Eternally seventeen? (No, thanks!)
by Mycenay
“The transition of moving from a girl to a woman or a boy to a man can be very traumatic. Many individuals do not want to become man or woman because it involves responsibility. In many instances it is much easier to remain a boy or girl for a lifetime, as long as you have the emotional support of others to keep you there, and as long as you do not have to take responsibility. Society today is set up to keep children eternal children; therefore, there are very few true mature ascending sons and very few mature ascending daughters.”
~Paladin, Chief of Finaliters on Urantia, 9/7/98, from a “Personal Transmission for Mycenay”
In order to move on and move out of the fallen system of consumption and corporate slavery we, as men and women, must redefine ourselves—our self-perceptions, our values, and, most importantly, our spirituality—who we are beyond the physical.
One of the delusions of our capitalistic society is the belief that youth and beauty represent life and power. If not fortunate enough to be rich or famous, one can find some social standing in physical beauty and prowess. Our’s is a culture that disregards and disrespects the elderly and the aging process, and so we try to deny it and hide it; we are ashamed of it. Many Americans don't feel they can age gracefully with dignity, and therefore many end up either feeling old and dejected or looking rather silly trying to act (and dress) “eternally seventeen”. These cultural mores are imposed upon us; they are not natural social impulses. Many pre-marketing and pre-advertising cultures respected the wisdom and experience that comes with age—and respected the natural processes of life and the effects they have on the physical body. It is those profiting from the sale of youth and beauty who perpetuate the idea that these qualities are more valuable than experience and wisdom, who perpetuate the marketing myth of the fountain of youth found in the cosmetic surgery and the creams, in the diets and the tonics of modern science.
Runway Runaway
I grew up in a family of models and photographers. Around the age of thirteen I was introduced to the modeling world and began doing television commercials, print work, and runway shows. Modeling was not something I'd been particularly interested in, but it was easy work for good money my family needed. My uncle's partner was a top fashion photographer, and my dad worked for a high-tech photo processing lab; so I was able to enter into the modeling scene for virtually nothing and with pretty good connections. There was little effort involved in this work, and I was not bedazzled by any means with the “glamour” of it all—it was just something I grew up around; I didn't feel attached to it, nor effected by it. However, now, twenty years later, as I open my eyes ever wider to many things about our society and our world, I realize that I was affected by that environment and its false images, its false messages about beauty, youth, womanhood, manhood, and personal value. In fact everyone who watches television, goes to the movies, and/or looks at a magazine rack (much less reads the magazines) is effected by the “beauty” industry. I (and I believe many women) cannot look at another woman (in life, in print, or on screen) without somewhere in my mind evaluating her physically by modern-day standards, and evaluating how I fit into that standard. When I really step back and look at how deeply advertising affects and conditions our minds, I'm appalled and very concerned for our future.
Rethinking “Normal”
Many things I used to accept as “normal” now sadden and sicken me, including the beauty and fashion industry that dictates and defines what's “in” and “out”, what's “hip,” “cool,” “hot,” “sexy,” what and who you're supposed to be in order to “make it” socially in the world. These paradigms dictated by the advertisers are increasingly self-destructive, unwholesome, and even violent. Westerners look upon the veiled women of the Middle East with pity and self-righteousness, blind to the slavery to body-image and beauty definitions to which Western women (and men) are bound. The difference is that ours (the West's) is a voluntary slavery of the mind and consciousness. While women of some cultures around the world are abused and even murdered for their femininity, we Westerners willingly take the surgeon's knife into our healthy bodies for vanity's sake. In Naomi Wolf's book The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women she states that, “In 1978, the American Medical Association made the claim that preoccupation with beauty was the same as preoccupation with health. Dr. Arthur K. Balin, president of the American Aging Association, declared to The New York Times that 'it would benefit physicians to look upon ugliness not as a cosmetic issue but a disease'.” She also tells us that “Cosmetic surgery is the fastest growing 'medical' specialty. More than two million Americans, at least 87 percent of them female, had undergone it by 1988, a figure that had tripled in two years.” According to a news release posted on Beauty Worlds: The Culture of Beauty website titled 2003 Cosmetic Surgery Statistics Show Strong Increases there was an 8.5% increase in breast augmentation and 6.3% growth in liposuctionin surgeries in 2003 from 2002. The report also states liposuction remains the most popular surgical procedure overall and that over 89,000 men had cosmetic surgery in 2003.
The desirable body-image portrayed by super-models is often anorexic, their bodies looking more childlike than womanly—eternally seventeen.
I hope reading about this leads you to ask, “Why is this happening and where did it start?” There are secular reasons such as the fact that cosmetic surgery, fashion, and beauty are multi-billion dollar industries motivated by greed. However, the root goes much deeper than these issues. The physical is merely the shadow of the spiritual, and these imbalances between men and women and how we view ourselves and each other are a result of a rebellion that took place on this world approximately 200,000 years ago. “From time eternal there was in the mind of God a plan for a union of souls, male and female, on all evolutionary worlds where the birth of the children and the spiritual growth of the planet was the primal order. This perfect plan was upset by the Lucifer Rebellion, the subsequent fall of the Planetary Prince, Caligastia, and the later default of the Material Son and Daughter, Adam and Eve. Because of the spiritual decadence and genetic imbalance, Urantia [Earth] became a planet where marriages and mating between the opposite sexes were not marriages of cosmic origin and spiritual attunement, but marriages of animalistic origin and materialistic expediency.” (The Divine New Order, p. 80) When male/female relationships fell out of divine pattern, became more focused on the physical than the spiritual, of course imbalances began to occur on all levels—spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical.
Progressive Living
In God's divine plan of balanced Mother circuitry and Father/Son circuitry there is no competition or insecurity; there is complementary relationship, understanding and appreciation for the cycles of life…and no one in their right mind would ever want to be “eternally seventeen!”