The Almighty Idiot Box

Last night I found myself watching the premier of “America’s Next Top Model” (hey, I get 5 channels…that was the best option). I watched one hour of the two hour premier, and found myself absolutely disgusted. First of all, because, and I say this in the nicest way possible, these were not attractive women at all. And I mean body image aside, I’m just talking about their faces. Not attractive. Not even a little cute. Maybe one or two of them out of the twenty or thirty girls I could consider beautiful, but I really expected that a national television show which auditioned thousands of girls across the country would have more impressive results.
But on top of that, not one of them seemed to have any redeeming personality qualities. Granted, I only got to know them for one hour, but I was audibly groaning and scoffing in disgust at the tv. I am of the belief that even the most unattractive people become gorgeous by having a beautiful personality, and vice versa, the most stunning women become utterly repellent with nasty personalities. And even though I tried to give them this benefit of the doubt, there was beauty neither inside nor out.
And as they strutted around in their I-have-bigger-handkerchiefs-than-that bikinis, very few body structures could I find appealing, most entirely too skinny to be attractive at all, and keep in mind the camera adds ten pounds!
And yet, something inside my feminine brain still looked at my own body and part of me compared myself to them, and I didn’t measure up. Despite my conscious and audible disgust, some automatic part of me still coveted this “beauty”. And admittedly, I worked just a little harder during my workout this morning. WHY?? How does this make any sense at all?? It doesn’t. And yet it’s there, and it exists.

No matter how content and secure a woman can be with her body image, we live in a world that worships the almighty idiot-box, and with that we allow the media gods to hand us our ten commandments that we should live by. Thou shall be beautiful to those who must look at you, and thy beauty is defined as zero fat, zero muscle, 5’10’’, and layers of makeup, hairspray, and padded bras. Thou shall make enough money. Thou shall be powerful. Thou shall be sexy and desirable.
Whatever that means.