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Jeffry invites the first candidate in. “Do you like the camera?” she asks Jessica from New Jersey. “I love it. I’ve always wanted to be a model,” Jessica says, beaming like a klieg light. Others seem less certain. Marsha from California wants to check out the East Coast vibes, while Andrea from Manhattan works on Wall Street and wants to know if she has what it takes to be a runway star. (Don’t give up a sure thing like a well-paying Wall Street job for this roll of the dice, Jeffry advises.) The line diminishes. Faces fall and tears well as the refrain “You’re not what we’re looking for right now” extinguishes the conversation—and hope. You’re not what we’re looking for. . . Confronted with this, Rebecca from Providence tosses her dark hair and asks: “What are you looking for? Can you tell me exactly?” Jeffry meets the edgy, almost belligerent, tone with a composed murmur. “It’s hard to say. I know it when I see it.” WHAT IS BEAUTY? We grope around the edges of the question as if trying to get a toehold on a cloud. “I’m doing a story on beauty,” I tell a prospective interview. “By whose definition?” he snaps. Define beauty? One may as well dissect a soap bubble. We know it when we see it—or so we think. Philosophers frame it as a moral equation. What is beautiful is good, said Plato. Poets reach for the lofty. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” wrote John Keats, although Anatole France thought beauty “more profound than truth itself.” |
Girls at play? With the pricey dresses, hairdos, and make up, the Regal Miss pageant on Georgia's Jekyll Island often seems like serious buisness. The pageant world isn't what we should be, admits an organizer. |
“Girls are literally weighing their self-esteem,” says Catherine Steiner Adair, a psychologist at the Harvard Eating Disorders Center in Boston. “We live in a culture that is completely bonkers. We’re obsessed with sylphlike slimness, yet heading toward obesity. According to one study, 80 percent of women are dissatisfied with their bodies. Just think about how we talk about food: ‘Let’s be really bad today and have dessert.’ Or: ‘I was good. I didn’t eat lunch.’” In one of its worst manifestations, discontent with one’s body can wind up as an eating disorder, such as anorexia, a self-starvation syndrome, or bulimia, a binge-and-purge cycle in which people gorge and then vomit or use laxatives. Both can be fatal. Today eating disorders, once mostly limited to wealthy Western cultures, occur around the world. “I was in Fiji the year television was introduced,” says Dr. Anne Becker, director of research at the Harvard center. “Eating disorders were virtually unknown in Fiji at that time.” When she returned three years later, 15 percent of the girls she was studying had tried vomiting to lose weight. “It’s easy to be oversimplistic in defining causes,” says Emily Kravinsky, medical director at the Renfrew Center in Philadelphia, a treatment center for women with eating disorders. “Some of these women don’t know how to cope or soothe themselves. They have low self-esteem. Also, there’s increasing evidence that biology and genetics play a role. Finally, the distance between the cultural ideal of what we would like to look like and the reality of what we actually look like is becoming wider. If Marilyn Monroe walked into Weight Watchers today, no one would bat an eye. They’d sign her up.” |
The Enigma Of Beauty |