To: America's Daughter

Western views of beauty have saturated the popular culture media with its antics on what beautiful really is. The media’s portrait of prototypic beauty may have some children and even adults associate beautiful with a single character on a sitcom, actress on a movie, or model in a Ralph Lauren add. Such impeded views and perceptions of beauty mirror what is developing psychologically within the individuals who think it. To America’s daughter: if one particular actress or model is conditioned to reappear in her mind whenever she attempts to grasp the arbitrary, individualistic characteristics of beauty, she is never beautiful according to her own perception. Thus, the uniqueness of idiosyncratic beauty is lost because she has to see herself as the “model” in order to recognize herself as beautiful. It is doubtful that she could ever familiarize herself with her own unique body parts and features as being beautiful; she is conditioned to recognize this model as the only definition of attractiveness. It follows that she could begin to define herself in the image of the beautiful. Personally, I know three young woman under the age of 20 who might say, “plastic surgery offered me a solution to my problem; it’s quick and easy too. Thank you plastic surgery.”