Authentic Beauty: The Shaping of a Set-Apart Young Woman - Couverture souple

Ludy, Leslie

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 159052991X ISBN 13 : 9781590529911

Editeur : Multnomah, 2007

Synopsis

In a culture that mocks our longing for tender romance, in a world where fairy tales never seem to come true - do we dare hope for more? For every young woman asking that question, this book is an invitation. With refreshing candor and vulnerability, bestselling author Leslie Ludy reveals how, starting today, you can experience the passion and intimacy you long for. You can begin a never-ending love story with your true Prince. Discover the authentic beauty of a life fully set-apart for Him. Experience a romance that will transform every part of your existence and fulfill the deepest longings of your feminine heart.

A propos du livre

Extrait :

The Erosion of a Feminine Dream
IT HAPPENED WHEN I was six.

Somewhere between my encounter with the breathtaking heroine in Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and my introduction to Malibu Barbie (who came complete with five evening gowns and a hot-pink convertible), I made my decision. Somewhere between watching the lovely Sugar Plum Fairy twirling around on stage during a local production of The Nutcracker and trying on my mother’s satiny wedding dress, I decided beyond a shadow of a doubt exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up...a beautiful princess. The fact that princesses were unheard-of in modern-day America did not bother me. I was convinced that somehow, someway, someday I would become one. It was not that I considered myself especially beautiful or princesslike. In fact, staring into the bathroom mirror one morning at my stringy hair and crooked teeth, I decided that the only remedy was a makeover, which I skillfully applied after digging in my mom’s makeup drawer. (The story of my memorable venture out into public that day with my bright pink cheeks, dark green eyelids, and vibrant orange lips is quite an unfortunate tale.) That was the end of my makeup escapades for the time being, but I held out hope that one day I would grow into a dazzling beauty like Cathy Henderson (my all-time favorite baby-sitter), with her supercool, neon pink nail polish and Barbie-like locks.
But much more than polished nails and eternally good hair days, it seemed to me that the really necessary requirement for becoming a princess was to find a noble prince: a knight in shining armor who would consider me the most desirable girl in the world, sweep me off my feet, rescue me from peril, carry me away to his castle, and cherish me forever. Sleeping Beauty had Prince Charming. Malibu Barbie had Ken. The Sugar Plum Fairy had the Nutcracker. The Beautiful Bride (a.k.a. my mother) had the Handsome Groom (a.k.a. my father). Even Cathy Henderson had the curly haired Scotty Darnell wrapped around her finger. Finding a prince of my own seemed like a reasonable goal.
It was a childish dream, a girlish desire that budded in my heart long before I knew anything about the real world. But for some inexplicable reason, it was a dream that I longed to come true more than I had ever longed for anything in my entire life. I desperately wanted to become a princess. It was a dream that I treasured, even as I grew older. It was a desire that remained rooted deep within my heart long after Malibu Barbie and her convertible were packed away in Styrofoam peanuts up in the attic. But things were about to change, and change dramatically. In my early childhood innocence, I had no way of knowing the weighty price that would soon be demanded of a young girl who dares to enter the real world holding on to the foolish dream of becoming a princess...

