Vanity in America

What is "beauty?" If we look back through our history and culture, we
see different views of what beauty is. If you are in the jungles of
South America, whoever has the biggest hoop in their ear is considered
beautiful. Take a look at the paintings in museums, and we see many
wide-hipped, overweight women in the paintings. Society and culture,
not any pretermined set of traits, establish what is beautiful- and
what is not.

In our culture at this moment, just look at
television and the movies to see what our society has determined to be
beautiful and sexy. If we look at these mediums, we see well devloped
women and well muscled men. If we look at American people as a whole,
we see a nation of overweight people spending billions of dollars to
trying to look like the airbrushed people they see in magazines that
are, ironcially, sitting on the shelf at the same store where they are
buying their beauty products and diet pills. There is no doubt that we
are a nation of overweight, out-of-shape people.Take a look at
television commercials to see how many ads there are for diets, beauty
products, and even 1 hour face lifts. In the extreme, we have a person
spending thousands of dollars trying to look like "Barbie."

Is
this really how Americans view themselves? Or is this how the
"snake-oil" salesman tell us how to be? The airwaves are dominated by
advertisements telling us how to look, how to eat, what cars to buy,
and, of course, that we can all get a better job if we look better.
Vanity has reached a new extreme in America.

There is no doubt
that we are a society that is overweight and needs to improve our own
health, as well as our childrens'. We have seen a rise in cases of
eating disorders and heart disease in the last hundred years, and even
cases of violence caused by people striving to be "beautiful."

Vanity
in America has reached epidemic proportions and we, as a society, must
take a look at the cost- not only in terms of products and services,
but on social level. The costs of vanity in America are beyond the
billions we spend on our vanity.