Why Can't We Just Look Good for Ourselves?

My daughter said something recently that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

She asked: why does everybody assume that when a girl wants to look good, she's doing it for somebody else?

That question stayed with me — because I remember being her age and hearing the exact same things.

That's too tight. You're trying to look too grown. Who are you trying to impress?

And sometimes? It had absolutely nothing to do with trying to impress anybody. Sometimes you just put on an outfit, looked in the mirror, and thought — damn, I look good. And that made you feel good. That's it.

My daughter is almost fifteen. She's at that age where she's developing her own style and figuring out what makes her feel confident. And recently, someone made a comment about something she was wearing that hurt her feelings. She wasn't dressed for somebody else. She wasn't trying to get attention. She simply liked her outfit.

And it immediately brought me back to being a teenager.

I developed early too, so clothes could fit me exactly the way they were designed to fit — and somehow my body became the problem. I remember wanting bell bottoms when they came back into style. They fit around my waist. They fit my legs. They flared exactly the way bell bottoms were supposed to. But because I had curves, suddenly they were too tight.

What I wish somebody had said back then was simply: your body is not doing anything wrong.

That matters more than people realize. Because when you repeatedly teach a young girl that her body needs to be hidden, she can begin to believe there is something wrong with the body itself. And those beliefs don't always disappear when she becomes an adult. Sometimes they turn into overcompensating — over-shopping, chasing a certain body type, trying to reclaim all the things you felt like you couldn't have growing up.

I know. Because I did some of that.

And now, as a mother, I look at this completely differently.

I don't want girls growing up believing that their self-expression automatically belongs to somebody else's gaze. I want them to understand — you are allowed to look good for yourself. You are allowed to dress up because it changes your mood. You are allowed to put on makeup because you enjoy the ritual. You are allowed to moisturize your skin, put on the body butter, spray your perfume, wear the earrings, and walk around your own house feeling like a million dollars.

Nobody else has to be there.

Because self-care does not require an audience.

And I think this is part of what we have to unlearn as women. Instead of teaching girls that their bodies are responsible for somebody else's behavior, we should be teaching them boundaries, awareness, confidence — how to trust themselves, how to protect themselves, and how to know that somebody else behaving badly does not automatically mean there was something they needed to change about themselves.

So — young woman, grown woman, mother, grandmother, whoever is reading this —

Put the body butter on. Wear the outfit. Do your hair. Take the picture. Look in the mirror and tell yourself you look good.

Not because somebody else is watching.

Because you are.

And maybe that's the kind of attention we should have been teaching women to give themselves all along.