Walking through the mall with my wife can be dangerous. This time, Lisa’s elbow in my side, accompanied by the admonition to “Keep walking and look straight ahead,” was justified. We were strolling past the sparkling floor-to-ceiling windows of a Victoria’s Secret store.

The display window was graced by half a dozen or so scantily-clad mannequins sporting a variety of sexy negligees (Do they still call them that?) while standing and laying in a variety of seductive poses. While I didn’t stop to measure, I can safely estimate that the garments worn by the skinny yet well-endowed plastic ladies might, on average, cover only about five percent of their bodies—if that. (The fact that I’m telling you this is proof that I didn’t follow Lisa’s instructions to avert my eyes, isn’t it?)

Heads of all ages and genders were turning to Victoria’s Secret, which I’m sure sells a good amount of sleepwear but you’d never know it. In fact, the chain is probably most effective at selling life-shaping messages about identity. In other words, the Victoria’s Secret window is not so much about what we’re to wear, but about who we’re supposed to be.

Where We’re At
This got me thinking.

I’m a 51-year-old man who’s been victimized by a lifetime of visual images that have combined to define personhood; maleness; femaleness; how to view myself; how to view a woman; and what makes a person valuable.

I’m also a Christ follower who has consciously sought to understand how the gospel and a biblical world- and life-view counters this onslaught—which I can choose to accept or reject—with the truth. Even with all my years of life-informing faith, my accumulated wisdom, my conscious resolve, and elbows in the side, I still find my heart and mind are battlefields over these issues. Take away the faith, wisdom, resolve, and elbows, and you’ve got a picture of how hard it is for our kids as they get pounded with these messages.

In today’s world, our identity is wrapped up in what we look like. You are what you look like. And what you look like determines not only your value and how others think of you, but how you think of yourself. While each of us has grown up with it, it’s still a relatively new thing.

Media Onslaught
Last year, the folks at the Dove Soap Campaign for Real Beauty released another in their line of thought-provoking video ads that cut to the heart of our culture’s appearance obsession. Dubbed “Onslaught,” a shot of a young girl’s innocent face is followed by a volley of advertising images for diets, exercise, cosmetics, and plastic surgery.

The message at the end? “Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.”

My two grandmothers lived their teen years when the last century was still a teenager itself. The blitz of post-WWII marketing was still years away. By the late 1950s and 1960s, a booming post-war economy combined with the expansion of the media machine (think television) to not only change the world, but establish standards of beauty. My mother was being hammered with ads like the one for Warner’s Concentrate Girdle and Little Fibber bra that showed a pear with the slogan, This is no shape for a girl. Or take the ad for Formfit Rogers pantyhose, which pictured a “perfectly-shaped” woman and told readers to Be Some Body.It only got worse for my wife and her peers.

And now, in today’s world, my two daughters—and the girls you minister to—are at least two generations removed from female relatives who grew up in a world largely void of this pressure. Print media, broadcast media, and the Internet shape that supermodel image that’s become an all-consuming passion and pursuit in today’s culture.

Listen to how one college coed we interviewed at CPYU described the pressure during the university years:

It’s hard to feel beautiful when looking through fashion magazines. It is even harder at college. College is like walking through a fashion magazine 24/7. It’s difficult enough to stay on top of schoolwork…[You also have] to stay on top of what you look like in comparison to the hundreds of other young beautiful women walking around campus. It is the only time in your life when you are surrounded by people your own age all trying to look their best. It makes you question your own identity and self-worth. It’s not easy.

Thus it should come as no surprise that experts estimate that:
* 42 percent of first-, second-, and third-grade girls want to be thinner,
* 51 percent of girls aged 9 and 10 say they feel better about themselves when dieting,
* 53 percent of 13-year-old girls are unhappy with their bodies, and
* perhaps as many as one in five young women practice some from of disordered eating, including over-dieting, purging, and binge-eating.

Boys Too
It’s not just our girls.

Before I entered my teenage years, The Okaysions had me and my male peers singing, “I’m a girl-watcher, I’m a girl-watcher, watching girls go by, my my my.…I was just a boy, when I threw away my toys, and found a new pastime to dwell on.”

My two sons have grown up in a culture that has sent them impossible-to-miss messages about the skin-deep attributes that not only make a female valuable, but worthy of their time and attention. To today’s young males, girls are less and less people and more and more objects to be ogled and used.

On top of that, more of our boys are defining themselves by outward appearance and athletic performance. An estimated 10 to 15 percent of people with anorexia or bulimia are male, and the use of performance enhancing drugs (including steroids) is widespread.

What Should We Make of It?
If we look realistically at our cultural obsession with what lies on the outside, there are some realities that we must recognize and understand before framing our ministry response.
* First, it’s not getting any better.
* Second, at its root, what we’re dealing with is idolatry.
* Third, we must think theologically about the realities that exist.

How Should We Respond?
* First, we must teach a theology of the Fall.
* Second, we must understand that our identity lies in who are as God’s created beings who are now in Christ.
* Third, we need to get under our skin, and our young people’s skin.