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Though I have watched it in the past, I've seen enough to the point where I don't watch it anymore. I can remember looking at every candidate during last season's running, and finally ended up shaking my head when the finalist was pronounced the winner. In fact, I remember the casting call looking for the next cast. I was fine with it until the requirement was a height of at least 5'7". In my two cent opinion, I think the show has done more harm than good. It sends out a message to women saying that you must look a certain way, talk a certain way and be a certain way in order to be beautiful.

I recently came across a passage in my favorite book, The Screwtape Letters, that had made me think about it. Now keep in mind this book was written by a man way back in the 60's, but I still think that what he wrote is still relevant now as it was back then:

" . . . Since this is a kind of beauty even more transistory than most, we thus aggravate the female's horror of growing old (with many excellent results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children. And tha tis not all. We have engineered a great increase in the license which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, an its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, of course; the figures in the popular are are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being 'frank' and 'healthy' and getting back to nature. As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist - making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible."

Basically, the images we see in America's Next Top Model, Victoria's Secret, and on the covers of Cosmopolitan, Elle, Seventeen and other magazines are faked images. These women have others to do their hair, makeup, and wardrobe. Then technicians "modify" their look with touch-ups done on the computer, erasing wrinkles and blemishes, nipping and tucking where needed, so the final print is literally picture perfect.

That's the image that we see. As a way to achieve that image, we spend so much money getting breasts augmentation, liposuction, other forms of plastic surgery, gels and creams that promise to turn back the clock on our aging faces, lotions that could take away unsightful cellulite and give us our youthful skin back, etc. Whatever happened to "growing old gracefully"?

Ladies, I implore you, don't fall victim to thinking that you're not beautiful because you don't look like that. Don't let anyone think that you're not good enough because you don't measure up to their unrealistic expectations of what "beauty" is. You're beautiful whether you're a size 2 or a size 20. You're beautiful whether you're 5'7" and 125 lbs, or 5'0" and 150 lbs. You're beautiful whether your hair is blonde/brunette/black/highligh ted or grey. It doesn't matter! You are beautiful just the way you are.

Oh, by the way, if a guy wants you to change your look to be good enough for him, don't bother. He's not the right guy for you. The right guy will love you for who you are, flaws and all.

Learn more about this author, Krista Strmic.
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