My Unattractive Belief
             I actually believe that it is okay for males to be less than attractive, but that any female that is not up to par is in a bad situation.  As a child I would always judge other females by whether they were unsightly or not.  Sure I had unattractive female friends, but in my head I pitied them.  I would talk with others about them as if they were marked with a sign of death before puberty.  At the same age, my male friends did not have to look any certain way.  I would notice if they were hard to look at, but I would not feel sorry for them because they were boys so it did not matter.
 
            In the times of thinking about the future and imagining my adulthood, I would always hope to have beautiful children.  I do not think that in itself is an unusual wish, but there was always this added sentence: "if my kids aren't cute, I hope they are boys." I know that I will love my children whether they are boys or girls or pretty or ugly or anything inbetween, but if they are girls and ugly, I would secretly feel bad on the inside.  I have stated on more than one occasion to different family members and friends that if my daughters turn out to be ugly, I will dress them impeccably.  They will always be clean with neat hair, expensive clothes and white teeth.  This way, at least they would have the illusion of being attractive girls.

        This belief is a direct result of the society I grew up in.  Throughout my childhood I have been bombarded with images of the beautiful female falling in love the man.  This image is present in movies, in commercial advertisements and even in my family.  I realized the inappropriateness of such use of women, but thought that by recognizing its damage I was not affected by it.  In fact, in preparing to write this paper, I found it hard to even pick a topic.  I debated for a long while thinking that I was a person above all such sorts of moral discriminations.  I thought of a few other topics that I could write about that I basically believed, but did not really have a passionate feeling about.  The topic of choice came about one morning getting dressed when I was rethinking a conversation I had with my sister.  The conversation was about my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend.  The quote I remembered saying is "she is so ugly she looks like she could be his twin.  Its okay for him because he is a man, but for  female she is ugly." I realized that my  statement was indeed gender discrimination.

         It is shameful to have to admit that the image of the beautiful women is something that is not only apparent in films from decades ago, but it is obvious in films that are out presently.  This facet of gender discrimination is also depicted in animated and computer-generated films.  I can remember growing up watching the Disney@ animated films Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast.  In the case of Cinderella, the prince was indeed attractive, but the stepsisters were definitely hideous.  The message: beautiful females (Cinderella) are worthy of marrying a prince while unattractive ones are doomed to a life with their mother.  The unattractive girls should be pitied.  It could be argued that the stepsisters were not worthy of the prince because they were mean, but they could have been equally as mean if drawn more beautiful than Cinderella.  The error of Beauty and the Beast is evident in its title.  People who have never seen the movie would be able to tell that "Beauty" was referring to the female character and "the Beast" was the male.  The message: it is okay for a beautiful woman to fall in love with a man, even if he looks like a beast.  How much more wonderful a country we would live in if the reverse were also true.  I can not think of one movie where an attractive man falls for a beast of a woman.  Shrek at least had a beast-like female find a man to love and marry her no matter how she looked, but is it surprising that he was as beastly unattractive as she was?
 
            The most prevalent thing in our society today is the commercial advertisement.  They are on television, on the radio, on public buses, in train stations, in stores and inescapable.  Over and over, attractive women are used to sell things with which they have no direct relationship.  The men in the same commercials are average if anything.  The common beer commercial has a group of male friends -just average men - drinking with each other and in walks a gorgeous, stunning, striking Woman who only talks to the guy drinking the brand of beer of the commercial.  Is that really necessary?  A brand of beer has nothing to do with the attractiveness of a woman who drinks it.  Then there was the Superbowl DoritosO commercial in which a man - just an average man - is at the Laundromat doing his laundry when in walks a beautiful, good-looking, attractive female (with no laundry) eating the new 3-D Doritos and she proceeds to get into a creative eating contest with this guy.  The message: you have to be attractive to get a man to perform tricks with you over a bag of chips.  As far as print ads, I can not count the times a bus has passed or I have flipped through a magazine and there was a huge, pretty female promoting anything from food to medicine.

             The lesson that attractive females are better off than others was taught not so subliminally in my own family.  My mother is the type of person who lets all of her children know exactly what she believes about everything.  I remember a phrase from one of her teenage lectures being "you are nice-looking so boys are going to talk," creating the dichotomy between nice-looking girls who receive attention naturally and unsightly girls who are in a lower position.  In nearly the same breath she would admonish me to not get an attractive boyfriend, but rather to wait on a repulsive one who was interested in me.  The message: he can be a beast even though I am a beauty.  My mother also raised us in the church.  Not long ago, the bible story was taught about the two sisters.  One was beautiful and loved by Jacob while the other was not easy on the eyes and Jacob was forced to marry her.  How I understood what happened is that the uglier sister was in a worse position than the more attractive one.

              After delving into my life to see why I hold such a gender discriminating moral belief, it is not surprising that I do.  The image of attractive women being better off than unattractive women has been around me from birth.  It is no surprise that I did not even notice that I held such beliefs because it has been natural for me from day one.  As a child it was present in my cartoons, growing out of my childhood it was surrounding me in television and print advertisements.  Then there is the added benefit of my mother's beliefs being given to me as advice.  Even though I am sure this will not change just because I recognize it in myself, I am more aware of the instances in which I discriminate between men and women based on appearances.