What Price Beauty?

A couple months ago, my pastor was preaching on love, sex, and marriage.  (You can imagine we had paricularly high attendance that Sunday.)  Our congregation is largely made up of young, professional singles, many of whom long to one day get married.  During the sermon, he said something addressed to the women that really got me thinking:

Every single woman in this room needs to know that you are beautiful.  It is something we don't say enough.

He is absolutely right -- on both counts.  Telling the women in our lives that they are beautiful is something that most of us don't say enough -- to our friends, our wives, our mothers, and our daughters.  It is a message that is important for all women to hear.

Our pastor went on to discuss how much we all expect an unrealistic standard of beauty from the women and how this is wrong.  Women feel pressured to try to look like super-models and men all too often encourage that behavior.

It looks like Dove thinks the same thing and has a wonderful series of videos called "Real Beauty" to bring focus to this issue.  Here is one of them:

I don't think us men realize the pressure many women feel about their appearance.  I'm not even sure if there's a male equivalent?  (Financial / career success perhaps?  Even this is very different.)

According to this video report, British girls have one of the lowest levels of self-esteem in the world.  One in four report wanting to have plastic surgery by the time they are sixteen:

Here is another video about how negatively many young girls in school view their appearance.

This video illustrates how much images of models are modified before reaching the public (giving us distorted expectations of beauty):

I don't think the focus on beauty is anything new, but I do think it is hyper-attenuated in Western culture for a mixture of reasons.  One of the primary causes is exposure to images of extreme beauty at a rate never before seen in human history.  In ages past, people saw other women in their villages.  Today, they see them from around the world -- on TV, in magazines, at the movies, on billboards, etc.  Another factor is unprecedented wealth that allows women to pursue far more avenues to enhance their appearance than at any time in the past.

While I don't think it is an entirely Western phenomenon, I do think it varies across cultures.  In 2003, I traveled to India with two American women and remember them commenting on how cool they thought it was that Indian women would wear clothing that exposed their stomachs, regardless of their weight.  I didn't think much about it at the time, but that is something most American women would certainly shy away from.  It is an interesting contrast.  What was also interesting was how all the women -- even in the poorest villages we visited -- were wearing incredibly colorful and beautiful clothing, even if the men were dressed in near rags. 

At all income levels in all cultures aroudnd the world, feminine beauty, in all its forms, is highly valued.  The question is at what price?