Let me give you an couple of illustrations of the False Woman.
There was a photo I got by email. It The photo captures one lone woman, pale and plain, holding a sign that said, “Women are not decorations.” She is glaring at the short-short clad women in Hooters® tank tops standing right beside her. They are bronzed, dyed and pushed up. They look at her with mocking smiles, and pity.
The only caption was “Think she is jealous?
I looked a long, long time at that photo.
My first reaction was, no actually I am not jealous. I am sick. I am sick for both groups of women who have totally missed the point of being a woman. God’s woman.
The False Woman has two faces, or two ends of the spectrum. Most of us live somewhere on the spectrum. One face, or end of the spectrum, is like the Hooters® girl. I call this obsessive desire for beauty the Trophy Woman. The other face, or spectrum end I call the Invisible Woman.
The Hooters® girl has determined that it is only what’s on the outside that counts. She has to look “just so” to be considered a “Worthy Woman.” Her success is measured by her bust size, her waist size and how many heads she turns. So much so, she is paid to turn heads. Not only does she live for that look, she is prostituting her beauty, and gets paid to let guys look down her shirt.
Let’s revisit the email photo. The homely protesting woman has determined that it is only what’s on the inside that counts. She has bought hook, line and sinker that it is only about “Inner Beauty.” She’s decided all that fluff and primp effort is vanity. Somewhere she has believed that she can’t win at the beauty game, so she has quit the game altogether. Can you see her complete lack of effort is just an extreme opposite of the Trophy Woman’s obsessive effort? I have found when you dig a little with the Invisible Woman, just like in the Trophy Woman, there is almost always a gaping wound.
The Invisible Woman wears a mantle of heartache. Her face, her countenance, her posture, screams out unloved, unattractive, uninvolved, unaware of God’s original design of a woman. To somehow separate herself from the Trophy Woman lie, she goes to the opposite extreme.
When I talk about beauty God- style, it is not about denying it, but about embracing it.
In this photo you can see the pain in the protestor’s eyes. Somebody somewhere told this woman that she was not lovely. And she believed that lie. When you see a woman who is un-tended to, I don’t mean no make-up, I mean un-invested in, un-cared for, you know who I am talking about, she is living out of a definition other than her maker’s.
Whether Trophy or Invisible, both women represent the same problem from the opposite ends of the spectrum called the False Woman. If we don’t live in God’s definition then we settle for the Hollywood cultural definitions of womanhood, we let ourselves be put in assigned boxes:
Got it,
Might get it,
Used to have it,
Never had it.
We have been put in these boxes, like it or not. So when we look around the room and see all the other boxes, we have to do something to make our assigned box seem like home. So we rationalize our health, our body structure, our genes, eating patterns, our drama and trauma stories, whatever it takes, to justify the box we have been assigned to. But guess what? All of these boxes are lies.
All of them. Lies.
Exerpt taken from Unhindered, Chapter 41
Let’s Get Real Here:
Where do you fall on the False Woman spectrum? Can you name the lies and wounds that hold you there? What do you think of beauty God-style?