gs1r: The Injustice of Woman's Self-Perception

"Even I don't wake up looking like Cindy Crawford."

- Cindy Crawford

This is Gisele Bündchen, born on June 20th, 1980, a Brazilian supermodel of German descent and is currently the highest paid and richest supermodel in the world. She has been the face of over 20 brands internationally and on more magazines covers than any other supermodel ever. Her resume at 28 years old overwhelming shows that she is the face of woman's beauty all around the world, and in a capitalistic POV, she can potentially obliterate all competition when she shows up on the scene. But in the same sense, capitalism promotes the ideas that someone's better and someone's worse, and that the person who's better is preferred over all the competition.

"Let us consider global standards of physical attractiveness. Looks standards... have become homogenized, globally, as white Northern European. This has wreaked havoc for the people of the world who do not have white Northern European features since they are pressured, if they wish to be economically and socially successful, to be slim, light-colored in skin and hair, and with Aryan facial structure."

Beauty Bias, by Bonnie Berry, pg 101,
Preview Book Here

The world is biased toward the Northern European standard of beauty, which means that all other forms of a woman that aren't conformed to this aesthetic are considered less attractive in the Western World. Many, many women try so hard to look like this standard by spending tons of money and credit on high end make-up, expensive brand name jeans, destructive hair appointments full of dyes and colors, personal trainers to get them "model" skinny, not to mention epidemics of liposuction, face-lifts, nose-jobs and botox to disfigure their faces to look Gisele-like. Imagine a Latina or black girl trying so hard to look like Gisele? They will never get there nor be satisfied because their biophysical origins are indigenous Native American or African. Regardless, these woman will go into self-destruction mode just to get the "optimum" figure, but little do they know that they are enslaved to the opinion of the professional modeling industry. In essence, the industry dictates what is beauty and definitely isn't, creating in women a loss of self-identity and replacing it with a(n) [insert brand name here]-identity, becoming their True Religion jeans, their Mercedes, their dyed blond hair.

The injustice is that the professional modeling industry plays these woman like puppets, standardizing the worldwide aesthetic bias for Northern European white girls, creating discrimination against anything other than this look (Asians, Latinas, Blacks, Indians, even ethnic whites, etc...) that spills into normal people's lives, such as job interviews, retail services, business opportunities, and academic acceptances and preferences. The industry pulls women's strings of insecurity and walk them to retailers and services for instant gratification as temporary as the trends. They don't care about their self-esteem of self-perception; they care about making money and are willing to find ways to break woman down to a crushed point so that at that moment the devil can speak to them VIA the mass-media and say "let me help you feel better about you..."

Women, stop trying to be Gisele and find your identity!
You are special and amazing; just go and look for it within =)

-gs1r-