Redefining Physical Beauty Does Not Promote Our Daughters' Self Esteem

Recently, there has been a media blitz of marketing campaigns speaking about raising women and girls' self-esteem with no shortage of talk aimed at re-defining society's perception of beauty. At first I thought, "Well it's about time! Finally, there is social movement that will help empower women and the daughters who are watching them." But this excitement quickly turned to disenchantment and disgust. Whether it is the rash of popular television programs that promote extreme weight loss or ad campaigns sponsored by cosmetic companies, they have all fallen short of the mark.

What started out as a movement that showed great promise for bringing about healthier mind sets for our daughters was nothing more than sleek new marketing campaigns to promote beauty products or other weight-loss related products and services. Just because these companies used verbiage and ads that seemed to promote self-empowerment and better self-esteem that didn't mean that they had anything of the sort to offer. It was all nothing more than sleek advertising designed to suck the public into buying what they are selling, which is what they have been selling all along. The only difference was the direction from whence their ad campaigns began.

Who doesn't want to look their best? But the desire to get into better physical shape should be motivated by one's yearning to achieve better health. What we see in the mirror will be merely "a positive side-effect" of better nutritional habits and frequent, consistent and appropriate physical activity. As for beauty products: they are merely topical solutions that have no ability to affect self-esteem on any real or long-term basis.

There has been a rash of advertisers and celebrities jumping on the "let's promote our daughters' self-esteem" bandwagon. Sadly enough these ad campaigns don't promote anything remotely close. All the campaigns focus strictly on a woman's external appearance totally negating all of the other aspects of what makes a human being beautiful. All there is, is endless useless rhetoric about how "we should redefine what society's definition of external beauty is" totally ignoring the issue of how we can truly raise our daughters' self esteem.

The late great Eleanor Roosevelt said, "No one can make you feel inferior unless you give them your consent." Historically, she is one of the world's most highly respected American female role models of our modern times. Ironically she was also one of the least physically beautiful. How many times have we seen successful women relentlessly degraded for their lack of physical beauty? Re-branding the definition of physical beauty will not address these assaults on the value of women.

It is no secret that men (as do many in our society) place a premium on a woman's physical beauty. However, a woman should desire to be valued for more than just mere physical beauty. In order to do this she must achieve characteristics that define true beauty: strength, grace, loyalty, intelligence, compassion and achievements that have naught to do with physical beauty. This is where the crux of the issue regarding real ways to teach our daughters self esteem lies. If one wants to engage in real ways to address our daughters' self-esteem then they need to engage in dialogue and activities that promote these qualities leaving the definition of external physical beauty out of the equation altogether.