Tonight, beauty made me cry but not in the poetic way of being moved to tears. Beauty rubbed salt in old, raw wounds, wounds that are an initiation rite for the vast majority of women. The instigator of salt was an article on Chinese women defying their beauty culture. These women are getting buzz cuts in a culture that values long hair, rejecting high heels, diets, makeup and other norms, risking abuse and censorship. These observations I have shared are initiation for many women; they are old wounds and they are new wounds, and deserve to be seen as much as our bodies do. 🪐
Beauty duty