I am currently reading a fascinating review into sexualisation of young people commissioned from psychologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos by the UK’s Home Office. The world over, Advertizing & Media Executives must be jumping up and down at the incredible success of their efforts to undermine women (and now men’s) self-confidence when it comes to sex and their bodies. This state of being is great for an industry that sells most every product by using glamour and sex. However, I believe we have just reached a tipping point here and it’s Heidi Montag!

The impact of sexualisation: Body image and gender inequality

In the past it was adult women who felt the imperative to look ‘hot’ and ‘sexy’, now this imperative is being adopted by younger and younger girls who will inevitably face the same feelings of inadequacy and failure to live up to an unrealistic ideal. The mass media promotes and reinforces an idealised notion of beauty for both men and women, presenting standards – of thinness for women and of muscularity for men – that few can ever hope to achieve. The effects of this are apparent – eating disorders are on the rise. The eating disorder charity BEAT estimates that 1.6 million people in the UK have an eating disorder. The vast majority of these – some 1.4 million – are female.37 And now we’re starting to see what happens when you tweak the message – young women need to be not only thin, but also sexually desirable. As anorexia increases so now does the number of young women having breast implants at an increasingly younger age. (Zuckerman and Abraham (2008) from this review.)

Recently, Heidi Montag went through a long list of procedures to change her appearance (notice I am not using the words improve here because enough people have weighed in on the transformation.) I am not a Heidi or a Speidi fan and have never watched the Hills but I am very familiar with who she is (or she is portrayed to be) from the immense amount of media coverage she gets. When I saw the after pictures I was a little surprised. In fact I could not even believe it was her in this hilarious video posted on Funny or Die.

Originally I blamed the blown-up look on post plastic surgery swelling but in a recent ‘The Hills’ advertisement Heidi Montag still looked like an over-Photoshopped version of herself from a magazine cover. You know how celebrities have to face underhanded or stupid comments from fans or industry people on a daily basis? I can only imagine that one too many people commented on the fact that Heidi did not look as pretty in person as in her incredibly stylized and made-up magazine covers. And I say that because having gone through two incredibly debilitating and painful procedures that took forever to heal (c-section and breast reduction) I know that it takes a lot of consideration to choose to undergo elective procedures. I also have over 20 friends who are in the process of adjusting their appearance and bodies through sex-reassignment surgery and feminization surgeries to math the gender on the inside as they transition from male-to-female or female-to-male so I have toned down my vocal disdain of plastic surgery over the past few years but I will not change my position when it comes to my child.

My daughter was born with malformation of her toes and as she grows up I try to consider how she will react when people around her start to comment on her crooked toes and possibly being cruel about it. She knows her toes are crooked but so far doesn’t make a fuss about it. I am bracing myself for having to manage issues of body image with my daughter as she becomes a teenager in the next few years because of how glamourized her favorite teen stars are today (Hannah Montana and Raven Simone come to mind.) But we watch America’s Next Top Model together and sometimes they even have normal girls like us on.

Glamour originally was a magical-occult spell cast on somebody to make them believe that something or somebody was attractive. In the late 19th century terminology a non magical item used to help create a more attractive appearance gradually became ‘a glamour’. Today, glamour is the impression of attraction or fascination that a particularly luxurious or elegant appearance creates, an impression which is better than the reality.

So now that Heidi has changed herself into and even more glamourized version of a Heidi, the all encompassing obsession to reach an ideal that does not exist has come full circle.