How Men Are Attracted To Women Who Do Not Exist

When a man or woman looks at a magazine cover, music video or even a feature film, they are looking at pictures of women who simply do not exist in the real world. The images they see are entirely fake and outrageously unnatural. Yet, the pictures men(in particular) see influence their very thought process and they begin to compare every woman to the images on the magazine cover. As a result, a man constantly chases the woman of his dreams….unfortunately, she does not exist.

[featured-image single_newwindow=”false”]1940s Fashion[/featured-image]

The devil is the main culprit behind this trend and he isn’t going to stop his campaign (as he started it long ago).

Screwtape lays out the devil’s battle plan this way:

The age of jazz has succeeded the age of the waltz, and we now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable form those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, we thus aggravate the female’s chronic horror of growing old (with many excellent results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children….

It is all fake, of course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender….than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being “frank” and “healthy” and getting back to nature. As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist–making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible. What follows you can easily forecast! (Screwtape Letters, 106-107, emphasis added)

We see this trend getting worse every year. With the advent of Photoshop, it has become even easier to manipulate images to make them look as artificial as can be. And we fall for it every time! (As a side note, it is interesting to see that Photoshop is not new and that they had already started altering images of women back in the 1940s!)

Unfortunately men continue to chase after women that do not exist and women continually try to transform their body to a figure that is impossible to mimic! What results is the fact that there is a large amount of single women who can never get a date. And there is a large amount of men out there who never ask a woman out. Our standards have been raised so high that we live in a culture where being single for years and years is a normal part of adult life.

Not only that, but many men engage in affairs based on the fact that their wife has grown old and doesn’t look like she did when she was 25. Wives are constantly pressured to update their look for their husband and get plastic surgery so that they don’t look like an average 40 year old.

This attitude towards exterior beauty is most prevalent in Hollywood. There are several celebrities who constantly change their look every year and even though they are physically 60 years old, they try to look like they are 20. Unfortunately they will never be “pretty enough” in the eyes of the world as the standard of beauty is impossible to attain.

Thankfully there are many organizations today that are fighting back against this false sense of beauty and even celebrities like Colbie Caillat are speaking out. However, we have a lot of work to do to fight against the devil. Changing a culture can not be done in one day, but we must start and first of all we must start with ourselves.

Let us ask ourselves, am I trying to chase (or imitate) a standard of beauty that does not exist? Do I really believe that I am beautiful, made in the Image and Likeness of God?

One thing is true, we are beautiful and the pinnacle of God’s creation….just as we are. We don’t need to be Photoshopped to be beautiful.

And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them.

And God saw all the things that he had made, and they were very good. (Gen 1:27,31)

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***If you would like to follow-along reading the The Screwtape Letters, I suggest to purchase your own copy of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. If you don’t like reading, I highly suggest buying the dramatization of the letters by Focus on the Family, called The Screwtape Letters: First Ever Full-cast Dramatization of the Diabolical Classic (Radio Theatre). It features Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and is well produced.

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