No Wonder our Perception of Beauty is Distorted...

I came across this video on my friend Matthew's blog. It's fascinating. I'm going to show it to my Virtues & Vices class tomorrow, as we're discussing the ways in which inordinate desires (here, the inordinate desire to measure up to a distorted view of physical beauty and worth) are not just detrimental to the individual, but can also lead to societal injustices.

Here's the general idea. Physical beauty is a good thing. But we tend to think that it is more important or valuable than it really is--other things are much more important. So we erroneously rank beauty among the various goods (a failure of prudence). And because we see beauty as so valuable, we desire or love it. But given the distortion in our evaluation of how important beauty is, we come to value it more than we should (a failure of temperance). This leads us to fear the loss of physical beauty more than we should. And because of this fear, we then behave in ways that are not only detrimental to ourselves, but to the common good--for instance, we foster entire industries that are built on exagerated importance of physical beauty (for example, not only the cosmetics industry [$30 for a few ounces of moiturizer?] but the 'cult of celebrity' that is built on beauty). And in the process, we end up distorting our children's understanding of their self-worth, as they tend to equate worth with physical beauty of an unrealistic sort. (See this other Dove ad here)