The magazines never tell you this, but they are full of what you can’t have. Models are photoshopped, and makeup ads essentially promise to give you plastic surgery in a bottle. The way women’s magazines are created today is to lure you with the idea that you can be the “perfect” woman, and that you can achieve all this through make up, clothes, and weight loss.
When I walk down the aisles to look for a magazine, basically every one has stuff plastered on the cover about how to change the way you look. It seems to be pretty much a given in their eyes that as women we are unhappy with the way that we look and we are looking for a way to change it.
Okay, to be fair, that might be true. When I think about it there is always something that I wish I could do to fix my hair, add to my closet, or change my body so it could maybe just look a little bit better in the outfit that I wore last weekend. But should it really be acceptable for magazines to constantly manipulate that insecurity and run with it?
The media today knows that inside every women are constant reminders like these that we always can look better, and they have adopted the role of “having our backs” to show us exactly how to change who we are to finally be the person that we want to be.
What the media has us women doing is running away from the harsh reality that all these superficial changes we make to ourselves to achieve this unrealistic ideal will not only never happen, but will also leave us unsatisfied, unfulfilled and unsuccessful. After all, as smart, gifted, capable Duke girls, do you really think that the words and advice of Cosmopolitan can get us to where we want and deserve to be in life?
What I wish the media showed more of were articles on body image and how to accept and love our bodies. We don’t need to change how we look; we need to change how we think. We need to stop following the media’s advice to figure out how to change the way we look and instead start accepting the validity of our parent’s advice that happiness really does come from the inside.
I’m not telling you to throw away the Cosmo, Shape and US Weekly, and I’m definitely not telling you to stop caring about the way you look. I’m just telling you to realize that the media is only as deep as the magazines are thick, and if you got into Duke, I can guarantee you are a lot deeper than that.
Photo Sources: http://www.pynkcelebrity.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/ed9b98b36a28379d…
http://www.glossedover.com/glossed_over/images/2008/10/09/cosmopolitan_n…