I Feel Pretty

A student sent this clip; she is planning to use it with her own students in her English class.

It is the climax of the movie “I Feel Pretty” designed to hit the audience over the head with the uplifting moral.

Unfortunately, it is a bad moral. It illustrates how far we, as a society, or at least Hollywood, has strayed from the path of good sense.

“When we're little girls, we have all the confidence in the world. We let our bellies hang out, and... And we just dance and play and pick our wedgies.”

“And then these things happen that just... They make us question ourselves. Somebody says something mean to you on the playground, and then we grow up, and you doubt yourself over and over again until you lose all that confidence. All that self-esteem, all that faith you started with is gone.”

A fair description of the experience of most girls, no doubt. But, “things happen”? Denial. What things? What exactly happens between childhood and adulthood? It is not that somebody says something mean to you on the playground. It’s the coming of the age of reason, and the realization that you might actually have done something immoral, as opposed to someone simply being mean for pointing it out. And it is the coming of puberty.

Girls are spoiled in childhood. Increasingly, with the “self-esteem” movement, all children probably are. They are told they are wonderful, no matter what they do, and nothing is expected of them.

To anyone who has been spoiled, coming to the age of reason, and puberty and sexual awakening, must be difficult. Now it is not possible to do whatever you want and still be good and wonderful. Even if you have no sexual morality, and see no issue with aborting unwanted children, you still suddenly have the need to attract members of the opposite sex to satisfy your desires. You must please others.

A spoiled child has no idea how to do so.

Moreover, she has no concept of morality. People who do not give her what she wants must only be being “mean.”

At this point, if she persists in the narcissism to which she has been trained, all other people are now her enemies. She is wonderful, and they are failing to acknowledge it. They need to smarten up.

This film advocates narcissism.

“What if when someone tells us that we aren't good or thin or pretty enough, we have strength and the wisdom to say what I am is better than all of that? Because what I am is me!”

Denial causes her to bury the issue—being good—but this is the real problem. The only way out is to discover morality. Her concern over being “pretty” is a matter of self-delusion, to avoid the real issue.

This is why so many young women are obsessive over being thin. It is not to attract men. Men often prefer women who are curvaceous, “zoftig.” Look at classical painting, or Playboy centrefolds. The obsession with being thin, sometimes to the point of anorexia or even suicide by starvation, is to reverse puberty, to get rid of those suggestive curves, in order to return to childhood, before one had discovered guilt.

Chasing after male attention and more sex is only going to make the underlying sense of guilt worse, and sharpen your hatred of the world and of men in particular.

The real problem here is raising girls, and children, with too much self-esteem, and no moral instruction. It is soul-destroying.