Beautiful Girls....All Over the World....

"We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world." ~Nelson Mandela, 1994 Inaugural Speech

A couple weeks ago on the radio, I heard a statistic that was shocking to me at first, but then really got me thinking. Here's the statistic:

When asked, only 2% of women said that they thought they were beautiful.

When I heard the statistic, I first though of that older country song, "She Don't Know She's Beautiful" and had that stuck in my head all day. Annoying!

But beyond that, I was mad. I thought to myself, "Wow, girls need to work on their self esteem." But then I wondered, if someone asked me that question, what would I have said? Honestly, I would be one of the 98% who would say no if you straight up asked me. It was really funny to me that I was all offended, but then when I looked at it honestly, I'm part of the problem. The problem is this. We don't see what other people see. We are so much harder on ourselves.

If you asked me to pick out my best girl friends, I would tell you that all of them are beautiful, and I would mean it because they are (some of their pictures are on this blog to prove it!). But the odds are, based on that statistic, not one of them would say the same about herself. When we look at ourselves, we only see the problem areas, and don't look at the whole picture. If we're lucky, we have people in our lives who try and help us see past our own warped opinions and let us know we're beautiful---hopefully on the inside and out. At least I hope that I'm that person in the lives of my girl friends.
Another interesting observation that I made while listening to the radio discussion is that guys think just about all girls are beautiful. It's totally true that guys do not think the way girls think about beauty. Don't get me wrong--I think if Megan Fox knocked on any guy's door, he'd be all over it. But I don't think that guys look at every inch of a girl's body and compare it to Megan. A lot of guys on the radio said that they honestly think the opposite of women---instead of only 2% being beautiful, they would say that 98% are beautiful. (Perhaps we should lay off the boy bashing sessions for a minute...just a minute though!)

It's girls who do the judging--to themselves and to other girls. Think about it--even like walking down the street I think we are totally judgmental of other women. That's probably a huge part of the problem....I don't think it's all Hollywood. And I don't think it's all men. I think a lot of it probably is us doing it to ourselves and each other.
Anyway, my point is this. We need to work on our self esteem and stop being so hard on ourselves and on other girls. Life is hard enough as it is without that added stress. And, in closing, while this whole issue with my girls, this comment was made.....yes, the Oklahoma Girl strikes again with a gem:

I guess we all just need to be thankful we have boobs, big or small and don't have a nasty penis like boys, we have the luxury of peeing sitting down, instead of peeing standing up, and we, thank goodness are not hairy like guys...they are hairy all over...gross!!
Hard to argue there. Sometimes an Oklahoma Girl quote is worth a thousand words.