Imagine you are born
and you are beautiful thing,
and for the next few years you will learn why.
Your parents, friends, the shows on tv send you little messages
about what beauty is,
and how it is good.
Your mother will brush your hair, her sister beside her,
they will gush in honeyed words over your beauty, inside and out.
Then they roll up their pants in the mirror and pick at their flesh and their spots sourly.
You are washing your hands in the school bathroom after playing on the monkey bars with your friend. You are both looking at yourselves in the mirror. You wonder, in passing, who possesses more beauty. It is an ugly thought. With no good answer.
Do you: Rise to the challenge? Spend secret moments tucking hairs, adjusting posture and your face in your little class chair, so any look passed your way may be in the most appealing light? Go to 2.
Do you: Reject the expectations, perceive them as a threat, get ugly, shout, pull gross faces for family pictures, come home covered in mud? Go to 1.
1. Congratulations, you are a rebel girl. Perhaps even a tomboy. You have rejected your birthright of beauty. You are brave, controversial. Some applaud you for this. Some are appalled. How could you do this? How dare you make a beautiful thing ugly. What a shame.
2. Congratulations, aren't you charming? You are pleasant, you are pretty. You carefully deliberate your choice of skirt, in hopes you will be rewarded with eyes and smiles. Seen as beautiful, you learn how to make other things beautiful too. Your handwriting, your hair, your laugh, and your tears.
Now imagine. You are sat down in the English class with the rest of the girls in your grade. Ms. K tells you about the horror of tampons and the beauty of motherhood. She informs you that most women forget the 10 on the pain scale soon after. She tries to sell it. Ms T gives it to you straight. She tells you Be prepared for misery, emotional and physical, recurring monthly. Not much talk is done about pain management, or accommodations. The girl behind you whispers about original sin.
Do you: Accept this challenge of womanhood? With grace and glowing skin? Make it your mark? Go to 2.
Do you: Find it disturbing? Unfair? Utterly humiliating? Go to 1.
1. You hide from your body. You are alienated. You are unhappy about your pain and this makes people uncomfortable. If something about you is not beautiful, it should be hidden.
2. Among sisters you are strong, but this strength is only expected. Required. You stand up tall and tuck in your gut while your core organs experience the sensation of being shredded. You would be mortified to tears to know there is a stain on the back of your pants.
At this stage, you are a house divided. You begin to realize why those praises of beauty were so coated in honey. One day you will be a mother. One day you will be a bride. Beauty is the test you pass to be something in the eyes of men. Physically yes, but its more than that. A desirable girl is more than just pretty. Desiring you is what they want you for. Desirability is your commodity. That you were born with the expectation of selling. The idea of not marrying or having children is not something to be mentioned in polite company. And while you grapple with the desirability you hold, and the world waits, watching to see what you do with it, you will start to realize desirability is a resource that is being extracted from you, weather you like it or not, all the time, by strange men outside, online, or even around the dinner table. You know vaguely, what the worst of men's intentions might be.
Do you: Withhold your desirability from men? Go to 2.
Do you: Embrace your desirability? Market it? Go to 1.
1. In studying how to market your value you learn you will never outmatch the women on TV. The ones all the boys say they have a crush on in truth or dare. You become convinced you must change yourself. You do. You put on your beautiful hair, soul, face, and body in the morning. This takes 30 minutes to 2 hours. You are judged on it frequently and judge yourself. You moisturize every 3 hours. You laugh at boys jokes to show off your smile. You never leave home without lip oil. You are greeted more frequently and with brighter faces than before. You have a greatly desired treasure, other girls are threatened by you, you climb higher and higher to outpace the girl in the chair one over. You receive favors, most don't want anything in return, except your beautiful smile of course.
