Searching For Real Beauty Between Stereotypes And Insecurity

Each day, I try to avoid things that offend me, yet this is becoming increasingly difficult as our visual media becomes more pernicious and pervasive. I am constantly feeling visually and spiritually violated. For example, I lose all faith in humanity when I’m subjected to to VH1 at the gym. There is so much I don’t want to see.

As I sit in the sterility of my cubicle, I think of how difficult it is to live a life guided and surrounded by beauty. When I overhear all the suits downtown talk about numbers on my lunch break, my soul barfs a little. When I can’t have a decent conversation with a friend at a bar because of the colossal TVs on full blast, I want to punch whoever is responsible in the snout. I know, I can be a bit of a curmudgeon, believe me, I’m trying to get better.

It’s not easy being like this.

Last year, I was subjected to one such offensive billboard several times a week. It was near our apartment right off of the expressway, advertising H&M and it always, always featured emaciated white models. I know that standards of beauty have and always will exist. I’m no dummy. What I want to explore is the escalating insidiousness of these images and their implications. I don’t watch much TV, mainstream movies, or read trashy magazines. I try my best to avoid the symbols and signifiers of ideologies I find repugnant. One of my problems is that I interrogate everything I see or hear. It’s become a compulsion. I simply can’t let things be.

And so what troubles me is that I don’t have the choice of avoiding these images. Ever. I have to look at the billboard near my apartment. I have to look at the advertisement of Jessica Simpson’s “The Price of Beauty” in which the women are blatantly ordered according to skin color. I’m not an unreasonable person; I’m not expecting these troubling images to disappear, but I do want more of a choice in the matter. I don’t want to constantly be bombarded with images that communicate that I am a lesser human being because my skin happens to be dark or because I weigh more than 80 pounds.

When I see advertisements that utilize the female body,  I wonder if people in real life actually find curve-deficient, sapless women attractive. I don’t get it. If we look at beauty in the context of evolution, this doesn’t quite make sense to me. According to biology, men would be attracted to voluptuous women with lots of hair because they would make good baby machines, right? What gives?

Unfortunately, I think women are often their own worst enemies. We create preposterous standards for ourselves and each other. It took me several years of intellectualizing my feelings and reading many, many feminist texts to feel like a confident and independent person. I realize, however, that my education has been a luxury. Not everyone is going to analyze images until they’re nauseous.

I want radical changes — but the least advertisers can do is use models that don’t look like they’ve imitated the diet of a refugee. Why is our culture obsessed with models and celebrities? Henry Thoreau once said “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

So every day, in the sterility of downtown Chicago, I listen to beautiful music that reminds me that I’m a human being. I try to remember that the world is vast and full of beautiful things. As I ride my bike home from work, I’m a scavenger of beauty. I avoid billboards and look for little flares of color, of nuance, of unexpected objects to undo my angst and ennui of the day.

Oh Hells Nah is a small and sassy Mexican woman exploring the relationships between poetry, politics, and food. She lives in Chicago, you can check out her blog — like hot dogs for your brain — or follow her on Facebook or Twitter @OhHellsNah.