Media in the past decade has had a vastly negative effect on women in America. Nearly every female targeted advertisement you see involves a woman who has been air-brushed to the point that she is simply inhumanly perfect. Deep down inside, we all know that even if we were to use that particular skin product for the rest of our natural lives, our skin still wouldn’t even remotely resemble the woman’s in the commercial, but now when we look in the mirror, the first thing we’re going to see is every spot and blemish we’ve acquired in all our years on this planet, and now we have a picture in our heads of what we would look like without them.
No one is completely immune to these effects. Whenever I find myself in the beauty products section of my friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart, I am surrounded by pictures of the effects that these products supposedly have, and I find myself holding out on the hope that if I simply bought the slightly more expensive brand of mascara, my lashes would look as silky and thick as the girl’s in the poster, even though I know perfectly well that the human body is totally incapable of growing that many eyelashes.
Jane Tallim informs us, “Digital manipulation is the foundation of the fashion and beauty industry, where air-brushed and digitally enhanced portrayals of ideal… female beauty promote standards of attractiveness that are impossible to achieve”
Now, suppose that a woman somehow becomes completely calloused to these advertisements; without making any effort to compete with the media’s “Every-day Woman,” how good are her chances of attracting a man who has had the exact same amount of exposure to pure, super-human beauty unless he also somehow manages to become completely immune to the visual expectations that he is bombarded with every day of his life?
The human race is more beautiful than it has ever been. Not only are beauty products more available, effective, and non-toxic than ever, the process of natural selection has caused us to develop into a largely attractive race. The more attractive you are, the more likely you are to reproduce. Hence, beautiful people marry each other and have beautiful babies. So why do eight million Americans have self-image based eating disorders? And why are only ten to fifteen percent of all cases of anorexia and bulimia male ?
It is because male fashion models don’t have a maximum weight requirement of 115 lbs, only to be slimmed down even further on the computer before being published.
When I was sixteen, I was accepted into the McCarty’s Talent Agency in Utah. I have always been slim for my height, but when I expressed an interest in modeling, I was weighed, measured, and then informed that I would have to grow two inches and lose ten pounds to become a high-fashion model.
This is a difficult time for the fairer sex. I no longer can allow myself to buy fashion magazines when I go grocery shopping. Not obsessing over my average face and body may be an uphill struggle, but I am not going to waste my time and energy competing with something that doesn’t exist.
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