The Glamour Gene

Here's some photos for you. I'll label each person for you. JoAnn is my mother, and Julia is my daughter.

JoAnn, around 20 years old

Julia, 18 years old

JoAnn in her late teens

 My mother lived in a Glamour Generation. She adored movies and movie stars. You can see that make-up was quite the fad. Julia also is living in a generation that loves make-up and fashion. I, on the other hand, grew up in the '70s, the time of tree-hugging and long hair. Young women were burning their undergarments, not shopping for fancy ones. However, I have a couple of photos of me with make-up. This one was taken by a friend in college when I was in Madrigals.

M.K., 20 years old

You can see the genetic connections here!

This was taken for our church's directory:

M.K., about 24 years old

Not a stitch of make-up here, but even at 29 you can still see the resemblance:

M.K., 29 years old

My mother was asked by a modeling photographer to come to his studio when she was in her late teens, so he could photograph her -- she was that kind of pretty -- and pretty mattered then. Now we think of that as objectifying girls/women, valuing them for their faces or bodies instead of who they are. However, it had no adverse effects on my mother; rather, she's quite confident, dresses as she pleases, and cares more for the insides of people than the outsides. All that attention to her physical beauty made her neither shallow nor insecure.

I don't like men to objectify women, to view them as objects of desire (and especially to say so - ugh!). But I do think it's good for humans to recognize beauty. We acknowledge it readily in nature, and in humans we don't personally know (like models), even in animals. But we're now cautious about telling a 20-something woman, "You're beautiful." We've been told that's a bad thing to say.

Well, my mother was drop-dead gorgeous. She laughs when I mention it now. And Julia has that same stunning, classic look. I might have worked up some of that too, if only the '70s had been a make-up era, haha! I spent too much time worried about my nose, which had a significant hump. How can a girl be pretty if she has a bump in her nose? I, who was never objectified by a fellow, lacked the confidence my mother had. As we know, today's young women suffer with even lower self-esteem.

I'm not sure what the answer is. I have a brother (who shall remain nameless) who once told me I could not tell his toddler daughter that she was pretty. He wanted to start early training her not to value her looks -- her body -- hoping instead that she'd value the inner girl. I think those ideas backfire, and I hope I don't get yelled at for saying so. I don't have the answers to this complicated issue, but I do think it's a good thing for us to tell our daughters the obvious -- that they are pretty in their bows and dresses (and jeans and camo). Because they are.