Sometimes I see things that make me laugh, and sometimes those same things make me sad. For example, MTV’s The Hills. I laugh because the show follows brain dead but gorgeous California girls around with cameras as they lead a cinematic, comically charmed life that people actually believe is real. It makes me sad because countless girls in our country see them as role models or believe that the main characters of this “reality” show made it this far because of hard-work and elbow grease, which is wildly false. Notice how MTV doesn’t want to follow around hardworking Ph.D candidates at Harvard or shuttle scientists at NASA.
But to be fair, our country’s emphasis on physical beauty and tendency to say “It’s OK” to illiterate students can’t be blamed on The Hills. That type of backwards thinking was always there. The Hills is just a television show profiting off of our appreciation of beauty.
Unfortunately, this emphasis and desire for the beautiful can cause REAL psychological problems in both girls and boys. These problems can range from social anxiety to the feared eating disorders anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. I never cared if people thought I was attractive or not, but for some people, it’s very important. It isn’t their fault. The pressure to look good is always more prevalent than the pressure to be intelligent or thoughtful, etc. And some people, it is true, have it all.
UB did a little research on fear of rejection, and here’s their conclusion: People who feel pressure to look attractive are more fearful of being rejected because of their appearance than are their peers. Really? Is that an article from The Onion? Here are some more conclusions from past studies of the obvious: People who feel hungry are more likely to seek food than their non-hungry peers. People who feel cold are more likely to seek a jacket than their jacketed peers. People who are threatened by bears are more likely to run away from bears than their not-threatened-by-bears peers.
I could go on and on.
I guess it’s just funny to me that this sort of topic required scientific research. What’s sad to me is that this sort of topic is important enough to be researched by a major university. Two of them actually, England’s University of Kent took part as well. I’m not saying UB shouldn’t have done the research. What I am saying is that it bothers me that there’s enough pressure to be attractive in our world that people are emotionally affected by it.