What influences you?

Today in the readings and discussion I was impressed to see that the three major sources of how we learn what it means to be masculine or feminine were through family, school, and mass media. It is true that mothers and fathers have a huge influence on what a typical girl is suppose to wear, how to act, and what to say and same for men. If a father is into body building and the looks of his image, you can assume that the son will follow in those same footsteps. If the mother is involved in plastic surgeries, weight loss, and looking glamorous, you can bet the girl will follow her mothers example in that area as well. This main source made me reflect on a past conference talk by jeffrey r holland when he stated this:

"In this same vein may I address an even more sensitive subject. I plead with you young women to please be more accepting of yourselves, including your body shape and style, with a little less longing to look like someone else. We are all different. Some are tall, and some are short. Some are round, and some are thin. And almost everyone at some time or other wants to be something they are not! But as one adviser to teenage girls said: "You can't live your life worrying that the world is staring at you. When you let people's opinions make you self-conscious you give away your power. . . . The key to feeling [confident] is to always listen to your inner self—[the real you.]"⁸ And in the kingdom of God, the real you is "more precious than rubies."⁹ Every young woman is a child of destiny and every adult woman a powerful force for good. I mention adult women because, sisters, you are our greatest examples and resource for these young women. And if you are obsessing over being a size 2, you won't be very surprised when your daughter or the Mia Maid in your class does the same and makes herself physically ill trying to accomplish it. We should all be as fit as we can be—that's good Word of Wisdom doctrine. That means eating right and exercising and helping our bodies function at their optimum strength. We could probably all do better in that regard. But I speak here of optimum health; there is no universal optimum size.

Frankly, the world has been brutal with you in this regard. You are bombarded in movies, television, fashion magazines, and advertisements with the message that looks are everything! The pitch is, "If your looks are good enough, your life will be glamorous and you will be happy and popular." That kind of pressure is immense in the teenage years, to say nothing of later womanhood. In too many cases too much is being done to the human body to meet just such a fictional (to say nothing of superficial) standard. As one Hollywood actress is reported to have said recently: "We’ve become obsessed with beauty and the fountain of youth. . . . I’m really saddened by the way women mutilate [themselves] in search of that. I see women [including young women] . . . pulling this up and tucking that back. It’s like a slippery slope. [You can't get off of it.] . . . It’s really insane . . . what society is doing to women."¹⁰

In terms of preoccupation with self and a fixation on the physical, this is more than social insanity; it is spiritually destructive, and it accounts for much of the unhappiness women, including young women, face in the modern world. And if adults are preoccupied with appearance—tucking and nipping and implanting and remodeling everything that can be remodeled—those pressures and anxieties will certainly seep through to children. At some point the problem becomes what the Book of Mormon called "vain imaginations."¹¹ And in secular society both vanity and imagination run wild. One would truly need a great and spacious makeup kit to compete with beauty as portrayed in media all around us. Yet at the end of the day there would still be those "in the attitude of mocking and pointing their fingers" as Lehi saw,¹² because however much one tries in the world of glamour and fashion, it will never be glamorous enough."

I know that just as women as we follow the example and counsel of our prophets it won't matter what the media, our friends, or the world says about our image, we know who we are and what we can become.