Consider This

I've been thinking a lot today about body image/photoshop/beauty mostly because we had two presentations on those topics in my media effects class. And then I get on Facebook when I get to work and see so many people have been reading articles on this kind of particular topic. One was a picture that showed supermodels before they had been touched up, which we see all the time in magazine articles entitled "Celebrities Exposed" or "They're Just Like You" or something like that.

Sooo why does everyone still think they look like they do on the cover of Glamour magazine?? And the better question is what is this doing to girls/women? I don't know about other girls, but I find that it gets a bit depressing sometimes to never be able to have the perfect skin/hair/eyelashes that all these models or celebrities have.

That's why I really liked this little fake advertisement that was shown in our class today. I am totally for enhancing photos in Photoshop.. I happen to absolutely love Photoshop. I am a big fan of covering up that pesky zit that just happened to come on the one day that you get with friends and take a picture. I am not a fan of altering all your photos so that you appear to be someone you're not. Simple as that. Real people are beautiful, and the media has perhaps lost sight of that.

That's why I love the Dove campaign for real beauty which is the other video I posted. This obsession with having the perfect body is downgrading women, making them into nothing more than eye candy. I'm not saying don't eat healthy, work out as much as you can, and take care of yourself... I'm saying don't let unattainable beauty be the focus of your life.

 

If you're still reading, there's a talk by Elder Holland entitled "To Young Women" that I posted some good quotes from: (It may look kinda long but it's really good, I promise!)

"I plead with you young women to please be more accepting of yourselves, including your body shape and style, with a little less longing to look like someone else. We are all different. Some are tall, and some are short. Some are round, and some are thin. And almost everyone at some time or other wants to be something they are not! But as one adviser to teenage girls said: “You can’t live your life worrying that the world is staring at you.

Frankly, the world has been brutal with you in this regard. You are bombarded in movies, television, fashion magazines, and advertisements with the message that looks are everything! The pitch is, “If your looks are good enough, your life will be glamorous and you will be happy and popular.” That kind of pressure is immense in the teenage years, to say nothing of later womanhood. In too many cases too much is being done to the human body to meet just such a fictional (to say nothing of superficial) standard. As one Hollywood actress is reported to have said recently: “We’ve become obsessed with beauty and the fountain of youth. … I’m really saddened by the way women mutilate [themselves] in search of that. I see women [including young women] … pulling this up and tucking that back. It’s like a slippery slope. [You can’t get off of it.] … It’s really insane … what society is doing to women.”

In terms of preoccupation with self and a fixation on the physical, this is more than social insanity; it is spiritually destructive, and it accounts for much of the unhappiness women, including young women, face in the modern world.

One would truly need a great and spacious makeup kit to compete with beauty as portrayed in media all around us. Yet at the end of the day there would still be those “in the attitude of mocking and pointing their fingers” as Lehi saw, because however much one tries in the world of glamour and fashion, it will never be glamorous enough."