America the Beautiful
Watch the video!I knew as we began this month looking at beauty, that we needed to start it with jowl lifts.
I was surprised and a little shocked when I saw pictures of a dog owner who had brought her hound dog in for cosmetic surgery. He was one of these wonderful jowly dogs whose mouth hangs down on both sides. But his owner preferred that his mouth be tight, and so she got him a face lift.
We are a little confused about beauty in this country.
We are confused as a society about the importance of the external, convinced that we need to change to be worthy of love, to be good.
In this faith, we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We say that each and every one of us is worthy and is good.
You are worthy. You are good. You are beautiful.
Beyond beautiful in any conventional brainwashed American sense, you, me, we all are full of beauty, a beauty which comes from and is infused with the divine.
A divine which is everywhere, a world infused with holiness in which each and every one of us is blessed and good and beautiful.
I know that I am grounded in that wide open heart of our Universalism when I can see beauty in every person, and not just in a 'well they have a beautiful personality' kind of way. The details of body and being, the specific manifestation of the holy which is beauty.
When I have been in the deepest and clearest states of contemplation and meditation, I have had this feeling, I have seen with these eyes, I have known this world as filled with beauty.
But this is not easy.
Seeing this interconnected beauty in every person, seeing it in ourselves and the world around us is not easy.In fact there are multibillion dollar industries focused on perpetuating an unattainable and often unhealthy ideal of beauty, making us feel less than, motivating us to buy products we don't need in order to become something other than we are.
In his movie, America the Beautiful, Daryl Roberts examines these questions of beauty and self image and how the forces of advertisement and pop culture shape our minds and hearts. 1
In this country we have 5% of the world's population, and we consume 40% of the world's advertising. In magazines, on billboards, on the television and now on the internet, we are bombarded by images.
And these images sink in.
And can be very destructive.
3 minutes looking at a fashion magazine makes 70% of women of all ages feel depressed, guilty and shameful.2
Three minutes.
The beauty industry and its magazines, which are really just huge advertisement containers perpetuate a pervasive sense of unworthiness and discomfort with self in so many of us.
They purposely make us all feel less than so that we will then buy their products.
And we do.
We spend over $45 billion dollars every year on cosmetic and beauty products.
So a lot of people have a lot riding on motivating us all to feel we need to whiten and tighten, to buy shine in a bottle, to be able to apply something to our outsides to make us ok.
But the question is what is all of this doing to our insides?
Right now, sitting here, in this moment, do you feel beautiful?
Do you know that you are beautiful, a manifestation of all that is holy and good in this world, beautiful?
Do you feel like you might be beautiful if just...
If you were just a little taller, shotrter, bigger, smaller...
If just...
In a recent survey, 91% of college women reported that they were "sometimes or often on a diet".
For high school girls it was 40% to 60%.
And between the ages of 9 to 11, 46% of girls reported that they were "sometimes or often on a diet".
I fear that we are very reliably indoctrinating our children into this image centered society of superficial beauty in which for them to be worthy of love, for them to be good, they need to be tall, skinny, shiny haired, light skinned, clear skinned and so many of them, so often so many of us are not.
In Fiji, in 1995 there was no television, and a very different concept of beauty than the one we are saturated with here in this country.
For the Fijians, for generations, the most beautiful among them were the larger people. A healthy, full body spoke of abundance, of the ability of your community to sustain life.
When she learned that they were about to get television, sociologist Dr. Anne Becker went to research the effect television would have, particularly on body image and the prevalence of eating disorders.
In 1995, not one of the teenage girls interviewed reported every having made themselves vomit after eating to lose weight.
In 1998, just three years later, 11% of teenage girls interviewed reported having made themselves vomit, the same number as in this country.3
Three years and already the culture had changed so much.
We have been steeped in our medias toxic depiction of beauty for our whole lives.
And sadly, often the ultimate effect is dire, and dangerous and life threatening.
For nearly 10 years, Jason Burroughs... [a college senior] has been fighting for his life. Burroughs has fought to control his weight since middle school, ...Burroughs has always been active. He was involved in gymnastics in elementary school, which contributed to his "skin and bones" appearance. Around the time Burroughs entered fifth grade, he started to become less active and slowly began to gain weight. In junior high school his classmates made fun of him and called him "chubby." He went home for comfort only to face more abuse. His father constantly made fun of his weight and ridiculed him for eating so much.
Burroughs had nowhere to turn. He could not find refuge at school and there was no solace waiting for him at home, so Burroughs turned to food for comfort. Whenever he was stressed out or felt bad about himself, he ate.
