Love Bites: A Pass on Pretty

When I first saw The Princess Diaries, I loved Mia Thermopolis. She had big curly hair and glasses and an Elliott Smith poster on her wall – in other words, she was just like me. I had decided it was my favourite movie; until, of course, I watched Mia receive her makeover. Hair sleeked, eyesight fixed, brows groomed and shoes replaced. It was the final nail in the coffin of a lesson I had begun learning: I was not pretty, and that mattered. 

The lesson was simple – it should be your goal to be pretty (and later, when you grow up, sexy, hot, and, most importantly, available). I spent a lot of time agonising over this – burning hair with straighteners, practising what angles my face looked best from, cancelling plans because I couldn’t get make-up right. It was like an entire door of womanhood was closed to me and I didn’t know the right password to open it.

Sometime in the 2010s, body positivity got a lot of wind in its sails – everyone is hot, it told us. Everyone is pretty. But no matter what, I couldn’t get this lesson to make sense to me. It just made me feel worse. Was desirability all I was for? Was this what being a woman was? 

Then I found a new lesson – body neutrality: the idea that how I look, how desirable I am, is the least interesting thing about me. 

I am not pretty, sexy or hot. And that is totally fine, because I am a good storyteller, and a good friend and I can tell you more facts about The Beatles than you probably ever wanted to know. And that’s fine, because I can make people laugh. And that’s fine, because I’m a person, and that’s important enough on its own.