Americans & Perfect Figure Syndome

Toward the end of Little Miss Sunshine, Richard Hoover; his son, Dwayne; and their brother-in-law, Frank; are sitting in the back row of the pageant, watching and waiting for their daughter, Olive, to compete. The other contestants are being called up one by one, and each contestant looks the same: they’re really pretty, really skinny, and really airbrushed to the point that the contestants may as well be applying for America‘s Next Top Model. Richard and Dwayne head backstage and plead with Sheryl, the mother, to take Olive out of the competition, for fear that the other parents will laugh and criticize her because she does not look like the other girls.

In this moment, the film’s biting satire emerges: our country’s obsession with image and the drive to become something we clearly are not. From the latest beauty product (s) being marketed in media ads, to watching slim and slender fashion models appear in billboards, magazines, television reality shows, etc, Americans are being fed a perception that if you look or dress a certain way, you’ll be considered beautiful.

So what do we do to try and obtain the perfect figure syndrome?

We ditch the clothes we wear for a trip to Abercrombie & Fitch and buy trendier outfits so we can fit in with the beltway crowd and maybe we won’t be considered a ‘loser’ or ‘un-cool’ for not looking like every other wannabe cast member from Laguna Beach.

Girls buy endless amounts of cosmetics and begin to do excruciating exercise activities just so they can keep their shallow boyfriends from cheating on them.

Regular looking teenage girls eat mother’s special short stack buttermilk pancakes with fresh berries, then up-chuck the meal in the girls bathroom before first period, sacrificing their health in order to resemble their idols, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.

We either eat limited meals or no meals at all, and then force ourselves to run five miles, just so we can fit into that cute size three dress for prom, or to drop a few pant sizes.

We buy diet pills that promise us that we’ll lose 40 pounds in 4 weeks because getting up, starting the car, and driving to a gym takes too much work. Plus, Days of our Lives is on and I, for one, won’t want to miss if Cassandra and Miguel get back together or not!

The sad part in our elusive quest for looking slimmer and younger is that some of us change not because we want to, but because we feel pressured to take extreme and drastic measures to please others. We are completely blinded to the simple fact that at the end of the day, we may look like some model or movie star on the outside, but we hate ourselves and we look and feel ugly inside.