Entitlement

Last night, I watched What Not To Wear. What can I say, I love the show. I love Stacy and Clinton. I love the transformations of mind and wardrobe.

Their victim participant was a 46 year old mother of three who dressed like a 10 year child. Bright Crayola colors, age-inappropriate styles, child-like pigtails, and an attitude I found really disturbing.

When Stacy and Clinton and company really dug deep and pressed her, she admitted that she hadn't always dressed that way, that her attitude had changed after she had children. Her words were: 'After I had my children, I didn't feel like I was entitled to be pretty anymore.'

I didn't feel like I was entitled to be pretty anymore.

Those words really bothered me. In this age of 'male & female enlightenment', are we still giving women the idea that they are only really any good as brood mares, and that after they have fulfilled this purpose, they are no longer required to be sexy?

It's a sentiment I have heard from several women in the last year. Shopping one afternoon, I overheard one women say to her friend, who was trying to get her to try on a cute, sexy dress, 'Oh, I'm married and have a kid now. I don't do sexy anymore. What's the point?' In the next dressing room, my jaw dropped open.

What's the point?

How about your self-esteem? What about showing your husband that he's lucky to have you? What about the satisfying thrill of seeing a man you don't know nod at you in acknowledgment of how great you look? How about taking that little secret thrill home and screwing the hell out of your husband because you are just that sexy?

I look around at my friends and I see several young mothers who have shut down in just this way. I see several young fathers who have just accepted it as the way things work when you have kids. I see a society that condones this attitude - this Be Fruitful and Multiply, and then Be Quiet and Fade Away mindset.

Then I look around my circle of Blogger friends and I see so much of the opposite. I see Hubman and Veronica who still see the sexy in each other. I see any number of women, mothers or not, who value the sexy in themselves and refuse to settle for ordinary. I see the men who still see the sexy in their wives even when they can't see it in themselves. I look around at all of you and I think maybe we're not the ones who are 'wrong'. I think maybe, just maybe, we might have it right. We deserve more.

We are entitled to 'be pretty'.