ARE WOMEN STILL BEAUTIFUL?
Erin Satterthwaite
My uncle asked if I had met anyone special yet. I told him no and he told me not to worry because “I got the goods.” He told me that the women in California are beautiful. So are the women in Miami, but they have HIV. “Oh,” I said.
“Back in my day, women were beautiful. I mean really beautiful. They didn’t wear so much makeup. I don’t even remember when all this makeup came about. Your cousins wear those fake eyelashes, I don’t like those, not one bit. Something happened. Farrah Fawcett–now that’s a real beauty. You’re a real beauty, you oughta be thankful for that,” he rambled.
“Totally,” I was scrolling Instagram, ensconced in the radiant beauty of two-dimensional women.
Being beautiful is the most important thing in the world, apart from going to prom. I got up from the couch and caught a glimpse of myself in the living room mirror. I remembered my cousins curling my hair one summer.
“Boys are going to love those freckles,” Meg said.
“You’re such a unique beauty!” Claire chirped. “Just like Lindsay Lohan!”
I looked at the child prostitute with caked-on makeup staring back at me in the mirror. After years of gangly limbs and crooked teeth, I was beautiful. Life changed. People didn’t ignore me anymore. Boys weren’t mean to me like they used to be; they were mean in exciting, interesting new ways.
Daniel Marenzo was a year older than me, but really stupid, so we were in the same math class. We talked about Tim and Eric.
“I didn’t know girls liked that show, that’s sick,” he said.
He took me to smoke in the woods. I pretended to have smoked weed before but after a few hits of his poorly rolled joint I was gone. He pushed me up against a tree and leaned in to kiss me. The bark scratched my bare shoulder upon impact.
“Your eyes look so fucking hot, all red like that,” he said.
“Real stoner moments,” I said.
Years after prom and kissing in the woods, my friend Jane told me our beauty was a currency and we needed to cash in. She thought we shouldn’t have to do things ugly people have to do, like wait in line for things, or buy tickets. I learned so much about the power beauty held. Photographers flooded my DMs, begging me to undress.
“You know, like, to promote your writing,” they offered.
Jane and I went to a bar. A group of men swarmed us. One of them, an aging millennial, took an interest in my beauty.
“What are you sipping on?” he asked.
“Arsenic,” I said.
“Two years locked inside and now all these beautiful women are talking like they’ve spent their entire lives on 4Chan,” he sneered.
“What did women used to be like?” I asked.
“Well, they were always awful.”
I used to have that someone special my uncle was droning on about. When the relationship unraveled, my ex-boyfriend told me that I was lucky I was hot–which is another word for beautiful if you absolutely hate the person–because I could be as annoying and emotional as I wanted to be. I felt lucky to have this privilege. People will at least look at me cry even if they refuse to hear me.
I sat back down on the couch and my uncle turned on the TV.
“Now, that Jennifer Aniston, that’s a real beauty,” he said. “Why can’t they stop wearing all that eye gunk and be like Jen?”
“Haha, yeah,” I said.
“I mean, have you seen those Kardashian girls? I don’t care what people say. Those butts are freakish.”
“Hahahahaha, yeah,” I said.
“Are women still beautiful?” He asked again after a while.
“They’re still beautiful,” I sighed.
Erin Satterthwaite is a writer based in Los Angeles.
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