2. You refuse the un-consensual enjoyment of your beauty, though many long to pry out your potential. You have chosen to define yourself on an alternative worth. You realize how difficult it is to get people to care about this worth. Your family look at you and think, you must be lost, to not embrace your ****** power. Men instead choose to interoperate this as an insecurity. You must be naive, about how to be desirable. You must have been hurt before, to have given up. How cute, they think. She's not so scary to talk to, they think.
But you were taught an art, and against any instinct you build a shrine to yourself and decorate it with love. You imagine a hidden place where every part of you is beautiful. You make who you are a masterpiece. Dark and brooding or pink and positive. These constructs of ego are fragile, it is hard to believe you are enough. But your alter to yourself stands ornate with personality and interests.
Most boys you let into your sanctum trample all over it. It means nothing to them. Most were never taught what goes into creating something beautiful. Some are even afraid of it, intimidated, and want to see it squashed.
But you'll find a boy that noticed your pouted lip. A boy that you let watch you shower. A boy that will then call you another girls name and strip you of the power you thought you built, and then as you battle to express your pain, will still look at you through their lens, an object of their desire first and foremost, underneath their ignorant gaze.
Do you: Believe you can make a thing of beauty with men? Try meet their standards? Give them the benefit of the doubt? Try find a man you can depend on? Go to 1.
Do you: Resent them? Reject them? Mistrust them? Go to 2.
1. You are a martyr. You take beatings. You risk life and death to depend on men. Confrontation is ugly. You pay your dues with your beauty.
You are torn apart and stitched back together one stitch tighter. You keep peace. You plant flowers and they are picked and you plant them again. You are only doing what is expected of you, as, first, and foremost, a beautiful thing.
2. Hopefully you are interested in women, romantically or platonically. Otherwise you are alone. You protect yourself from the ignorance of men, becoming invisible to them. The ones who notice you in passing you may try to teach. They are resistant. They do not want to talk about their lack of burden. They do not want to imagine themselves weak. They do not want to imagine you strong.
They do not see you as someone to learn from. They would prefer you be first, and foremost, a beautiful thing.
Dec 1, 2025
Dec 1, 2025 at 2:09 PM UTC
Imagine you are born
and you are beautiful thing,
and for the next few years you will learn why.
Your parents, friends, the shows on tv send you little messages
about what beauty is,
and how it is good.
Your mother will brush your hair, her sister beside her,
they will gush in honeyed words over your beauty, inside and out.
Then they roll up their pants in the mirror and pick at their flesh and their spots sourly.
You are washing your hands in the school bathroom after playing on the monkey bars with your friend. You are both looking at yourselves in the mirror. You wonder, in passing, who possesses more beauty. It is an ugly thought. With no good answer.
Do you: Rise to the challenge? Spend secret moments tucking hairs, adjusting posture and your face in your little class chair, so any look passed your way may be in the most appealing light? Go to 2.
Do you: Reject the expectations, perceive them as a threat, get ugly, shout, pull gross faces for family pictures, come home covered in mud? Go to 1.
1. Congratulations, you are a rebel girl. Perhaps even a tomboy. You have rejected your birthright of beauty. You are brave, controversial. Some applaud you for this. Some are appalled. How could you do this? How dare you make a beautiful thing ugly. What a shame.
2. Congratulations, aren't you charming? You are pleasant, you are pretty. You carefully deliberate your choice of skirt, in hopes you will be rewarded with eyes and smiles. Seen as beautiful, you learn how to make other things beautiful too. Your handwriting, your hair, your laugh, and your tears.
Now imagine. You are sat down in the English class with the rest of the girls in your grade. Ms. K tells you about the horror of tampons and the beauty of motherhood. She informs you that most women forget the 10 on the pain scale soon after. She tries to sell it. Ms T gives it to you straight. She tells you Be prepared for misery, emotional and physical, recurring monthly. Not much talk is done about pain management, or accommodations. The girl behind you whispers about original sin.
Do you: Accept this challenge of womanhood? With grace and glowing skin? Make it your mark? Go to 2.
