Industries are born on the backs of Women hating themselves.
It’s an emotional slavery that milks these women, dollar by dollar,
Like chained dairy cows, Oozing vicious droplets of self-hate
That rot the roots of a woman’s inner beauty.
You see, executive bonuses don’t swell when women feel naturally beautiful
Just as they are.
You can’t push lipstick, eye shadow, foundation, and blush
Like crack cocaine or heroine,
On a woman who sees her true worth, you dig?
Millions are milked from the financial breasts of women
Simply by convincing them
A Grand Canyon exists between them and being beautiful.
Magazines and movies are complicit in this lie that warps all of our minds
into a silent submission prostrating to the Lords Of Media
Who enrich themselves on the suffering of a woman,
as she whips herself leaving emotional scars that don’t have to last a lifetime
but all too often do.
Diet pills, Spanx, and photoshop are foot soldiers in the war on women’s self-esteem,
hell-bent on their own Crusade to convert unsuspecting teens, or worse, preteens,
into self-critical consumers of false hopes offered by surgeons, photographers, and others
who want to hide, reshape, retouch, or fix what actually isn’t wrong with you.
Millions are milked from the bank accounts of women who have been brainwashed
to believe they aren’t good enough.
Industries thrive when she looks in the mirror and hates herself just a little more with each day, each wrinkle, each magazine consumed.
Embodied self-esteem breaks the chains of dependence on products that merely momentarily massage our bandaged egos,
Cutting the umbilical chord of self-suffering that has been feeding their bodies and their brains with toxic imagery of fake tits and other ideals that are nothing more than comparative trampolines:
Your mind soars on the amphetimes of a shopping spree
yet crashes when the superficial effects wear off.
Ask yourself this:
Who would buy what is being sold if women actually believed they were beautiful for who they are,
not what they look like?
Industries would crumble. Bonuses would deflate.
Executives would scramble, Board rooms would be abuzz.
What would they do if women stopped buying the lie that they are flawed, that they aren’t enough?
And the best part of the corporate magic trick to maximize profits built on women hating themselves:
women do a bangup job making other women hate themselves too,
and have become the front line warriors destroying other women’s fragile sense of self.
You can blame everyone and their mother
or you can believe: It’s time.
It’s time to close your eyes, ears, and wallets to the pimps of self-loathing
who want you hooked on their drugs that manufacture dysmorphia in your brain.
Self-esteem doesn’t come in a bottle. You were born beautiful.
There is only one way forward. Women rising up &
Empowering each other to leap into the unknown chasm
of life’s greatest love affair with one’s own self.
-Alok Appadurai is a writer, co-founder of “A Beautiful Body Project” & “Fed By Threads”, is an advocate for animals & the environment, a public speaker, and new dad.
***If this poem touched you deeply, please visit A Beautiful Body Project to see the book & beyond***
