(Stillness in the Storm Editor) Body dysmorphia is a psychological condition wherein an individual feels that part of their being is flawed in some way. It is a destructive pathological condition that causes people to feel uncomfortable in their own skin. Normally, it is attributed to more serious instances wherein people feel as though their body is tragically out of alignment with their sense of self, such as someone who identifies as an animal, known as otherkins in today’s language. But there is a more insidious and subtle form of body dysmorphia that plagues our planet, I contend, is directly related to the use of advertising in the modern world.
A person’s perception of beauty is both objective and subjective.
Objectively, beauty is recognized as order, particularly, symmetry around the golden mean or phi ratio. Physical proportions close to the golden mean ratio evince a strong beauty reaction in most people.
In the below image, a photograph of a woman who doesn’t possess perfect golden mean symmetry is altered (on the right), making her appear more objectively beautiful.
This objective form of beauty influences us subjectively via pattern instantiation or what we might call programming. That is, we can be conditioned to find some things beautiful over time, and once done, the standard of beauty used as a benchmark changes. That’s effectively what media has done over the past 150 years.
The programmed beauty effect is what can be so destructive. To understand this, let’s imagine a world without advertising and photographic media. Imagine a world without television, magazines, online images, and advertising. Image life back before the digital age, where other people were the only instances of beauty you saw.
What do you think you’d find beautiful? Do you think your sense of ideal beauty would be different?
While it might be hard to imagine, your sense of beauty would be very different. You’d likely find beauty in many different body types, as opposed to the unidimensional ideal we see in the modern world.
In 2006, a study was conducted found young people see more than 40,000 advertisements every year, and this was before the smartphone revolution. Consider apps like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, which place a premium on people who fit the mainstream version of beauty. These apps also offer digital augmentation filters that alter the image to make it look more beautiful, or idealistic. People are actually having surgeries to make themselves look more like their Snapchat filters—which is a glaring example of body dysmorphia.
All of this suggests that the method by which we assess beauty has been fundamentally altered, and not in a good direction. It seems, the more prolific the influence of media the more distorted our individual sense of beauty becomes.
There are many different body types in the human species, but only some of them are upheld as ideal by advertisers, Hollywood, and video games. This lack of true diversity causes a narrowing of the recognition of the ideal beauty form in human consciousness, at a collective level. The overall effect makes people feel less and less beautiful like there’s something wrong with them that needs to be fixed. In other words, we’re describing a subtle form of endemic body dysmorphia. And this is just one example. The prolific use of makeup for women is another example. As a matter of fact, women have been targeted for body dysmorphic programming arguably more than men by social engineers.
The introduction of pornography has also had a destructive effect on our sense of beauty. But the focus is more on body parts, particularly sexual organs. Consider the rise of plastic surgery alongside the rise of more and more images of limited beauty archetypes in society. Is there a connection? I think it’s a fair guess to say there is.
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Beauty isn’t as rigid and inflexible as we’ve been led to believe.
It’s wrong to assume because your body doesn’t look like Barbie or Ken, or some other unrealistic standard, that you’re imperfect or undesirable. But that’s exactly what more and more people are feeling, especially young people.
Physiologically, there’s more variance in the morphology of sexual organs than other parts of the body. We each have unique sexual bits and they are all beautiful in their own unique way. But when you look at porn, and you’re a young person, what’s happening? You’re comparing yourself to what you assume is an ideal. You assume that the body types and parts you see are the best, and anything less than that is imperfect, or worse, ugly.
Today, some 25 years into the internet revolution, a whole generation has been subjected to this unchecked social programming related to body image. And it will likely be obvious to many that this has caused major problems for the millennial generation, who are at higher risk of developing mental disorders.
The following article describes a growing trend of women seeking plastic surgery to “fix” their vagina’s, to make the look “better.”
It’s an alarming trend that, I’m suggesting, speaks to the culturally reinforced body dysmorphia issue highlighted above.
Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I look like this ideal person or thing?” we should be asking, “How am I uniquely beautiful?”
Author’s note: I find this trend deeply disturbing, reflective of how sick our society actually is, so much so, we’ve ingrained pathological conditions in our culture, we’ve normalized them. And I can tell you based on my research into the psychology of relationships, pair bonding, and sexual expression, it’s causing untold suffering in human life. People are more depressed, lonely, and isolated than ever, despite the “connectivity” experienced via social media. If we don’t address these problems, things will only get worse. I’m personally committed to diagnosing and solving these issues, which frankly, aren’t hard to address if we can do the “hard work” of facing them!
What if we changed this paradigm? What if had a culture that revered and exalted all of the various forms of beauty on our beautiful planet?
Looking to my psychological studies, it would likely greatly improve the quality of life of all people.
Neurologically, we possess a system in our brains that is designed to evaluate our worth in society, our place in the social dominance hierarchy, managed by dopaminergic and serotonergic systems. What this means is that your sense of worth or value in society alters your brain chemistry, particularly your mood. The less valued you feel the less dopamine and serotonin your brain produces, increasing your sensitivity to negative emotion (neuroticism) and reducing pain tolerance. This affects mental health in a host of ways, such as low-self esteem, depression, bipolar disorders, and so on.
