From one to ten, how would you rate my looks? I’ve been asked this by so many friends of mine and even asked it myself. Subconsciously wanting to rate my looks on a scale made by society’s world of what “beautiful” is. I haven’t always struggled with my self image as much as I do now. I used to be pretty alright with how I look and I used to not care about how I look at myself. But, that didn’t last very long.

One day at school, I saw a few boys talking. Usually I would ignore them and go play by myself, but I knew these guys, they were my friends! I wanted to talk to them. When I walked over, they were talking about some of the girls in our class, who they thought were the prettiest. I didn’t really understand why but I wanted to know how they thought about me, as a girl.

They said “But yea, you aren’t like a girl girl. You wear shorts and pants! You’re basically one of us. You aren’t really on the pretty scale.”

For some reason it made me happy but also why? I felt a flash of annoyance and inferiority. I stopped talking to them after and I started to look at myself more. I wore a lot of black, I wore a lot of T-shirts, I wore a lot of things unbecoming of a young girl. That was the first time I felt self-conscious of how I looked to everyone. I wondered if everyone saw me like that. As just “a lesser guy” because I wasn’t exactly a guy but I didn’t really look like a girl. 

“She was letting me know that however long I lasted, she would last longer. She would not be bested by a fat ass.” – Roxane Gay

So many girls are pitted against each other, to see who is the prettiest, who is the skinniest and who is just better than each other. They have to present themselves in a certain way to even be considered a girl but it’s also a competition to see who is the most pretty, the most beautiful, the most skinny. To girls who don’t fit into any of those categories, they aren’t seen as girls at all. You feel inferior to other girls, which builds resentment to them, to everyone. A constant unseen competition between women.

Gender itself is a social construct but it goes much deeper than that. It’s something that is rooted with every day activity, how we perceive our family, friends and especially ourselves. It’s a concept that was made a long time ago that has slowly evolved into something more but the fundamentals of it stay the same.

In Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing like a Girl,” it discussed how there is a “remarkable difference in the manner of throwing of the two sexes.” This is just scraping the surface of how these types of mannerisms and phrases are so ingrained in our minds. When you think of “throwing like a girl” the thing that most people think of is a girl throwing with just her arm and with little to no strength because we are taught to leave sports to boys. It is taught that it is a more masculine trait to be athletic or be strong and that is what makes a man. As the opposite, being weak is associated with being more feminine and that is what makes a woman. These beliefs are everywhere in life, from something simple as throwing a ball to something much more important such as our opportunities in this society when getting jobs and respect from your fellow workers.

Why is this? That is a question I always asked myself every year and every time there is a reason to question it. Why must I be weak to be seen as a girl? Why do I have to wear these clothes labeled feminine to be seen as a girl? Why do I have to be seen as a girl at all? I usually spiral into questions and end up with all different answers. It’s society, it’s my family, it’s our beliefs or it’s just me. These are a lot of questions for just one person but not so much for one society, but to remedy centuries of submitting to one belief, we first have to start with ourselves before it could become a movement.