Fallen....

Having spent time this evening watching as women underwent radical, painful, life threatening, and extreme procedures to, supposedly, improve their appearance and become "beautiful", I find myself extremely disturbed and even a little bit angry. I think the reason this upsets me so much is because I am capable of understanding their desire to change their bodies in such a drastic way, simply to be considered attractive. All women are inundated everyday by images and messages that let us know we are not "good enough" as we are, that we are not beautiful, or sexy, or of worth. When we look in the mirror, do we see our beauty? No, of course not. All we look at are the so called flaws; My nose is too big, my teeth aren't white enough, I'm not thin enough, my arms aren't toned, I'm too "this", I'm too "that", not enough, not enough. It makes me question how we've gotten to this point. Of course, through out history there have been ideals of beauty, but really, the world we live in today is beyond ridiculous in its expectations of women and appearance. To some extent, I feel like we, as women, are to blame. Are we the sole cause? No, of course not, but is it any coincidence that women are more unhappy today than 50 years ago? What exactly did the feminist movement and the sexual revolution get us? Sure, we were liberated from our apron strings, but what have we traded them for? We are now imprisoned by an unachievable, unrealistic, unattainable image of beauty that wears us all down day after day, whether we ackowledge it or recognize it. Not only that, we have to balance our beauty in a whole new way. We can't be too sweet, too virginal. Yet we can't be too sexual. We're constantly doing this balancing act of Virgin Mary vs. whore archetypes in a society that is never satisfied with what we present. We have allowed our worth as human beings to be reduced to our physical desirability. Women needed more freedoms, needed more equality, there is no argument there. We deserve to be heard, to have opinions, and to be able to express ourselves just as much as a man. But by exercising our new found freedoms, by being openly sexual and opinionated human beings, we allowed ourselves to be turned into objects of desire and lust. I feel like as women, we've lost our divinity. We've reduced ourselves to something much less then we are worthy of, or were created to be. After all, women create and give life! There is nothing more God-like then that ability. We've lost sight of our worth in an attempt to please a society that is less then worthy of our consideration. We allow ourselves to believe that because we don't look a certain way, we are not beautiful, we are not enough, we are not worth being heard. And because we continually try and try to fit into this box of beauty, we allow the men around us to believe that this is how its just supposed to be. We hide our true selves from the men around us. We don't allow them to see us as we really are. How can we blame men for their lack of respect and their objectification of women, when we are continually allowing ourselves to be satisfied with the role of the objectified?