by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

Come into this circle of love and justice,

Come into the community of mercy, holiness, and health.

Come, and you shall know peace and joy.

Come now, and let us worship together.

I have an assistant who will be helping me with the sermon this morning.  Mark, will you bring out my assistant?  (Mark brings out life-size cardboard figure of Marilyn Monroe.)  Another Marilyn.  Another era.  You see the blonde sex goddess, but do you see the child?  She hid the child well. She had been born not Marilyn but Norma Jean—she never knew her father, who never married her mother and in fact left her before Norma Jean was born.  Her mother had a mental breakdown when Norma Jean was five, and she grew up in a series of foster homes.  A lonelier child, there never was.  Do you see that child here?  And from this background, she became perhaps the most famous of all beautiful women, the very symbol of feminine beauty. 

She was desired by men, and misused by many.  She was the ultimate trophy woman.  By Marilyn’s own testimony, her body was never a source of sexual, orgasmic pleasure to her.  Sex was a price she paid, thinking to get the love she had missed as a child.  She had many abortions.  She abused her body with prescription drugs.  Marilyn died at the tender age of thirty-six.

And yet through it all she was merely playing a role, and she knew it.  She took the poetry of Shelley, Whitman, Keats, and Rilke, and novels by such writers as Thomas Wolfe and James Joyce with her on movie sets where she played the classic dumb blonde.  Toward the end of her life, she was wanting to move toward serious dramatic roles.  When a drama coach told her he felt “sex vibrations” when she read Chekhov, her anger rose.  She said, “I want to be an artist, not a celluloid aphrodisiac.”  Marilyn, we never knew you.

Now I’m going to take Marilyn away for the rest of the sermon, so that you all can focus this Marilyn, and what I’m saying.  But before she goes, look at her body.  By today’s standards, let’s face it, she would be considered fat—chunky.  She would have to have liposuction.  And if you’ve seen any nude pictures of her, which I did in my recent visit to New York, you will know that her breasts were not perfectly formed, and not really all that large—she would have to have a breast augmentation operation these days.  Marilyn died in 1962, before women’s bodies were liberated from girdles and padded bras and waist cinchers.  But I wonder—just how free have we become?  Thanks, Marilyn, for joining us—we’ll see you again in the next service.

Now how did a body like hers—of these proportions—come to be perceived as overweight, as fat?  The pictures that are always before us these days are of the anorexic supermodels.  Jill Zimmerman, psychotherapist and college lecturer, specializing in women’s issues, tells the story of a young woman who came to her office for help.  “She sat there in my office,” says Zimmerman, “her delicate face obscured by a shield of blond hair, her timid voice just above a whisper: ‘I want to look like the supermodels.  I’m five-foot-nine, so I have the height, but I can’t lose the weight.  I’d like to look like Cindy Crawford.  But I can’t get below 140 pounds.’” Zimmerman says, “She reminded me of a frightened rabbit, <as> her eyes softened with tears: ‘I’ve tried everything,’ the young woman said, but I just can’t.’”  Zimmerman comments:  “Time and time again, I hear this confession in the conversations I have with young women.  They want to look good in a bathing suit. . . . .  They go on diets and work out every day.  They’re never thin enough, so they go to unnatural extremes.  All they really want is to feel good about themselves in a sea of doubt . . . encouraged by a multi-billion-dollar-a year beauty industry.  And they think the panacea is to look like a supermodel: perfectly thin, tall, sculpted, and commanding, our cultural epitome of feminine success.”  Many end up starving, binging, and purging—some even dying, as they become obsessed with a grotesque thinness that will no longer sustain life.  Others go under the surgeon’s knife for makeovers, hoping that a different nose or bigger breasts might bring them fulfillment.

But if many young women want to look like supermodels, many older women will take drastic steps to deny that they are aging.  Face-lifts have been around for decades.  But one of the more drastic new trends is surgeons’ actually cutting women’s feet to fit into the new fashionable shoes on the market today.  The operations are called toe cleavage and de-boning.  One of the doctors who does this surgery talks about it as “style surgery.”  She says, “I am simply fulfilling a need, a need to wear stylish shoes.”  Columnist Ellen Goodman comments: “That’s a sentence that should make you raise your eyebrows, if your forehead hasn’t been paralyzed with Botox.”  According to the New York Times, an increasing number of doctors are performing these delicate and expensive operations.  Among the most common are operations to shorten toes, at a cost of $2,500 per toe. 

Back to Botox.  In a Botox treatment, the sterile form of the poison that causes botulism is injected in to the face to erase wrinkles.  Millions of these injections are administered every year, even though Botox patients apparently lose, along with worry lines, their ability to show facial expressions.  There are other approaches to the aging skin as well, to remove the blemishes of age, such as chemical peeling and abrasion. 

