Is Every Woman Beautiful?

Must beauty hide behind the sadness of a tree by Lemuel Cantos

Last weekend I attended the AXIS 2010 International Java Jazz Festival [1]. I hadn’t planned on coming before, because I felt I didn’t appreciate jazz enough to justify the time and money for a jazz festival. But because Diane Warren [2] came to perform, and me being a musician and all, I decided to come anyway during the busy and jam packed Saturday night.

One of the bands who performed were Tika and the Dissidents [3] – a local indie band whom I heard from Adit, my guitarist. I first heard them when Adit and I were traveling to Bandung together, and he brought their CD. I chose to see them at Java Jazz because their schedule was precisely before Diane Warren, and I wanted to know how they sounded like live.

During one of their songs, the vocalist – Tika – said the inspiration behind it was the thought “every woman is beautiful”. She said every woman is beautiful in her own way, and guys should know that too. Of course, the audience responded with a cheer (or at least most of the female audience), but standing at the back line I said to myself I want to contest that theory:

IF every woman is beautiful, then it should also be TRUE that every man is handsome. Is this correct?

The permutations of beauty

Think about that for a moment: is every man handsome? I think accepting the belief that every woman is beautiful is far easier than accepting every man is handsome. Because history and society has had its share of mass murderers, corruptors, terrorists, kidnappers, violent husbands who are largely the male population. Yet from the logical relation, it should hold true, that ALL men are handsome.

IF you disagree and say NOT ALL men are handsome, how can ALL women be beautiful? What’s the difference between women and men such that ALL women are beautiful but NOT ALL men are handsome? It’s like we’re going against a law of nature when we make that statement.

Therefore, I think NOT ALL men are handsome, and NOT ALL women are beautiful. There are four combinations in total, based on beautiful inside and beautiful outside:

1. Women who are beautiful outside, not beautiful inside
2. Women who are not beautiful outside, beautiful inside
3. Women who aren’t either
4. Women who are both

The same also holds true for men.

The four pillars of beauty

This writing might make you think I’m a chauvinist [4], but I can assure you I’m not. The reason I’m writing this is because I want to ask the truth behind our beliefs. I feel the idea “every woman is beautiful” functions more to console the feelings of women who feel they aren’t beautiful, and gives women a justification to NOT do the hard work to BECOME a beautiful woman.

Beauty is a state of success, therefore it demands hard work and high commitment – whether you’re striving for inner beauty or outer beauty. To say that we are all already beautiful inside is mostly a fallacy – the fact is we all have our ugly sides that still need to be educated. Don’t let the idea make you think that you don’t have any work to do – on the contrary if you have the idea then there’s much work to do.

The conclusion: No, NOT every woman is beautiful, and NOT every man is handsome. Everyone needs to put in their hard work to be beautiful. This includes studying to be articulate in an intelligent way, exercising to be healthy and young in a physical way, experiencing enough adversity to be strong in an emotional way, and understanding grace to be humble in a spiritual way.

The question is then: are you beautiful?

Maybe you’re just pretty.

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[1] Official Java Jazz International website. I share my thoughts about going there HERE (also includes pictures!)
[2] Diane Warren website. During the concert, she only appeared on stage twice; the rest of the show was to promote her new project Due Voci
[3] Tika and the Dissidents on MySpace. Turns out they have quite a number of fans (and Tika, if you’re reading this I’d like to know your thoughts)
[4] Check Wikipedia for the definition of chauvinist
[5] Photograph by Lemuel Cantos