Welcome to Sacred Musings, a space where I share reflections from the heart on love, life, caregiving, and the lessons that shape us into who we are. My hope is that these words bring comfort, perspective, and inspiration to anyone walking their own path of healing and growth.
I’ve been seeing the commentary about Jasmine Guy lately, and some of it has genuinely disturbed me.
For those of us who grew up watching A Different World, Jasmine Guy was unforgettable. She was beautiful, petite, funny, talented, stylish, and extraordinarily gifted—a classically trained dancer who could sing, act, dance, and make you laugh. Whitley Gilbert became iconic because Jasmine Guy made her iconic.
And now she has done something apparently unforgivable:
She aged.
She is a woman in her sixties who looks different from the young woman we watched on television decades ago.
And somehow, people have decided that this is something she should be humiliated for.
It reminded me of a conversation I had with my son when he was maybe eight or nine years old.
We were talking after school one day, and he started teasing a little girl he thought was ugly. I stopped him and said:
“Girls don’t owe you pretty, little boy.”
That was it.
I don’t remember ever hearing him speak about another girl that way again.
And perhaps some adults need the same lesson.
Women do not owe you beauty.
We don’t owe the world smooth skin.
We don’t owe anyone thin bodies, tiny waists, perky breasts, thick hair, straight teeth, youthful faces, or sexual desirability.
We don’t owe you Botox.
We don’t owe you fillers.
We don’t owe you plastic surgery.
We don’t owe you an endless performance of the woman we were at 22, 32, or 42 so that looking at us remains pleasurable for you.
And perhaps most importantly:
A woman does not have to remain attractive to you in order to remain worthy of dignity.
That is the part that bothers me most.
Because underneath so much of this commentary is an extraordinary sense of entitlement—the idea that women somehow arrive in this world owing society an aesthetically pleasing experience.
I don’t walk through the world angry because every man isn’t handsome enough for me.
I don’t believe a man owes me his body because I find him attractive.
I don’t believe he owes me his paycheck because I like money.
I don’t believe he owes me his hands in service, his sexuality, his youth, or any other part of himself simply because those things might please me.
His existence is not a consumer product designed for my satisfaction.
Neither is mine.
Neither is Jasmine Guy’s.
Women are allowed to get old.
We are allowed to gain weight.
Lose weight.
Wrinkle.
Sag.
Gray.
Scar.
Get tired.
Get sick.
Change.
We are even allowed to become completely unattractive by whatever arbitrary standard society has decided to use this decade.
And we are still entitled to respect.
And there’s another part of this that I wish people would consider before they hit “post”:
Jasmine Guy is a real person.
Not Whitley Gilbert. Not a photograph. Not a meme. Not a piece of nostalgia from your childhood that was supposed to remain frozen in 1991 for your enjoyment.
A person.
Imagine opening Facebook and seeing strangers discussing how terrible they think you look. Imagine seeing your mother’s face turned into somebody’s punchline. Imagine being her daughter, her family, one of her friends, or simply someone who loves her, and watching thousands of people who do not know her pick apart her appearance for entertainment.
What exactly is the purpose of that?
What good is being accomplished?
If that were my mother, I would be furious. I would want to defend her in every public square where someone had decided that her aging body was community property available for inspection and ridicule.
And that’s what social media sometimes makes us forget: the person you’re talking about belongs to somebody.
Somebody calls her Mom.
Somebody loves that face.
Somebody knows the voice behind it.
Somebody has held those hands.
Somebody knows an entire human being where the internet sees a photograph.
And even if she had no daughter, no family, no friends and nobody standing beside her, she would still deserve basic human dignity simply because she is a person.
Imagine having spent decades singing, dancing, acting, entertaining people, creating an iconic character, contributing to Black television history—and strangers look at the totality of your life and decide the most noteworthy thing about you is that your face got older.
What an impoverished way to see a human being.
Jasmine Guy doesn’t owe us Whitley Gilbert’s face forever.
She already gave us Whitley.
She gave us the performances.
She gave us the laughter.
She gave us the art.
The rest of her life belongs to her.
And maybe it’s time we finally teach ourselves the lesson I taught one little boy many years ago:
Girls don’t owe you pretty.
And neither do women.
By Kimberly!