What Have They (or Maybe WE) Done to Us?

Cindy wedding 1971The day I got married my mother looked over my shoulder into the mirror and said “NOW do you finally believe you’re beautiful?”  Of course I said no.  Each of the #TBT photos here elicited the same response: “Am I beautiful?  Remotely?  No. Cute maybe.  Fun.  Smart.  Lively.  But beautiful?  No way.”

It’s always been like that.  For decades I’ve read feminist pieces on self-image and beauty and with all the intellectual awareness I have, I still can’t for the life of me, figure out how I got here.  All the years I wasted feeling so much less than, it seems, I was.

Look at these – if not beautiful, certainly not bad:

Cindy Smith College 1965
1965
1965
1966
Cindy DC 1969
1969
1974
1974
1975
1975
Cindy Paris thumbnail 1988
1988

 

1994
1994
2008
2008
cindy small marin august 2014
2014
cindy parkside edited
2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I know internal beauty and intellect are treasures, but this matters too – we can’t help it. Let’s keep the girls in our lives today from wasting so much energy and time on the what the world doesn’t seem to want to let them understand, and learn to define their beauty for themselves.

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Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.

3 thoughts on “What Have They (or Maybe WE) Done to Us?”

  1. After reading this post, so wish you were going to be here for Finding Our Way’s public discussions on Oct 18. We will miss your contribution to Women Made Visible/Unvisible. All that said, wishing you a fine trip.

  2. Three cheers to this. I think part of it is pulling back the curtain and showing girls the beauty myth while they’re young. It gives them a chance to write their own story before they believe the one they’re going to be fed.

  3. Years ago an boyfriend told me he always got a kick out of the fact that I never noticed men looking at me. Sure wish I had figured it out earlier while I was young enough to enjoy it.

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