Media and the construction of beauty patterns

By Sivana Vergopolan

To be a beautiful woman nowadays, you need to be skinnier, have big breasts, a wonderful body, and a long straight blond hair, be tanned and have a perfect smile. This is the beauty pattern.
Every hour, every day, in your entire life, whatever you look, whatever you listen, from the moment you awake to the moment you sleep, you’re being bombard by advertisements that will tell you what you should use and that you have to be beautiful and wealthy.
Just turn on the TV and someone will show you what kind of car you have to drive, what you must have eaten for breakfast, for lunch, dinner, the right toothpaste, shampoo, moisturizes, soap, CDs, and a lot of things and machines you don’t even know that was possible to exist. Everything is showing you by handsome guys and perfect girls with terrific bodies and they swear to you: “you can have these muscles too with our new product”
You see and realize you need it! How could you live without it until today? Maybe that is the reason why you don’t have a girlfriend like that!
This feeling is caused by the media power and as a consequence you buy, buy, and buy.
This is the media work and this is not a fair game because every new day a new product that promises to make you skinner, fashion and cool is shown you in the media.
The media was invented to lead people to believe, for example, which by drinking a specific brand of beer can make you date that Diva of the advertisement. It is absurd, but works.
As it works when they convince you that if you drive that car you’ll look like a loser.
Why it works? Because you don’t want to be a loser, you want to be a winner.
Being a loser can cause sadness, loneliness and these kinds of feelings nobody wants.
The main problem is today this beauty pattern works, makes you fashionable. Tomorrow it cannot works anymore. Everything is fast, disposable, replaceable.
But don’t worry my friend! The media will always be here to tell and sell you whatever you need to be “in” again. As a result you will be wearing the new clothes, shoes, shampoos, toothpaste and cereal. You will be driving the new fancy car and trying to keep up with it, even if you don’t realize that. This is the result of the human nature .The human greed.
Vanity is something amazing. It’s definitely my favorite sin.
People need to stand out in a crowd, need to differentiate themselves from the others, need to acquire lavish things at any price and it can result in diseases, phobias, disturbs and a lot of bills.
But what can we do? We need to be cool to be accepted by the others. So, we work more to have more money, to buy fancy things, to be cools, to be accepted by the others.
And whatever happens, the media will be there to help us and sell us everything we need and more than we can dream.
Whatever can it be? In the end, it is all about money and vanity. That’s my opinion.
Nobody is victim and nobody is villain. We’re just human beings.


Sil
May 11 of 2008