the desire to be desired.

On Thursday night, there was a forester lecture by Dr. Kim Gorman and her experience with anorexia. She spoke about her own struggle with the eating disorder as well as gave insight as to how and why so many girls suffer from this disorder. She gave some unbelievable statistics about how high of a priority being thin is to women. “Half of women would rather be hit by a car than be considered fat” and “two-thirds of women would rather be stupid than fat.” She said that many girls believe that they can be somebody…  if they are thin.

If and only if they are thin will they be of value.

This is what causes people to develop eating disorders and what motivates America to spend $40 billion on dieting each year: the desire to be of worth. In many women’s lives beauty equals value, and unfortunately media and advertisement get to decide what beauty is. Not only is there an inappropriate obsession or need to be thin and beautiful, but there is also a false perception as to what thinness and beauty are. We see all these ads and commercials with extraordinarily tall,  thin, beautiful, perfect models. Many models go through extreme, unhealthy lengths to look the way they do. In addition to that, most are photo-shopped, like we saw in class, to look absolutely perfect. These models represent the ideal look that women all across America desire to look like, and it is simply unnatural. This is not true beauty, but women believe it to be and feel inadequate in comparison.  One experiment found that exposure to thin images taken directly from fashion magazines produced significant increases in self-reported depression, stress, guilt, shame, insecurity and body dissatisfaction relative to women exposed to images of average weight women from magazines.

The Dove campaign videos that we watched in class the other week showed just how messed-the perception of beauty is in media. Adults, teenagers, and kids are exposed to this misconception constantly throughout each day. Knowing that God values people for everything other than outside appearances, it is struggling to find how many people find little value outside of looks, especially distorted, unrealistic ones.