FREE ESSAY ON BRING ON THE CHEESECAKE

BRING ON THE CHEESECAKE

I AM…beautiful. As you are beautiful, as he is beautiful, as all of us, even our
enemies, are beautiful. And yet, most of us spend a good portion of our everyday lives
looking in the mirror, critiquing ourselves, pointing out problem areas, and generally
going ugh. We compare ourselves to Kate Moss, Ricky Martin, Nicole Kidman, Brad Pitt, and
Brittney Spears, all of whom in our eyes exemplify the ultimate in beauty, sensuality,
and … airbrushing. Yes, airbrushing, that oh-so-handy technique employed by
magazines worldwide to make the attractive look perfect. Perfect? You call Kate Moss
perfect? Every time I see her picture, I just want to force-feed her a huge piece of
cheesecake!(Ethos) But her look of three-square-meals-a-year has become en vogue as women
and men all over the country starve themselves in order to conform to what they perceive
as society's concept of beauty. Our appearance, this thing we call beauty, where does it
come from? Can it be photographed and plastered on a 50-foot billboard or circulated on a
million magazine covers? Consider for a moment that it might be something more personal.
Something a little more than skin-deep. So hit me baby, one more time, fasten your
seatbelts, and hold on to your cheesecake as I take you for a ride through society's
conceptions and misconceptions of beauty.
I don't know how many times I've heard some healthy, attractive individual proclaim that
they would do anything just to lose 15 pounds. Hello, we live in America. The land of
plenty. The land of opportunity. The land of a $33 billion diet industry. People all over
the world are starving and yet here we are spending ridiculous amounts of money so people
can tell us not to eat. And then we get into the fad diets. Between the Cabbage Soup
Diet, the Atkins Low-Carb Diet, the Grapefruit/Fruit Juice Diet, the Metabolism Diet, and
the Russian Airforce Diet (it actually exists), it seems that all Americans ever do is
diet. In fact, at any one time, half of all teenage girls in America are dieting. Now I
prefer a different set of diet rules. I like the one that says if you eat something and
no one sees you eat it, it has no calories. And then there are the rules that if you
drink a diet soda with a candy bar, the calories in the candy bar are cancelled out by
the diet soda. Oh, and did you know that food used for medicinal purposes NEVER count,
such as hot chocolate, toast, ginger ale, and my personal favorite, Sara Lee Cheesecake.
Ah, cheesecake: my #1 recommended cure for… anything! Never underestimate the
healing powers of cheesecake.
Speaking of people in dire need of cheesecake, People Magazine recently did a cover story
entitled Wasting Away which chronicled eating disorders among female college students. It
opened by talking about an incident in 1996 in which sandwich bags disappeared in mass
quantities from the kitchen of a college sorority house. Upon investigation, the sandwich
bags were found hidden in a basement bathroom, filled with vomit. These popular,
successful girls were making themselves sick in order to conform to the types of bodies
they saw portrayed in the movies and on TV. Interestingly enough, in the very same issue,
People Magazine ran a picture of Mariah Carey, with a caption discussing how Mariah
scarcely squeezed into a designer dress for the Oscars. They denounce eating disorders
and say that what matter is truly inside, and yet in the same breath, they denounce a
celebrity for gaining a couple pounds. Now what kind of message does that send?
We must think about what kind of messages we are sending. Professor Theresa Thompson
recently did a class project in her communications course at the University of Dayton in
which the students studied magazines for girls ages 8 to 18. The messages? Beauty, body,
and boys. In discussing the body, the magazines did not talk about health and fitness,
but rather they spoke of looking good and what one could do to look better. Eating
disorders were viewed as a problem, not because of their health risks, but because of
their affect on your hair, skin, and nails. One quiz invited readers to discover if they
were a brain or a beauty, implying that the two are mutually exclusive. 
And talk about your bad messages, has anybody seen the movie She's All That? In the film,
the most popular guy in school, after being dumped by his girlfriend, makes a bet with
his friend that he can turn any girl in school into the Prom Queen in six weeks. The
target? Shy, self-conscious, Laney, the weirdest girl in school. Within a few weeks,
Laney trades in her overalls, mousy haircut, and Pointdexter glasses for a little red
dress, 4-inch platforms, a trendy hairdo, and lots of Mary Kay. She turns heads with her
new look, becomes automatically happy, falls for jerk-boy, and (surprise, surprise) he
falls for her. So let me get this straight. If you're a guy, you're not attractive unless
you're shallow and insensitive, and if you're a girl, then it doesn't matter what you're
like on the inside, honey, because all anybody cares about is how you look. We all know
that a popular guy can come along and transform a dorky girl into the Kathy Ireland of
her high school with one wave of his…magic wand. Now there's somebody who could
really use some cheesecake.
In perusing the magazine rack at Borders, you might come across articlessuch as A Better
Body in 30 Days, The Easy Way to a Flat Stomach, 101 Best Clothing Tips, and Good Hair,
Good Sex. It might surprise you to know that all of these articles come from men's
magazines. Tolstoy once said Nothing has such a striking impact on a man's development as
his appearance… Men fall victim to this artificial concept of beauty just as
readily as women. Men spend an estimated $9.5 billion a year on cosmetics and plastic
surgery. It is a proven fact that tall men earn $600 more per inch. Hello, NBA, and look
at Donald Trump, Steven Seagal, the Jolly Green Giant, and everyday, men are bombarded
with media images of tall, muscular manly men, when in reality, the average man is less
of a Ricky Martin and more of a Rick Moranis. 
Featured twice on the list of People Magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People of the Year, a
plus-sized supermodel who goes simply by the name Emme states that, If we can't see
ourselves as we truly are, we can never present ourselves as we wish to be seen. How do
you wish to be seen? In a study of the American ideal of beauty by Vogue columnist
Charles Gandee, one female panel member proclaimed that if she could just look like
actress Uma Thurman for a week, she could die happy. Another panel member said that any
woman, who says that she wouldn't like to look like Pamela Anderson, at least for a day,
is lying. We live in a society that values silicone and sex over intelligence and
compassion. We are so preoccupied with our appearance that we forget that true beauty
isn't something you can buy. As the Oil of Olay commercial says, It's not about looking
beautiful…it's about feeling beautiful. Plato described beauty as an everlasting
loveliness which neither comes nor goes, neither flowers nor fades…the beauties of
the body are as nothing to the beauties of the soul. 
Throughout history, we as a society have changed our minds a myriad of times about what
we consider beautiful and we have arrived at this false, inhuman ideal of starvation and
artificiality. If we want to change society's concept of beauty to something more
natural, realistic, and healthy, it has to start here. It starts with me and it starts
with you. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote Though we travel the world to find the
beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. I urge all of us to seek true
beauty in our lives. To be healthy and be beautiful, but know that true beauty truly
comes from the inside. And with that, I say bring on the cheesecake! 
Bibliography
1. Gandee, Charles. "American Ideal of Beauty". Vogue Magazine. March 08, 1998
2. Lipton, Michael A. "Wasting Away". People Magazine. June 3, 1996
3. Thompson, Theresa. "The impact of Advertising on Teens." Nov., 1995
4. Quoteland.