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In the eye of the beholder?
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It seems to me that no matter how old we get and how much wisdom we acquire from our experiences, most of us never truly find contentment with ourselves. While I think that it is a part of human nature that exists in all of us, you can't argue that this problem seems to plague women the most. We are never satisfied with what God or Dr. 90210 has given us.
It is a no brainier that we live in a world that worships pretty people. Being physically beautiful has its advantages. Things just get handed to you; people will fight to open doors for you. The problem resides in the notion that the question "what is beautiful?" can almost never be answered. Cause really who can be the judge of something like that? Parents, Vogue, MTV, men....Maybe it's Tyra Banks ?
People may argue that the media defines what is beautiful and I can agree with that to an extent. You can't turn a blind eye to your environment however, most environments are centered around a television set. Mine certainly was. My generation grew up with icons like Claudia Schiffer and Stephanie Seymour gracing the covers of magazines and playfully pouting for Cover Girl ads. A few years later "beautiful" shifted into a completely different world and Kate Moss and "heroin chic" were all the rage. That was what my media fed me, day in and day out,and none of them looked anything like me.
There I was a short, chubby, dark skinned ecuadorian girl who did not have "who's that lady hair" or "we wear short shorts" legs. I had piles of thick, ebony hair awkwardly growing out on my head and that was styled to make me look like one of those Sally Struther kids that needed your small donation to get me though the year. But I was still a dreamer and wanted to be the first non-white singer/actress/ ballerina. So while I dreamt of becoming big things, I knew it would have to be after my grand makeover to the white world. I was suffering from the Michael Jackson syndrome. Good thing I was too poor for aesthetic surgery! I can laugh about it now but at the time it was so sad because I knew that I wasn't the only one going through this problem. All the girls who weren't Cindy Crawford and who could never be Cindy must have felt like i did: ugly.
These days fabulous companies like Dove have developed campaigns to boost self-esteem in our youth. Commercials with real sized women occasionally get airplay on TV and the occasional self-esteem workshop is offered to school girls (if you are in the right district that is). Hollywood has also embraced ethnic looks and hurray for me, it is fashionable to be latina! (17 years too late I may add). Actresses and singers of hispanic descent seem to be everywhere: J-Lo, Salma Hayek, Eva Longoria, Dr. Torres on Grey's and Ugly Betty herself.
But even though America Ferrera is one of Hollywood's new it girls, and even though she does looks like me, I know that if people were given a choice between her and Jessica Alba or Eva Mendez, America would lose almost every time. She is beautiful just not beautiful enough.
So you can campaign all you want Dove, we can put every woman in several episodes of "How to look good naked" and it still won't stop us from always wanting to lose 5-10 pounds, or wishing that we didn't have so many freckles, or wishing that we were born with mom's more "refined" nose rather than dad's big nose. We will still feel guilty after eating that second slice of pizza and we will still hate on a woman simply because she wears a size 2 and we don't. No one has ever taught women to stop hating and truly begin to love themselves. Not one of us have stopped nit-picking our faces and calling our unique traits " imperfections." Why do I have to have my "imperfections", why can't I have Angelina Jolie's instead?
I believe in leading by example. I want the younger generation to look at all of us oldies as positive role models of self-esteem. And as much as I want to say I love how I look, most days I want to look like Adriana Lima, so what does that say about the future for women?
For more info: http://www.dove.us/#/cfrb/
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