8 Comments

1. Kasia CVM on October 27, 2006 8:28 pm

   I don’t know if the film is trying to put a negative spin on ‘created beauty’ but more so about setting a realistic standard. Music created in a state of the art studio for most musicians is unattainable. Often it is even unattainable for the musicians that recorded it. The underlying thought in women is that they should look like that bilboard 24 hrs a day 7 days a week in order to be considered beautiful/desirable, but a lot of human effort and digitized aide went into the final product featured on the bilboard. I agree with you that your worth in God’s eyes is not based on your appearance or your skills. We are loved and saved by grace and judged by the our hearts as only He ca know. So what do you think is the definition of physical beauty and do you think she was beautiful before hair, makeup and computer?

2. Jeremy on October 27, 2006 9:40 pm

   hi katie!!! how’s life back in michigan? hope things are going well for you!
   ========
   “The underlying thought in women is that they should look like that billboard 24 hrs a day 7 days a week in order to be considered beautiful/desirable”

   you poor soul… honey, if you go on thinking like that then you’re going to drive yourself into terrible depression! that’s just not reality! anyone who thinks that they should look like a billboard 24/7… i mean seriously… it was photoshopped! it’s like having halloween 365 days a year! and there are certainly guys out there who aren’t so shallow. who are looking for a lot more than a girl who “looks like a billboard.” obviously you’ve found a great one (Steve). :)

3. Kasia CVM on October 28, 2006 8:11 am

   It is very nice being loved for my not so photoshopped appearance. When you are loved well on earth - and it is a rare thing unfortunately - it gives you a window into the greatness of God’s love.
   By the way….remind me to smack you next time your within 60 miles. I’ll make the drive.
   And thanks for the veiled compliment. At least, I’m going to take it that way. Thanks for the update!

4. Dawn on November 3, 2006 4:08 pm

   “you poor soul… honey, if you go on thinking like that then you’re going to drive yourself into terrible depression!”

   But that’s the problem: women are made to feel like we have to look like that billboard, all the time. And as we know, it’s impossible, even for the best of us. But that’s what we’re told is the standard. Now you know why so many women have issues with their bodies.

   The billboard is not a thing of art: it’s advertising, and meant to entice you to buy a certain product because, by implication, you too will look like this or get a woman that looks like this.

   And studying to be beautiful? Are you kidding? There’s a difference between knowing how to highlight your best features and going all out every day in order to attain an impossible goal. The effort involved (leave out the Photoshopping for a moment) in all that makeup and hair is ridiculous. It took me 30-45 min. to do makeup for my last photo shoot and the last time I had my hair done, that was a 45-60 min. process. And even then, you can’t entirely make things like zits disappear. Then you’d have to constantly touch up the hair and makeup all day, because it’s not going to stay put for longer than a couple of hours.

5. Jeremy on November 3, 2006 7:56 pm

   “women are made to feel like we have to look like that billboard, all the time.” … “that’s what we’re told is the standard.”

   i disagree. sure, advertisements for beauty products show pictures of happy, beautiful people. duuh… they’re selling beauty products. but i think that how you “are made to feel” is at least in some part the result of choices - about who you become friends with, where you spend time, what media you surround yourself with, what culture you allow to influence you.

   WHO told you “that is the standard”? what made you believe them? it doesn’t have to be the standard. certainly, for example, i wouldn’t tell you this. it all depends who you surround yourself with and how you build your self-identity. you can start making choices now that will dramatically shape your self-perception in a year. choices you made five years ago are shaping your self-perception today.

   spend all your time on rush street and you’ll probably feel like you’ll never measure up unless you look like a supermodel 24/7. spend six months living in India teaching kids music and you’ll suddenly realize that it doesn’t really matter. nobody there looks like an american supermodel and they’re quite happy.