Do you: Find it disturbing? Unfair? Utterly humiliating? Go to 1.
1. You hide from your body. You are alienated. You are unhappy about your pain and this makes people uncomfortable. If something about you is not beautiful, it should be hidden.
2. Among sisters you are strong, but this strength is only expected. Required. You stand up tall and tuck in your gut while your core organs experience the sensation of being shredded. You would be mortified to tears to know there is a stain on the back of your pants.
At this stage, you are a house divided. You begin to realize why those praises of beauty were so coated in honey. One day you will be a mother. One day you will be a bride. Beauty is the test you pass to be something in the eyes of men. Physically yes, but its more than that. A desirable girl is more than just pretty. Desiring you is what they want you for. Desirability is your commodity. That you were born with the expectation of selling. The idea of not marrying or having children is not something to be mentioned in polite company. And while you grapple with the desirability you hold, and the world waits, watching to see what you do with it, you will start to realize desirability is a resource that is being extracted from you, weather you like it or not, all the time, by strange men outside, online, or even around the dinner table. You know vaguely, what the worst of men's intentions might be.
Do you: Withhold your desirability from men? Go to 2.
Do you: Embrace your desirability? Market it? Go to 1.
1. In studying how to market your value you learn you will never outmatch the women on TV. The ones all the boys say they have a crush on in truth or dare. You become convinced you must change yourself. You do. You put on your beautiful hair, soul, face, and body in the morning. This takes 30 minutes to 2 hours. You are judged on it frequently and judge yourself. You moisturize every 3 hours. You laugh at boys jokes to show off your smile. You never leave home without lip oil. You are greeted more frequently and with brighter faces than before. You have a greatly desired treasure, other girls are threatened by you, you climb higher and higher to outpace the girl in the chair one over. You receive favors, most don't want anything in return, except your beautiful smile of course.
2. You refuse the un-consensual enjoyment of your beauty, though many long to pry out your potential. You have chosen to define yourself on an alternative worth. You realize how difficult it is to get people to care about this worth. Your family look at you and think, you must be lost, to not embrace your ****** power. Men instead choose to interoperate this as an insecurity. You must be naive, about how to be desirable. You must have been hurt before, to have given up. How cute, they think. She's not so scary to talk to, they think.
But you were taught an art, and against any instinct you build a shrine to yourself and decorate it with love. You imagine a hidden place where every part of you is beautiful. You make who you are a masterpiece. Dark and brooding or pink and positive. These constructs of ego are fragile, it is hard to believe you are enough. But your alter to yourself stands ornate with personality and interests.
Most boys you let into your sanctum trample all over it. It means nothing to them. Most were never taught what goes into creating something beautiful. Some are even afraid of it, intimidated, and want to see it squashed.
But you'll find a boy that noticed your pouted lip. A boy that you let watch you shower. A boy that will then call you another girls name and strip you of the power you thought you built, and then as you battle to express your pain, will still look at you through their lens, an object of their desire first and foremost, underneath their ignorant gaze.
Do you: Believe you can make a thing of beauty with men? Try meet their standards? Give them the benefit of the doubt? Try find a man you can depend on? Go to 1.
Do you: Resent them? Reject them? Mistrust them? Go to 2.
1. You are a martyr. You take beatings. You risk life and death to depend on men. Confrontation is ugly. You pay your dues with your beauty.
You are torn apart and stitched back together one stitch tighter. You keep peace. You plant flowers and they are picked and you plant them again. You are only doing what is expected of you, as, first, and foremost, a beautiful thing.
2. Hopefully you are interested in women, romantically or platonically. Otherwise you are alone. You protect yourself from the ignorance of men, becoming invisible to them. The ones who notice you in passing you may try to teach. They are resistant. They do not want to talk about their lack of burden. They do not want to imagine themselves weak. They do not want to imagine you strong.
They do not see you as someone to learn from. They would prefer you be first, and foremost, a beautiful thing.
