I've fought to define beauty in a better light in my life, to come to grips with the person that I am and to define myself in my own terms. But the forces were not as simple as a few people in my life, magazines and movies and the "media," all played a role. In my day I remember clearly the "controversy" surrounding the stars of Facts of Life that were all but one told to go on diets. Blaire could not be the coveted if she possessed too many curves. And so, I'd look at myself in the mirror and wonder, if she's fat, then what am I?
But that was just the tipping point. The average size of women on television and in movies continued to shrink. And because men actually like curves, women began buying them, making them look more and more like a Barbie doll with unrealistic dimensions that the average woman couldn't compete with even in the best of times.
So recently there have been so many examples of how far we've come - in a bad way - when it comes to women and beauty. There was a report recently that 43-year-old Jennifer Aniston spends roughly $141,037 on her beauty routine a year (which does include her trainer and special diet food), with roughly $1,180 on her skin care regime monthly alone. No normal woman can compete with that. That's why many women her age have age spots that she admits she's had zapped by lasers.
But it doesn't stop there. There are so many examples of how celebrities and models are photoshopped that you don't have to look far. When I typed the keywords "photoshop" "models" and "pictures" into Google, I generated 71,200,000 results. So today models can't even look like models. No amount of make-up or dieting made them "beautiful" enough without professional retouching.
The other day I listened to a conversation on The View where they were discussing the phenomenon of "hairlessness" as a new beauty attribute. And women pay dearly to have themselves waxed and plucked all over to maintain a vision of beauty.
But today for me was the tipping point - because now that women are hairless, it's not enough - today I happened upon the second news story in as many days about vagina bleaching - because now that the hair is removed the discovery is that the skin underneath is not always as pristinely white as would be desirable.
And who are women doing this for anyway? From where does this idea of unnatural "beauty" proliferate?
There comes a point when all this vision of beauty becomes so ingrained that even those of us that don't buy into that image catch ourselves judging and evaluating other women. We dissect and discuss. And while I've had countless conversations that talked about weight, beauty, plucking, waxing, breast implants, diet, exercise, gray hair, age spots, wrinkles and more, never, once have I ever had a conversation with a male or a female about how someone's vagina needed bleaching because it wasn't a light enough color. It isn't something that women have ever mentioned noticing about themselves, it's never been something that a male friend said he dumped his significant other over and it's just not something that anyone I know has ever mentioned. But two stories in two days means that somewhere this is either a trend or it's something that someone wants to be a trend.
So now, on top of worry about the grays that have appeared in my hair and the crow's feet and the strays that I'm constantly plucking from my eyebrow region and the hair on my legs, now I'm supposed to have a new worry - am I pristinely light enough.
Just when I thought I'd tallied all the possible things I had to worry about along comes this. I have to say that I have no idea what to expect next, but I know that I'll be at least one trend behind.
