It's Not Your Job to Be Pretty
What I tell my daughter about beauty, bodies, and belonging — repeatedly
There is a moment in most parents’ lives when they witness in a concrete way that the world has begun its work on their daughters. The messages arrive through screens and storefronts and offhand comments and inappropriate stares, through the architecture of social media and the subtle tyranny of the algorithm. By the time their daughter is standing in front of a mirror getting ready for school, she has already absorbed more noise about what she is supposed to look like than either of them can consciously know.
The other day, peeking in my teenage daughters room I saw her getting ready in front of her small coffin-shaped mirror (she’s got a dark sense of humor). I bellowed jokingly, but of course not joking at all: IT’S NOT YOUR JOB TO BE PRETTY!
I think I caught the requisite eye roll in the mirror but as I say in my book about raising empowered girls, I’m willing to be cringey many times over in service of that mission.
If you asked her, I’m sure she’d say I’m repetitive and that she already knows the world is trying to exploit her for profit or break her to fit patriarchy’s parameters blah blah blah. She’s right. I am repetitive because we’re playing the long game here. We can’t expect our teenagers to have the hard-earned perspective we have (on our best days anyway). The hope, though, is that we’re helping them grow into an understanding of just how much pressure is put on them to meet some destructive, soul-crushing, clone-farming standard. The deluge is loud and constant so I figure, in comparison, I’m coming on much less strongly.
What I'm after isn't a single breakthrough moment. It's the slow accumulation of a different kind of voice in her head. One that pushes back, asks questions, that knows, even on the hard days, that the mirror and certainly the culture doesn’t always tell the truth. One that asks: how much of my fashion/makeup/primping/body-related choices are actually mine?
I may be repetitive but I do try to be creative with how I voice my push back to the thousands of subtle and not-so-subtle ways she’s told her appearance and body is the most important and precarious thing about her.
I tell her:
On Beauty
The most magnetic people in any room are rarely the most conventionally beautiful ones. They are the ones who are fully, unapologetically present — who know what they think, say what they mean, and make everyone around them feel interesting. That quality has nothing to do with a face or a body. It is built from the inside, slowly, by knowing yourself and trusting that knowledge.
Your life was made for living, not for display. For taking risks and failing and getting up again. For laughing at yourself, and cackling with your friends, and figuring out what you like and changing your mind. Your appearance should always be the least interesting thing about you.
Your beauty is your singularity. You were never meant to be a copy of someone else's original. Not the curated faces on your screen. Not the ones in the hallway. Your humor, your energy, your single dimple, whatever particular light you carry — those are one of a kind. Selling that short is a genuine loss.
Comparison is never a fair fight. Every time you hold your complex, imperfect, ordinary self up against what you see on a screen, you’re measuring real life against a two-dimensional, highly curated story of how someone wishes their life appeared.
The mirror sometimes lies. Some days your mood (or an annoying hair day) colors everything, including the face looking back at you. That distortion is not fact. It is just a rough day wearing a convincing disguise.
On Bodies
Your body is not a performance piece. Care for it because it houses and carries you, not because someone somewhere has an opinion about it. It’s not a problem that needs to be solved or shrunk or morphed. It just needs the kindness of being lived in well.
Your body will change. Many times, in many directions, across your whole life — and every version of it will have carried you through something real. The goal was never to freeze yourself at some imaginary peak and maintain it forever. The goal is to be someone who lived fully in every body she ever had, so you don’t look back with regret at the things you didn't do because you were too busy worrying about how you looked while doing them.
Let your body be a source of pleasure and rest and silliness — not just something you manage and monitor and hold at arm's length with judgment. Eat the food that makes you happy. Dance badly. Sleep in. Joy is not a reward you earn after you've fixed yourself. It's available to you right now, exactly as you are.
Your energy is valuable. At some point you will realize how much mental energy you have spent on this — on the mirror, on the comparison, on the ongoing project of deciding whether you are enough today. And you will want that energy back. You will wish you had spent it on something that mattered more, on things that help you grow and become more YOU. You don't have to wait until you're older to decide your mind is too valuable for that.
On Belonging
You can have a million friends and still be completely alone—when the version of you they know is not really you. Fitting in at the cost of yourself is one of the loneliest feelings there is. Being known is better. It takes longer but it’s worth the wait. And the risk.
So if they need you to be more, or less, or different — walk away. Your people will never ask you to break yourself to fit.
Share this essay with your daughter or consider doing a version of this demonstration with her:
If this essay resonated with you, my book Sexism and Sensibility goes deeper — into all the ways girls' development gets systematically undermined, from their self-esteem and physical confidence to sexuality, pleasure, and equal relationships. If you’re raising a daughter and want a guide for the fight, this is it.
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