I saw an article in the Huffington Post about girls and our obsession with their appearance: the standard ice-breaker is a compliment on how pretty, how cute, how adorable.
The trouble is, however harmless a boost to their fragile little egos it may be to tell them they’re beautiful, the side-effect is that they grow up thinking their looks are what matters most.
Every year, the make-up threshold gets younger, eating disorders and cosmetic procedures go up while the age of patients goes down. Even the books marketed to little girls reinforce this: stories like Purplicious, which is about how girls’ clothing choices define their identities and social status. This may be the way our world works, but that doesn’t make it the way it should work.
When more young women aspire to win a reality show than a Nobel prize, and even academically and professionally successful women would prefer to be considered hot than intelligent, we have a problem.
When primary school girls openly aspire to be glamour models and exotic dancers in order to get boys more easily, we have a problem.
When the automatic opener to a conversation with a girl is to compliment her appearance, especially with a generic compliment, we have a problem. Sure, it’s a safe opener, but if you must go down that road, if you truly can’t think of anything else, surely it’s just as easy to pick a detail that reflects on her choices (where did that bracelet come from? What was it about those tribal earrings that took her fancy?) and might open new topics that respect her mind, her personality, not the accident of genetics that makes up her appearance.
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