My wife is beautiful. It’s not just me who thinks so… her former boyfriends and male friends would love to take a shot. However, she has a problem. She claims she needs to lose 15 pounds. WTF?! My wife does not need to lose any weight. She is thin enough already! However, I’ve noticed that often enough when she mentions that she needs to lose weight it is because she is reading some stupid magazine that glamorizes women or watching some Oscar show or award show… It bothers me that my wife is so weak willed that she lets these images create such an effect on me.
So, is my wife weak willed (which I suspect) or is it actually possible that Hollywood can affect one’s state of mind?
How does glamarization affect society?
Is this affect mostly seen in industrialized nations or can examples be seen elsewhere?
My daughter is 21 and I see this all the time with
her and her friends. Women comparing themselves with
the 8 or 10 most genetically perfect women on the planet
earth. the plastic surgery craze is driven by these women.
Trying to look like those 8 or 10 women who look “perfect”
out of over 3 billion women.
My theory is women are driven by two things, one is
a self-esteem issue and the other is they don’t know what they
want . You get women with a different mix of those two issues.
I’ve commented on this before but I’ll rehash my version of events.
There is no 8 or 10 most perfect women - FHM publishes a different top 10 each year. There is no one version of female beauty to which all women simultaneously aspire. There is only the lack of sufficient self-esteem to just not give a damn, there is the expectation of women that somehow they just aren’t good enough. The curvier women think that they need to be thinner so they starve themselves or get some quack to suck out their lardbags through a tube, the skinnier women think that they need to have greater curves so they get breast implants (sometimes several consecutive enlargements so that they start to totally fuck up their backs) or wear extremely tight, low-slung trousers to imply that their curves are so dramatic that they are busting out of their clothes…
Basically you can sell a lot more varieties of fashion and surgery if you have no specific canon of beauty but maintain the widespread feeling of having not achieved proper beauty. J-lo doesn’t look like Kylie, particularly, their buttocks are quite differently shaped but apparently they both have the ‘ideal’ rump. Personally I have a fine rump and wouldn’t want it to be more like Kylies (it is more like Kylies than J-los) though I’m not claiming that the rest of my physique is quite so fine. I’m fine with that. Apparently most girls that I’ve met worry about their bottoms more than any other part of their body.
It’s a curious one, particularly as a male observer who reads so little into definitions of beauty. I’ll freely admit that I find most women to be superficially attractive, not because I have low standards as such, but more so because there are reasons to find beauty in just about every face.
Even I can’t pretend that I can see how to be attracted to some of these people…
edit - incidentally when I was glancing over the total number of votes on these ratings websites I did notice that the unpleasant ones got many many more votes than the pleasants ones - more people were concerned with voting others ugly than with voting them beautiful.