The more you're shown the body you don't have, the less you want the one you do.

There's a brutal reality of advertising: homeliness and plainness don't sell. Beauty does. And it doesn't matter what the product, your potential customers will pay more attention if they see someone beautiful using it. That's why, not only will you never see Roseanne Barr advertising for Covergirl, you'll never see her advertising a vacuum cleaner, toaster, brand of tires, or anything else. When we're considering buying something, and we're watching someone else use it, we are, in essence, trying out the product vicariously. We are imagining ourselves as the person who is using the product. So advertisers show us people they feel we will want to imagine being.

The problem is that the constant array of advertising with exceptionally skinny and tall women (the modern, American cultural model of beauty) and super-muscular men (ditto) the more that seems less like the ideal, and more like the norm. (It doesn't matter to our poor brains that those people are far from being the norm. Most of them aren't even natural. Those body types don't occur in nature!) And if those supposedly perfect bodies become not only an ideal, but a norm to our minds, then we become side-show freaks, even if we look perfectly normal.

Of course, the worst effect is on kids and teenagers. They have so few mental references of body types to refer back to that it can begin to feel to them as if they are the only side-show freaks in a world full of beauties and manlies... Enter eating disorders and steroid use. It is no wonder.

Hopefully, one day (soon) America's public standards of beauty will change, and no longer idealize the freakishly skinny, and cartoonily muscular, unnatural-looking people it prefers today. Until that time comes, advertising will continue to inflict havoc on the body images of everyone - especially the youth.

Learn more about this author, Frank Sinbeans.
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