Our parents’ generations spent their entire lives trying to improve the social opinion of women. They worked for a more realistic standard of feminine beauty and tried to be accepted for something other than their looks.
Yet now it seems like that entire movement has been turned upside down. Instead of trying to be seen for their unique traits, women have begun to focus solely on how they can be seen as sexual objects. America keeps forcing that view down our throats at every turn.
We’ve pretty much returned to the 60’s, when the only real value women had was how they were viewed by men. After our parents’ generation tried so hard to make women be seen as people and not as their gender, we have pretty much screwed it. Nowadays, it seems everything about women pertains to sex or being a sexual being.
Television especially keeps forcing down our throats that we have to meet a specific standard of beauty to even be accepted. There has been a long line of horrendous shows focused on making women fit perfect Barbie doll stereotypes. And even the shows that don’t literally give women a makeover have every girl on the show with some type of plastic surgery or procedure to make them look younger or more ideal.
E! Channel now has a new show called Bridalplasty that is honestly terrifying. Women literally go head-to-head in cutthroat challenges to “earn” the right to have a plastic surgery of their choice off a “wish-list” that they made before the show. Then these women get paraded across TV, being made into the perfect bride, while viciously cutting each other down to size throughout the process.
And the worst part of this show is that it takes each woman individually, and publicly points out each tiny little imperfection by circling them on their bodies while they stand in their underwear.
It’s mind-boggling how they aren’t absolutely mortified by being objectified like this. I really hope I’m not the only person who finds this disturbing and demeaning.
The whole idea that women have to be completely redesigned, muck like full-grown Barbie dolls, to be accepted by their husbands is disgusting.
What does this say about what society is teaching current and future generations? That these women need to be perfect cookie-cutters of the current image of beauty to be married to their husbands.
Even Perez Hilton had his say in how much we should hate this show and others like it. That should really say something. But then again, these are the same people who created previous shows like The Swan where women were also made over from “ugly ducklings” into beautiful “swans.”
Yet again this goes back to how unrealistic American society has become about how women should look. What’s wrong with being who you are? I would rather my husband or boyfriend be attracted to me for who I am. Not whatever fake good looks I managed to buy so that I could look like a clone of Heidi Montague. The worst part of such a superficial societal atmosphere is how it effects the younger generations. Barbie looks usually can’t be achieved through plastic surgery.
It’s disturbing that we have somehow created a society that not only has an entirely new subset of image problems for women, but also has a serious negative impact on the psychological growth of young generations.
Psychological problems like eating disorders and depression have been on the rise, especially in young girls.
And to make matters worse, the American media has created a new breed of girls who actually strive to attain eating disorders just so they can look better.
Indeed, communities like Pro-Ana are dedicated to teaching girls how to be anorexic and bulimic.
Girls in these communities force themselves to lose extreme amounts of weight just to reach what they think is a model’s weight.
Why on earth would we want these girls to make themselves unhealthy or spend thousands of dollars to reach a ridiculous physical standard? Why, or more aptly, how, has American society gone so far with this shallow obsession with image?
