December 9, 2012
Dear Young Woman Aspiring to be a Model,
I hope this letter finds you well and adjusting to your new life in New York City. I know your friends and family are extremely proud of your achievements; completing high school, immediately finding a modeling position and starting to gain recognition as the beautiful young woman that you are. I have watched you grow up over the last fifteen years and as your neighbor and someone who cares about your well being I certainly understand your attraction to the world of fashion, making a good income while modeling beautiful clothing and the latest accessories. I became a teenager in the early 1970’s and Twiggy, having become a big hit in the ‘60’s was still the model that we all idolized and wanted to emulate because she was tall, very thin and had an innocent angelic kind of beauty. In those years I felt enormous pressure to be attractive as I tried to formulate my value in this world. I was born into a patriarchal family where both my parents had nine brothers each. They had emigrated from a little French island in the Indian Ocean called Mauritius to South Africa, where I was born, and I vividly remember hearing many conversations between my uncles over the years about beautiful women and particularly the body parts of those beautiful women. I learned at a very young age that a woman’s value was in her looks.
The drive for women to do all that they can to enhance their looks certainly permeates all cultures around the globe and I believe this drive is the very basis of women’s biology in order to attract the best possible genes in a partner which will therefore afford their offspring the chance to not just survive but to thrive. This fact was highlighted by a Newsweek article entitled the Biology of Beauty where several scholars of the beauty question where quoted including Nancy Etcoff, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab who wrote a book on her studies of human attraction. She says "I defy anyone to point to a society, any time in history or any place in the world, that wasn't preoccupied with beauty. The high-minded may dismiss our preening and ogling as distractions from things that matter, but the stakes can be enormous.” "Judging beauty involves looking at another person," says University of Texas psychologist Devendra Singh, "and figuring out whether you want your children to carry that person's genes." Newsweek’s article clearly illustrates this behavior by women comes from an internal drive rather than from external forces.
It seems that long before the media and advertising were around women had an intrinsic need to enhance their looks with whatever was available to them in order to achieve their perceived standard of beauty. However I believe that advertising companies and the media play directly into this fact and take major advantage with very little regard to the millions of women all over the world that have been adversely affected. This mechanism to be beautiful has been going on for centuries and in every culture, where women go to extraordinary lengths and even dangerous lengths to make themselves beautiful. In a Morton Report article entitled Chasing Beauty: Cultural History of Beauty Obsession the author states that “During the Renaissance, Italian women thought that large pupils were alluring and placed a toxic plant extract in their eyes to dilate the pupils. That plant still bears the name belladonna, Italian for "beautiful lady." Chinese fashion considered small feet appropriately dainty for women; the practice of foot-binding created "lotus feet," deformed appendages that didn't allow women to walk without assistance for the sake of beauty”. This article clearly highlights that even before the media was manipulating and lying to women we were attempting to reach the beauty standard of the culture. I have had half a life time to reflect on the beauty issue and although I have never been inclined to entertain any drastic surgical changes, now in my 50’s I am willing to do the very uncomfortable work of reflecting at a deeper level and admitting to myself that my obsession with exercise over the years has played directly into this discussion. I have been a marathon runner since my 20’s and I have run six days a week through all types of weather including as much as twenty-six miles in a torrential downpour with severe winds. I have run in the forest at 5 am because it was the only time of day I was able to get my workout in with little regard for nocturnal creatures, including mountain lions that we know live in our mountains. I ran when I was sick with flu and sinuous infections and the like, all the while justifying my actions as “keeping healthy”. Today, I am able to ask myself, was it really just keeping healthy or was it partly an obsession for keeping my weight down and a desire to feel and look good? I know the answer and I can now acknowledge the truth to myself and know that there is a very fine line between keeping healthy and being obsessively focused on how I look: and that line I walk everyday with significantly more awareness than I was able to in my youth.