   also, i do think that a billboard is a work of art, albeit with a focused purpose as you pointed out. creating an image which will evoke a specific reaction in people is an art form in itself. and i do think that your appearance CAN be a creative endeavor just as much as art can be. for example, people who dress goth to make a statement are using their appearance to communicate something. i dress totally different in different situations to make very intentionally different impressions in those situations. as an artist/musician i’m sure that you’re very aware of how much your appearance is a part of your show - you spent an hour and a half just on makeup and hair for your last photo shoot?

   maybe i just have a much broader view of “art” than many other people. :) i view much of life as art.

   not sure i understand your last paragraph. i wrote in my first post, “if you have a passion or desire to be beautiful then I think you should learn and study and figure out how to do that. and don’t feel bad about it.” i’m saying that there’s nothing wrong with figuring out how to highlight your best features. it’s different for everyone and each person has got to figure out how to do that for themself. and nobody just “knows” - you really have to learn that. for example, who taught you how to do makeup? some people learn at a young age from their parents or friends but many people learn later, or never really think about it. and of course you probably wouldn’t get totally done up every day (depending on your job)… but i think that everyone likes getting really dressed up every once in awhile and maybe having a night on the town and being absolutely stunning!

6. Dawn on November 8, 2006 6:43 pm

   I would call a lot of different things art. But a billboard is advertising/propaganda, not art. Ditto with Left Behind and a fair amount of CCM. The lines can be blurry, but where I’d say that the drawing a four-year-old makes or the performance of a slam poet are art, their purpose is not to provoke you into buying a product.

   I do agree that where you spend your time influences what you think about beauty–years ago, I stopped reading fashion/women’s magazines because I realized that reading them creates a mentality that I don’t want to have; you can’t read them and be consistently content with your wardrobe or appearance. However, there is a certain about of this mentality that is woven into our society and is nearly impossible to avoid; the media feeds this, and even if you don’t watch much TV yourself, you’re still influenced by societal ideals. It’s never a question of one or two people telling you that perfection is the standard for beauty; the standard is something that pervades magazines, TV, film, billboards, etc. If you live in any peopled area, it’s impossible to run away from.

   Your appearance does communicate something, but what I’m saying is that measuring up to an impossible standard of beauty is different than wearing appropriate attire for the occasion or learning how to accent your best features (yes, both of those do take some skill and work). The most beautiful people can’t look as good as a magazine ad without professional and computerized help. They can look amazing in reality and make people comfortable around them, but they wish that they looked as good as the advertising; no amount of personal style and skill can make them look as good as a computer can. Even they can’t measure up. What of a person who’s doesn’t fit society’s standards of beauty at all? Without surgery, you can’t change a large nose, pockmarked face, wrinkles, etc. And what I was saying in my last paragraph from the other comment is that it’s near impossible to maintain the image that we are told we must–the effort expended into “looking good” on that level requires hours, hours that would be better spent enriching yourself in some other way.

   Men are allowed to age. But one day I’m going to be old. And even if now I’m considered of sufficent attractiveness to model, in 20 years I won’t fit society’s standards very well (and since we’re in a progessively more youth-oriented culture, I may be even more obsolete, never mind in modeling, but in life in general). Older women still can be beautiful, but they won’t fit the standard. Men, on the other hand, are still considered attractive enough to get women decades younger without having people flinch. Take any Sean Connery movie in the last few years, for example. Or think about how much stranger my relationship with Bryan would be if our ages were reversed.

7. sbp on December 6, 2006 8:16 pm

   I’m an artist too, kid. I view life as story. But I think advertising, particularly the oppressive body-image forced onto the world’s women through it, is, as Dawn says, pure propaganda.

   And the propaganda reaches far deeper than merely the push to buy a certain product. Particularly with billboards and magazine spreads, where there is no movement of image to emphasize a certain feature (eyelashes, for example), or a voiceover declaring the overt objective, I don’t even notice the product which drives the advertisement. I only notice the model’s body. The model’s distorted, airbrushed body.

