Wednesday, August 25, 2010

As Per Request

This first video is being posted at the request of one of my loyal readers. I'm gonna warn you all up front though, this first video is quite creepy. It's a haunting and stunning portrayal of the elusive concept of beauty and its increasing impossibility. Which is completely true, fashion, style, all of it is moving at a pace that is nearly impossible to follow. We bombard our kids with unrealistic images (those 12 pack abs you see on that male model? anatomically impossible, sorry girls) and then tell them that's beautiful, that's sexy, that's what they should be like. Bullshit. Thirty years ago, Marilyn Monroe was rocking a curvaceous size somewhere between 12 and 16. Now, kids (mostly girls, though guys aren't immune) see pictures of size 00 models and tell them how high fashion that is. A size, not only very hard to achieve, but potentially unhealthy to certain people. And, on top of being 00, most models are photoshopped on top of that to make their figures even more unrealistic (see second video. I didn't mean for this post to be about unrealistic beauty expectations and such, but you know how I ramble). Actually, I saw one of the Real Beauty Campaign girls speak at my school last semester and it was one of the best speakers I've ever seen. She talked about everything from being in the campaign (some of the stuff people wrote about her....ohh man I would have cried myself to sleep many a night...) to all the crap 'the industry' does behind the scenes to keep us all unsatisfied in our quest for beauty. WHICH IS A LOAD OF CRAP. As you can tell, this issue hits a nerve. But, I digress...

That all being said, this first video is still is a little weird. But is superbly done and has a message worth watching for.







Basically, if there's anything you gain from this post, it's that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is real and cannot be manufactured by all the computers and makeup in the world. All that shit serves to do is cover up what's really there, and that's a pity because we really lose something when we whore ourselves over to companies who feed on our insecurity and need to feel beautiful by anyone else's standards but our own.