In the last line of
my essay on Beauty I conclude, Beauty nourishes our better selves, and because
we love what is beautiful, beauty stimulates our ability to love.
So I feel duty-bound
to combat the perversion of the individual sense of beauty happening in the horrorshow
of advertising’s efforts to colonize territory that’s rightly controlled by
individual responsiveness. The psychological capacity to respond to beauty is a
necessary compass to lead to what is good for us. Today, it’s being reduced to
a single kind of physical attractivness as the only meaning of the word. The
day-to-day satisfactions of finding beauty by accident and anywhere is
obliterated by the onslaught of a single look.
This documentary exposes the depths to which advertisers
sink in pursuit of profits. It is an industry that creates insecurity by the
constantly reinforced message that one’s lovability depends on matching the
impossible image they say is beautiful. Media sells a look that’s
pathologically conformist in a world rich with variety. Once conditioned to the
type that saturates the media, the rest feel devalued, invisible, which
undermines the natural beauty available through their individual look. Real
beauty is the result of harmony and happiness. The beautiful people I know are
the ones who are comfortable with who they are, relaxed about being the person
they were born to be. Smiling pulls the features into symmetry, often considered
a primary attribute of beauty.
Young people are smothered in images pushing the same mold, pushing
them farther away from the beauty inherent in each individual. Insecurity
twists the features. Many of the more sarcastic and snide of media’s talking
heads are starting to wear permanently crooked mouths because of the repeated
sneer, and no amount of purchases will change that. The plastic surgery will
still get pulled sideways by the facial expression. I prefer the radio for news, to protect my mirror neurons from the chemicals stimulated by nasty facial
expressions. Obviously, I can’t look at the president.
The fact that a worldwide model of beauty is pushing a
western look does violence to the natural beauty of every other cultural group.
When I see a video of a beautiful young Japanese girl getting ready to have
plastic surgery, the announcer is saying this is what they think they need to
look like in order to succeed. Self-loathing is actualized when a person denies
their natural beauty with an act of mutilation that will alter the harmony of their
personal alignment.
The anxiety created by fear of not looking like the media
standard stokes fear of rejection. Many avoid others but yearn for connection.
They have products on all sides, ready to come to the rescue and the solutions
cost too much. The theft of an individual’s sense of beauty and techniques of
advertisers should be held accountable for the psychological damage.
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