What We Need to Be Doing

The media does not tell us the right things to do, like to look for things that we like about our appearance instead of things we want to change. The markets certainly never urge us to look for the beauty inside because the cosmetics industry's financial success depends on us concentrating and hating on the outside. Instead of telling us to pay attention to our health and our emotions, we are told to focus on our wrinkles, our tummys, our hair. We are told to hate the way we age, the way we look, the way others see us; we are told to spend money and hours everyday trying to change our appearance… all so others can like a fake us?

Is anyone else tired of this message being thrown at us everywhere we look? Isn’t the media supposed to be serving us… not the other way around? Beauty has nothing to do with height and weight or expensive clothing and make up. It’s our job to get the ball rolling in the other direction, to make sure the next generation of little girls aren’t taught to hate their bodies.

Let’s teach the world to be happy with their healthy, beautiful individuality. Instead of spending billions on surgeries and makeup to change the way we look, billions on diets and workouts to lose the weight we don’t need to lose, let’s work towards a positive goal. Let’s take that money and spend it on programs to reverse the negative effects the past decades have had on our body image. Let’s show the kids that beauty is everywhere, in every shape and size and color. Let’s teach the world to love each other again.

A Glimpse of Change?

There are two modern television shows that simply sum up each view on the beauty ideal.

The antagonist:
“The Swan was a 2004 U.S. reality television program broadcast on Fox in which supposedly very ugly women were given "extreme makeovers" that included several forms of plastic surgery. The title of the series refers to the story of The Ugly Duckling that grows up and becomes a swan.”

The protagonist:
How to Look Good Naked is a television program, first aired on British Channel 4 in 2006, in which fashion stylist Gok Wan encourages women who are insecure with their bodies to strip nude for the camera. The program is unique among other similar makeover shows in that it never encourages participants to undergo cosmetic surgery or lose weight.

And here’s the good news: The Swan was cancelled and How to Look Good Naked thrives on. Maybe the media is finally hearing the message from everyday women that we’re tired of the skinny plastic version of beauty being shoved down our throats? Let’s hope for more of this.

Plastic Chaos

There is an even more extreme insecurity-preying industry that we’ve come to accept as a society. Cosmetic surgery. People will spend obscene amounts of money to have doctors cut into their skin, so they can be “prettier”. The most popular procedures are relatively well known: liposuction, breast augmentation, BOTOX, facelift, tummy tuck, and rhinoplasty.
There are also some rather lesser known and just as ridiculous surgeries such as: necklift, chemical peel, cheek implants, fat injections, lip augmentation, dermabrasion, body contouring, gastric bypass, buttock implants, calf augmentation, and hand rejuvenation.

Here are some descriptions from cosmeticsurgery.com (a site promoting the surgeries):

Facelift: $5,000-$10,000: During the facelift procedure, excess fat is removed and underlying muscles are tightened and the remaining facial skin is redraped.

Dermabrasion: $400: Dermabrasion is a procedure where the surgeon scrapes away the top layers of skin using an electrically operated instrument with a rough wire brush or diamond-impregnated burr.

Body contouring: $20,000-$55,000: This is a very extensive procedure, where excess skin is removed and the remaining skin is pulled, tightening it up.

Chemical Peel: $600-$4,000: A chemical peel is a procedure that uses chemical solutions to improve upon these skin conditions, leaving it looking smoother and younger.

Fat injections: $1,100: This procedure involves removing fat cells from areas of one’s body, including the abdomen, thighs, and others, then injecting this fat into the person’s facial area.
Necklift: $3,000-$5,000: During the neck lift procedure, excess fat and skin are removed from the neck and the neck muscles are either removed or altered.

Tummy tuck: $4,000-$8,000: This is achieved by removing excess skin and fat from the abdominal area, and having the muscles tightened.

Buttock implants: This involves the surgical insertion of artificial implants into the buttocks in order to enhance its size and shape.

Gastric bypass: $20,000-$55,000: the stomach is made smaller by creating a small pouch at the top of the stomach using surgical staples or a plastic band. The smaller stomach is connected directly to the middle portion of the small intestine, bypassing the rest of the stomach and the upper portion of the small intestine.

All sounds really pleasant right? People are so desperate to be skinny and “perfect” that they will risk their lives under a knife, spend thousands of dollars, go through weeks of painful recovery, have fat injected into their faces, plastic bands put around their waist, and even have their muscles or pieces of their stomach removed.

Instead of dealing with our self-image issues in a healthy, constructive way, we are encouraging women to pay thousands of dollars so doctors can slice them up, inject chemicals and animal fat into their skin. We’re masking the real issue with a risky, costly, debilitating “solution”.

11,701,031 of these procedures were documented in 2007.

Even more disturbing – over 333,000 of these procedures were on people 18 and under. Meaning parents or guardians granted permission for 4,108 girls to get breast augmentation, 8,194 to get Botox (what wrinkles do you have to get rid of when you’re a teenager?!), 2,735 agreed their children should get liposuctions, 26,709 let them get a chemical peel, and 373 got a tummy tuck. When you’re under 18 you should be worrying about find thing the perfect dress for prom, your recent crush, and graduating high school, not having bigger breasts, less wrinkles, and smaller tummies. Yes, some of these cases were fixing anatomical problems like Poland’s syndrome, but over half of the breast augmentations in girls under 18 were purely cosmetic.

