re looking like instead of what we’re looking at. Okay. We are going to move on to our Next Right Thing.
All right. We’ve got a Next Right Thing for all of you today. And we started this conversation by talking about the word beauty, and I think a lot. I wrote in Love Warrior about the word, beautiful. I’m a words person. And I started thinking hard about the word beautiful and what you realize about that word when you think hard about it or not too hard is that it means full of beauty, right? Beautiful means full of beauty. We have switched that concept to mean beauty on the outside, covered with beauty, appearing beautiful. But the word means filled on the inside with beauty, right? It’s this idea that a beautiful home or a beautiful person or a beautiful relationship or beautiful woman is a person who has so much beauty on the inside of them, who has taken the time to know what beauty is. And it is so filled up with it that you can see it radiating out, right?
I was out really early the other morning. I don’t think I even told you this yet sister, but I was out early walking the dogs at 5:45 and there was this woman walking down the street and it was just the two of us. And she probably… she looked like maybe she was, I don’t know, 65 or something, but she had a full white suit on, no shoes, just her hair was wet and she was carrying a surf board on her own by herself, walking back up from the beach, which means she had already been out by herself surfing. And she just looked so effing beautiful that I had to stop and stare. Here is a woman who has figured out what beauty is to her and found a way to get it before most people are going up in the morning. And it had nothing to do with other people looking at her. She was alone and she was radiating.
So, our Next Right Thing this week is let’s figure out something that is beauty to us and then figure out a way to get it. To get filled with it this week. This is hard for us, because we are used to being the object instead of the subject of our lives, right? We are used to being, trying to figure out how to be wanted, not figuring out what we want, right? So this is a switch and one tip I have that I do sometimes is to always go back to my senses, okay? To figure out what I want or what I think is beautiful.
What do I want to touch? What I want to feel? Okay. What feels good to me? What do I want to see? What is beauty to me to see, to fill up visually? What do I want to smell? Right? What breathing in. What is breathing in beauty to me? What do I want to taste? Right? What’s filling up that way? And also, what do I want to think about? What is beauty to me that I can take into my mind? We do so much of our… we are what we consume, right? And we do so much of our consumption, whether it’s online or we unintentionally, right? But one of the things I love about reading books is you make a choice. Now, this is what I want to fill my mind with. This is beauty to me.
So, this week, let’s think about going back to our senses, finding what is beauty to us and how will I fill up with it this week. And when life gets hard this week, don’t you forget, we love you and we can do hard things. Bye, bye.