Friday, November 10, 2006

Kinder Expectations

So, here is an interesting video that I was recently sent. I guess we all hear about how the images of beauty we see are very distorted, but this really demonstrated that in a way I have not seen before. I guess the ideals of beauty we have in our culture are true in some ways, but are also a product we are being sold. I read one time about how until modern times (I took that to mean the last 100 years) most people had limited exposure to other people. Since life was for the most part rural, people might only see several hundred other people in their lifetime. The chances that any of these people would be astonishingly beautiful, was slim. And even if someone was naturally beautiful, the amount of hard work they endured, coupled with the lack of cosmetics and time to take care of themselves would lessen it. So I think the article was saying that the exposure to so many beautiful people who have so much help looking the way they do (trainers, artists, computers) makes us think that we should look this way too; which would not have been the case until recent times. This is interesting to me and makes me wonder if people maybe would have felt that other things besides physical beauty were important. If all you saw was Jane, Mary, Leah... who all worked hard like you did and all looked about the same as you, what would distinguish between you? Would you focus on clothes? Not unless you were rich, I would think. What about your figure? Well, the standards of modesty would have prevented that in large part. So I wonder, would your personal qualities like your work ethic, your gentle nature, or your love for life be what people noticed about you? I do not know. Human nature was not better 100 years ago, so maybe I am just imagining; but maybe things would be different if our expectations were a little kinder.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

With the expectation of beauty being mostly unattainable for most of us (since we can not walk around with photo shop covering our bodies, and make-up artists at our beck and call) it leaves little options. One can see why it is so easy to resort to an eating disorder. We may not have 30,000 dollars for lypo suction, but we can certainly stop eating. Thankful that the bible makes it clear that beauty is fleeting, but it is a woman who fears the Lord that is greatly to be praised.

Anonymous said...

unfortunately i don't think anything is different than it is today. think how often a woman's beauty was spoken of in the Bible. so many stories surround beauty being a central feature when a woman was mentioned. david and solomon took the most beautiful for their own. and on and on. sorry, its the reality of our fallen nature....distorting the search for God's beauty and misplacing it in our own.

luke