By Mark Azzara
My Dear Friend,
Sometimes when I get on the Web I am confronted by ads that I immediately see are targeted to me because advertisers are mining my data and feeding me stuff they think I want. (Just so you know, they’ve been 100 percent wrong so far.) But I know for sure that the ad I saw recently was not aimed at me.
As I emailed last week’s column to my editor I was confronted by an ad on my email page promising to make me look altogether better than my unretouched photographs. Of course, the ad featured two attractive women, offering before and after photos that conveyed the message that the “real” person wasn’t good enough. Welcome to the world where illusion is reality.
I am lucky because I don’t have a face that’s worth saving photographically. Even my barber has given up on me. I am what I am, and I’m grateful for that. But I have seen a lot of these kinds of ads for decades. I once was asked which industries we could do without in this country, and the first two that came to mind were tobacco and cosmetics.
This photo reimagining business is nothing new. Painters of the rich and famous have been doing the same thing for hundreds of years. But there seems to be a driving desire these days to live an illusion. Reality isn’t good enough.
These “services” are aimed at the masses who are no longer satisfied or content (if they ever were) with who they are – the ones who always want to be prettier (i.e., sexier), richer, more influential or powerful. Again, nothing new. In the 13th Century St. Thomas Aquinas said we all are tempted by what he called the four false substitutes for God: Power, pleasure, wealth and honor.
I just got back from a week-long visit to see my one married daughter, her husband and their children. My daughter is an attractive woman who has never felt the need to make herself artificially pretty. My three grandkids have been raised to be pretty self-unaware. They don’t make a big deal about what they wear or how they look (to the extent my daughter was a little mortified when her son went to church in a clean but unbelievably wrinkled T-shirt he’d pulled out from a pile of washed laundry at the last minute).
My daughter makes it a point to clearly explain to her two daughters that some kinds of fashion aren’t appropriate for them — or any other women, for that matter — because those fashions objectify women. Unlike a great many women I see all the time, my two granddaughters are learning never to wear anything that reveals cleavage.
I spoke earlier today with a friend who mentioned that the wife of another friend of his dresses in a way that makes her look like a self-centered, sex-starved teenager rather than a mother of three young children. He mentioned it because even the husband has noticed.
It’s easy to equate external appearance with internal beauty. I fear that many of those who seek a nicer-looking portrait or a sexier wardrobe do so because they don’t see their inner beauty. I suspect they really want to be loved, but having a photo that’s not the real you isn’t the way to do it. And just because everybody else is doing it doesn’t mean you have to do the same thing.
If you can’t look at yourself in the mirror and say “I am beautiful” then I’d like to suggest that you ask God to tell you how beautiful you are. Ask God to show you how he sees you. I do that and I’m amazed by the Lord’s answer.
Ask God to reveal the lies that govern your life because you and I face a choice either to live the life we have or to live a lie — a choice whether or not to get the “f” out. Please don’t.
All God’s blessings – Mark
You are fine just the way you are, but don’t show cleavage? You are fine just the way you are, but don’t dress in a way that makes me uncomfortable?
While I appreciate the sentiment of the message, some of the content is judgmental and degrading.
Agreed. Cultivating greater self-worth is one thing. Purity culture is another. And it doesn’t seem especially correlated with high self-worth.
Religiously, you’re talking about idolatry, serving a god of greed and accumulation as a subsection of empire, over and against the god not of self worth, but a god of the worth of us all. It is about, must be about Justice, not narcissism. Get us anxious about what we really are, either through creating in us desires (won’t you give me a Mercedes Benz) or beliefs that we are inadequate and need more (more police, army, money, surveillance at home and airports) to survive (fear the other, the foreign terrorist). We will then seek the easiest, most readily available means to reduce that tension and anxiety. Buy, consume, buy this new product. You’ll be OK then.
It’s service and liturgy for the idol Mammon, part of Pharos’s Army. Consumerism, focused on accumulation and greed, not on Justice or love of neighbor and enemy.