The #NoSizeFitsAll Challenge: What Femininity Really Means

Femininity has been dictated far too long by a fake reality, but the real reality is that femininity goes deeper than appearances and actions. Now is the time to question standards, make a change, and to start to truly accept our Self and feel empowered. Beauty can be found everywhere, you just have to look for it and accept it as it is.

For as long as I can remember, the fashion industry and mass media have translated feminine to “skinny and pretty,” reducing and oversimplifying the female figure. When we reduce the feminine to skinny and pretty, women lose track of who we are because we’re watched from an extremely narrow bandwidth. This diminishing, oversimplified definition of femininity has profoundly twisted and turned upside the minds of too many females for too long of a period of time. Female body moulds of unattainable thinness have rapidly become trends which put pressure on models and more widely on all women to suppress their individuality and strength and succumb to fit the image. This oversimplified view on women affects all of us, whether consciously or unconsciously, slowly shrinking our sense of ease and comfort in our own skin.   

What is accepted escalates into what is expected, and expectation traps us into a manufactured fashioning of the self to adhere to the mass “likes.”   

#NoSizeFitsAll challenges the fashion industry’s approach to body image and the impact this has on professional models and more widely on all women and girls.

When you look at the female and what “feminine” means in spiritual traditions, you dive into the archetypes and into a deeper understanding of the feminine and its place in the universe. There’s a masculine and feminine, that is, there’s yin and yang, sun and moon, earth and heaven, left and right, up and down. Yin, or feminine, is that aspect of the universe and of the self that at a deeper level means nourishment. The Earth also represent femininity and our sense of connectedness.

The feminine is an indwelling force that is constantly calling to us, drawing us to our Self.

The feminine is all about love, cooperation, harmony, and rhythm, and every woman holds the potential to be a nourisher, to be connected to her body, to the earth, to her naturalness, and to her own body wisdom. The feminine has to do with the beautiful flow of emotions that don’t need to be explained or justified, there is a sensuality, softness, surrendering, caring quality for the world.  In Tibetan and Hindu traditions and Ancient Greece, there’s a whole pantheon of gods and goddesses, some tender, some kind, and others are fierce, untamed beasts that will destroy and cut your head off if you hurt them. Being feminine brings with it unconditional compassionate love and also the ability to destroy and shatter to pieces.

For all of that to take place, we need a safe space, an internal masculine that holds this magic feminine water.  We need both feminine and masculine, or else world would fall apart, but we need them to be in their healthy place. But, when we get too much into a masculine, left brain, logical linear, scientific calculating approach to life and we calculate everything that we do and are, the feminine inside starts to shrink down. When we measure food, count calories, and grams of fat, we become limited. We live on guard and can’t relax or feel loved, because deep down there is a big negation of who we are.

Reclaiming the feminine means beginning to have a bigger and wider definition of what the feminine is. If we keep the definition of feminine in surface level—young skinny and pretty—as women we contract, we tighten up, we become fearful, and we lose our connection to our Self. The end result is what we limit our potential and we lose track of who we are. As we lose track of who we are and our place in the world, men too begin to look at women through a very narrow and false bandwidth.

In the collective need to acknowledge the equality of men and women, we also often fall into the trap that men and women are the same. We are not. We are equal and we are different. We are different and we are equal. But when we forget that we are different, then we neutralize each other: men become demasculinized, and women defeminized, and as a result we become less interesting to ourselves and to others.

We are in a time when we need to have a bigger, broader, more useful, more interesting, more respectful, and more real definition of what the feminine is.  It’s time to begin to have an honest look at the women of the world and not fall into the trap of getting dominated by the fashioning of the feminine form.