Beauty should not be found only in a size 5 pair of Calvin Klein knock-offs strutting down Hollywood Boulevard. The standards shouldn’t be confined to a catwalk kitten or big screen siren. Not to say that some of the most fascinating women don’t grace the glossy pages of magazines, because they do.

The majority of women in high fashion, television and film are brilliant. Don’t get me started on the long lineage of inspiring female actors and models who singlehandedly changed the history of feminism. (Forgive me for using the “F” word so early on in the discussion – weather on my warrior.)

Call me crazy, but I don’t find sickness beautiful. A woman starving is not captivating to me. A woman hollow from meth is not happening in my book. A woman reconstructed under a surgeon’s knife is deeply disturbing. (I’m not against the occasional tummy tuck or breast reduction – moderation is fine. I’m shaking my librarian finger at the extremes.)

Watching beautiful women crumble under the paparazzi’s magnifying glass to feed a hunger of an insecure public fat on overconsumption makes my heartache. I don’t feel validated at the ringside of another diva devoured. My self esteem issues are only deepened when someone else has to burn on the cross because our cultural concept of beauty is only obtainable by the privileged.

Call me archaic, but can someone point out the difference to me between the Roman’s feeding slaves to the lions in a coliseum full of diehard fans and the piranha-like frenzy on Britney Spears. There is no difference. We are after blood. Well, actually, I think maybe the Romans had a bit more mercy then we do. The kill was quicker.

Pull your claws out of my ass with the “she’s asking” for it argument – we aren’t in a rape trial. The kid’s sick right now and needs some breathing room before she drops dead on a hotel floor.

Call me anticlimactic, but I’m just not in the mood to stand by as a complacent witness watching another happy ending of a snuff film.

Side note: Snuff films are underground skin flicks where women and/or children are killed in tortured ways for the purpose of the ultimate jack-off. Usually they are drugged first and rarely do they think that their role is anything more than a kinky “f**k puppet.” They are victims of other people’s need for really disturbed pointless entertainment.

Britney isn’t the point of my essay though – only another example of the extremities that we use to show ourselves how the everyday falls so short. There we go again, constantly comparing our insides with someone else’s outsides, so that we can walk away, cocky and superior.

Beauty is another victim of the fatal extremist thinking that we call the heart of American popular culture.

Health is the balance of beauty. Health is the marker that trims the obese while fattening the concentration camp survivor. Health is the reflection in the mirror that hugs us back.

Just stretch the standards of beauty to include all shapes, sizes, skin tones, brilliant smiles, and extraordinary actions of community and art.

Beauty is inclusionary. Hate is exclusionary.

Beauty as a battlefield has nothing to do with the wonders of symmetry that genetics can produce. A wonder of nature matched with acts of spirit rooted in a big heart. Actions large enough that we get over ourselves long enough to still believe in community and humanity. Talent is talent – no matter the size of panties she wears.

Beauty as a battlefield is an excuse to be a hater.

Another side note: Beauty doesn’t have standards. “Standard” is just another hater word that says someone else is going to define what I can marvel at. It’s a way to say something is better than something else - the concept that there is high art and low art. The “Haves” and the “Haves Not” are just cousins of the “Jones” who are secretly owned by the “Hipsters.”

Beauty has balance. Health is what balances beauty. A balance is not perfection. No one can be completely healthy. No one is perfect. But one can balance themselves to the best of their ability in a way that shines like a Tiffany’s diamond in the breakfast light.

Some woman left me a comment about how she just loved the internet, because she thought that I was advocating that we call overconsumption beauty. Her comment reminded me of the Platte River – a river that looks vast and wide, but when you step in it only comes up to your knee.

There are some large women who are master level ballerinas that nature played a terrible thyroid trick on and they aren’t able to fit into the mold that gets them through the casting call.

Call me kryptonite, but I don’t believe in throwing away that kind of talent like yesterdays garbage. Nature is full of diversity. So should be our stages, magazines, films and streets.

There is enough room to worship all kinds of talent, all kinds of beauty, all forms of flattery and inspiration.

Without stages such as those that Burlesque provides, we are left with a very narrow window. A window that doesn’t reflect the face of the world we live in. Burlesque is more than a striptease and a few slapstick comedians. Burlesque is a political statement – a feminist mantra. (There is that f**king “F” word again.)

Burlesque is where the boundaries of beauty are stretched into inclusion - where every woman is allowed to feel safe in her skin. No one in the backstage of a burly show asks a woman to hate herself so much that she feels obligated to mutilate herself to belong. Women are often safer at a Burlesque show than in their own homes – where their ass is fat, their food preparation skills mediocre, and their partners bored.

Burlesque only asks you work to your ass off to express yourself as openly and freely as possible. It’s more than the shimmy. A bump and grind is only the beginning. Burlesque never means to just hack up the hairball called standards of beauty.

The stage is not a reflection of society, although an audience member will often work hard to project unto those that stand upon it. That ultimately is the audience member’s issues – not the performers. A stage is a place where humanity is recreated – the imagination allowed to indulge that which is a stretch in our daily lives.

What is it that the modern Burlesque gives us permission to do?

Modern Burlesque allows women to claim their sexuality proudly, loudly in a myriad of different ways in all kinds of various sizes, skin tones, and lipstick colors – and get paid for it legitimately. Women are not devalued for their public display, expression of beauty – of sexuality.

What other professional setting do you know that a woman can be so proud of her body and how it moves without getting penalized for it? Why is that anyway? Why does society have such tight reigns on our public expression of our selves? And why the hell do they call those reigns “beauty standards?”

All right, I need to go fire extinguish Britney before she gets too crisp – the Joan of Arc wannabe that we so make her out to be… Poor kid.