Beauty Pressure

I absolutely loved our lesson on advertising as it is so pertinent to our lives. We are faced with some form or type of advertising every day. As a result of that class I searched for ads that have changed my perspective or rather "sold me" to their message.

#1 BEAUTY PRESSURE

DOVE  started a self-esteem campaign for women and this was one of the ads for it.
From this ad I not only felt ashamed of certain aspects of our unrealistic beauty industry (for men as well as women), but also realized the need our society has for better and healthy fashion examples. Most importantly (especially for DOVE), I took my thoughts and feelings and made an association between DOVE and moral values. This type of ad showed me that DOVE cares for women, cares about our true beauty and wants to make a BIG change on how we view women and ourselves.
In the end, I may not buy their products, but I know if I was faced between two different brands of soap at the store, DOVE would definitely have a leaning vote from me. Or else, I would only have great things to say about the company itself and their values.

Not only did this ad win me over with the Facets Model, but it also is a great example of how the media or rather beauty advertising can be harmful. I don't want to get into this debate, but I'll just leave my opinion that we mean so much more than how we look. We don't need to have the perfect, toned body to feel good about ourselves. If we are choosing to love ourselves as God does and we focus on good things, we don't need that "perfect body" to be happy. Yes, working out and being healthy are good-- and at times I'm really glad that is a consequence. However, it is the times that I focus or put all of my energy into that one consequence that makes me feel like I'm a slave to my body/mind and most importantly, it makes me feel that love is conditional. To think that loving myself or that others will love me based on my appearance is false. It's the biggest lie Satan could tell us to use our bodies against us. It defeats the whole idea of self-love and self-worth.

Learning to love myself and ourselves with whatever we are is a long process. There are times when we will become worried and care too much. In fact, God loves us and He cares about what we care about. He will comfort us and help us with our goals, however, He expects us to try to see ourselves the way He does. We are here to change and to become more like God and to let go of our wants, obsessions and desires. I struggle with this, but hope that I can learn it now and save myself pain and anxiety over something that in the end is of no eternal significance. I hope that I can be a good example to my children and to never make them feel ashamed for not fitting an unrealistic image. It all starts with me and how I choose to see and judge myself.

Lastly, I found this amazing quote from Elder Holland on the topic:

Frankly, the world has been brutal with you in this regard. You are bombarded in movies, television, fashion magazines, and advertisements with the message that looks are everything! The pitch is, “If your looks are good enough, your life will be glamorous and you will be happy and popular.” That kind of pressure is immense in the teenage years, to say nothing of later womanhood. In too many cases too much is being done to the human body to meet just such a fictional (to say nothing of superficial) standard. As one Hollywood actress is reported to have said recently: “We’ve become obsessed with beauty and the fountain of youth. … I’m really saddened by the way women mutilate [themselves] in search of that. I see women [including young women] … pulling this up and tucking that back. It’s like a slippery slope. [You can’t get off of it.] … It’s really insane … what society is doing to women.” 

In terms of preoccupation with self and a fixation on the physical, this is more than social insanity; it is spiritually destructive, and it accounts for much of the unhappiness women, including young women, face in the modern world. And if adults are preoccupied with appearance—tucking and nipping and implanting and remodeling everything that can be remodeled—those pressures and anxieties will certainly seep through to children. At some point the problem becomes what the Book of Mormon called “vain imaginations.”  And in secular society both vanity andimagination run wild. One would truly need a great and spacious makeup kit to compete with beauty as portrayed in media all around us. Yet at the end of the day there would still be those “in the attitude of mocking and pointing their fingers” as Lehi saw,  because however much one tries in the world of glamour and fashion, it will never be glamorous enough.

A woman not of our faith once wrote something to the effect that in her years of working with beautiful women she had seen several things they all had in common, and not one of them had anything to do with sizes and shapes. She said the loveliest women she had known had a glow of health, a warm personality, a love of learning, stability of character, and integrity. If we may add the sweet and gentle Spirit of the Lord carried by such a woman, then this describes the loveliness of women in any age or time, every element of which is emphasized in and attainable through the blessings of the gospel of Jesus Christ.