Feel beautiful, but remember the beholder!
Baboki Kayawe | Friday January 30, 2015 15:02
This week on social media, the nation, especially its womenfolk, has been up in arms over the highly circulated ‘Most Beautiful Women in Botswana’ list. Beauty has been the buzz.
Post after post, tweet and retweet, Batswana debated the true essence of beauty. The article and its proclaimed ‘Top Ten’ triggered intense debate, which even overshadowed key national issues such as the dismal Junior Certificate Exams results. Beauty, what a powerful construct! Save for when Fenny Lekolwane’s drama, Beauty airs on the national broadcaster on Monday, the word has never stoked up such passions among social media users.
Social media, with its ubiquitous ‘selfie’ obsession has created a craze around beauty and being beautiful.
However, as has happened throughout history, what beauty is and is not, remains very contended. The adage, ‘beauty is in the eyes of the beholder’, is pretty much alive.
Local entertainment promoter, Dose Mosimanyane of the annual ‘My Maun Experience’ festival, says beauty is more than looks in his eyes. Beauty is how one carries themselves, how they behave, grooming, humility as well as self-confidence.
Beauty is a feeling and communication of sound form, as the inner being expresses itself outwardly. He says more often than not, beauty is misconstrued for fashion.
“Beauty is not fashion. They are two different things,” he says.
Locally designed apparels showcased by ‘our beautiful local models’, were one of the key features of the recent My Maun Experience Fashion Show, says Dose.
Controversial painter, Wilson Ngoni, whose brush is notorious for painting women’s torsos, defines beauty as, “anything that reminds me of things that I like”.
Perhaps in the weirdest definition of beauty, Wilson says he likes “a lot of things about women”.
“Women confuse me because I tend to like a lot of things on and about them such as good, round, turgid breasts,” he says.
“I have this great love for stretch-marks. I like full teeth, good and clean hair. Slim healthy women do it for me, but unfortunately they don’t have stretch-marks,” he says.
In Ngoni’s opinion, stretch-marks and wrinkles are the epitome of beauty, as they “always resemble faces of very old people!”
“Like I said, beauty to me is anything that reminds me of things I like. So when I see ‘faces of old people’ on a woman’s belly it gives me satisfaction and all,” he says.
Ngoni is one of the many who believe that beauty matures like old wine.
“Yes old women have something amazing about them,” he says.
He shares this opinion with silver screen legend, Audrey Hepburn, who is on record as saying: “And the beauty of a woman, with passing years only grows!”
To unpublished poet, Olorato Mphinyane beauty is being content with what you are.
“The confidence that comes with it, and the appreciation that follows that contentment,” says Mphinyane.
“Beauty is the love that comes from our hearts. Mother Teresa was beautiful; Gogontle Phaladi is beautiful too. Beauty is a love that surpasses everything,” she says.
“Beauty is no quality in things themselves,” according to philosopher, David Hume.
Writing in 1979, Hume further says: “Beauty exists merely in the mind, which contemplates it; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others.”
The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy posits that perhaps the most familiar basic issue in the theory of beauty is whether it is subjective, meaning located ‘in the eye of the beholder’ or whether it is an objective feature of beautiful things.
However, whether you or your super beautiful cousins somewhere else in the country did not make the list or whether the most beautiful face you have ever seen resides in your mirror, just feel and act beautiful.
There is the beholder yes, but you too are a ‘beautiful stakeholder’ in the beauty debate.