Difficult Women

"The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance." -Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

- Chinki Sinha

CINDERELLA could and should have stayed home and written notes about an imagined ball, reinvented the characters and made herself more than a girl who must aspire for beauty and validation from a prince, substituted velvet slippers in deep crimson rather than leaving a glass slipper behind.

When I read her story as a little girl, I had cheered and clapped when the prince found her,

In my forties, I think little girls should not read such fairy tales where a prince finds a girl with a slipper in hand and all is well. They end with "happily ever after". Girls discovered by men. That's how we grow up. Metamorphosis is personal. And all that is personal is political.

Rather, little girls should read about Alice in that Wonderland who believed in six impossible things before breakfast, who slayed the demon bird and exited the Wonderland.

A girl once and a woman now, I should edit these fairy tales, these mythological texts where women are prized possessions, decorations, and their worth and curse are tied to their "beauty".

There are so many moral things around everything that a woman does in our culture. Make-up, appearance and of course, political views. All these make-up brands and all the influencers telling every woman out there to use serums and lotions and go for cosmetic surgeries to look more beautiful and younger are hitting at the core of what we have always faced-invisibility, insecurity, indignity.