by Riley MacDonell

Created on: September 27, 2009

It's just a fact of life that our society today is an appearance-obsessed one. The entertainment industry executives determine who it is that we see on television, on the big screen, on billboards and in music videos; rarely do their choices in actors, actresses, models and musicians seem to fall into any normal body category. These people are deemed beautiful by the mindless masses that eat up whatever it is that's being cranked out at the time. Ever catch a glimpse of that annual Maxim's Top 100 Hottest Actresses list? The very fact that the list is existent is a problem in itself because of what it teaches our children (and us for that matter) about the extreme importance we place on beauty and looks today. Each and every celebrity in the list is gorgeous, sure, but they all look more or less the same. The industry has deemed what it takes to be beautiful and if you don't fit the mold they ignore you and pass you up for someone that does fit that mold. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there for the beautiful people in the entertainment industry, and with so many possible replacements for actresses who might gain a few pounds or lose that signature Hollywood look, most of the actresses we see strive to stay at their lowest weight and be that typical Hollywood beauty for us to gawk at in the magazine ads, in the movie theaters, in the full-length posters and on the billboards.

The thing is that I don't look like those girls in the Maxim Top 100 list. In fact, most women don't look like those girls. Olivia Wilde, Megan Fox, Eliza Dushku and Jennifer Love Hewitt are all beautiful women, there's no denying that fact, and I'm sure that a lot of people out there think that they deserve to be in the Top 100 Hottest Actresses list. But everyone is beautiful in their own way and classifying what is beautiful and what is not sends the wrong message to women, men, boys and girls of all ages, races and mindsets. That old saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder may be true but it's becoming harder and harder to differentiate what one thinks is beautiful when the beholder in under a constant barrage of images of what society tells them should be considered real beauty. It's hard to think for yourself when those tops entertainment execs are weeding out everyone who they don't regard as beautiful and leaving you with a very narrow pool of those who they think are for you to base your own opinions off of.

So many women hold themselves up to that Hollywood standard and

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>