Beauty the Beasts: (Probably) Part One of a Series

Beauty is a bit of a beast.  Two beasts, actually, and they have torn us up and are now feasting on our sons and daughters.  (How's that for a dramatic opening?)  Seriously, though, I have been thinking a lot about beauty and the pursuit of beauty in the time since I last posted.

It started with a Facebook link to an article in which the author urged people to engage girls in meaningful conversations, rather than compliment them on their appearances.  It was for the most part a fairly good article with some excellent advice.  And it got me thinking about beauty and our culture's unhealthy obsession with and frantic pursuit of beauty.  I do not want to trivialize the very real and serious issues facing our boys, but I will focus mainly on how the beasts of beauty threaten to devour our girls.  Please do not think I am ignoring the boys.  I have three of them, and I have plenty of reasons to be concerned about the ideas of beauty presented to them, but tonight, I'm talking primarily about girls.  I do this because I have only a vague knowledge of the dangers to boys, not enough to write with any confidence.  As a woman who was once a girl, however, I have a bit of insight into how the young female mind works.  I also have a daughter who loves to please others and may very easily be convinced that she is not as beautiful as she is, that she needs to make herself into someone else, that she isn't good enough.  I do not want that to happen, and anger and sorrow well up in my heart when I think of the challenges she is likely to face as she grows.

The most obvious obstacle to a healthy view of beauty is the media.  Very few would argue that the media - television, movies, the internet, magazines, newspapers, etc. - do not contribute to some very unhealthy views of beauty.  Everywhere one turns are images of thin youthful people, ideally proportioned, and unnaturally complexioned.  One need spend only a minute or two in the grocery store checkout line to see what the print media thinks of beauty.  Thin and flawless body and fashionable hair and makeup are the rage.  Once in awhile, the tabloids celebrate the everyday-ness of celebrities by mocking what most of us look like all the time.  (How kind of them).  Faces blurred, we see that we average folk do not have a monopoly on flannel pants and oversized tee shirts.  But those who are celebrated as beautiful, however ugly their lives may be, are always physically well put together in every way - figure, complexion, style...  We know that many of these beautiful people are airbrushed and touched-up, that they have personal chefs, trainers, and stylists, and that a good number of them have some sort of eating disorder to aid in the maintenance of that perfect form.  As adults, I hope we have the wisdom to ignore the illusion of perfection and rejoice in the lives we have been given, but fear we often do not do so.  As for our children, too many of them, to whom the tricks of the trade have not been disclosed, see the images of perfection and wish to emulate the fantasy.  The media makes a pretense of condemning anorexia, yet how many girls view photos of skeletal stars in bikinis with a secret longing to be so thin?  Probably more than we care to admit.

Television and movies are no better, portraying populations of characters  that don't quite square with populations of people in reality.  Those thin, fit beauties of the check-out lane move across the screen, perhaps with an average sidekick, maybe with a flat-out ugly adversary.  Even the Glee club "geeks" on Glee are pretty good looking people, (besides being a tad too old to be entirely believable in their roles as high schoolers).  With the exception of a few very talented actors, British sitcoms are about the closest you'll get to real people that you might meet in your own neighborhood.

The media have set up unrealistic goals for our children, especially our girls, and it is tempting, and probably quite fitting, to rail against them.  It is right to deplore the images set before our children, for they have the potential to do great damage to our sons' and daughters' views of themselves and of others.


But the media, for all its evils, is not the only problem.  We who love the girls in our lives dearly aren't helping.  We're going crazy with big bows, coordinated outfits, mommy-daughter pedicures, and so forth.  We're dressing our little girls like teenagers and all too often letting our teenage girls go out dressed like prostitutes.  We're teaching our girls from the start to be slaves to beauty and standing helpless, and sometimes encouragingly, when their ideas of beauty take a turn for the scandalous.  We have taught them to seek beauty first, and in so doing, have failed to teach them to be mistresses of true beauty rather than slaves of whatever distorted form of "beauty" the world craves at any given time.  These are strong words, I know.  I also know that they are not universally true and that it is possible to promote inner beauty and natural beauty even while painting toe nails to match coordinated outfits.  But I'm a little scared for my daughter.  As a culture, we are praising girls' appearances, rather than probing their minds and admiring their accomplishments, in a wholly unbalanced manner.  We are setting girls up for insecurity, because so long as they are looking at supermodels in the checkout lane and being praised more for their outer attributes than their inner attributes, they will never consider themselves good enough.  There will always be someone prettier, thinner, better put together.  If I write strongly on this topic, it is for the sake of my tender-hearted little girl - and for the doubting, insecure young lady that I pray she will be spared from becoming.

