Oh, checkout-line magazines. What wonderful reflections of popular culture you are. I was in Wal-Mart last night when I noticed the cover of the latest People magazine, which asks:

“Breasts enlarged, chin reduced, nose redone—and she wants more. ‘I’m obsessed,’ says Heidi, 23. But has she gone too far?”

Yes. Has she gone too far? And if she has, I ask, “How would anybody know?” Because we are constantly bombarded by media with the message that we are fundamentally inadequate. For every aspect of the human physical condition, there is a marketer who is willing to define it as an ailment, and a product to be sold as a cure. When we continuously participate in the idea that our bodies are flawed and in need of repair, who are we to point fingers at Heidi and say, “Oh, that’s over the line.” Perhaps Heidi has just internalized the message a little more thoroughly than those who stop at shaving their legs and underarms, bleaching their teeth and skin, tweezing their eyebrows, putting on wrinkle-reducing cream, and dying their hair.

But really, who can blame her? Magazine covers regularly Photoshop already stunningly-beautiful people (link link link link) to further “enhance” them into completely fantastical realms of physical “perfection.” In fact, in some cases, the person is manipulated so dramatically that they are hardly even recognizable as themselves afterwards! Would you have guessed that the two people pictured below are the same person?

Ugly Betty may be “hot,” but I wouldn’t know, because she’s not actually on that magazine cover. So perhaps we can interpret Heidi’s surgery as nothing more than an attempt to “Photoshop” herself in real life like has been done on magazine covers.

As Shakesville points out, discussing Nia Vardalos,

There’s nothing wrong with being a 46-year-old woman, and there’s nothing wrong with looking like a 46-year-old woman. There’s also nothing inherently and objectively unattractive about a 46-year-old woman. Only according to some bullshit beauty standard that expects women never to age is there shame in showing the hard-earned lines of a life fully lived, and only in a vain and immature culture which axiomatically favors youth over experience can there be found justification for dehumanizing Vardalos into a plasticized doll-version of herself and calling that an improvement.

Oh, but the icing on the cake was this other magazine that I found, just across the aisle.

Because, apparently, it’s scanadlous if Heidi gets radical plastic surgery, but if Cher does it, it’s “Wow!”

And the point of all this, dear readers, is that you can’t win. No matter what you do, you will never be beautiful enough to satisfy Media. You will never have bought enough Product and never have done enough Crunches. And if you do somehow manage to pull that off, you’ll just be vilified for over-doing it.

Stop trying to satisfy the tabloid, Hollywood, magazine-stand beauty standard. Be beautiful. Give up. Love yourself. Oh, and by the way, if you are saying, “I do love myself, I just have to lose five more pounds,” or, “I do love myself, except for this hair on my upper lip,” you’re missing the point.

I strongly recommend reading the “Impossible Beauty” series on Shakesville. It’s got over thirty entries, most of which can be accessed from the list at the bottom of this post.