Beauty at the cost of dignity?

Everyone wants to look their best there's no denying that, it's all part of the wonderful theater of daily life, but at what cost? Many times it is women that are desperate to look their best at all costs but men are just as vain, and sometimes a lot more. But let us first address this obsession we have as a society, again it springs from the media, magazines, bill boards, television and film, they all say that we must dress a certain way and look a certain way- and by doing this we will have elevated our social standing and be respected. The need to be respected and to belong is one reason the other reason is for women to look better than other women in order to impress men.
It seems no matter how far we come as a society, men will always have something to do with our actions. This is one of the issues as to why there will be no solidarity between women: competition and the need to out do each other will always rear it's ugly head.
Another issue and this ties in with my earlier comment about raising your social standing, it plays into the mindset that if you look this good, you must have a lot of money, after all celebrities look amazing and they have piles of cash!

Forget about make up or your daily moisturising rituals, some people go as far as to go under the knife and have fat removed, implants or even have poison injected into their head, all in the vain attempt of looking younger. A case arose in the US fairly recently and was reported on Fox news, where a women that waned a bigger butt put herself in risk. Unknowing to her the surgeon was a fake and put high grade silicone in her that had devastating affects.

It still baffles me as to how some people can be so vain but it's not just about vanity it's also laziness. People no longer have the required patience, like the case I just made reference to, there are simple exercise that you can do to shape your bum naturally but this will take time and effort which a sad amount of people are unwilling to give, instead they want the instant results. People who do this kind of cosmetic surgery incur the pain and trauma of the surgery and the rehabilitation afterwards, now for a butt enlargement this involves not being to sit down for 4 weeks or you may risk displacing the implants, just imagine the humiliation of not being able to sit down for 4 weeks! People also fail to take into account that their bodies are constantly changing and the will put on weight, now what do the think will happen to the implant? It will stay hard while the flesh around it starts to sag and drupe.

But if celebrities do it then it must be good for you, people should realise that they're not celebrities and aspiring to be like them is not always good for your health.

The Harrogate Experience: Teenagers check out the Army

Aspiring for fame.... and nothing else.

There is an unhealthy obsession to be famous even if it is at the cost of ones dignity. Many of these "talent shows" are just an excuse to see how much humiliation a person will take just to get their 15 minutes of fame. It is glaringly obvious that most of the population would do an awful lot of degrading activities just to get a chance at fame, but this also shows how society itself enjoys to see people get humiliated and embarrassed on TV, how else can you explain the astronomical rise in "reality shows"?

Almost everyone has a desire to be noticed, but there is more than one way to get the attention you require, but people want the quick and easy method which is usually TV or become an underwear model. Not a lot of kids would equate a good education one of the ways to be noticed for the right reasons. With a solid education you could acquire enough wealth through perseverance and hard work. The quest for fame is disturbing and somewhat unsafe. Any person who is so desperate to get an ounce of fame will do almost anything to do it and the world is full of unpleasant people who would just love to exploit it for their own gain. And with the internet becoming so easy to access it is becoming increasingly dangerous, as a story has unfolded about how a US mother forced her daughter to pose naked infront of the webcam so that a stranger posing as a photographer could see her. The mother was charged with child endangerment eventhough she also posed naked for the camera, but this has just proven my point, people are willing to ignore common sence in the faintest hope of fame. Do people who are famous look that happy? With the paparazzi snapping every minute of their day and with the tabloids constantly reporting rumours as facts-

Who would want that?

Runaway Grooms..

You'll may mistake this title with the Hollywood movie Runaway Bride but you would be seriously mistaken as there is no fairytale ending to these stories. In this there is only heartache, pain, shame and not only a loss of a huge amount of money, but also of your standings in your society. Many Indian women fall victim to this, they get married to a British Indian Citizen and after he gets what he wants from her and her family they head back to the UK while their new brides are left waiting and hoping that one day he will return. It is not only confined to the UK as it also occurs in the US an Canada, although not always reported.

A wedding is a moment of celebration and many families will spare no expense to make sure the day is perfect, now this may not be such a hard event to put together for the like of you and I from the UK, but for a struggling family in living through hardship everyday, this would mean something between 6 months wages to your life savings. Least we forget, many Indians still participate in the tradition of giving a dowry. A dowry is the payment of cash or other forms of gift given to the bridegroom's family along with the bride,this practice has led to a rise in female infanticide and sex selective abortion which has thus led to it becoming an outlawed practice, however it is still practiced and has lead to a large amount of people living in poverty.

But getting back to my original point, new brides are often used for sexual pleasures and then abandoned, they are left with the realisation that they have been used and also that they cannot remarry because of years of tradition but also because people in India and other Asian parts of the world frown upon the idea of getting a divorce, so they are then left in a state of marriage limbo" and have no way out,there are at least 15-20,00 Indian brides that have been abandoned by their British husbands, this is an unacceptable amount of people left shattered and duped into thinking their lives were getting better only to realise that the worse is yet to come..It is just another form of exploitation and like exploitation it SHOULD BE STOPPED.

Suffering in silence..

There can be many forms of domestic violence ranging from Physical abuse to emotional abuse, truth be told it is harder to categorise what it is. In regards to the law it is defined as an incident of threatening behaviour, violence or abuse ( physiological, physical, verbal, sexual, financial or emotional), but even though the law has tried very hard to categorise it, there is no way of know it has happened if no one reports it and even then it can be dismissed due to lack of evidence.

The tool that is often used to help people suffering from this type of abuse is likely to be severely slashed, Legal Aid is to be cut enough so that the Government can save £ 350m a year, which will make it increasingly harder for people with limiter financial resources to get help. The Government has implied that they are doing this for the good of the people, and that it is only used to help the " most vulnerable" people. But what constitutes as vulnerable, if you are the victim of anything, you should be considered vulnerable. The authorities have underlined what qualifies you to legal aid, only if you can prove it i.e police report, doctor report or physical abuse are you classed as the "most vulnerable". However many women will suffer at least 20 incidents of domestic abuse before reporting it to the police and many victims will be to scared to report it at all.

Does it ever occur to these people that a victim may not be able to report it, their spouse or partner may be blackmailing them in an event that they will try to alert the authorities. Many other forms of abuse exist but may not be taken seriously by the authorities, forms such as refusing the access to the telephone and the outside world, this is just as serious as it is disregarding your basic human rights, but because you can't produce any physical evidence it may be disregarded.

The long term affects of suffering from abuse can be even worse than any form of physical abuse. An individual who has endure years of abuse would very often be very nervous, suffer from low self esteem an have an even lower sense of worth, but that's not all, if children also beared witness to the event they could also be traumatised and not be able to connect with anyone because they always fear of suffering the same way their parents did.

So I ask you.. are the shot term benefits worthy considering what the long term risks may hold???