I do not want her ever to feel that she needs to be taller or skinnier or lighter or darker or that she needs to show a little more leg or a lot more cleavage.  I want her to be comfortable in her (appropriately covered) skin, confident in her mind, and compassionate in her heart.  I pray that she never doubts her beauty, that she grows up always knowing that God created her marvelously and that her heart and mind are full of treasures that will enrich her world.  But I am not completely naive.  I realize that this beast we call beauty has a companion.  There is the outer beast of media and culture, that feeds girls the lie that they should be more beautiful than they already are.  But there is also an inner beast, an innate desire for beauty that has warped into an insatiable hunger for beauty and that leaves girls (and maybe boys...  Never having been one myself, I can't say...) often doubting and always striving.

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis suggests that the sins of gluttony and sexual immorality are distortions of two natural and good drives.  Humans need food to eat and sex to survive as a species.  Without the former, an individual perishes.  Without the latter, humankind perishes.  In addition to their necessity, we may gain pleasure out of both food and sex.  Either one, however, when twisted or taken to excess can be detrimental to one's health and happiness.  I don't know what Lewis thinks about beauty, but I wonder if the same principle might apply.  Beauty is good.  God created a beautiful world, and I believe He gave us, who are made in His likeness, an appreciation for beauty and a desire to create beauty.  The artist, for example, reaches his highest bliss in creating a masterpiece, in looking at the finished product and saying, "Yes, that is it.  Beauty."  With this perspective, I can appreciate the desire to accentuate one's more pleasing features as not entirely bad.  I might even call it "good."

Our appetite for beauty, of the physical, human sort at least, has for the most part gone beyond "good" to mutate into something unnatural, unhealthy, unholy.  We do not "make ourselves up" as an act of stewardship, nor do we seek to improve our appearance for the sheer joy of creating something lovely with which to honor a creative God.  Rather, I suspect, we do these things at best to make ourselves look good, at worst to make ourselves look just a little better than someone else.

And this is nothing new.  We can blame the media.  We can blame beauty-zealous mothers, relatives, and friends, but I suspect this desire for beauty is just a part of who we are.  I Peter 3:3 states, "Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes."  Long before the invention of the photograph, long before the onslaught of television and movie stars, beauty was wreaking havoc, leading women to invest too much in outward appearances and too little in inner character.  I suspect, if we were to trace the history of vanity, it would lead to the first meeting of two women and one man, if not to Eve herself.

Woman and girls want to be beautiful.  Sometimes we want to be prettier than someone else, but always we want to be beautiful.  We may not be overwhelmed with a constant yearning to be beautiful, but for better or worse, it's part of our nature.  You can turn off the television, live off the land far from civilization.  You can shield your daughter from any comments on her appearance.  I doubt you'll kill her desire to be beautiful.  And you shouldn't.  The inner desire for beauty, unlike the outward pressures inflicted by media and culture, is not a beast to be killed, but one to be tamed for nobler purposes than self-promotion.

And so the problem of beauty is a pair of beasts.  One attacks a girl from without through media and culture.  One devours  her from within, filling her up with a disastrous potion of vanity, envy, and doubt.  The second beast is to be handled with care, that our daughters may learn the meaning of true beauty and live peaceably with a tamed and healthy perspective of their own beauty and that of all their eyes behold.  The first beast, we ought to kill, but won't.  Too many have no interest in wounding that beast, let alone killing it.  And so we must equip our daughters to stand firm against that beast's attacks.

God help us.