WHAT WE DO NOT SAY

IV.

Only some women are allowed to be beautiful and gentle or beautiful and strong. Some women are always beautiful. Other women must be hard, strong, fierce, resilient, determined, radical. Other women cannot be gentle or sweet or innocent. Other women are never beautiful and, if they are, they are thought to be something else, something closer to what is deemed normal, but not quite. In essence: to be beautiful and Other is to be almost human.