You may or may not know that the military now offers its recruits free cosmetic surgery as one of its perks.  Anyone wearing a uniform is eligible, though it appears that most of the takers are women.  According to the New Yorker, personnel in all four branches of the military and members of their immediate families can get face-lifts, nose jobs, breast enlargements, liposuction, or any other kind of elective cosmetic surgery, at taxpayer expense.  There is no limit on the number of cosmetic surgeries one soldier can have, although Dr. Bob Lyons, the chief of plastic surgery at Brooke Army Medical Center, said, “We don’t do extreme makeovers in the military.”  This practice gives new meaning to the motto, “Be All That You Can Be.”  

The question, of course, must be asked: why would women choose to take these radical, dangerous steps?  Why would they do this violence to their bodies?  It’s really pretty simple: to be loved.  Women are acculturated in this society—and this remains true, in spite of feminist reforms—we are acculturated to believe that our worth is found in our youth and our beauty.  What happens if we’re young—but not beautiful—or at least, not beautiful enough, according to the standards of the society?  And even worse, what if we’re aging, and so by very definition in this culture, no longer beautiful and sexy?  You’d be surprised how many middle-class women of modest means get facelifts or have liposuction.  What would you pay to be loved?  Would you slice off some flesh?  No cost is too high. 

The cost is financial and physical, of course, but the greatest cost is spiritual.  There is a huge cost to the personhood of a woman who buys into these commercial ideals.  It’s not even the surgery itself—it’s the buy-in.  She agrees to become something other than herself—she is an image, like Marilyn Monroe, and she hopes to find her worth outside of herself.  And that, my friends, is a dead-end street, spiritually, emotionally.  She cannot be loved for herself if she cannot reveal herself.

If there are very real and present dangers to women from the beauty industry, what are the dangers for men?  Do they go scot-free?  Hardly.  If women come to have expectations about their bodies, men also come to have expectations about their women’s bodies.  I read one article in Psychology Today entitled “Why I Hate Beauty,” and it was by a man, a Michael Levine.  Levine works as a publicist in the beauty capital of the world, Hollywood—he says that because he is surrounded every day by incredibly beautiful women, an ordinarily attractive woman—not a movie star—seems relatively unattractive.  And so he finds himself single and lonely, he says.  Nobody beautiful enough will date him.  Pity. 

But it’s not just expectations about women’s looks that is a problem for men—increasingly, men are worried about their own looks.  The beauty industry is preying upon them, too.  Now many men color their hair as readily as women, and a growing number have hair plugs implanted in their scalps when they begin to bald.  Some are visiting cosmetic counters in department stores for make-up.  Craig Sowash, a 43-year-old sales manager with a pulp and paper company, says he feels more confident with customers ever since he had the wrinkles on his face smoothed out with a few injections.  And more and more men are having face lifts and other cosmetic surgeries.  “Men feel that doing some of these procedures gives them a foot up in the business world, a competitive edge,” says Dr. Marla Ross, a dermatologist in suburban Tigard who gave Sowash wrinkle-reducing injections of Restylane. 

Marketers have persuaded males, as they had with females, that they are flawed.  Says Dr. Darrick Antell, a leading plastic surgeon in New York City, “From Calvin Klein ads for underwear to GQ, I think the media have made men more aware of how good they should look.  They see an ad and say, ‘I don’t have abs like that.’”  And of course Dr. Antell can help.

Sadder still, teen and pre-teen boys and even boys younger than this are becoming obsessive about their physiques.  Personal trainers report that they are working with younger and younger clients these days.  Young males are on the same negative treadmill that females are on. They spend hours in the gym; a growing percentage abuse anabolic steroids, with great peril.  Their narcissism is in the service of the same thing—they’re hoping for love.

I’d like for us to stop for a moment and think about where real beauty lies.  For me, it lies in a face that bespeaks integrity—like the many-wrinkled visage of the artist Georgia O’Keefe.  She is who she is, and nothing else.  Beauty lies in spontaneity and playfulness, and youthfulness is found more in the eyes than in the muscles or skin.  A young person without hope in his soul, without that juiciness of being, can be old beyond her years, whereas an 80-year-old can have the look of innocence and expectation that draws us to him.  And beauty lies in the heart of love.  Look at a picture of the Dali Lama.  He radiates compassion.  Nobody cares about his abs.

Truthfully, all you have to do is to look, really look, really be present for a long, quiet moment with another human being—take away the cultural blinders, take away the commercial overlay, and you will see the miracle that that human being is.  And I mean this about each and every one of you.  If someone way back when you were growing up gave you a message that you weren’t somehow good enough, or good looking enough, now’s the time to give that message up.  And for sure we’re all told every day that we’re not measuring up to the figures in the commercial world all around us.  Let those images go.  Acknowledge that they are there, and let them go.  You see, those images are not real and you—you are.  Don’t let them damage your soul.  How could anyone ever tell you that you were anything but beautiful?  So be it.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

Go now, and let your true beauty, your true radiance shine forth from within, and let it shine upon others, and bless this world.  Go in love and go in peace.