This is for those girls who can achieve higher goals than just being a dumb beauty. If you can relate with this then you are the one chosen by the power of universe to exhibit your virtues beyond external beauty or else look at mother Teresa’s hands….full of love only.
A 22-year-old Delhi girl, Naina Kataria thought why women should remove their body hair to fit into the stereotyped image of beauty and wrote a thought-provoking poem that has gone viral. Earlier, she uploaded this photo of her leg on her Facebook page “Infinite Entropy”, alongside a poem called “When A Man Tells Me I’m Beautiful,” about the policing of women’s body hair.
Though, the issue that Naina has raised with her poem is not new and has been a topic of discussion among women worldwide but such interventions are important to keep the fire alive.
One day she went out for a movie with a male friend. We were watching this ad about razors for women when I remarked that celebrities shouldn’t endorse such products because it sends out a message that one HAS to buy them to look beautiful. He replied by saying, “OMG you’re too much of a feminist.”
That made me ponder over two things — one, about the unrealistic standards that we’ve set for beauty. They keep saying that it’s optional, but I believe otherwise because these norms are something that are just ingrained into us. The second thing that hit me was how much we hide all these things from men. Women go through excruciating amounts of pain to look merely presentable and men don’t even have an idea of what it’s like.
Naina says she is humbled to receive the support and compliments but she wishes more and more men read this and understand the message she is trying to convey. “What I observed was that it was women who shared this poem everywhere. The idea was to notify men and grab their attention about what the process of hair removal is like,” she writes.
Here is the poem:
When a man tells me
I’m beautiful
I don’t believe him.
Instead, I relive my days in high school
When no matter how good I was
I was always the girl with a moustache
He doesn’t know what it’s like
to grow up in your maternal family
Where your body is the only one that
Proudly boasts of your father’s X
While your mother’s X sits back and pities
It’s unladylike-ness
He doesn’t know the teenager
Who filled her corners with
Empty consolations of
Being loved for who she was- someday.
He doesn’t know hypocrisy.
He doesn’t know of the world that
tells you to ‘be yourself’
and sells you a fair and lovely shade card
in the same fucking breath
He doesn’t know of the hot wax and the laser
whose only purpose is to
replace your innocent skin
with its own brand of womanhood
He doesn’t know of the veet and the bleach
That uproot your robust hair
in the name of hygiene
Hygiene, which when followed by men
makes them gay and unmanly
He doesn’t know how unruly eyebrows are tamed
and how uni brows die a silent death
All to preserve beauty
And of the torturous miracles that happen
Inside the doors marked
“WOMEN ONLY”
So when a man calls me beautiful
I throw at him, a smile; a smile that remained
After everything the strip pulled away
And I dare him
To wait
Till my hair grows back.