It’s not “letting yourself go,” it’s “letting yourself be”

Yesterday I read “In Defense of Letting Yourself Go,” in the Huffington Post. Author Dayna Evans reminds us (without endorsing this line of thinking) that:

When a woman concedes to letting herself go, she rings the death knell of her valued contributions to society. Letting yourself go by putting on weight, not wearing makeup, eating buttered Pop Tarts, deciding to wear clothes that are fit for comfort instead of style, is the equivalent of saying the morally accepted standards of beauty and presentability do not apply to you. And this is unacceptable.

Last week when I wrote about Christie Brinkley appearing, at age 63, in the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated (I remain surprised that it’s still a thing!), I said something along the lines of “isn’t there an age where we can just stop worrying about whether we fit the normative ideals of feminine beauty that we’ve had imposed on us for all of our lives?”

I can relate to Dayna Evans’ statement that “Being a woman is a little like putting on a pair of tight shoes at birth and then not taking them off until you die.” So the desire to do what is interpreted as “letting yourself go” is as understandable as wanting to kick off those shoes. She associates the permission to let yourself go with giving yourself the permission to age.

Granted, since youth is a huge part of the oppressive feminine aesthetic, older women have an inescapable strike against them already. The beauty industry preys on our fear of aging — of “letting ourselves go” — by offering an overwhelming array of products meant to stave off aging.

But allowing ourselves to age is not “letting ourselves go.” And at any age, allowing ourselves to give up those figurative high heels for more comfortable shoes is not “letting ourselves go.” Why don’t we think instead of honoring ourselves enough to let us be who we are without having to stuff ourselves into an ill-fitting, uncomfortable mold.

I know it’s optimistic to think that we can just overthrow the pressures of normative femininity overnight. But if we each take little stands against it, defying the narrow range of “acceptable” in order to change it, we can make some progress towards broadening those ideals so that I wider range of “looks” that encompass diversity — of age, race, body size and type, hair colour and style, fashion, etc. — are considered acceptable.

I totally agree with Dayna Evans when she says:

Wouldn’t it be nice, instead of concerning ourselves every morning with the most flattering shirt to wear or putting aside extra cash to dye our hair, if we wore the shirt we wanted to and the one that felt good? And we put that extra cash toward a bowl of chili on a cold winter evening? And when we wanted to “be cozy,” we just were cozy. Or we didn’t put Spanx on under our bridesmaid dresses because the shape of our bodies is just that: the shape of our bodies. Why shouldn’t we?

What I disagree with is that we should think of that as “letting ourselves go.” I get that she’s embracing this and that in so doing, she’s performing an act of defiance. But giving in to dominant characterizations of this type of defiance as “letting ourselves go” doesn’t take it far enough. Let’s challenge the status quo and the narrative surrounding it by letting ourselves be.

Are there any areas of your life where you’ve made a conscious decision to let yourself be? We would love to hear from you about it!