Age before Health and Beauty

As I walked up to a girlfriend, she was finishing up a conversation with another woman, who had just handed her a box of something that looked like fancy lotion.  A tall, slender box with silvery lettering.

"Use it for a week and then give it back to me," the woman said to my friend.  

"What is that, some kind of wrinkle cream?" I asked.

The woman fluttered her eyelashes and said, "Anything we can do to help get rid of those wrinkles.

Smoking Man in Beauty Shop
Nationaal Archief/Spaarnestad Photo
Flickr Commons

I'm actually only 23, can't you tell?"  And she flitted away, saying, "Just bring it back next week!"

"Oh dear," I thought to myself.  "Another woman trying to hold back the clock."

"Yeah," said my friend, as she opened the container to reveal a very fancy dispenser.  "It's night time wrinkle cream."  Then she lowered her voice, "I'm just helping her out with her business."

"I love my wrinkles.  They're beautiful!" I declared.  "I'm not going to stop aging any time soon, and the wrinkles are just going to keep coming.  What happens if I hate my wrinkles when I'm old?  I'll just hate myself."

My friend shoved the fancy dispenser back into the box as her husband walked up on the conversation.  "Wrinkles are good," he said.

Well there you have it.

Quantifiable beauty?

 Beauty contest in Turkey.
Men admiring participants beauty contest.
 Flickr Commons

Let's get something straight right now.  I can measure my height, weight, cholesterol, heart rate, blood pressure, and a large number of things that might tell me how healthy or fit I am.  I can count how many years I have been alive, and I my age is increasing at the exact same rate as every other living being's.  But no matter how hard I might try, I can not measure how beautiful I am.  Are we talking inner beauty or outer beauty here?  It doesn't matter.  Nobody has, nor will anyone ever build a foolproof, objective system for measuring beauty--beauty pageant judges included.

So why does society equate age, weight, health and numerous measurable things with something that can not be measured?  There is no logic behind it, other than oppression.  It is the driving force behind societal ills such as scientific racism, where body measurements have been used as justification for genocide, forced sterilization, internment, apartheid, slavery and other expressions of racism.  Equating beauty to age and health is society's way of building a false hierarchy of humanity.  I reject this dominant paradigm, and I invite you liberate yourself from it, too.

In the aching back, clogged arteries, and wrinkled eye of the beholder

The best connection I can see between beauty and the quantifiable is that our perception of ourselves,

 May, 1960.
Fern Derstine combs Mary Schlegel's hair.
Mennonite Board of Missions.
Illinois
Flickr Commons

our self-worth, can impact our health and aging process.  It has been shown in studies that increased pride in one's identity increases overall health.  If someone fails to perceive their own beauty, they will be unhappy with themselves and their health will decline, and health factors associated with age may become more apparent.

There is no standard for beauty beyond self-identification of it.  The one truth in beauty is that it is immeasurable.  If I choose to believe that I am beautiful, I define "beauty," therefore it is true that I am beautiful.  If others see me differently, their views are irrelevant and wrong.  The good news is that I will likely pass on my good looks to my kids, and also my healthy outlook.

Skin deep

What about all that inner beauty business?  Are people who love themselves for who they are the meanies and bullies of the world?  I mean, yeah you can read all about how school bullies are just climbing the social ladder and they don't necessarily come from abusive homes or have low self-esteem.  But really, come on.  It's insecurity that causes people to wrong others.  Jealousy, greed, and unkindness aren't born of self-love.  They may be born of megalomania, but that is arguably an overdose of self-esteem, or overcompensation for self-hatred.

Bully Suicide Project campaign
for Campus Harmony, Inc.
photographed by Fashion photographer Tracy Nanthavongsa.

So I say go ahead and love those wrinkles.  Let your hair go gray.  See it, live it, love it.  Overweight?  Still beautiful.  Fighting cancer?  You're gorgeous.  Did someone along the way say otherwise?  They were not speaking a truth.

The Paradox of Love and Hate, Gay and Straight

Today I read a blog that said, essentially, "If you're gay, I love you, and God loves you.  There's nothing wrong with being gay, just don't ACT gay and you'll be free from THAT sin, and then I can trust you around my kids."

