"I plead with you Young Women to please be more accepting of yourselves, including your body shape and style, with a little less longing to look like someone else. We are all different. Some are tall, and some are short. Some are round, and some are thin. And almost everyone at some time or other wants to be something they are not! But as one adviser to teenage girls said: "You can't live your life worrying that the world is staring at you. When you let peoples opinions make you self conscious you give away your power... the key to feeling confident is to always listen to your inner self (the real you). And in the Kingdom of God the real you is more precious than rubies" Every Young Women is a child of destiny and every adult women a powerful force for good. I mention adult women because, sisters, you are our greatest example and resource for these Young Women. And if you are obsessing over being a size 2, you won't be very surprised when your daughter or the mia maid in your class does the same and makes herself physically ill trying to accomplish it. We should all be as fit as we can be- that's good Word of Wisdom doctrine. That means eating right and exercising and helping our bodies function at their optimum strength. We could probably all do better in that regard. But I speak here of optimum health; there is no universal optimum size.
Frankly, the world has been brutal with you in this regard. You are bombarded in movies, television, fashion magazines, and advertisements with the message that looks are everything! The pitch is, "If your looks are good enough, your life will be glamorous and you will be happy and popular." That kind of pressure is immense in the teenage years, to say nothing of later womanhood. In too many cases too much is being done to the human body to meet just such a fictional (to say nothing of superficial) standard. As one Hollywood actress is reported to have said recently: "We've become obsessed with beauty and the fountain of youth...I am really saddened by the way women mutilate themselves in search of that. I see women, including young women, pulling this up and tucking that back. It's a slippery slope. You can't get off of it. Its really insane what society is doing to Women.
In terms of preoccupation with self and a fixation on the physical, this is more than social insanity; it is spiritually destructive, and it accounts for much of the unhappiness women face in the modern world. And if adults are preoccupied with appearance- tucking and nipping and implanting and remodeling everything that can be remodeled- those pressures and anxieties will certainly seep through to children. At some point the problem becomes what the Book of Mormon calls "vain imaginations" and in secular society both vanity and imagination run wild. One would truly need a great and spacious makeup kit to compete with beauty as portrayed in media all around us. Yet at the end of the day there would still be those "in the attitude of mocking and pointing their fingers" as Lehi saw, because however much one tries in the world of glamour and fashion, it will never be glamorous enough..
May you let the eternal realities of the gospel of Jesus Christ lift you above temporal concerns and teenage anxieties.
...I want you to be proud you are a woman! I want you to feel the reality of what that means, to know who you truly are. You are literally a spirit daughter of heavenly parents with a divine nature and an eternal destiny. That surpassing TRUTH should be fixed deep in your soul and be fundamental to every decision you make....Be a woman of Christ. Cherish your esteemed place in the sight of God. He needs you.... I say to you what Prophet Joseph said more than 150 years ago: "If you live up to your privileges, the angels cannot be restrained from being your associates"
-ELDER HOLLAND (Modesty, Makeovers and the Pursuit of Physical Beauty: What Mothers and Daughters Need to Know)
LOVE this meg! Thanks :)
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