Breast implants are becoming an increasingly popular high school graduation gift. I think that occurrence speaks for itself.How can parents be approving of letting their daughters surgically alter their appearance? Shouldn’t they be reinforcing to them that they are beautiful just how they are? Where would I be today if my father had not consistently and persistently told me when I was younger that I was “the most beautiful girl in the world”? What if instead I had been like my close high school friend whose mother convinced her she NEEDED a nose job? Is that healthy? Is this what society is crumbling into? Can we please all reach over knock some sense into the person next to you? We’ve all gone mad.

Julie lost 74 pounds!

The diet industry makes money by preying on our insecurities. They start off by telling us, you’re too fat. You’re obviously not beautiful. Look at those thighs, that butt, that stomach. Men will never find you attractive when you are that huge.

But, they tell us, there is hope. It’s okay, we can help you. Just look! These people have used our wonderful, easy, miracle treatment and they are so skinny, so happy, so perfect now. And, lucky you! You can be just as skinny, happy, perfect as they are. Just buy our product. You’ll lose weight, and therefore people will love you and you will love you. We promise, just give us your money and do everything we say.

Jenny Craig promises to “lose 20 pounds for just $20” (“plus the cost of food”). Trimspa’s offers of a seven-day supply of chocolate Hoodia weight-loss supplements for $24.95.

Yet, they all have been denounced by the doctors and specialists, at least those who are not being paid to promote them. For the most part, these diet programs and pills don’t work in the long term, are harmful to your health, and cost ridiculous amounts of money. What ever happened to the historically-proven method of eating healthy and exercising regularly?

Yet American’s desperately spend $40 billion a year on weight-loss programs and products. FORTY BILLION DOLLARS. There are so many more productive ways we could spend that money. Actually, most ways we spend forty billion dollars would be smarter than on fake chemicals that only worsen our health.

The ad to the right is a typically ridiculous message. Apparently, if we're not on AcaiBurnMax, we won't find love, nevertheless a date, or be as happy as the little blonde woman in the picture.

These advertisements, these promised miracles, are something we all see everyday. For the most part, we simply glance at it and move on; but do we realize that the tiny effects add up after seeing outrageous numbers of these weekly? Is that okay with you? It's not okay with me.

Things Change.

Things change. People evolve, cultures reinvent themselves, social norms morph. Change is an inevitable part of every aspect of life. However, and quite unfortunately, change can sometimes also cause a lot of damage. The change in the beauty ideals of women from luscious, healthy, natural bodies to the skin and bones and breasts of “beauty” now has caused of lot of anguish.

The definition of beauty has transformed from the gorgeous, voluptuous women of the 1950’s and 1960’s into the blond skeletons the media projects at us now.

Men used to drool over Marilyn Monroe, women used to emulate Esther Williams. These women would today be considered FAT. We’ve gone from loving the curvy women of Rembrandt’s art to skipping meals and cutting calories to look like a girl from a Calvin Klein ad.

How sad is it that the first thing we usually see about another person is their outward beauty, or lack thereof? Height, skin, hair, weight, breast size – that is NOT what makes you beautiful. We should be judged on the way we treat others, the love we express through respect and kindness; we should NOT be loved or love ourselves simply because we can survive on 500 calories a day, or because we can fit into those size 0 pants.

True beauty comes in all shapes, ages, colors, and sizes. Yes, of course, there are very beautiful women who are 5’10”, 120lb; but they are beautiful because of their strength, because of their character. They are gorgeous because they let their personalities shine. There are also 5’1” 200 lb girls who are just as stunning as their counterparts.

Every single one of the women in that picture are beautiful; they are each unique and glamorous.
But, why do we not all feel this way and treat our bodies and ourselves fairly? Not the only reason, but a huge factor is the media. Magazines, movies, television, advertisements. They're all overtly or subliminally telling us we can't be beautiful if we aren't skinny. But they're wrong. And things need to change again, this time for the benefit of everyone.

Ideas

I had this idea/urge to see exactly how many overt and covert "be thin and look this way" messages were in issues of magazines either people I know or I personally read. I'm going to go spend some time cutting apart the Cosmo issue of April 2009. If it's effective in proving a point, I'll go hunting for some other magazines. Maybe a giant collage of pictures and words will be good.

Close to Home

So, I sent out an anonymous survey on Facebook to about 70 girls I know. So far, 19 have responded (I don't know which ones answered but it's personally effected me all the same).

I was saddened but not surprised by the answers the girls (ages 16-21) gave.

Q1: How often do you think about your physical appearance daily?
multiple times
whenever I walk past a mirror
constantly
everytime someone else looks at me
almost all the time
almost always

Q2: Have you ever cried because you felt not pretty enough?
11/19 girls said yes.

Q3: Have you ever not eaten what you wanted to because it had too many calories?
89.5% said yes.


Q4: How does the average supermodel make you feel about yourself?
insufficient
fat
fatter
like i wish i could be as skinny and toned as them
fat
fat
ugly
shitty
huge
the average supermodel is a body image to strive towards, albeit an extreme, unattainable goal
fat
fat
that you need to be skinny to be pretty

Q5: How often do you feel the need to be skinnier?
daily
often
always
every day
constantly
I would love to be skinnier
most days
all the time
daily
frequently
too much
almost always

Q6: Do you feel the media's definition of beauty is fair?
The response to this question worried me most
Only 73.7% said no.
Yet, 89.5% don't eat what they want because it has too many calories. This means that not all these girls agree that the media's definition of beauty is unfair. Is this because they truly think the media is not an influence on the need to be skinny or is because they think that the media's ideal image is really beautiful and what they should strive to be?

These numbers and responses impacted me even more than national statistics. These are girls that I personally know and interact with. And I can think of maybe 8 of the 70 who would still look healthy after losing 10lbs. Yet, almost all of them feel fat, don't eat what they want, and feel the need to be skinner daily.