   Could that be art? Sure, if the real, deep, concealed motive weren’t to make ALL women feel they have to look just like the model. (The distorted, airbrushed model.) But that’s the true message of the propaganda. Not “Buy Olay, it’ll make your skin look like hers”; but rather, “Look at her body. You should look like that too.”

   And, whether or not women SHOULD feel this pressure, this buried message, this hidden agenda (because obviously we shouldn’t), we DO.

   And I am not blaming men. Particularly not the nice gentlemen like yourself who DON’T think women should look like skin stretched over skeletons, with heroine eyeliner and puffy lips. It’s a societal trend, particularly “common in declining cultures” (as Dr. Brennan says in Bones). And I’m glad you refute the necessity of women destroying their bodies and their psyches in pursuit of a perverted view of beauty. But denying reality doesn’t negate it.

   The truth is that of all the women in my age group that I have ever known, perhaps two of them (perhaps) have not, at some point in their lives, engaged in eating disordered behaviors, whether or not those behaviors developed into a full-blown eating disorder. We as a sex feel a constant pressure, from the television, the magazines, the movies, and the billboards to be much thinner, more glamorous, and more “fit.” But particularly and especially thinner.

   When my sister was at her worst in her eating disorder, we had to hide the Victoria’s Secret catalogs on her mailing list when they arrived. They threw her deeper into self-starvation, all while she was convinced she was fat. And when you consider that the West, with its epidemic focus on a bony aesthetic, is the ONLY culture to produce such behaviors, you have to conclude that there’s a faulty, indeed deadly, societal emphasis equating thinness with beauty, expressed through advertising.

   Women should play to their strenghts in the looks department. I don’t think anyone would argue that point with you. Everyone should dress to his/her body and coloration, and be glad in the things that make him/her attractive. I love being beautiful, myself. I also love being between a size 8 and 10. But I’ve had to work, for many years, to come to the point where I’m comfortable with the fact that it is impossible for me to healthily attain a size 6 or 4.

   As I write, I’m watching a friend develop an eating disorder. Advertising worsens an eating disordered individual’s psychological (and thence physical) condition. I don’t pretend to know everything about art, but my understanding is that, particularly with the political bent flooding artistic styles, movements, and criticisms, art tends to contain a message. And any “art” that leads to this kind of crisis among a culture’s women contains a deadly, diseased, and insidiously destructive message.

   Whether or not that culture’s men, however good and noble or base and horrible, acknowledge it, the problem is still there. And unfortunately, unless the men take action as much as the women against the doctrine of the skeletal, it’s going to keep eating the flesh from female bones. Literally.

   Perhaps you know many women who are overweight, or even a normal weight. I do. I’m one of those normal weight people. But you won’t meet one honest woman who will tell you she has never compared herself to a model in an ad, and has never wished her hipbones were as sharp, her collarbones as jutting, and her cheekbones as prominent as those of that airbrushed, “artistic” figure displaying herself as an impossible standard above our streets, like Folly in the book of Proverbs shouting for attention and promising riches and sex appeal for all who heed her.

   Kudos to Dove.

8. The_Lex on December 11, 2006 6:17 pm

   It would be strong to say that any man making any kind of commentary on women and advertising is hypocritical. After all, even though not necessarily as strongly apparent, men can become susceptible to some of the mainstream “propaganda” out there.

   Nonetheless, to try making some kind of objective argument about advertising as non-influential art and people being totally rational about their self esteem strikes me as an argument with a focus on individualism. It fails to take into account that people are born into society and community, and are enmeshed in that society and community. As such, it takes more than just the individual to affect society’s, a community’s and even an individual’s self esteem and body image.

   As much as we try to pretend that we, as individuals, have acted as the sole influence on our own personal decisions in even personal matters, my research and understanding of the world simply makes that kind of viewpoint false.

   BTW, nice layout and color template for the blog (check out my blog to see what I’m talking about). =D