She quoted the Bible, of course.  You may have heard this passage used as a weapon against gay people before:

1 Corinthians 6:9-11 Those who indulge in sexual sin, or who worship idols, or commit adultery, or are male prostitutes, or practice homosexuality, or are thieves, or greedy people, or drunkards, or are abusive, or cheat people--none of these will inherit the Kingdom of God.

Other than saying that this snippet of the Bible, taken out of historical context, is an incorrect interpretation, I'm not going to go into great detail here.  Those can be found in many places such as texts by biblical scholars, the detailed blog I'm Christian. I'm Gay. Let's Talk, and in this amazing scholarly interpretation of six Bible verses by the very brave Matthew Vines in Wichita, KS in 2012.

I'm going to say now that I agree with the scholarly interpretations that say that committed homosexual relationships are not condemned in the Bible because the scholars presented convincing evidence.  I firmly believe that what this calls for is a more universal acceptance of future members of "heaven."

• If Jesus was so opposed to homosexual relationships, why was he silent on the issue?  Maybe because it wasn't a big deal to him.    Were there no gay people in Jesus' time?  Highly doubtful, since there are references to homosexual acts.  But Jesus doesn't criticize, so long as we respect and love each other, and love God.  Who is this God he wants us to love?


• They say "God made man and woman in God's image."  Did God create everyone in his/her image?  If so, does God have a gay side?  There are other human diversities besides sexual orientation to consider.  There are gender identity and chromosomal issues that blur the lines of male/female.  A lot more people than you'd probably guess are born with sexual ambiguity.  According to the Intersex Society of North America, one in 100 people are born sexually ambiguous.  In fact, the number of people born without a distinctive XX or XY sex chromosome makeup is one in 1,666! (And it God said, "it was good.")  That's a lot of people, if you ask me.  Weren't they made in God's image, too?  According to the Bible, who can sexually ambiguous or trans people have sexual relationships with?  I'm pretty sure the science required for such conversations wasn't available when the Bible was written,  or when it was transcribed or translated.  Nor was homosexuality well defined or understood at the time.


• Aside from the androgyny of God, above all, it is said that "God is love."  Jesus said, "Love," more than he said much of anything else.  Love the poor, the enemy, the leper, the child, the woman, and so on.  He never said anything about NOT loving.  So who is supposed to love?  All of us.  And we do love those we are close to and who we understand.  If someone has a child who is born different in some way, they love the child, and wouldn't imagine spending eternity in heaven while their "different" child spends eternity in a fiery pit.  So a mother or father would INCLUDE their child in Club Heaven if given the choice.  Is their love stronger than that of the god who created them in his/her image?  Does the mother's or father's capacity for grace exceed that of their heavenly mother or father?  


• More love?  Why, yes.  The modern argument against same-sex life partners never seems to focus on the love they share with one another.  It always focuses on what they are doing with their private parts in the bedroom, which is one of millions of ways that partners express love for one another. Relationships aren't only about sexuality.  They're about who we love and how we treat those people.

• 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 was only translated to refer to "homosexuals" in the 1940s.  Within historical context, and translated more accurately, the original text was referring to prohibitions of economic and sexual exploitation, not prohibitions of homosexuality.  If society continues to say that the LGBTQ community has to stop acting so gay and go about procreating in opposite-sex marriages, is no one being exploited? Exploitation means "to make use of, selfishly or unethically." Let's say for argument's sake that I'm correct that consensual same-sex relationships are ethical and that population increase shouldn't be the only goal in a committed relationship.  Wouldn't requiring those who are attracted to the same sex to only have relationships with the opposite sex be both selfish and unethical?  Forcing anyone to go against their own natural desires would be exploitation.


• Finally, since when did condemning people become OK? "I love you, and God does too.  But I thought I'd give you fair warning that you're going to perish for being your true self."  What a paradox!  It's not loving to tell anyone that the way they were born is going to send them to Hell if they act on their god-given nature.   Gay people weren't sent to the earth to be the bad example for everyone.  They were made in God's image, too.  If another, more historically accurate and contextual interpretation of scripture says NOTHING about condemning God's LGBTQ children, why not embrace the more loving translation?  What's the payback for so much disdain, fear, hate and moral posturing?  Who, then, are the sinners -- those who chose to love, or the select heterosexuals who condemned the lovers?  

Hopefully by the time those sinners make it to Club Heaven, they will have worked on their manners around gay people.