From the cradle to the grave, the most important word for the female gender is being “pretty”. All girls want to be just like Barbie, the perfect doll with a beautiful face, lovely hair and a perfect figure. Females have been taught that brains belong to boys while aspiring to be pretty is every girl’s sole ambition and desire.
I was born smack in the middle of four little barbie doll wanna-bees, so I consider myself an unofficial expert on this subject. Tell a female she has put on extra pounds or you spotted a few gray hairs in her once gorgeous auburn locks, and you’ve made an enemy for life. She files away remarks like that in her mental filing system, which she never forgives or forgets.
Although I didn’t always agree with him, my dad thought every woman was “pretty”, even though my mother was the only love of his life. I suspect my dad appreciated the soft, sweet, inner beauty of the female gender, and over time he adopted the attitude: “Pretty is as pretty does”. He wasn’t one to toss out the word “pretty” until the outer and inner merged and true beauty began to shine forth to the world. In other words, to be “pretty”, a woman had to earn her stripes every day. Hopefully, attitudes are changing about the importance of a girl being “pretty”, but until that happens, some things remain the same. The beauty Queen, with a "respectable" IQ score sometimes finds life to be a little easier than the brilliant, but not quite so beautiful Valedictorian. The world is quick to pass judgment on all of us who were evidently behind the door when God passed out the "pretty pills”and the "smart tablets".
