This is something that has long since bothered me. And I
need to get it off my chest.
Beauty can come in all shapes and sizes. While I’ve always
been able to accept this for everyone else, it’s taken me some time personally
to accept this fact for myself. When I express these thoughts, I’m always met
with disbelief and positive affirmation: “You are handsome.”
And handsome has
stuck. Many mothers have remarked handsome
I am. Friends have told me how handsome
I look. Guys tell me how handsome I
am in my pictures.
The part that bothers me, however, is that handsome is never used to describe the
underwear model in magazines. He gets hot,
sexy. The movie star will be called beautiful, a gorgeous if his fan is especially adorning. Rarely, however, do
these men get a handsome.
The issue I have is not a personal one; it’s not about the
fact that I’m being called handsome, or being called it instead of other words.
The issue is this: in our words and our adjectives, we have begun to rank
beauty and put different forms of it above another. Someone that’s handsome is never sexy, and someone that’s hot is
never handsome. While beauty comes in
different shapes and sizes, why do our words have to make some forms of beauty
better than others? If all people are beautiful, why do we distinguish between
them so that some are less than others? Why
is beauty put on a hierarchy?
I might be overanalyzing, or I might not be.
