Real life women

I love BYU-TV. A few weeks ago I was watching a talk from Education Week and had to record it. This morning I watched it again and had to copy down some of what he said. The talk was given by Van Gessel, a Family Life professor. He said:

"Excessive exposure to media images, whether erotic or not, creates unrealistic expectations in the mind of a husband and often produces unfair feelings of inadequacy in the heart of the wife.... There is an unbridgeable gap between the ridiculously phony images of fantasy women manufactured by the media and the reality of being a living, breathing human woman in the real world. The plastic pin-up hawked in the videos and movies has no soul of her own. She is a slave to the natural man who can control her in every corner of his imagination. She never gets pregnant, never gets tired, never has headaches or morning sickness and never catches a cold. She never ages, never gets wrinkles, and can be traded in for a new model whenever her master tires of her. She never complains or disagrees-- thereby reinforcing, no doubt, the telestial man's deluded sense that he is, after all, a perfect specimen himself. And the only purpose in her lifeless life is to cater to man's every whim.

"How tragically ironic that in our days of modern enlightenment, at our time when women enjoy greater legal and political rights than any other time in history, the greatest challenge lies in having to compete with the phony fantasies of women peddled to us by the partnership of Hollywood and hell.

"The greatest irony of all is this: These pseudo-perfect women of media fantasy cannot ever achieve the everlasting perfection that can be achieved by a real women of the covenant, who does, paradoxically, age and deteriorate. Her body will change in shape and function as she fulfills her divine roll of child-bearing. But this real life woman is the only kind of woman who carries with her to potential of attaining true perfection."

Listening to this made me proud to be a real-life woman! I am a thinking, breathing, feeling person with amazing potential. The "ideal" woman portrayed in the media is a mere shadow-- a mirage that fades away when inspected with any degree of proximity. I am the real thing... and so are you!