Does This Article Make Me Look Fat?
There ought to be a new law. Those in favor could lobby Congress with me:
Each magazine or tabloid editor who publishes close-ups of a celebrity's less-than-dainty derriere should be themselves photographed by a rival publication—under fluorescent lights from unflattering angles.
Turnabout is fair play.
I know that all the talk these days is about airbrushed beauties who look "perfect" in every way. And I'll get to that in a minute. But there's an, um, underbelly to celebrity culture that's equally significant. So significant, in fact, that I'm getting sick of being accosted by famous cellulite while waiting beside tabloid racks in grocery store checkout lanes. You know the headlines: "Cover Your Flab, Grown Men Are Crying!" "Britney Lets Herself Go!" "More Oprah Than Ever Before!" "Famous Bods That Look Beached!"
Why are these stars so viciously skewered for looking perfectly normal?
In the 1960s, the average runway model was 15 pounds lighter than the average woman. In the 1990s, she was 35 pounds lighter and four inches taller. And she continues to waste away and grow taller while being splashed across every form of media as a ridiculously impossible standard of feminine beauty.
As our concept of reality shrinks with each cover girl, women of all walks of life feel pressured to look that "good." Though educational and career opportunities have vastly expanded during the last 40 or so years, our world's definition of beauty has dramatically and unfairly narrowed.
With such demands from society, what woman hasn't beaten herself up for not having an "attractive enough" body? And thanks to countless publications that radically retouch photographs of models, more men than ever before have glanced at their un-Photoshopped girlfriends or wives and secretly thought, Man, I wish she'd lose a few pounds.
So who caused outrageous beauty standards to hijack our minds and send tabloid headline writers into a heavy-duty frenzy? Victoria's Secret? Vanity Fair? Vogue? Foreign fashionistas?
Line Up, Lemmings
Most of us think our notion of beauty is innate—that media merely reflect and promote what the world has always considered attractive. But our perception of aesthetics is actually rather arbitrary. Individual cultures shape their own concepts of what looks good. And they do so relentlessly. As a result, it's unlikely that any of us have had too many inventive thoughts on who or what is beautiful—because since birth we've been unconsciously trained to accept the consensus opinion of the particular society we are a part of.
If you don't think we're all beauty lemmings, then look back through history. What, other than relentless peer pressure and/or mild to moderate insanity would cause entire cultures to consider foot-binding, hair-plucking for forehead elongation and eyebrow-shaving with mouse fur replacements—not to mention parachute pants and most of the clothing from the 1970s—to be remotely attractive?
But if you still need further evidence, then visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Full Figures Were All That and a Large Bag of Potatoes
When I lived in New York, my friend Leah and I used to wander around the Met and routinely get lost because the place is a labyrinth. One afternoon we ended up in a gallery of Renaissance-era portraits, many of them nudes. Leah pointed at a painting of several corpulent, unclothed women and sighed, "Clearly, I was born in the wrong century."
Maybe she was. She would have been a hottie in Peter Paul Rubens' day. Her fair complexion is striking. Hair and eyes, exquisite. And her body, buxom—much like Rubens' rotund, happy, glowing models who were considered gorgeous.
Then. But not typically now.
It's hard to imagine, but being slender and tan used to indicate that you were a poor manual laborer who didn't have the status or wealth to be plump and pale. The Bible itself mentions skin-tone socioeconomics in the Song of Songs when the Beloved disparagingly compares her own sun-kissed complexion to black goat-hair pelts: "Dark am I, yet lovely ... dark like the tents of Kedar." In essence, she's self-consciously telling her lover that she's beautiful despite her sun-browned skin, not because of it.
That's a tack you'll never see today's multimillion-dollar tanning salon industry take.
Saving Society From Size-2 Standards
In the United States, 42 percent of 1st- through 3rd-grade girls want to be thinner. Eighty-one percent of 10-year-olds are worried about being fat. Sixty percent of adult women would trade three to five years of their life in order to maintain their ideal weight long term. Some 80 percent of women say images on TV and in movies, fashion magazines and advertising make them feel insecure about their looks.
Why? Because if tabloids crucify "fat" and "homely" size-2 celebrities, normal women and girls begin to think, If there's something wrong with her, then there must be something seriously wrong with me!
God mentions beauty frequently in the Bible. He delights in it, and it was His idea! But how we twist His ideas has sinister side effects. We have wrongly made a woman's body an object to be "perfected" on the exterior, though her heart means much more in His eyes. For example, when was the last time you complimented a little girl on her sweet spirit rather than her dress or pretty blonde hair?
I'm not saying women shouldn't use makeup or care about their attire. As a former pastor friend used to joke, "If the barn needs painting, paint it!" And though I work with a group of men who wouldn't notice if I wore a burlap bag to the office, I do make an effort to appear attractive.
What I am saying is that it's time for a societal shift. And to pull that off, we have to start with ourselves. After all, our underlying problem isn't one of weight or attractiveness at all. It's of identity and chronic anxiety over issues of acceptance. Each of us tends to look outside of ourselves for affirmation regarding what we're worth. But God tells us to look at Him, not our thighs, abs or cheekbones.
The Hollywood machine and the tabloids that surround it aren't doing any of us any favors. So in defense of reason and truth, we need to recognize and take inventory of the ways media have affected or damaged our beliefs about appearance.
Maybe once we start doing that we can get a grip on this merciful maxim: "Pretty" is something some people are naturally born with; "beautiful" is an equal opportunity adjective.