America the Beautiful

Last night, for the dorm film showing, I watched America the Beautiful. This film was a documentary written by a guy who had passed up an incredibly beautiful woman just because he wanted to see if he could find someone even prettier than she. The woman ended up falling in love and marrying a different man while he was left pondering the mistake that he. He wanted to discover why exactly Americans, especially women, are so obsessed with being “beautiful”.

 In the film the director, Darryl Roberts, gives many examples of how advertising and especially modeling corrupt our society on our views of what a woman should look like in order to truly be beautiful. He particularly showed the story of a girl who began modeling at the young age of only twelve years old. Already then, this girl had started comparing herself to sexy women and advertisements as well as the bodies and slim figures of models. He then went on the say that over 46 percent of eleven to twelve year old girls already begin dieting and talking about plastic surgery at their age. To me, this was not only a very sad statistic to hear, but also a sad reality to be confronted with. It made me realize just the extent that so many women go to in order to achieve the American eye of beauty. As Jessica Reaves phrased it in her review in the Chicago Tribune, “Women suffer all sorts of indignities, anxieties and pain in our futile attempts to achieve a narrow, twisted standard of attractiveness”.  I completely agree with this statement because to many people around the world, every American woman is absolutely beautiful, yet to Americans, there’s automatically a certain standard that women hold themselves to which only a slim few can actually achieve.

The film also gave the statistic that over 91 percent of college girls are on a diet. This also hit me hard being that I myself am a college student. I think one of the biggest differences I can do in my life for myself is to recognize that I’m beautiful to God and that alone is the opinion that matters, not the world. The biggest difference I can make amongst my peers is just simply giving a compliment and genuinely letting someone know their beautiful. Sometimes it’s the smallest things that truly make the biggest difference.