Society has raised many people to believe that we should define beauty and intelligence based on a secular ideal . That to be considered attractive you must be so thin you no longer menstruate .They often tell us that we need to be this ideal to be happy and successful . But we don't .
The following is just my own interpretation of how I think this should be challenged on a large scale . All my life , media has idolized those women who have proportions that defy natural limitations . The large breasts , tiny waist , the long silky hair and legs that " go on for miles" . Basically a hairy ant . Oh I correct myself , hair is deemed something taboo if not on your head . Therefore all my ideas of what beautiful was , never really matched what mattered : me and the people around me . There was never a popular idea that appealed to a short , talkative Indian girl , what could I (and many others like me ) find that was similar to us in pop culture ?
In history , for ages at a time , society idolized different ( also impossible ) body shaped . The overly sized sculptures of women with almost obese bodies , that symbolized fertility , often occurred in many ancient societies around the world . The Venus of Willendorf ( found in Austria ) is one such figure with large breasts and a large abdomen , an ideal of beauty at the time . The Venus de Milo is almost the opposite . It is a Greek sculpture that represented the idea of perfect proportion where all sculptures had similar characteristics and believed in perfection . Both were considered beautiful .
Nowadays , it is the look of synthetic beauty that strives to tell the younger generation that they simply are not good enough . That we need to eat less , be taller , emaciated and only then , will we be beautiful . Yes , there are new trends of using pus sized models and promoting new ideals of " pretty " . But they do so little to help when there are about 50 television shows about changing your outfit to change your life , or plastic surgery shows to say that you aren't perfect as you are , you should change . It would be a welcome change to see a beauty pageant with girls who weren't stereotypically pretty or to see The Most Beautiful Woman in the World be someone who didn't have fake breasts . Something that isn't Ideal .
It does not help that many adults encourage this form of thinking . Often , I encounter older people ( often relatives ) who will tell a little girl ( who is a perfectly healthy and pretty child) that she needs to go on a diet because she is getting fat or that she must stay out of the sun or she will get dark . And yet , no one challenges them ( I'm prevented from saying something particularly caustic by my mother who believes very much in maintaining respect for ones elders . I do concede that respect is important but it is a 2 way street . ) ( also I've been told that in the same breath by those people and therefore also cannot be rude because , again , my mother is a force of nature I wouldn't contend with , but who would rather tell them off herself in a polite manner ... Thus defeating the purpose of it all ) . My parents feel that I take those comments far too seriously , that the little cousin will be fine because they don't know what I know . People think she'll be ok but ... But she won't . I know because I was her once .
And now this gets all too personal when I intended to be very argumentative and objective ... But yes , I was that little girl once too . I think it was around my eleventh or twelfth birthdays when someone said , " You've gotten fat hey , shame you're so pretty otherwise ." and if memory serves me correctly it was the same set of people who keep doing it now . It may have been just that as a catalyst and many other things that did contribute but for a long , long time after , I grew to hate myself . I hated that I wasn't tiny and fair . It grew to be something that may or may not have been an eating disorder at the time but I would starve myself and then eat and then purge ( and oh no , I sound like a headcase but that's what happened for about a year or so , erratically) and cry . Because I wasn't what society wanted to see . I was a bookworm , who liked to talk , who was short and who had curves . I cried a lot during that time because I didn't understand why . I didn't know why I wanted to look different because before that , I was happy with me . I was happy with who I was . This may be far too confessional but I think that because it happened a long while ago ,it doesn't hurt as much to talk about why I get angry when people tell my little 7 year old cousin that she is fat and that I want to tell them just how disgusted I feel because of their words . They make me want to be excessively brutal with my words so they understand the impact if their narrow minds on an impressionable child .
I cry every time I revisit that because it's like it happened yesterday . I cry because I wish more was done to show young girls and young women that they are beautiful , that they are in fact more than just a face . You say that we are a civilized and modern society , tell me how ? Tell me how when such narrow views are placed on one of the the most undefinable things in the universe : beauty . The fact that we are alive , is a thing of beauty . When we see a plant grow , we should see how intricate and dynamic a group of cells form the basis of our food chains . We should find our own ideas of beauty , not what is on the cover of the latest magazine that is dictated by a small group of people who never leave their hotels or villa's .
If we said , to the next girl or woman we saw , that they are beautiful beings , that they are worth something , maybe we could begin to change a life , that a life can impact the people around them . And if the ripples are big enough , we could impact our society as a whole .
