Beautiful On The Inside

Some indiscriminate time ago, a fine young specimen told me that a woman "..should be beautiful on the inside as well as the outside." Leaving aside, for another more vitriolic post, the arrogance of an assumption about more than 50% of the world's population and the arrogance of the notion that one can dictate preferred qualities on an entire gender, I got to wondering... what would a woman be like on the inside, that is beautiful, that would do any good at all? Universally considered beautiful: a rose; a white dew dropp'd rose... how simple a thing to crush it! To render it bereft of all that made it beautiful! So delicate, so unable to resist ownership, accumulation, admiration and desecration! Useless, in other words, for a woman to be as beautiful as a rose, on the inside... So what, I wonder, would be beautiful yet able to survive the wrath of life? The universally brutal travails of existence? The insects would survive a nuclear war, more so than any other life form, but not the irridescent butterflies, the autumnal moths or spectrolite dragonflies... but the cockroaches, dung beetles and such hard cased scavenging things. Conifers, pine trees, smell beautiful, never lose their needles, are well worth striving to climb though they leave a sticky mess hard to remove! Providing excellent shelter, food and bedding, they are however relentlessly harvested annually for decoration, to be made beautiful, to fill our homes with scent and magic before being discarded on a kerbside or recycled in the great circle of consumerism. A fitting analagy then? A woman ought not to wish for such a fate! So what, 'should' a woman be like?