Why do so many Girls Aspire to be Models
Modern western civilization is an overwhelmingly visual society. The demise of mysticism and the steady transition from a faith-based to a secular society has shifted our collective focus to visual engagement and validation - seeing is now, quite literally, believing. As such our visual validation of the human figure, as represented in the runway model, has become the site at which we collectively identify humanity's perfection. In a secular, visual society, the perfect human, rightly or wrongly, becomes our God.
Obviously, most young girls aspiring to become models don't rationalize their desires in such cerebral terms. They may point to their attachment to the hair, make-up or clothing that particular models wear, or enjoy the carefully constructed, marketing-driven fantasies of model's lives that they see on television or read about in magazines. A few may even see modelling as a means of escape, either from the daily traumas of an unhappy youth or the prospects of growing up only to achieve the same level of drudgery and unimportance that they perceive in their parents.
All these rationalizations serve as comforting, acceptable, even reasonable arguments for young girls who aspire to become models. But beneath these rationalizations runs a deeper, much darker force - the need for perfection.
If the model is our collective site for the identity of perfection, then any girl who can occupy that site must, at least in her own mind, be perfect. In the young girl's mind reaching the Paris catwalk or the cover of Vogue means that she needn't worry about being pretty enough, because no one could possibly be any prettier. She needn't worry about being skinny enough, because no one could possibly be any skinnier. Most of all, she needn't worry about her grades, her abusive home life or the fact that she doesn't have a boyfriend because quite obviously being pretty and being skinny are the only things that are really important.
Of course the reality is that the most of the girls who feel this need never realize their dream, and in fact fall far short of it. This perceived failure can lead to eating disorders, depression or even suicide, but for the vast of girls majority it simply creates within them a lifelong self-loathing and sense of inadequacy.
They can accept that they will never be "model perfect," but they will never forgive themselves for it. They will spend their entire lives investing in beauty products, feeling guilty every time they take a second helping at dinner, and looking at themselves in the mirror every day and seeing only fat. Many will still be worrying about how they look on their deathbeds.
The reason why so many young girls aspire to be models is because we, as a society, have told them to do so. They will continue to do so until we migrate to a new site of human perfection (which may be even more harmful), return to a faith-based world view (which seems unlikely) or collectively advance as a species to a point beyond purely physical and visual validation, reaching towards a higher, less complicated personal aesthetic that eschews the physical in favour of the moral, the intellectual and the spiritual. Given our current fascination with models however, it's unlikely that such a re-think will happen any time soon.