This fine line is even more difficult to navigate today than it was forty years ago because technology has progressed so significantly and digital enhancement and air brushing of photography has changed everything. The”perfect” woman is now attainable, but only in the glossy pages of fashion magazines. This has created one of the biggest issues in the world of advertising and the media: an extremely unrealistic standard of beauty that so many women are striving for. It is no wonder that those of us after seeing these images of perfection struggle with low self esteem and a intense desire to attempt to measure up and this has caused the beauty issue to take on a dangerous and unhealthy direction. The statistics for women of your age and younger having plastic surgery is astounding and a 2004 article from The New York Times entitled How Young Is Too Young to Have a Nose Job and Breast Implants? stated that “The number of cosmetic surgeries performed on people 18 and under reached 74,233 in 2003, a 14 percent increase from 2000, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Girls and boys as young as 6 get plastic surgery to flatten protruding ears. Adolescents of 13 or 14 have nose jobs. And nearly 3,700 breast augmentation surgeries were performed on teenage girls last year, according to the society.” It is extremely unfortunate when children and teenagers, and no doubt their parents, view their physical appearance negatively and this of course plays havoc with their self esteem. It is bad enough when teenagers feel they are not attractive enough but even worse when parents agree with them. In another New York Times article entitled Seeking Self-Esteem Through Surgery the author Camille Sweeney highlights a young woman whose mother and sister had both received breast implants and this young girl, because she had small breasts said “I didn’t feel like a woman.” So at age 18 she followed in their footsteps and had saline implants put in and then tells us that “I just wanted to look normal, and now I do”. Comments like this clearly leave the impression for many smaller breasted women that they must be abnormal or somehow deficient.
This thinking is now a part of our society’s deeply held belief system helped by advertising, the current culture and now the latest rage of reality TV shows such as America’s Next Top Model and Extreme Makeover. I read on ABC’s website about Extreme Makeover and this is how they describe their show to the American public; “Extreme Makeover follows the stories of the lucky individuals who are chosen for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be given a truly "Cinderella-like" experience: a real life fairy tale in which their wishes come true, not just by changing their looks, but their lives and destinies.” There is no doubt why the viewer is left with the idea that changing one’s looks can change your life and following on in the fairytale theme, the rest of one’s life will be completely perfect and trouble free as long as the surgeon reconstructs several parts of your face, enlarges your breasts, liposuctions your thighs and enhances your lips with collagen. It is this beauty discussion that I feel compelled to write you this letter; primarily to offer you an alternative way of thinking about your new found career for no other reason but to give you a heightened awareness of the potential adversity that you are likely to encounter in the world of advertising.
Walking and balancing on that fine line has to include questioning ourselves on how and what we choose to eat. The excessive focus on the need to be thin once again creates for us the clouded vision of the perfect woman and this gives rise to an unhealthy and obsessive distraction of diet in an attempt to reach this unobtainable goal. The statistics for eating disorders are grave and according to the South Carolina Department of Mental Health there are seven million women in the United States who have eating disorders. They also inform us that “A study by the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders reported that 5 – 10% of anorexics die within 10 years after contracting the disease; 18-20% of anorexics will be dead after 20 years and only 30 – 40% ever fully recover” and that “The mortality rate associated with anorexia nervosa is 12 times higher than the death rate of ALL causes of death for females 15 – 24 years old.” This shows that our country’s obsession with thinness is not only serious but in many instances it is deadly.
As I think about you and the extraordinary situation you find yourself in, I ask you to consider what an incredible opportunity you have before you: the ability to become a powerful voice for young women around the country who are looking at you in those glossy magazine pages in order to formulate their own value in this world. How I wish I had a powerful voice to guide me through the maze that took me forty years to navigate. With self-confidence and a deep understanding of yourself you can use this opportunity to state loudly and clearly what young women and perhaps women in general should or should not have to believe about themselves. You could help in starting a real paradigm shift in this industry. I believe that a smart and beautiful young woman such as you does not want to perpetuate the myth that women are not beautiful unless they have significantly modified what they were born with.
My best regards to you,
Veronica
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