So what happens when the standards of beauty in a society become so out of alignment with the reality that massive portions of the population feel ugly and undesirable? An explosion of mental disorders occurs. Perhaps this is why depression has sparked sharpy in recent years, especially amongst those in the first world, those most likely exposed to a great deal of media.
Please, for the sake of human consciousness, take some time to understand these things. Everyone is affected but this issue is not as flashy as other topics. Yet, it’s the subtle that can be so powerful and is often overlooked.
– Justin
(Joe Martino) It was 11 years ago and I was in a big documentary phase. I had watched hundreds of documentaries in a single year as I had come to realize the world around me was not quite what it seemed, and I was thirsty for knowledge.
by Joe Martino, November 14th, 2018
After hours of UFO/ET docs, docs exploring the true history of our world and governments, and even health docs, I one day landed upon a documentary called ‘The Perfect Vagina.’ Quite honestly, my initial thought was, “what the heck is this?!” So I read the description: “Lisa Rogers investigates vaginal cosmetic surgery and why more and more women consider this surgical procedure.”
Wait, cosmetic surgery for what? I was 20 years old at the time and had not heard of people doing cosmetic surgery on their vagina. So I decided to watch the film.
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The further I got into the film, the more I learned how many women, like men can be about their own bits, can be quite self-conscious about the look of their vagina. Sure, I was no stranger to the fact that everyone is slightly self-conscious about their parts, but how deep things can sometimes go, and the specifics that were focused on were all a bit of a surprise.
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To make the story short, the documentary chronicles the journey of one woman who decides to have her labia minora ‘trimmed down.’ As you might imagine, it was an incredibly painful process following the procedure, and the subject was not all that jazzed about her choice in the end.
Where do these ideas about how our parts look come from? What stories do we tell ourselves about why we need to change them? How often do people actually make fun of our parts? These were all things I thought about. Sure, you see it in pop culture, men or women talking about specific positive details they want in the bits of their partners, but I never really saw this all that much in ‘real life.’
As I entered into more relationships in my life, I began to really realize that each of us may view our own private part in a very specific manner, while our partner often sees it in a very different and unique way. What we’re self-conscious about, they don’t see or actually love. And ultimately, connection, not our bits, were the core of what produced the greatest experiences involving those bits. (This is super family friendly as you notice lol)
This is partly why I was so interested to see the result of a video I came across just this morning, even though it had been out for some time. The video was done by Layla Martin as she was inspired to capture the difference that can sometimes exist between how a woman sees her body and the way her lover/partner views it.
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Women were invited into a photography studio to have their vaginas photographed, they then viewed their own vaginas up close, and then watched in secret as their partner was shown the picture.
How did each react? Check out the video below, but be sure to read the important reflections I wrote below the video as well.
*Note: The feature image used for this piece was originally used and chosen by the filmmakers themselves.
We All Experience Hardship
To say that our world is experiencing polarity at the moment is an understatement. Things are VERY extreme right now. Whether it’s specific activist groups or political groups, everyone wants to be the biggest victim and pretend no one else can possibly know how they feel- and therefore should have no opinion.
This shows us how unwilling we are to face ourselves and how much we struggle with practicing true empathy.
Men, women, children – of any ethnicity or social class, experience feelings of doubt, fear, self-consciousness, worry, guilt, etc. You name it, in some way, others experience it. While it can be juicy to want to figure out who suffers the most, who the biggest victim is, this doesn’t really lead us anywhere productive as looking at things in this manner is from an extreme place, creating more extremity on the other side.
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I bring this up in the context of this video simply because I know from direct experience of living in society on this planet, regardless of what extreme activists might suggest, that both men and women deal with self-consciousness issues about their private parts (and many other things) and it comes from many places. But ultimately, only WE, individually, can move beyond it. I mention this, because this understanding applies to all things we go through as humans, and it’s only within true empathy that we will be able to assist one another past our challenges.
In doing the work that we do here at CE, we are very careful to avoid creating divides or encouraging groups of people to feel victimized, simply because we know where that leads. Instead, we cut the BS and get to the core of why we suffer as humans and what we can do about it. We challenge us all, from all aspects of life, to view the challenges we face not through the light of looking at how others ruin things for us or make us feel sad, but instead how we can be solid within ourselves. As this is the only way we have true power individually and collectively.
A quick reflection I thought was worth sharing as we all can relate to what it feels like to struggle with aspects of self-consciousness and self-judgement.
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About The Author
Not sure how to make sense of this? Want to learn how to discern like a pro? Read this essential guide to discernment, analysis of claims, and understanding the truth in a world of deception: 4 Key Steps of Discernment – Advanced Truth-Seeking Tools
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Source:
https://www.collective-evolution.com/2018/11/14/your-vagina-is-more-beautiful-than-you-think/
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