This Powerful Poem Will Tell You Why No Woman Should Be Ashamed Of Her Hairy Legs

Beauty.

A combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight.

This is what the Oxford Dictionary has to say about beauty.  Isn’t this a shallow way to define it?  Women are constantly, and it wouldn’t be wrong to say always being judged on their physical appearance. We have been stereotyping the concept of  ‘being beautiful.’

Naina Kataria, a 22-year-old freelance writer decided to pen her thoughts and put an end to this stereotyping. She posted her poem ‘When A Man Tells Me I’m Beautiful’ on her facebook page Infinite Entropy.

Her poem has struck a chord with many women and has gone viral in less than two days after it was published. Read the profound poem below:

When a man tells me
I’m beautiful
I don’t believe him.
Instead, I relive my days in high school
When no matter how good I was
I was always the girl with a moustache
He doesn’t know what it’s like
to grow up in your maternal family
Where your body is the only one that
Proudly boasts of your father’s X
While your mother’s X sits back and pities
It’s unladylike-ness
He doesn’t know the teenager
Who filled her corners with
Empty consolations of
Being loved for who she was- someday.
He doesn’t know hypocrisy.
He doesn’t know of the world that
tells you to ‘be yourself’
and sells you a fair and lovely shade card
in the same fucking breath
He doesn’t know of the hot wax and the laser
whose only purpose is to
replace your innocent skin
with its own brand of womanhood
He doesn’t know of the veet and the bleach
That uproot your robust hair
in the name of hygiene
Hygiene, which when followed by men
makes them gay and unmanly
He doesn’t know how unruly eyebrows are tamed
and how uni brows die a silent death
All to preserve beauty
And of the torturous miracles that happen
Inside the doors marked
“WOMEN ONLY”
So when a man calls me beautiful
I throw at him, a smile; a smile that remained
After everything the strip pulled away
And I dare him
To wait
Till my hair grows back.

Poignant and Perfect.

Here’s the original post on Facebook:

You go girl, Naina Kataria. 🙂

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