Getting Back to Basics

Ever since the very humble beginnings of history, the female bodice has been a form that has been revered as one of the most pleasurable of sights for a multitude of reasons; for her softness, her curvature, her length...it's attractiveness appealing not only in aesthetics, but stimulating to the sexual appetite as well. There is a special beauty about a woman's form in it's most natural state that can be easily recognized by most. However, when that same untouched body lengthily goes through the process of being tucked, pulled, plucked, stretched and swelled into an unrecognizable, unattainable and, most importantly, artificial version of what it used to be and then labeled the cultural 'ideal', in turn, how many young minds are devastatingly warped everyday into trying to achieve that impossible altitude of aesthetics? How many individual markers of beauty are thus sapped away from their very reflections they see in the mirror, their self esteems dwindling to almost nothing as a response? Just how many?

With the magic of airbrush and photoshop, this beautiful woman isn't even recognizable anymore.

When girls and women compare themselves to this stylistically molded airbrushed stencil of the female form, it's no wonder that there is a billion dollar business today in cosmetics and plastic surgery in order to achieve this impossible ideal. As touched upon in previous postings, the female sex has been devalued by our media, with it's use in the gender binary coming up to nothing more than an aesthetic for men to fawn upon, her beauty being very well her only weapon in life and her only source of worth; born to be observed, never to act. (insert quote here) With this much devaluation constantly being paraded in front of the eyes of growing children, girls make an unnatural strive for strength and acceptance in how they are observed by the opposite sex (something that is not often practiced by their male counterparts interestingly enough), finding no way else to achieve that same sense of self worth in other parts of life. It's a depressing reality, and whether we are conscious of it or not, a system we often succumb to begrudgingly, where we are forced to validate our very existence by how sexually appealing men find us.

An extreme parody of how some men view women in this day and age; not caring at all for a woman's wit or personality, but only the chance of a night's sexual conquest. As disgusting as it might seem, this is unfortunately true for a lot of men and is a result of the systematic exploitation that women face everyday. 

 In advertising, natural human attributes are warped into ugliness with the use of airbrushing techniques and digital alteration, and the girls and women who view these images are none the wiser that no human on this earth can achieve that grade of flawlessness normally.

Even Britney Spears can't escape it...

Skinny or 'waifish' forms are the set standard, and yet even some of the more thin models are still altered artificially to make them appear even thinner. According to Anthony Cortese, the failure to achieve this impossible ideal creates a natural living nightmare for so many young girls who consider these poreless long-legged women in magazine spreads “the only valid form of female identity.” Their sense of self is compromised every time an ad rolls about showing a mindless female body, artificially altered in appearance and placed in overtly submissive, sexual and even violent positions. In advertisements, women are just as thoughtless as the products they push and are only shown to entice the male appetite. They are stripped away of all personal attributes and devoid of human thought so that they can be objectified into the seductive sensual form that has long since been so popularized today.

“The sex object is a mannequin, a shell. Conventional beauty is her only attribute. She has no lines or wrinkles (which would indicate she had the bad taste and poor judgment to grow older), no scars or blemishes—indeed, she has no pores. She is thin, generally tall and long-legged, and, above all, she is young.” – Jean Kilboune, Beauty and the Beast of Advertising

So what can be done to change such a dangerous system that not only exploits young bodies for profit, but ends up warping our ideas on what it truly means to be female? It would be as simple as taking real life photographs of women in our streets to show how skewed the representation of the female sex is in media and in the minds of men. Alas, we have wrinkles, pores and blemishes. Our hair and clothes are disheveled at times. Our thighs touch and our waists thick. We are not seen rolling around on the street floor covered in diamonds and fur, giving every male that passes by a suggestive stare. We are real people, with emotions and aspirations that go beyond just selling you a product with our bodies. We have just as much drive as our male counterparts to be successful human beings in areas that don't necessarily pertain to our beauty and it is ridiculous that our sexual attractiveness is still what primarily deciphers our strength as living breathing human beings in this day and age. How about the prize of our intellect, our physical strength, our charisma? A woman can still be as attractive in full business attire without having to opt for the slinky bikini to accentuate her breasts and curved behind.

What about the excessive amounts of photoshop and airbrushing techniques? Maybe if people knew that their favorite celebrities had dark under eye circles, finely wrinkled foreheads, cellulite, bruised skin...all things that are considered normal happenings, maybe we wouldn't feel so low about ourselves just for being human. There is a sense of courageousness and strength in showing attributes people are typically insecure about in a two page spread in Vogue, though, seeing it as nothing more than a mundane occurrence that happens to just about everyone, there would no doubt be less shame surrounding it. Yes, the lack of photoshop might bring these star studded talents and beautiful models crashing back down to earth from that unearthly unflawed figure of them we see on our television screens, but so what? Maybe if we came to realize those glossed over photos are nothing more than a hyperactive fantasy, we wouldn't have so many hang ups about our bodies bare and unfiltered and maybe only then can we can come back to what it truly feels to be a natural beauty, flaws and all. 

Sources: 

Jean Kilboune, Beauty and the Beast of Advertising

Anthony Cortese, Constructed Bodies, Deconstructing Ads: Sexism in Advertising
Joe Lajoie, Show Me Your Genitals, Youtube