America - Land of the Beautiful

...

In addition, I think living in Southern California puts even more added pressure on someone to be physically fit and attractive. Most people think of California as a place where everyone is constantly at the beach, working out, and eating healthy. The fact that Hollywood has become a mecca for any aspiring actor or model has reinforced the idea that California is filled with beautiful people due to all of the competition among the entertainment industry. To illustrate this even further, in Orange County where I attended high school, I witnessed the girls around me become increasingly obsessed with how they looked and become more and more willing to take drastic courses of action to change them. It was not unheard of or even questioned, for example, if one of your friends came back with a different nose after spring break. Several of my girlfriends got a new pair of breasts as a graduation present. Looking back, it really makes me sad that at such a young age these girls felt such immense pressure to look a certain way that they resorted to intensive cosmetic surgery.

These days, I work as a counselor at a treatment center for women specializing in recovery from eating disorders. I see women every day who have been severely affected by the the idealistic view of beauty and perfection American society has practically been forcing down their throats since they could read and write. Photos in teen magazines never show overweight girls being asked to prom by the quarterback of the football team, it is always the skinny captain of the cheerleading squad. Models in fashion magazines are severely thin, having a BMI that would be considered underweight. This is what society is training us as a population to acknowledge as beautiful. Indeed, society’s standards of beauty are unattainable for most women.

Most women are not 6 feet tall and weigh 120 pounds. In fact, less than five percent of women are born with the body type of a model. Society is projecting this image of perfection and beauty onto a population that will never naturally be able to fit this standard. Emotional and mental consequences of this are immeasurable. Girls as young as five years old are being diagnosed with eating disorders because they are not able to become as thin or perfect as the impossibly perfect (and usually photoshopped) girls in the magazines. I can only hope that one day America can loosen it’s grip on it’s obsession with appearances and instead place more value in the integrity and character of a person.