Maybe she's born with it...doubt it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJLVj-j6ze0&NR=1

How we think changes how we act. It’s a fairly simple, yet accurate, idea. It can pretty much be applied to everything we encounter in our daily lives. In this case I’ve chosen a commercial that I cannot seem to go a day, without seeing on TV.

Maybelline has become a ginormous beauty icon, and most women would consider it pretty common to own or at least know someone who owns a product by Maybelline. The commercials suggest that it’s the perfect product for a girl on a budget who wants to look like she’s got a million bucks! Sounds like a pretty rad deal, right? So what do us, girls do? We think “Well I’ve got terrible skin, and I need to fix it, and that commercial seems pretty reliable. I mean, look at her skin, its gorge!” So what do we do next? We go out and buy it, of course! Or we think “man, all of my problems would be solved if I had that skin.” Which leads to, “all of my problems would be solved if I had that body, those clothes, etc…”

Now, we, the subjects, are women. Particularly women in American culture, who have been made to believe that what we’ve got isn’t good enough. We’re the perfect prey for this ad! We’re made to take a position on the information we were just fed. That position being; my skin isn’t good enough, but with that object it will be. The object, of course, being the wonderful Maybelline foundation on the beautiful model that will make my skin perfect. All of those things come together to form that ridiculous idea in our minds that we’ve got to have it because we won’t be as good without it.

And now to top it all off ladies and gentlemen, we can tie that idea right in with Susan Bordo’s text on how women view themselves. She explains that in more recent times, women are becoming more critical of their bodies. They’re putting more and more energy into improving themselves; into becoming, docile bodies. So why is it that I can’t go a day without seeing that Maybelline commercial? Probably because looking up to par is becoming more and more competitive. There are products to fix everything wrong about you. We’re all docile bodies, all we need are the tools to improve, and Maybelline is doing a fantastic job of supplying them.

This part of our culture is all about what we see, monkey see, monkey do. We want to be just like those women we see on TV, and if we’re given the right tools to work with, we can’t help but at least want to try.