Photo by Kevin Simmons
Flickr Creative Commons
An interesting article in the Chicago Tribune exhorts, “Stop telling your friends they’re beautiful — it’s making them sick.”
A new book by Renee Engeln entitled, Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession With Appearance Hurts Girls and Women, “explores the ways we remind women — young and old — that the most important thing they can be is beautiful. ‘Then we pummel them with a standard of beauty they will never meet,’ Engeln, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, writes. ‘After that, when they worry about beauty, we call them superficial.'”
Although concerns about “beauty sickness” usually focus on young girls and women who develop eating disorders and, sometimes, depression, the relentless pressure on women to be beautiful continues throughout life. Anti-aging cosmetics, remedies, and exercise programs are continually foist on women of all ages because getting old is simply not acceptable. It was positively radical when Dove began its “Pro-Age” campaign.
How does this pressure to be beautiful affect older people? Or, perhaps equally significantly, how does it affect how younger people respond to older people?
Are old people beautiful? Does it matter? What do you think?
