True Beauty
Uploaded by Kristy923 on Jan 15, 2004
True Beauty
We all want to be beautiful. For more and more women our “want” to be beautiful has become a desire for thinness. For a long time we have focused on the thin, beautiful women; and in doing this we have created a nation of starving, self-obsessed women dying to be thin. Girls as young as nine years old have developed this “want” for beauty. According to National Organization for Women’s Redefining Liberation Campaign, eighty percent of girls in the fourth grade (ages eight-nine) are already dieting, and four out of every hundred will develop bulimia by the time they are in college. Another third will develop a binge-eating disorder and gain over 20 percent of their normal body weight.
Our society continuously encourages its young women to focus on the superficial rather than the real woman. Media images are always portraying desirable women as being thin. Even as REAL women grow heavier, models and “beautiful” women are portrayed as thinner. I am not bashing the media or blaming advertisements for all the cases of bulimia and anorexia or every occurrence of binge eating. Magazines and all the other media products are just reflections of trends that society holds today.
Magazines, movies, commercials and music videos do not cause low self-esteem or eating disorders, but they absolutely reflect a society that does -- a society that, as I said before, continuously encourages its young women to focus on the superficial rather than the real woman.
If we are going to end this obsession with physical beauty among women, then we need to realize our responsibility as a society. We often use the word society as a safety net for problems. If something is wrong, it is easy to blame society. But if the problem of women expecting to reach an unrealistic body standard or weight is to be solved (if any problem is to be solved), we are going to have to stop seeing society as something beyond ourselves. We have to realize that when someone says “society encourages young women to focus in the superficial,” they are really saying that each of us as individuals do this. We are society!
We just need to question the media’s motives about fashion, cosmetics, diet, exercise, and surgeries. Do we encourage people to do this in order to feel good about...