I remember looking in the mirror when I was 13. I examined each curve, each new bulge, with cringing disgust. Fat, fat everywhere. I hated that flesh, that new roundness. If I could have sliced the excess tissue out with a knife?releasing my old trim, streamlined self?I would have.
This change was the product of puberty. My body had, right on schedule, transformed from a boyish, child-like silhouette to that of a maturing woman. Suddenly I cared about the details of my appearance. It was reassuring to feel hunger pangs?the bulges on my body seemed smaller and smaller the hungrier I felt. When I did eat, I raced down to the exercise bike in the basement and burned off the calories I had just consumed.
It’s all over now. Little by little, as I adjusted to my new body, I grew accustomed to it, eventually accepting it.
Unfortunately, in the last few years, it has become more and more challenging not to fall back into the old pattern of fighting?of hating?my body. As a 21-year-old female, I am supposedly at the peak of sexual desirability. I am close in age to all the barely-legal sexpots of pop culture?the size-one Aguilera, the steel-abbed Spears. Granted, since the dawn of visual media and Hollywood, it has been difficult for women to live with, not to mention up to, the celebrity-based standards of beauty. However, in the pre-digital cable, pre-Internet days, there was only a handful of starlets by whose image one could feel pressured to gauge one’s own appeal, and one’s exposure to them was limited. Perhaps you saw their glamorous faces when you went to see their films or on movie posters, maybe once in a while on television. The icons were more realistic then, too. Marilyn Monroe might have been a bleach blonde with false eyelashes, but she was a solid 12. From her stomach to her hips, she was rock-hard nowhere. Her breasts were real. Her beauty?if not possible to replicate?was achievable.
As touch-of-a-button, computer-based visual technology carries the images of popular culture deeper into our everyday existence, famous midriffs get higher, skirts shorter and pants tighter. The highly-revealed bodies to which we are exposed through satellite cable and the Internet get further and further away from the realistic female form. As our lives increasingly fuse with the virtual world, the images that are streamed to us are also becoming more virtual, losing touch with the concrete world of the imperfect. Goodbye, Marilyn. Hello, Pam Lee.
We are bombarded with more images than ever before. There is a proliferation of beautiful hopefuls begging for our glimpse. Physical perfection of a pseudo-dreamlike, virtual sort is a commodity in the competition-driven entertainment market. Generally speaking, the girl-next-door look won’t do the job; a pretty girl doesn’t cut it, either. Bite-your-fist, jaw-dropping eye candy is key to overcoming short attention spans. It takes hard, bright, big-on-top-but-slender-all-over airbrushed physicality to stop the loafer on the couch from switching to channel number 256, to prevent that mouse from clicking to the next site. It takes a vision of fantasy.
This battle for our attention?the product of pop culture’s intrusion into the domain of daily routine?is what allows the celebrities of today to affect us to such a new and extreme degree. With this intrusion, we are losing touch with what is reality and what is contrived, carefully produced and marketed image. These worlds are mixing quickly and smoothly, and?it seems?mixing us up. As women feel compelled to embody the fantasy shape, men are beginning to regard the virtual look as a real-life standard.
In my opinion, it is no coincidence that, in the last few years?as newer, faster and better forms of visual communication have been introduced into every home, school and office?a growing number of diet products have been sold. At Georgetown, it is impossible to find a vending machine that has more buttons for regular cola than diet; our food store’s best-selling items are from the low-fat and diet category. If a girl is drinking a beverage during class, eight times out of 10 it is a diet choice.
Millions of people?particularly women?down gallons of diet soda each day and ingest Olestra products, both of which bear labels warning consumers about their potential health risks. Who would have thought a few decades ago that women would be consuming food items with warning labels? By and large, this is not the result of a growing concern for health, unless one defines health solely by weight management.
The diet food trend is reflective of the depth to which the “perfect” pop image has been internalized. We are now not only allowing the pervading pop standard of beauty to dictate the outside of our bodies, but?in the chase after the ideal exterior?to govern what goes inside us, as well.
I fear that, with time, as they seamlessly integrate into our visual environment, the images of beauty will only seem more real while becoming less and less realistic. I am afraid that, by the time my own daughter stands before the mirror examining her reflection, it will be impossible for her to release herself from the prison of self-comparison to the digital women that surround her. I am afraid for the future of female happiness. I am afraid for female lives.
