A friend and I were talking today about physical appearance in the movie, A Promising Young Woman and I thought about how tragic it is that young women today feel the pressure to be fully made up at looking perfect at all times. I didn’t wear make-up until I was in my 20s and then I only wore it on dates!
I have been speaking and writing about gender differences and nonverbal communication for decades. This is a wonderful quote from a book I read years ago. To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space…She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because of how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another. Here is the quote from the book I recommend.
