Beyoncé is Beautiful

I have seen a lot of people talk about the over-sexed half time show.

May I say, if you saw it as over sexed, the problem is with you? Not the show.

I watch a lot of R-rated movies. Swearing? Violence? Doesn't bother me. Overly sexual scenes? Problem. I don't watch those movies. Give me bloody violence any day.* I am super-sensitive, though, to seeing overly sexualized images. I don't want to see it. 

How do you know if something is overly sexual? The attitude of the person portraying it. What is the underlying feeling that THEY are portraying? When you see their face, what emotion do you see there? What attitude is in their eyes? Are they looking at you with lust or inviting you to lust? Then it's probably bad.

There was no invitation to lust in Beyoncé's eyes.

What Beyoncé did was powerful, beautiful, confident, and unapologetic. 

She walked out onto that stage and declared it her stage. She owned the stage and her body. And she doesn't care what you thought about it, because she did what she intended to.

In a male-dominated world, women's magazines spend an inordinate amount of time telling women how to "get a man." Why? Shouldn't a woman's magazine be about how to feel confident in our own skin, just to feel confident in ourselves? Without a man?

The answer is: 

Yes, the should, but they don't.

Beyoncé has a beautiful, curvy body that stands in stark contrast to what woman's magazines show as the ideal. She stood on that stage in a sea of "ideal" women, and she was not ashamed. She was not a shrinking flower. She stood next to them and looked beautiful, confident, and radiant. You weren't noticing her "flaws" because she wasn't. She stood there and declared herself to be just as beautiful as the rest of them, because she is.

In a world where an "ideal" is still being sold to women, we need more women like Beyoncé to stand up and own themselves. To break the chains of oppression (there! I said it) that we are bound with and declare them obsolete. To stand and say, "I don't fit the mold, but I am just as beautiful, confident, and wanted as the ideal I will never be." Because when one woman does it, the rest of us can start to.

She created a beautifully safe place for the non-ideal. She did it without men (everyone on stage with her was female) and she did it without apology. 

Think what you want about her show. Define her as over-sexed if you will. But remember, when you do that your definition of her will not stick. She defined herself and no one else can do that for her anymore. She defined herself as Confident, Powerful, Important, and Beautiful. When she walked out on that stage, she took who she was into her own hands, and out of the hands of men (and women for that matter).

No one can take that from her now.

*The Hollywood kind. I don't really want to see people hurt in real life. That's not good, at all.