The Race

My wife always conveys to me, while watching television or a movie, that some babe looks gorgeous in this dress or that makeup. Of course she doesn’t mean to motivate me but it’s a consolation price destined to be for whom so ever she considers worthy enough. This, however, rarely happens in her live observations on the people around her.

Then my 13 year daughter and my 12 and 9 year old sons also, time and again, categorically try to identify glamorous celebrities who appeal to them in the descending order. Machoism being the theme for the sons, as they are yet not old enough to appreciate the feminine beauty, while the daughter targets beauty and distinguishes it from the ‘beast’.

I keep on reminding them that all this has less to do with what their admired ones are and more to do with what they are portrayed to be. I highlight the fact that it is their job to glamorize themselves and highly trained professionals are paid huge monies to make them look what they probably are not.

But all this goes into the drain when yet again someone amongst them, or those around, repeats the same sentences, and again, and again.

I am not against the good looking, but am afraid of the impact that this fictitious beauty has on the mind of the immature, and the mature as well. Fantasizing is what I don’t want them to do, but I also don’t blame them because sometimes I also can’t help the way things are presented to me.

Again fantasizing in not so much a problem but you can start fearing for the worse when people start imitating what they see. My theory was proved correct when I read the news about the teenage boys who are increasingly ending up in hospitals after injecting anabolic steroids in the search for the ‘perfect body’.

In UK, statistically speaking, the number of under18s admitted for poisoning from the muscle-building drugs has soared by almost half in five years, from 97 to 138 but that is only the tip of the iceberg, according to official figures.

The number of 11 to 15-year-olds taking steroids almost doubled between 2001 and 2007, from 6,800 to 13,300. Children using the drugs are most likely to be young boys who want to emulate sporting and fashion heroes.

Anabolic steroids are chemically produced class-C drugs that mimic testosterone. For males, the side effects can be withered testicles, sterility and breast growth. In women it can be the growth of facial hair. They can also stunt growth in the young, cause liver problems and aggressiveness known as ‘roid rage’.