It is a truth universally acknowledged that all women want to look beautiful on their wedding day. However, for some women this desire is more extreme than for others.
Honestly, some women don't even want to get married, although I'm sure those who want marriage more than anything believe everyone secretly does, even if they say otherwise.
The fact is, as the show Bridalplasty (on E!) so disturbingly shows, there are many people who are willing to do anything in their power in order to make themselves beautiful in the photos taken on one day of their lives as well as more attractive to their future spouses.
The show has been featured on lists such as "15 Things That Made Me Die Inside" (PopWatch) and written about in articles with titles like "The New Reality Show That Proves We're Doomed" (Cracked.com) and "The Final TV Show Ever Made Before Mankind Slips Quietly Into The Dust" (Videogum).
For those of you who have not seen the show, the basic premise is that 12 women live in a house together and compete in wedding-themed challenges in order to win cosmetic surgeries. Each week, the "top bride" wins a surgery, and one of the "bottom brides" gets voted off when not enough of the other contestants "RSVP" to her wedding. Naturally, the usual reality show drama occurs, the women fight, form alliances, plot against each other and talk about who is "most deserving" of the coveted surgeries.
This, as a whole, is terrifying to me as a woman not only due to the fact that these women are so desperate to change their appearance as to appear on a show like this, but also because of the network's exploitation of the women's insecurities to gain viewers.
Bridalplasty sends the message that if there is something you don't like about yourself, if you are not physically perfect, not only will your wedding day be a failure, but so will your marriage.
Dr. Susan Albers suggests in a Huffington Post article about the show "These worries (that the show promotes disordered eating as well as lowered self-esteem), as you can imagine, are just the tip of the iceberg." The show suggests that physical beauty on a single day of your life is more important than acceptance of yourself, not to mention your health.
I would like to be able to make the argument that this is just a small percentage of the American population, that most people are less concerned with appearance and more concerned with their mental, emotional and physical health.
However, I do not find myself able to convince even myself that is the case. When I look at other reality shows that are popular, most of which feature all or predominantly female casts, I see different variations on the same theme.
The Bravo network has a huge number of shows like this, namely the Real Housewives of… programs, which currently feature six different series with a seventh to be added this year.
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Each iteration of the show features generally ridiculous women who are all filthy rich and Botoxed within an inch of their lives.
The majority of the women do not work, do not take care of their children without help and do not do much but go out to lunch, gossip about each other and shop.
While this is amusing to watch in the sense that the women are hilarious caricatures of people, it is scary to think that not everyone watching the show thinks of them in that sense.
Many people who watch these types of "reality" shows emulate the people featured and covet not only their lifestyle, but also their fame.
The emulation of reality shows has begun to yield disturbing results, such as the reports of teenage girls getting pregnant in order to audition for the MTV show 16 and Pregnant.
I find it greatly disturbing that the desire to have your body mutated by surgery and to be wealthy in excess are being so highly glorified not only by the media, but by young women as well.
As someone who watches these shows and finds them fascinatingly terrible, I think there is something definitively wrong with the incredible amount of importance being placed on appearance and wealth in a time when our country's economy is in a decline.
If anything, this is a time for realism, and the fact is that not everyone is perfectly beautiful and not everyone is going to be a millionaire, and also that neither of those things are requisite for happiness.
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