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The S.F. Chronicle featured some articles about a museum show and book describing how young girls are pressured to conform to an ideal of "beauty," and how they learn to be dissatisfied with themselves and their bodies. (See http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/02/02/LV40274.DTL and http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/02/02/LV40148.DTL). One of the authors was a former classmate of my daughter's, so I wrote him a letter (poor man, I should have just written it here). Following is part of that letter. Is the pressure to conform to an ideal of beauty new? No. I still remember the chapter in Little Women, "Meg Goes to Vanity Fair," when oldest sister Margaret is 'made over' by her friends and "laced into a sky-blue dress which was so tight she could hardly breathe and so low in the neck that modest Meg blushed at herself in the mirror." First publish date? 1868. Unattainable beauty is a centuries-old message, we're just transmitting it with our latest media. And the message doesn't disappear over here on the downward slide of life's slope. For every unattainable goal that women relax about as we age (at 45, I no longer have to worry about looking good in a crop top), we exchange it for a regret (I'm less attractive since I'm too old for a crop top). We live the message, we can't escape it, and sadly, we pass it along to our children. My stepdaughter is a beautiful girl. Yet I'm certain I contributed to any feelings she had as a teen or may have now about not being attractive due to some imagined deficiency. All mothers with daughters face this. As long as we're still struggling with our own self-image, worrying about our weight or complaining about our looks, we model image insecurity for our children. It's worse as a stepparent, because you're also competing, but we all ask ourselves: "How can I reassure her she's beautiful, when I can't feel that way about myself?" But to find the source of the pressure, I think this quote [from article #2 above] from a barker in front of a sex show in San Francisco's North Beach is worth examining more: "When women look good, they feel good, and when they feel good, they have good sex." Change that to second person and add one word: "When you think you look good, you feel good, and when you feel good, you have good sex." Is that not true for all of us, men and women? It's all about the desire to be desirable. I don't think we can unpeel it from the basic urge to make our genetic material look attractive enough that we can entice someone into helping us pass it along. We all feel the pressure to conform, to be attractive, to fit in. The pressure on men is not so much on physical beauty, though overweight boys can tell you that they are ostracized in much the same way overweight girls are. The difference in response might be that women tend to blame themselves for their troubles, while men blame others. So girls starve or cut themselves while boys just get resentful. But not all -- an old boyfriend of mine spent a couple of years fighting bulemia because he was a little chunky. It even seems like desirability, that trigger to keep us procreating, is stronger than the actual goal of procreation. My sister, who is fairly heavyset and also a lesbian, once told me that being overweight prevented men from getting close, kept her protected. But she didn't tell me if, among her girlfriends, there's still pressure to be beautiful in some way. I would not be surprised if there were, just expressed in different ways. I don't have any close homosexual male friends to confirm this, but it appears to me that beauty can be a big deal in that world as well. And given that, I don't know if I can "blame" anyone, other than our general culture for being better at fostering self-criticism than self-esteem. Maybe we are built to doubt ourselves, men and women both. I don't think the media's ability to spread our insane ideals of beauty farther and faster every year is a root cause; it's a secondary evil of our primary flaw: we desire so desperately to be desired. |