I am over the moon excited about sharing my deepest passion with you, and my new website - Kitty Cavalier's School of Charm and Cheek. As I sat down to type this message I expected to be overflowing with fluffiness and joy, which I do feel. And at the same time, I am filled to the brim with heartache.
It is usually those with the deepest wounds that create the greatest change in the world. Instead of sensing our cultural insanities like a low hum in the background, they feel them acutely, like a bullet in the back. The change-makers are the ones who take this great pain and transform it into their tale of triumph.
We all have our individual "pet" wounds. The wounds where we think, "if only the world was relieved of this, oh how things would change". Mine is the way the culture teaches a woman to believe that her body is anything less than sacred, beautiful and holy. Which then causes her to believe that she must meet an impossible list of qualifications in order to feel good about herself. The tricky thing about this list of benchmarks however, is that there is not a woman alive who could even come close to meeting them all.
For every woman who wishes her hips were smaller, there is a woman who wishes her hips were more round. For every woman who wishes her breasts were fuller, there is a woman wishing she could wear t-shirts without feeling self-conscious. It reminds me of the story "The Emperor's New Clothes". We are all striving so desperately to be perfect, sexy, beautiful, young; yet it is this exact desperation to change what is already perfect, which makes us feel so downright ugly.
We all do it. Even women who love and adore their bodies are not exempt from the sneak attack of self-judgement that comes when we pass our reflection and see something other than what we'd see in a magazine. You can blame the media, but it is not their fault. Media messages are simply a reflection of the beliefs and trends that thrive in a culture. So, who's fault is it then?
Yours.
And mine.
It is all of ours.
The fact that a 13 year old girl will make herself vomit until her teeth fall out; the fact that girls are hating their bellies for how they stick out at the age of 4; the fact that girls are being sexually violated because they are so disconnected from their bodies that they think they have no right to say no - these things are downright CRIMINAL. If someone knocked your daughter's teeth out, what would you do? If someone railed against your 4 year old for having too round of a belly, would you give them what-for? Of course you would. And yet, here we are, squeezing our flab in the mirror and commiserating with our girlfriends about the size of our thighs. We don't think twice about the warfare we put our bodies through every time we find them wrong. But I am telling you girlfriend, it is killing us. And the only way to stop this cancer from spreading through our future generations is to take a stand. NOW.
I have dedicated my life to finding a cure for this insanity. The School of Charm and Cheek is the asylum we have all been longing for. The members of this tribe of truth are what I call Femme Vitale's. We are all familiar with a Femme Fatale, a woman whose erotic power is considered dangerous and deadly. A Femme Vitale is a woman who uses her rapturous beauty, her feminine charm and her erotic power to bring pleasure, love and joy to everyone she meets. She is shameless in her self love. She owns her body from head to toe. Her beauty transcends her age, her shape, her size. She knows how to turn her lights on, and from that, she turns on the world.
The School of Charm and Cheek is Femme Vitale Academy. A place where a woman can come and learn how to truly own her beauty, and bond with a culture of women who are pursuing the same truth. We have classes in the sensual art of Burlesque which give expression to the Seductress that lives within you. We offer Primp and Polish classes, which are like having a slumber party with your best girlfriends, and sharing all your best beauty secrets. We have sensual movement workshops, so a woman can work out the way her body was designed to - in a state of pure pleasure. All the things you wish your Mom would have taught you, if she had known herself.
Right now I am obsessed with the song "Dog Days" by Florence and the Machine. Listen to these lyrics:
Run fast for your mother; run fast for your father,
Run for your children, all your sisters and brothers
Leave all your love and your longing behind.
You can't carry it with you, if you want to survive
The dog days are over
The dog days are done
Can you hear the horses
'Cos here they come
The dog days of senselessly disapproving of our bodies are OVER. So dance with me today, my dear Femme Vitales. Dance for your Mother and Father, who created your sexy, succulent body. Dance for your children, that they may never know the feeling of self hatred; all because of how you chose not to buy into it in your lifetime. And most of all, dance for your sisters and brothers, that we may all find the courage to tell the Emperor he is buck naked, and that he looks just great.
