I had this horrifying thought while talking to one of my coworkers about Beauty and the Beast. For the record, I haven’t watched the live-action version, but I have seen Disney’s cartoon version a very long time ago. While we talked about it, I mentioned that my cousin jokingly called it ‘Beauty and the Bestiality’. As I said this, my mind gears started turning. Beauty and the Beast isn’t the only story that portrays a girl falling in love with an animal who’s actually a human. There’s also The Princess and the Frog. And similarly, there’s also Shrek, even though he wasn’t actually a human. But what all these cartoons have in common is that their attractive leading ladies end up falling for some thing who probably wasn’t the dream guy in their heads to begin with. I couldn’t help but wonder: is our media guilty of teaching our girls to settle?
How to get a guy – according to the movies
Sure, you’d argue, the women fell in love with the charming interior of a being with an otherwise unappealing exterior. At the end of the day, shouldn’t someone’s insides count more than their outsides? I wholeheartedly agree. But then when I consider the flip side, we hardly ever see the situation reversed when the woman is the unattractive party: the ‘Plain Jane’. We often see women getting a makeover, or to some extent, changing their personality, just to get the guy of their dreams to fall in love with them.
Let’s see: She’s All That, Never Been Kissed, The Duff, Maid in Manhattan, The Ugly Truth, Two Weeks Notice, Miss Congeniality, My Fair Lady, The Princess Diaries, Grease, America’s Sweethearts, Mean Girls … I mean, the list goes on and on, obviously! And clearly, I’ve watched a lot of movies! Anyway, in all of these movies I mentioned, the Plain Jane doesn’t really get the guy to appreciate her insides until her outsides have dramatically changed and she’s gone from ‘not’ to ‘hot’. How sexist is that?
The Flipside …
Meanwhile, in movies like She’s Out of My League, Notting Hill, Knocked Up, The Girl Next Door, The Invention of Lying, Good Luck Chuck, and possibly every Adam Sandler movie, the Average Joe has the enviable opportunity to be with the hot, attractive, successful girl. If we wholeheartedly believe that someone’s insides should count more than their outsides, then why has Hollywood perpetuated a trend where beauty is everything, but only where women are concerned?
Hollywood is clearly male-centric, and it’s given all men, even the meh ones, the hope that they can score a hot chick no problem. Unfortunately for women, the perception is that to be with a hot guy, you have to be a hot girl, and otherwise, you have to settle for the less than ideal guy. To me, that’s not okay.
The media is affecting the female ‘subsconsiousness’
Of course, media is simply supposed to entertain, and we’re not really supposed to digest said entertainment and confuse it with reality. Now while I may not have concrete, quantifiable proof, I do have a gut feeling that these tropes seep into our subconscious and change the way we perceive real life. In any case, we can see traces of this all around us. We know that society prefers attractive women. A great deal of emphasis is placed on looks: makeup on fleek, body on fleek, etc. Everyone wants a piece of eye candy. Sexy, scantily-clad women are on billboards peddling beverages, cars, even air conditioning. The age-old adage is ‘sex sells’. So we hold our women to these high ideals, thus negatively influencing their perception of their looks and their image.
Meanwhile, I can’t say the same happens often to men. Sure, we still see attractive men in movies and in ads and on billboards, but there isn’t as much emphasis on their looks as there is on women’s looks. So men get away scot-free, and I believe they walk around daily with a much healthier image of themselves, and higher self-esteem. An Average Joe, in my opinion, is far more confident and has a more inflated ego than a Plain Jane, or even the prettiest ‘Vain Jane’.
Do women ‘settle’ more than men do?
I honestly feel that out there, there are beautiful, attractive, smart, successful women who still just take what they can get, and thus give up on finding the ‘princes’ in their lives, the men who they truly deserve, as if they were somehow a fairytale. I’ve certainly personally been like this, where I went out with guys or fell for guys who I knew deep down weren’t my ideal. It’s my low self-esteem and fear of being alone forever driving my choices.
Still, I can’t help but draw a correlation and partly blame the media for this. Hollywood often portrays men who maintain their high standards in terms of what they look for in an ideal mate, while the attractive women don’t always maintain these high standards. And God forbid the attractive woman turn down the advances of the Average Joe! Society is ready to pelt stones at her for only caring about looks (figuratively speaking, of course)!
Final words …
To be honest, I suppose the media is only guilty of one thing: making as much money as possible through whatever will sell. And maybe I’m guilty of overthinking this. I also know this could be an over-generalisation. And of course, this doesn’t excuse the fact that we are all responsible for our own self-esteem, no matter what images we get bombarded by through the media.
The thing is I’m not trying to say that attractive girls should only be with attractive guys, while Plain Janes should only be with Average Joes. I’m also not looking down on couples where the woman is considered to be more attractive than her beau. Maybe all I’m saying is that I’d like for Hollywood to make less movies where women have to change their external appearance just to get noticed by the guy they like.
It sure wouldn’t hurt to see more movies where the Plain Jane gets the hot guy with minimum effort on her part. And it would certainly be nice to see more movies where two people fall in love, and where the emphasis isn’t placed on looks. Of course this will never happen, but I thought it was a conversation that needed to be had.
So, what are your thoughts about this topic? Let me hear them below!
