Beauty Rant

I don't know how else to name this post, because that's what this is. Did anyone else happen to catch Oprah last week about beauty? Did it depress anyone else? Ugh.

The topic was beauty around the world and how it is defined in different cultures. (The show is right here if you wanna watch or read about any of it.) She had a Chinese American woman go to Shanghai. She went to a Barbie store and asked these little girls if they liked Chinese dolls and they said no, they only wanted the blond hair blue eyed barbies. (Can you imagine your little girl preferring a doll that she cannot identify physically with in any way? Not only that but thinking if it did look anything like her, it was ugly. It saddened me.) Then she went to a hospital and showed the waiting room for plastic surgery, and it was ridiculously packed. All of these Chinese women were getting their eyes operated on to have wider eyes. It then talked about a surgery going on where people are actually having their legs broken and some kind of material grafted into their bones in order to make them a few inches taller. Really painful process and recovery. I know it seems absurd but I bet some of the procedures that are so common today seemed absurd a few decades back too.

I immediately wanted to pack up our house and take my little family to live in the mountains away from society. I just feel so fiercely protective of these little daughters that have been sent to Jason and me. I feel so protective of raising them in this crazy world.

I just hate the obsession with physical beauty. It breaks my heart to see what people are willing to put themselves through to feel accepted and "beautiful". Don't get me wrong, I love a good mani/pedi. I like to shop and get my hair done. But there are such extremes. I hate the standard that society tells women we are supposed to meet. I truly do.

There have been times in my life that I have been ultra femi-nazi. Times when I have been pretty Jessie Spano-ish. I remember being an insecure 13 year old pubescent and announcing from my soapbox to my family I wasn't going to shave my legs anymore. (I had just started and decided I hated it with a passion.) My brother said, "Sick. No guys will ever like you." and I went ballistic. I asked him why didn't he shave his legs and see how he liked keeping it up. I told him women were meant to have hair on their legs and that's why God put it there. I ended up running out of the room crying, and probably yelled, "I hate you all!" as I did and went and got into my loin cloth and ceremoniously burned all my bras or something. Sometimes I feel like I should have been born in some primitive tribe in south america where my leg hair could grow freely and undisturbed. (And then I remember the blessed epidural that I'll be administered in about a month and a half and I shout praises for where I was born.)

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland addressed the issue in conference some time ago. He said the following, and I love what he said:

"I plead with you young women to please be more accepting of yourselves, including your body shape and style, with a little less longing to look like someone else. We are all different. Some are tall, and some are short. Some are round, and some are thin. And almost everyone at some time or other wants to be something they are not! But as one adviser to teenage girls said: “You can’t live your life worrying that the world is staring at you. When you let people’s opinions make you self-conscious you give away your power. … The key to feeling [confident] is to always listen to your inner self—[the real you.]” And in the kingdom of God, the real you is “more precious than rubies.” Every young woman is a child of destiny and every adult woman a powerful force for good...Sisters, you are our greatest examples and resource for these young women. And if you are obsessing over being a size 2, you won’t be very surprised when your daughter does the same and makes herself physically ill trying to accomplish it. We should all be as fit as we can be- that means eating right and exercising and helping our bodies function at their optimum strength. We could probably all do better in that regard. But I speak here of optimum health; there is no universal optimum size.

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 a slippery slope. [You can’t get off of it.] … It’s really insane … what society is doing to women.”

When I was younger and people used to give me dating advice and tell me things like, "Beauty is skin deep... looks fade," I just thought they meant you get old and wrinkly, blah, blah, blah. I didn't realize it meant along with physical changes that come with age and babies that the very first thing to move down on what's important in your partner in a healthy marriage is physical appearance. Of course I think my husband is handsome. Of course I will call him out if he is trying to leave the house wearing something that slightly horrifies me. Of course I want us to be physically healthy and active all of our lives. Of course we are physically attracted to each other. If we weren't, we wouldn't be in the state we are in now. (Well, the state I am in:). But plenty of people buy into the illusion. Plenty marry solely for looks. And what a hellish ordeal that must be to find yourself in. Because no matter how smokin' hot the person you marry is, the novelty wears off and you simply get used to the way that person looks. I think that some of us have this idea that if we were all super models with ginormous boobs and tiny waists that our husbands would be tearing our clothes off every time we walked in the door (if your husband does do that and you like that he does, more power to you), and that he would constantly be in that, you are so hot I can't even think stupor whenever he looked at us. That's just not the way real relationships work. One of the reasons I married my husband was because I knew without a doubt that while we had a hard time keeping our hands off each other, he saw far beyond the exterior in me. He wasn't critiquing me physically. He saw things in me that I loved very most about myself. I knew he loved things about me that no other boy had before, and that's what I hope and pray that my daughters will find in a husband.

I pray that I can instill something in my daughters that makes them love themselves for what they are inside. I'm not trying to be cheesy here folks, because I sincerely pray that I can do that. I hope they love to make people laugh. I hope the desire to care for others comes naturally to them. I hope they pursue their education and love to learn. I hope when they go on group dates they don't sit back picking at their salad and let the boys do all the talking. I hope they are not afraid to (politely) challenge people's opinions when they feel strongly about something. No one's life was ever changed for the better because they saw a flawlessly beautiful blemish-free face or a tiny waistline. No one has ever stood up at a funeral crying and ranted on about just how perfect this person's physique was. Those are not the things that make impressions on our hearts and minds about others. Those are not the things that ever end up mattering in any relationship. And relationships with others are so fundamental to what this life is all about.