In high school, Burroughs tried sticking his finger down his throat after eating so he could lose weight and fit in with the popular kids who made him the butt of their jokes. This did not last long because Burroughs could not tolerate the gagging...But Burroughs still wanted to look like everyone else, so he stopped eating. "I didn't think I was good enough to eat," Burroughs said. Burroughs focused on his schoolwork and would only eat one meal a day. Sometimes he did not eat at all. During his senior year, Burroughs lost 30 pounds in a period of about six months. He was only satisfied with himself when his bones showed through his skin. He was encouraged to continue starving when his friends said he looked anorexic. "It actually made me happy that I looked sickly to some people," Burroughs said. "I was happy that people weren't calling me chubby."
During the worst part of his eating disorder, Burroughs would go three days without eating anything at all. "It was really hard for me because, although I liked the fact that I was losing weight, I hated who I was," Burroughs said. "I couldn't continue to live that way ... it hurt too much inside." Burroughs tried eating better, but he always felt like he was not thin enough, so he turned to physical exercise. He did at least 300 crunches and 120 pushups every day. He would do aerobics in his dorm room until he was too tired to move. Burroughs was eating more, but he was exercising away more energy than his caloric intake allowed. ...With the support of his mother and those around him, Burroughs slowly started to realize that, in order to be truly happy, he had to take care of himself. He started eating better and exercising less. Although he still has trouble forcing himself to eat properly, he says he has reached the point in his life where he is happy with himself and depends on his self esteem and attitude to attract others. 4
More than eight million people suffer from eating disorders in this country, and more than one million of them are men.
And all of us, even those of us whose suffering does not compromise the health of our bodies, still, so many of us are similarly sick in our hearts and minds.
Right now, sitting here today, do you know you are beatiful.
With this body, with this life, just as it is.
Aimee Mullins says, "Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than me, but nobody calls her disabled," She is an athlete, activist and actor born without fibular bones in her legs. Aimee has had prosthetic legs essentially her whole life. And today, she's transforming the limits of the human body and art...
She's a world record-setting athlete. She's been told she's too pretty to be "disabled." But she's over that. She's forcing her audience to ponder what human beauty is and what it means to be sexy. Mind you, some of her pairs of legs (She has over a dozen.) tower her over six feet tall in stilettos. 5
In the Netherlands, there is even a show, Miss Ability, which is a beauty pageant for young women with visible disabilties.
On the show, soon to be headed to our own airwaves, women with various disabilities visible with the naked eye compete in a beauty pageant complete with evening gown and baithing suit competition. In addition, they tell their story, sharing how they have overcome their disability.
Even disabled people can be beautiful it seems to say, even disabled people can overcome their conditions and look like the images of beauty that we have been spoon fed by the media.
Even disabled people can rise above their conditions and become normal.
This is exactly the same brainwashing in a dubiously progressive seeming form. The contestants are not beautiful just because they are, they are not celebrated because all they have held, all they have faced.
Rather, their stories are only worthy of TV because they have risen above their conditions to fit, however imperfectly into that same old oppressive ideal.
This mythic self hating ideal which makes so many of us sad and so many of us sick in body and soul.
I believe that we are called to bless this world, beginning with our own selves, our own children and our own beloveds. We can look deeply into this world into the divine made manifest all around us, in body and in beauty.
We can see with clear eyes and liberated heart, we can see through these images and hear through these voices which surround us, which tell us that we are too fat, too old, too gimpy, to short, too tall, too anything to be loved, to be beautiful.
This doesn't mean that we will not strive to make ourselves pretty, but that we will do so with open eyes and open hearts, knowing that deep down we are beauty, we are love, we will do so not hating ourselves, even a little bit, not longing for something other than we are.
It will mean we will look into the mirror, gaze upon the fullness, the perfection, the beauty which is our body, we will see ourselves with new eyes.
It will mean that as we move through this world that our knowledge of our beauty, our soul deep grounded knowledge of our goodness and worth will be contagious.
It will mean that we will look upon one another and not catalogue imperfections and judgments, but that we will be free to see the fullness and perfection that we are.
May we know beauty.
May we know that we are filled with beauty, that just as we are on this day, at this very moment, we are glorious manifestations of all that is holy and good in the universe.
May we know beauty.
May we open our eyes and ears, may we open the floodgates of our whole beings and see one anther and whole world, as it is.
As beauty.
Amen.
America the Beautiful from UU Church of Berkeley on Vimeo.
Copyright © 2010, Rev. Chris Holton Jablonski, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
1 America the Beautiful, Daryl Roberts, writer/director, 2007
4 Fercho, Tracy L., Students Suffer From Eating Dosorders, http://www.caringonline.com/feelings/byvictims/stud01.htm
5 Harness, Ashley, Too Pretty to Be Disabled, http://www.velvetparkmedia.com/blogs/too-pretty-be-disabled
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