THE DREAM BEGAN to fade when I was ten. I was standing by the water fountain with Mandy and Katie, my two fifth-grade bosom buddies. We were deeply engaged in an animated discussion about the many virtues of Sour Patch Kids, the latest candy craze to hit Crestview Elementary since Nerds had come on the scene a year before. Then, seemingly from out of nowhere, a small group of fifthgrade boys surrounded us, laughing obnoxiously and jolting Mandy out of an awe-inspiring tale of her recent attempt to eat five Sour Patch Kids all at the same time. Katie rolled her eyes and looked at the boys in annoyance.
“What do you want?” she demanded.
The ringleader, Andy Archibald, only smirked at Katie. Andy was a loud, skinny kid in baggy Levi’s who brought three or four Twinkies in his lunch nearly every day of the week. (I had noticed this fact with great envy, since my mom was a health nut, and the “treats” in my lunchbox were usually carrot sticks and sugar-free granola bars.)
“Go away!” Katie ordered in an irritated voice. Andy didn’t budge. His sly grin grew wider. He stepped a little closer to her. The rest of the boys began to snicker.
“Timmy likes you,” Andy finally announced triumphantly, as the snickering grew louder. Timmy immediately shoved Andy against the water fountain, protesting loudly with a swear word. I quickly looked around to see if any teachers had heard him. Fifth graders were not allowed to cuss in school (we were told that once we reached middle school we would be grown up enough to say whatever we wanted in the halls). I expected the Cussing Police to come rushing over, grab Timmy by the earlobe to drag him off to the principal’s office, and force-feed him a bar of Dial. But no adult was anywhere in sight. I found myself strangely disappointed that Timmy’s great sin had not created more of a scandal.
My thoughts on this were short-lived, however, because Andy had recovered from Timmy’s outburst and seemed to be gaining momentum. “Timmy thinks you’re a babe,” he crooned to Katie in his grating, prepubertized voice, as Timmy yelled, “Shut up, dude!”
Katie’s face had turned bright red, and she was staring at the floor.
“Yeah,” piped in Jason Smits, a squirrelly kid with oversized glasses, “Timmy thinks you’re hot, cuz you re de-vel-op-ing!” He pointed at Katie’s chest. “You have to wear a training bra!” At this, the entire group of boys burst into wild, uncontrollable laughter. Katie pursed her lips together in humiliation and hugged her science book tightly against her chest. Mandy glared at the boys but remained speechless. I looked around the hallway again, realizing that there were still no adults anywhere near us to come to the rescue. I decided it was up to me to defend Katie’s honor.
“Leave her alone, you jerks!” I burst out. I immediately wished I had kept my mouth shut. The hyper group of boys suddenly turned their full attention on me, and I went from feeling like Wonder Woman to Minnie Mouse in a matter of seconds. Andy curled his lip cynically and looked me up and down.
“Hey,” he said, nudging the kid next to him, “check out this ugly chick—she’s flatter than the plains of Kansas!” The boys howled. Jason quickly opened his mouth to outdo Andy’s insult, but before any more verbal abuse could occur, our teacher decided to appear.
“Okay, boys and girls, let’s get back in line. Our break is over. It’s time for our science lesson!” she called out happily, oblivious to the drama that had just unfolded. The snickering group of boys quickly dispersed, and we were herded into the classroom to learn about the exciting process of metamorphosis.
While Miss Thompson began her lecture on the larval stage of a caterpillar, I was vaguely aware of new, confusing emotions dancing around in my heart. Since I was only ten, I hadn’t had much experience being scrutinized, criticized, and discarded by members of the opposite sex. It was a strange sensation, and it created a knot in my stomach that seemed to linger there all afternoon. Andy Archibald’s words rang over and over in my ears. It wasn’t supposed to work this way, I told myself in bewilderment. There was a marked difference, I noticed, in the way Andy Archibald had treated me and the way the beautiful princess was treated by her prince in all the stories I had grown up with. The men in the fairy tales treated women as valuable treasures, to be prized and cherished. The “men” in the fifth grade at Crestview Elementary seemed to treat us the same way they treated their soccer ball—like something to be roughly kicked around for fun, then tossed unnoticed into a corner of the playground. The longer I sat thinking, the more I found it hard to believe that boys actually noticed which girls were wearing training bras and which were still wearing pink cotton undershirts, like me. I had never been insecure about it until that day; in fact, I had never really given it much thought. My friends and I were usually too busy discussing Sour Patch Kids and Care Bears to obsess over our bodies. And until that day by the water fountain, the boys in my class had always spent most of their energy trading baseball cards and telling the latest Peewee Herman jokes. But now, they seemed to have found a new, more exciting pastime—tormenting us about how we looked.
Boys like Andy, Timmy, and Jason had always tried to irritate the girls by flipping their eyelids inside out or cracking all their knuckles at once. But now, overnight, they seemed to have realized that they could get a far bigger reaction from us by brutally teasing us about the fascinating new phrases they had learned last week from Miss Thompson in health class. They had started using new words like developing, or Katie’s most recent downfall, training bra. Though Miss Thompson had emphatically explained that these matters were nothing to giggle or be ashamed about, the boys hadn’t seemed to catch the part about not laughing. As for not being ashamed about it, I found myself suddenly wanting to ask Miss Thompson how a tenyear-old was not supposed to feel embarrassed while facing a group of boys howling about the fact that she had not yet developed. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that Miss Thompson and our new workbook called My Body were partly to blame for
this strange and unwelcome change that had come over the Crestview Elementary fifth-grade boys.
Another possibility I considered might somehow be related was the magazine that Andy Archibald had discovered under his older brother’s bed. I had heard Andy telling Jason Smits all about it during Susie Montgomery’s oral report on the planet Jupiter a few days before. From what I could tell, it was a magazine with nothing but pictures of women who apparently were not wearing very many clothes, and the boys used the word babe repeatedly as they whispered to each other about it. It sounded like a boring magazine to me. I couldn’t understand why Andy and Jason were so excited about it. But it had seemed to awaken them to this new idea of studying all the girls and deciding whether or not they were hot. Whatever was causing the boys to act this way, I knew one thing for sure: being subject to their cruelty was not getting me any closer to becoming a princess. In fact, I was beginning to feel more like one of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters than the lovely girl with the glass slipper. A seed of doubt had entered my mind—maybe my dream of becoming a beautiful princess and being cherished by a noble prince was simply not possible for someone like me. Maybe it only happened for girls like Snow White or Malibu Barbie. Maybe men would always see me as ugly and undesirable. Maybe I was not pretty enough, or talented enough, or vivacious enough. Maybe in order to be found attractive...I needed to change.

