3. Of a person: that engages in an activity or occupation by night; preferring to be active at night.
Vanity: A Vindication for the True Beauty in Women
Wednesday, March 4, 2009 “Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”
~Mary Wollstonecraft-Godwin
***
For quite some time now, I have been avoiding reading Mary Wollstencraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (you may have heard her as the mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein) because I cannot the stand the run-on writing style of her period. The sentences overflow with tremendous commas that I find myself lost in the middle of a syntactical chaos. Then again, I have only read Wollstencraft’s work once in my entire lifetime and like any other piece of literature, a mere one-hour sitting is not sufficient to fully grasp its whole essence.
However, from that one-hour reading I can tell you she was quite the feminist writer who used the pen to rebel against degradation of women’s rights and status in a patriarchal society. From reading this text, I cannot help but ponder how we, women, have indeed gone a long way from being just mere “caretakers” of the household to being the main “engine” that keeps the train going as it ought to be. I, myself, cannot imagine our household without my mom and it’s not just because she provides us with cooked meals, rather, it is because she serves us with full helpings of emotional and matriarchal support everyday.
Nevertheless, a woman should not be categorized by mere matriarchal attributes alone. Our intellects and passion are the same as with any other man and I for one, cannot and will never give respect to anyone who still perceive gender equality in the limelight of a chivalric age. Even though we have our damsel-in-distress moments, we do not need knights controlling and ordering us what to do. We may seem to have a “weaker frame” than a man’s body but without this weak frame of ours, mankind would not exist, in all of his allure and glory, today.
As John Keats has once said, “Truth is beauty, beauty [in] truth” and flattering a woman based on artificial means is just plain ridiculous. Of course, the opposite sex cannot be entirely held responsible for such actions after all, the development of beauty pageants and its growing popularity are not their fault alone. Wollstencraft asks,
To gain the affections of a virtuous man is affectation necessary?
and like her, I believe these “affectations” to be no more than false displays of affection. While this maybe true, women also share equal blame in this kind of perception for we allow society to operate this way by continuing to fall prey to cosmetic enhancement products. Sadly, in truth, we only have earned gender equality but we never completely strayed away from sins of vanity. Everytime we open our eyes, we release the evils of Pandora’s box- we see vanity everywhere and yet, we remain blind to its true social stigmas because there is no real way of escaping illusions when realism itself remains to be but a mere shadow behind it…
Dove’s Ad Campaign For Real Beauty, which box are you going to check?
[to be continued… indefinitely]
That is all.
Adieu.
))
