Pretty - Ugly

"You don't have to be pretty. You don't owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend, spouse, partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don't owe it to your mother, you don't owe it to your children, you don't owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ' female'." 

- Diana Vreeland, writer and editor for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, both magazines I rarely ever cared to lay my eyes upon.

A startling quote to me, I have never heard it put quite this way. Current culture puts an inordinate amount of emphasis on looks, be that in regard to women, nowadays even men, products or produce. I discovered the quote on facebook under which a lengthy discussion ensued about the use of make-up or not. This clearly is not the issue, the point is women should no longer feel compelled to have to spend inordinate amounts of energy and time into prettifying themselves. It should be a matter of choice.

In my career as a professional massage therapist at various spas, I had several clients confess to me their disappointment in not having gotten one of the prettier 'masseuses' - followed by gratitude for provenance that had brought us together and gave them exactly what they needed! This is because I did not touch them skin deep only, but I managed to connect to deeper aspects of themselves. Emotions, sensations to full-fledged memories those men had no idea existed within them, but I welcomed all of those often neglected aspects of being human. They left often feeling relieved, relaxed, profoundly moved, and grateful. To those clients, I suddenly looked beautiful and given a chance they would request my expertise again and  again.

This is still the week of the Donald having been accused once again of another attack on a woman, this time of fat shaming by one of his beauty queens. He has fired back with ludicrous early morning tweets for us to go and check out some porn sites! Overweight, white, male, slob's demands on a latina woman to work out just will not fly, certainly not with millennials, the latin population or women in general. Wide girthed, patriarchal, white males such as Trump, Guliani, and Gingrich, that treated their wives horribly, coming to Trump's defense and attacking Hillary for her husband's indiscretions will surely not fly either. How ludicrous can this election season still get?