“The farther you are from ideal (young, beautiful, white, nice features, sexy, slim, looks like a child, rich, seductive, defenseless, embarrassed, scared) – the less you mean.” Psychologist Brené Brown on why we like to live the life of celebrities more than our own.
“For several years I taught in my last year of social work training, conducting seminars with students on women’s issues. Every semester, I hosted a “magazine day” in one of my classes. The students brought their favorite fashion magazines and laid them out on the floor – at least 150 different publications were obtained. I gave the girls scissors, glue and cardboard. First task: in an hour you had to look through magazines, cut out pictures and make a collage of your ideal appearance from them: clothes, jewelry, hair, makeup, arms, legs, feet, shoes, and so on – everything that inspires them should be reflected in the picture . By the end of the first hour, each had a finished collage, sometimes quite detailed. One of the most important insights from this exercise was how quickly we slice up images of women to make up our perfect pictures. We want to use her eyes, nose, lips, hair, but in a different color. Her arms are too skinny, but I like her thighs. We, in fact, dismember women in order to cut out individual parts and put them together to perfection.
Read more:
- “Shame on the stars”: why are we discussing celebrity misses?
The next task was this: I offered to find and cut out pictures from magazines that looked like them. Images should correspond to the real appearance of the participants: appearance, body size and shape (arms, legs, buttocks…), clothes they wore today, hair… After about a quarter of an hour, many students got lost and quit their jobs. Someone managed to find a similar hairstyle or shoes, and that was it. After this exercise, I asked the group one simple question: “Where are you here? You pay for this magazine. You like it. But where are you in it?
The answer is simple, but can be embarrassing. We are not there because we are not important in this culture. And the further you are from the ideal (young, beautiful, white, nice features, sexy, slim, looks like a child, rich, seductive, defenseless, embarrassed, scared) – the less you mean.
The last step in the journal exercise is to answer the question, “How does it feel to be invisible?” The vast majority of women answered that they immediately begin to blame themselves: I am invisible because I am not good enough, or I am invisible because I am insignificant …
Brene Brown
“All Because of Me (But It’s Not)”
Brené Brown, a professor of psychology at the University of Houston (USA), talks about a feeling that is not very common to write and talk about: a sense of shame.
Invisibility means disunity and impotence. When we don’t see how our culture reflects us, we feel we’ve been reduced to such an insignificant size that we’re about to be erased, removed from the world of important things. Both the erasing process and its outcome, invisibility, can be incredibly embarrassing…
The destructive obsession associated with perfectionism is the worship of celebrity culture. We frantically flip through magazines, looking for intimate details about the lives of the stars we love or hate. We want to know who lost weight, who decorated the house, what they eat, what they feed the dogs… If they eat, wear, have or lose something, we want the same!
We want to live their life because we believe that in this way we can get closer to our perfection. And celebrities also bring us closer to another valuable prize – to look “one hundred percent”. The importance of this should not be underestimated. We know what dangerous folly teenagers go to in order to be considered cool among their peers. Unfortunately, in our culture, the urge to be cool doesn’t end after high school. Women between the ages of 18 and 80 have told me how bittersweet it is to be seen as “stupid”, “unfashionable”… Unfortunately, in a culture based on profit, there are multimillion-dollar industries that benefit from having excellence and conformity to generally accepted values remain seductive and yet elusive…
Read more:
- When we feel ashamed
This view of things really threatens our families: they form our new society, much less diverse than in real life. The new society is not the old neighborhood, where everyone knew each other and always helped out if necessary. A fashion show host won’t help if your car won’t start on a winter morning. The owner of factories and steamboats will not bring food if the head of the family loses his job. These vicarious relationships create a new kind of loneliness—the loneliness of people who associate with characters rather than individuals.
In addition to cultivating perfectionism and loneliness (which go hand in hand), we compare our lives to those of celebrities. We watch shows for hours, where there is nothing but the details of their meetings and partings. And consciously or unconsciously we compare their lives with our own.
Both men and women took part in my research, many said that they were ashamed of their “boring, insignificant life.” With rare exceptions, these participants compared their lives to what they saw on TV and in magazines… There is less variety than in real life. The problems that are shown are not the problems of real people. A number of typical situations are exploited, for example: a young star who is threatened, or a young handsome man fighting crimes. Other situations, more vital, do not fall into the field of view: a parent meeting, a trip to a museum, the delivery of ready-made food, learning to play the piano … Ordinary people, and these are the majority among us, are not represented at all. Stories on which you can make money are selected. The richness and complexity of real life disappears.
Read more:
- Find an antidote to shame
In our culture, shame and fear of being ordinary is common… Our culture undervalues quiet, ordinary, hard-working men and women. Often we equate “ordinary” with “boring” and, even more dangerously, “ordinary” becomes synonymous with “meaningless”.
One of the most serious consequences of devaluing our own lives is tolerating what a person is willing to go to achieve a “prominent” position. Baseball players who pump themselves up with steroids are heroes. We envy corporate CEOs who receive million dollar salaries even if at the same time their employees lose their pensions and profit shares. Young girls create websites and chats where they discuss what tricks celebrities use to hide their eating disorders and stay slim and beautiful. Young children are overstressed and suffer from anxiety due to an excessive number of lessons, electives and tests …
The problem arises because at some point most of us begin to believe in expectations about who we should be, how we should look and do, how much or how little we should mean.
We become afraid to reject such expectations. We see that if we resist them, we will be rejected. Therefore, we absorb them into ourselves, and they become our emotional prison. And shame is on guard.”
For more details, see B. Brown “It’s all because of me (but it’s not)” (Azbuka business, 2014).