BY THE TIME I was thirteen, thoughts of becoming a princess had all but disappeared from my mind. After three years filled with hundreds of moments like the one by the water fountain at Crestview Elementary, listening to the taunts and barrages of snickering boys who examined and criticized nearly every part of my anatomy, I was tired. Tired of trying to convince myself that someday I would be beautiful. Tired of hoping for a noble prince to rescue me and carry me away to his castle. My desire to be loved and cherished by a gentle knight had not diminished, but had only grown more intense. Yet I had begun to question whether such a fairy tale could ever happen to me. I had innocently stumbled into the real world while holding tightly to my girlish ideals. In response, the world had laughed at my tender heart, mocked my deepest desires, and trampled on my treasured dreams.
Instead of wasting my time looking for a fairy tale, I finally determined that, in order to avoid as much painful rejection as I could, my energy would be better spent on making myself as desirable as possible to the opposite sex. After enduring one too many cynical jabs from greasy-haired boys like Andy, I knew I could not survive that way much longer.
Thankfully, I had become a little more—ahem—endowed than in my days at Crestview Elementary. I had also learned a few things by watching other girls around me as they interacted with guys. I decided it was time to put these new tricks into action. By now the guys had designed a new way of interacting with girls’ bodies that went far beyond examining them from a couple feet away.
In addition to continually scrutinizing and graphically describing our bodies, they had also developed the habit of attempting to grab, touch, and tickle anything feminine that ignited their hormones. How a girl responded to these gestures often determined the way she was treated from that point on.
One morning during my first week of eighth grade, as I was rummaging through the chaos in the bottom of my bright orange locker, I had an eye-opening experience. My friend Ashley had the locker next to mine, and she was passionately describing to me the horrors of Ms. Vickers (her militaristic English teacher) as she tried to shove a notebook into her already overflowing backpack. Suddenly, she was cornered by Matt Montoya and Tyler Pierce, two wiry basketball players with spiked hair and oversize shorts that showed off a good five inches of their boxers.
“Hey, babe, how about a quickie in the bathroom?” Matt panted into Ashley’s ear as Tyler stood behind her and unhooked her bra through her Hard Rock Café T-shirt. I pretended to be captivated by the cover of my social studies book, but I watched the scene closely out of the corner of my eye. Instead of staring helplessly at the floor with a red face or angrily protesting in the name of sexual harassment, Ashley had a different and surprising reaction.
“Ma-a-tt!” she squealed, playfully pushing him away and giggling. Then she spun around with an affectionately annoyed smile at Tyler, who was just beginning to tug at the back of her jeans.
“Stop it,” she whined in a cute, lighthearted voice, looking up at him seductively as she skillfully rehooked her bra. Matt was not to be ignored. “Come on, Ash,” he crooned, sliding his hands down past her belt, “just five minutes—you and me?” At that moment, the bell shrieked loudly from a speaker above us, and the steamy dialogue dissolved. With one last pinch near Ashley’s back pocket, Matt slung his backpack over his arm, and he and Tyler strutted down the hall, laughing obnoxiously as they glanced back over their shoulders at Ashley, who was grinning back at them. I learned quickly. It seemed to me that the girls who responded to guys the way Ashley did knew exactly what they were doing. Instead of getting ridiculed and mocked by guys, they got drooled over, touched, and propositioned. Maybe this wasn’t the ideal kind of male attention. Still, it was far less painful than complete humiliation and rejection, which is exactly what a girl would get if she showed any sign of resistance to their constant sexual attention. We had been taught in health class about the importance of standing up to sexual harassment and were told that we should not hesitate to come to any adult if we were being verbally assaulted at school. But this advice was so pathetically impractical, it was quickly tossed aside. What girl wanted to invite even more ridicule and torment by drawing attention to the fact that she was upset by the way the guys were treating her?...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Inside Every Young Woman is a Princess…In Search of her Prince

In a culture that mocks our longing for tender romance, in a world where fairy tales never seem to come true — do we dare hope for more? For every young woman asking that question, this book is an invitation. With refreshing candor and vulnerability, bestselling author Leslie Ludy reveals how, starting today, you can experience the passion and intimacy you long for. You can begin a never-ending love story with your true Prince. Discover the authentic beauty of a life fully set-apart for Him. Experience a romance that will transform every part of your existence and fulfill the deepest longings of your feminine heart.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Multnomah
• Date d'édition: 2007
• ISBN 10: 159052991X
• ISBN 13: 9781590529911
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 272