O Magazine- Beauty Revolution?

Recently, at Barnes and Noble I was getting ready to pay for my items when a magazine at the checkout counter caught my eye. The magazine was O The Oprah Magazine and the major headline was: We're Starting a Beauty Revolution! (say bye-bye to feeling bad about your looks). Since starting this blog, I am constantly looking (with a critical eye) for positive and constructive statements about beauty in the media. The headline sounded promising, so I impulsively purchased the magazine. After reading the articles and the rest of the magazine I have conflicting feelings about the message that is conveyed. I would first like to share some of the encouraging and affirmative statements made in the article titled The Revolution Starts Here by Valerie Monroe.

"[When you look at a photos of a women in a magazine] If you are thinking, 'Well, this one could lose weight, and that one should try a push-up bra - and what's up with her hair?' you're probably casting the same beady, critical eye on yourself. Enough! It's time to change not how we look, but how we see."

"Everywhere we turn, there are images of gorgeous women, constant reproaches to the reality of us, with our real bodies and un-Photoshopped flaws. We're not buying it anymore!"

"Though the cultural ideal has broadened to include more diversity, it remains an ideal, setting an unrealistic standard by which we all, consciously or not, judge and are judged"

"Gorgeous is not a good stock to invest in. No matter what you do, how well you take care of yourself, one day you are going to lose everything on your investment. You know this, I know this. Even so, we buy into the beauty rules, colluding with a culture that makes us feel inadequate, whipping ourselves when we come up short. Which makes us-come to think of it-part of the problem."

"What if, instead of colluding, we traded cruelty for kindness? What if we started a revolution, if each one of us took a vow to catch ourselves scowling or sneering at our imperfections - and simply stop? If we noticed every time we had a nasty, hostile response to someone else's appearance - and simply stopped?"

"This is a call to arms. A call to be gentle, to be forgiving, to be generous with yourself. The next time you look into the mirror, try to let go of the story line that says you're too fat or too sallow, too ashy or too old, your eyes are too small or your nose too big; just look into the mirror and see your face. When the criticism drops away, what you will see then is just you, without judgment, and that is the first step toward transforming your experience of the world."

After reading part of this powerful and beautifully crafted article, you must be wondering "Megan, why do you have mixed feeling about this?"

My conflict is not because of the content of the article, but instead, the content of the magazine. While the article tries to promote a "beauty revolution" based on self-acceptance, the magazine seems to be running business as usual. Along side articles titled The Self Esteem Tool Kit and The Beauty Revolution are advertisements for Botox, diet plans, diet products, and lingerie featuring meagerly clothed models. It is hard to concentrate on self-acceptance when you are staring at ads that palpably tell you that you are not measuring up.

I do not mean to discredit Oprah or her magazine, because in fact, I find her magazine FAR less hypocritical than most. I applaud that the magazine confronts the issue of beauty and body image. I think that the contradiction in the magazine enforces Valerie Monroe's statement that we are "part of the problem". Advertisers such as these would not have ads in any magazines if there was no demand for the products they promote. We are obviously part of the cycle, but I hope that as we think about what is beautiful and become less accepting of what the media is feeding us we can at least break the cycle in our own minds.