Yesterday my sweetheart and I were wandering around in San Francisco and, in a store, we found a book called “French postcards” and subtitled “an album of vintage erotica”.
It was amazing to see the difference between fashionable women's figures at the turn-of-the-century and now. Absolutely NONE of these women would've qualified as models today, and yet barely 100 years ago they were considered beautiful.
Recently, I saw some photographs of VERY slender models that had been photoshopped to make them even thinner. These are the images that we all look at when we see advertising. These are the images that cause ordinary women to think of themselves as ugly and overweight, and yet these models don't even exist in reality.
This experience made me think again of the disconnect between real people and the so-called “beauty” industry. Women literally starve themselves to achieve an ideal that does not exist, except in the diseased minds of advertising executives. And I have to wonder why we would literally kill ourselves to conform to an image concocted by someone who wants to make money by making women look like concentration camp victims.
Do these people really want to sell clothes? Or do they want to sell liposuction, diet foods, unnecessary surgical procedures, self-hatred, and other “products” to a public so blinded to the 'real' that they don't know that their version of the 'ideal,' invented by nameless taste makers driven only by money, really doesn't exist?
I look again at these “French postcards”, and wonder how we could have gone from such real women, women who still have hair under their arms, to what is being pushed on us today in advertisements. Are we really so naïve, so blinded by the relentless onslaught of the media that we would live a life of such dissatisfaction with ourselves?
In case you're wondering what all this dissatisfaction with ourselves means, here's a statistic:
" Market data estimates that the total US weight loss market was worth $55.4 billion in 2006. The market should reach $68.7 billion in 2010”. The market leaders were Weight Watchers ($1.2 billion) Nutri system ($568 million) and Jenny Craig ($462 million)” (statistics from Yahoo! answers)
So you can see there's plenty of money to be made from dissatisfaction with ourselves; but it's one thing to want to improve ourselves, and another thing to try to live up to an artificial standard made expressly for the purpose of causing us to be dissatisfied with ourselves.
What's even more ironic is that I can't show you these photographs, these ' French postcards', because they might be considered “obscene". What I find obscene is the manipulation of people's minds, bodies, and health by an industry that is entirely unnecessary and invented. And I might add, a multibillion-dollar industry.