It is perfectly natural to want to be pretty, handsome, beautiful, dashing, enticing, radiant, pleasing to the eye, in a word, attractive. It comes with being human. People are drawn to one another, and appearance often plays a significant role, so we make an effort to be attractive to each other. There's nothing new about it. It's been around since square one of evolution, not something that began with the age of advertising. It's built into our psychology, and we couldn't stop doing it even if we wanted to.
People are judges. We judge other people all the time, instantly and automatically, sometimes glowingly and sometimes damningly. When somebody new gets on a bus, or a stranger walks into a room, we judge them.
Nice eyes, bad hair, a little string-beany, slightly awkward. I hope he sits next to me, or I hope she doesn't. No sense in feeling that it's right or wrong to judge others. It's something we do, and the sooner everybody cops to it, the better.
It's a private affair for the most part, a running internal commentary about everything in the world around us, not just the people we encounter. Very little of it gets spoken aloud. The root motive is not to flatter or be cruel, but to constantly assess things, including ourselves. I challenge you to get through five minutes in a public place without doing it. It just happens, and pretending that it's not happening all the time, all around us, is lying to yourself and putting your head in the sand.
Maybe you were taught as a child that it's not nice to judge others. If judging others is a reflex, however, and not a choice, then the lesson translates as:
I'm not nice or
none of us are nice. But if it's something we all do, better just to admit it and move on to thinking about things that we might actually be able to influence.
For example, our habit of judging, in combination with another reflex, vanity, gets exploited in our consumer-driven economy and has exploded into multi-billion dollar industries. We're all a little vain. If you've got model assets to work with, maybe vanity works well for you. Congratulations. But if your vanity far outstrips what you have to work with, somebody is probably advertising a product to prey upon your insecurities. A staggering amount of money gets spent each year on advertising, and a big chunk of that is for products that are supposed to give you better outcomes in the judgment game.
Anti-aging creams; things to make your hair thick and shiny and not grey; pills, programs and devices for weight-loss; sexy cars and push-up bras; things to make you smell better and your teeth whiter and various organs bigger or firmer or longer lasting. What's next? A surgical procedure to make your voice sexier? A dietary supplement to make your sweat tastier? For…you know…when intimacy gets around to licking. You can bet that out there somewhere they're working on how to fix some new shortcoming that you won't even realize you have until you see the ad on tv. Dingy ear lobes or fleshy ankles or elbow odor.
Every advertising agency counts on one steadfast fact: sex sells. On the surface, there doesn't seem to be anything inherently harmful about it. People want to be appealing, sexy, tempting even, and products have been created to help them do it. It's the free market, and in a free market, everybody wins, right?
Wrong. Because the advertisers don't settle for presenting their products as something that will enhance you. They are determined to create a steady drumbeat to convince you that if you do
not use their product that you will be judged inadequate, or maybe even hideous and unbearable, by everybody you know or will know, or more likely will
never know because you're such a lousy specimen of humankind.
Your breath is bad. Your armpits stink and are wet. Your teeth are drifting toward beige. Your cock's not big enough. Your tits sag. You have too much belly, hip, chin; not enough muscle, eye lashes, color in your cheeks; too much hair in this place and not enough somewhere else; too many wrinkles, pimples, scars, age spots, lines. You're too round, too shapeless, and too unconcerned about how you look. Your butt's not firm enough, your nose is too big, and your lips are too pale, like those of a corpse.
And it's not just about your appearance that you need to worry. You're hyperactive (don't worry, there's a pill for that), or a shrinking violet (don't worry, there's a pill for that too). You don't have enough education (get a degree online), or bookish (have a beer and loosen up). Your abdominal muscles are not rippled (a whole industry unto itself), and you are aging (the root of all evil apparently, but never fear, the cure is free, just pay shipping and handling). Everybody is too this or too that. Nobody is just right. Where the hell is Goldilocks when you need her?
The list of flaws is endless, so lets face it, there's a lot wrong with you. The only solution is to go shopping. And here's the good news, as a previous president and philosopher from Texas has pointed out, shopping is also patriotic, especially during
The Depression, Part II, which it took him eight-long years to achieve before getting back to his true passion, golf.
Why not go shopping? Otherwise you're just going to sit around watching tv. And the more you watch tv, unless you DVR everything and skip through the commercials, the worse you're going to feel about yourself. Maybe you think television is your best friend, but it's not. Shopping is your best friend. All this feeling bad about yourself that the advertisers promote might make you feel that it's better to never be seen in public again, but it's time to get down to the mall. The salespeople are nice, not vicious and judgmental like the people in that reality show with all the babes and bucks. Enough of this S&M relationship with the box. Get out of the house and get a little exercise. Go buy something.
Just imagine if religions and governments berated and undermined their own people the way corporate advertisers do. Oh, wait! They do do that. So I guess it's all part of the same cloth.
Once upon a time there was an outspoken resistance to all these
make you feel bad about yourself campaigns, and it was called hippies. They bought used clothes and wore them till they wore out. The women let hair grow under their arms and stopped shaving their legs. The men didn't spend hours on their abs and declared anti-perspirant deodorants to be poisonous. Their every gesture flipped Madison Avenue the bird. Okay, maybe they went a little overboard, but nowadays you hear people spitting the word hippy as if it's synonymous with Nazi. Fact is, those people had principles, even if most of them eventually gave up their principles in order to get jobs.
The advertisers, or
sponsors as they're known more affectionately, are bullies. And the only way to erase a bully's power is for everybody to get together at once and declare that their tactics for making everybody afraid just aren't going to work any more. They have to be called out. We're not all Marilyn Monroe or Adonis. We fart and sweat. Aging is natural, and in some cultures it's still considered a mark of distinction and grace even, not an incurable disease that can be covered up.
Because ultimately you see, there's death, the elephant in the room that our culture is in complete denial about. There's heaven of course, but that doesn't seem to stop everybody from doing everything they can to avoid dying, and trying to cast an appearance in the meantime as if they never will. But you can't avoid dying, or aging, or for that matter, 90% of how you look. No matter how much you mutilate or inject your body. No matter how many vitamins you take. No matter how much life insurance you buy, because despite the slightly misleading name of that product, there's no escaping the grave.
So what is real beauty? Don't ask me.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That's the best I can come up with. But that old adage has been vetoed. We've all let our flair for individual style be colonized. We've relinquished our aesthetic sovereignty to beauty dictators who don't have anybody's happiness in mind, just their own profits. Maybe it's becoming fashionable again to beat up on corporations. Why not? Since corporations are now "people" according to the Supreme Court, maybe we should start judging them as harshly as we judge each other, and ourselves. Lets send a few of these
people, BP and Bank of America come to mind right away, down to Texas for an old-fashioned execution.
The world has been drifting steadily toward one big homogenized corporation-satisfying system of aesthetics. But we're not there yet, so there's lots of wiggle room, and lots of opportunity to stand up to the beauty bullies. We can all de-escalate our participation in the beauty arms race. Spend a little less on cloning ourselves to the herd. Tell our imperfectly formed friends, not only that we love them, which might mean that we value them
despite how they look. Lets start telling everybody that they are
beautiful, and more importantly, mean it.
