Amanda Meuwissen's Blog - Posts Tagged "anecdote"
Prettier Than You - My Foray into Non-Fiction
I'd like to discuss a budding project of mine that is non-fiction. Now, I'm not a stranger to non-fiction. I regularly write content for my day-job, and handle most of the copy-editing and blog posts for BigWorldNetwork.com, but I have yet to publish any non-fiction books. This project is actually quite dear to me.
Prettier Than You is a non-fiction book idea I have about how we are trained from an early age to think of the word ‘pretty’ in a certain way - and how this needs to change.
My husband once said to me that whenever men enter a room they can’t help scanning for other guys and asking themselves (subconsciously or otherwise), “Could I take him?” I wondered how that translated for women, and realized that we do it too, only the question we ask is, "Is she prettier than me?"
Our self-worth shouldn’t be based on how we stack up against others, and being pretty shouldn’t be the most important thing on our minds. And yet it happens. Being pretty tends to be the be-all end-all for little girls and how the world tells them to think.
And thus I have put it out to some of the women in my life to help me write this book, getting their stories as well as my own to explore this idea. We're excited about where this can go, and hope to eventually donate our portion of the proceeds to charity.
Now, nothing is officially written yet, mostly ideas flowing right now, but here's a little snippet of some of my thoughts when I first came up with the concept:
It isn't about the fault only lying with some unattainable goal of being like the models we see on TV or on magazine pages. The fault is also with us. When we’re little girls we adore beauty pageants and models because we want to be just like them. When we realize that isn’t going to happen, we try to at least outdo those around us. What may actually make us happy is being the prettiest possible version of ourselves, beating out ourselves, not other women.
Now don’t mistake my intention here. I’m not saying we have to be ‘pretty’ to be happy or to have self-worth. What is pretty anyway? That’s a whole topic within itself. I’m simply using it as a general term to mean we should be happy with ourselves—who we are AND how we look—regardless of whether we’re prettier than the next girl or fit any societal standards of beauty.
Prettier Than You is a non-fiction book idea I have about how we are trained from an early age to think of the word ‘pretty’ in a certain way - and how this needs to change.
My husband once said to me that whenever men enter a room they can’t help scanning for other guys and asking themselves (subconsciously or otherwise), “Could I take him?” I wondered how that translated for women, and realized that we do it too, only the question we ask is, "Is she prettier than me?"
Our self-worth shouldn’t be based on how we stack up against others, and being pretty shouldn’t be the most important thing on our minds. And yet it happens. Being pretty tends to be the be-all end-all for little girls and how the world tells them to think.
And thus I have put it out to some of the women in my life to help me write this book, getting their stories as well as my own to explore this idea. We're excited about where this can go, and hope to eventually donate our portion of the proceeds to charity.
Now, nothing is officially written yet, mostly ideas flowing right now, but here's a little snippet of some of my thoughts when I first came up with the concept:
It isn't about the fault only lying with some unattainable goal of being like the models we see on TV or on magazine pages. The fault is also with us. When we’re little girls we adore beauty pageants and models because we want to be just like them. When we realize that isn’t going to happen, we try to at least outdo those around us. What may actually make us happy is being the prettiest possible version of ourselves, beating out ourselves, not other women.
Now don’t mistake my intention here. I’m not saying we have to be ‘pretty’ to be happy or to have self-worth. What is pretty anyway? That’s a whole topic within itself. I’m simply using it as a general term to mean we should be happy with ourselves—who we are AND how we look—regardless of whether we’re prettier than the next girl or fit any societal standards of beauty.
