Adapted from a sermon given at Reformed University Fellowship, University of Oklahoma

Women are beautiful. Women want to be beautiful, be seen as beautiful, be told they’re beautiful and on and on. There is a place in each woman’s heart for beauty. But what is beauty? Fergie is Fegalicious. She sings, “Fergalicious”:

Make them boys go loco

They want my treasure
So they get their pleasures from my photo





Fergalicious 
(So delicious)

But I ain’t promiscuous

And if you was suspicious

All that **** is fictitious

There is a powerful beauty culture in our society, and it forces women to squeeze into a certain ideal. Many of the college women in my ministry say they resist it, but if you watch the sorority girls go out on Thursday night, walking to the Deli, you see a remarkable sameness in their look, their clothes, their Ugg boots, their hair styles. Why is this? These are the “in” things to have. The purse, the boots, the shorts. It’s the look.

But this ‘look’ is very, very difficult to maintain. If you think about it just for a few minutes, you have to realize that beauty is fading. That these college students look, for the most part, better than they will ever in their lives. How can they possibly maintain this height of beauty? I think women get more beautiful as they get older, but our culture disagrees. Younger, tighter, tanner is the order of the day. Can you keep up? No way.

In that context, hear 1 Peter 3: 3 Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear— 4 but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.

Why is Peter saying this? Peter taps into one of the things that haunt women, their looks and bodies. These are two different, yet obviously connected struggles that women have. Whereas men struggle with thinking about sex all the time, it seems to me (and has been confirmed by the women that I’ve asked) that women struggle with thinking about their bodies all the time. Just as women cannot fathom how men can think of sex every two seconds, men cannot comprehend how women have their bodies in the back of their minds every waking moment. There are legitimate and illegitimate reasons for this of course.[1] Women are more in touch with their bodies (I know a woman who says she can tell when her egg drops each month – I don’t even think I know what that means exactly!), and I think Satan uses that good thing and turns it into a very bad thing.

Men, in general, just don’t think about their bodies in this way. Women don’t know what to do about it, and many either totally give into the power of the wrong-headed idolatry or they reject that the body has anything to say at all. It is a multi-faceted thing, so let’s consider it for a minute.

In our society, and in every society, there is a feminine ideal.  Naomi Wolf calls this the Beauty Myth in a book by that title. Much of my thought on this has been shaped by the book, Eve’s Revenge, written by Lilian Calles Barger, which I highly recommend.

The images on the covers of fashion magazines start with an average model who is five feet eleven inches and weighs 117 pounds. With these measurements, she represents only 2 percent of American women.  Even these women have been changed and nipped and tucked and augmented. I remember hearing that even Julia Roberts had a body double whenever she had to do nude scenes. These images aren’t real women, but they have the power to pound real women into thinking that it is real, it is beauty and it is attainable. Men buy into this equally.

The idealized female images projected by media dovetail with the fact that men have not changed much; they still respond to “beautiful women.” A survey of two hundred college women found that no matter how these women felt about themselves, their dating activity was directly related to how men saw them. According to the researchers, if you are perceived as unattractive [according to the female ideal] and overweight, men may have little to do with you when it comes to dating. But haven’t women known this all along? Author Dorothy Parker says she had never seen a man forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. Nor a successful one, I would add. I’ve known plenty of brilliant and fascinating women of all ages with no man in sight. But rarely have I seen a knockout waiting to dance. One woman commented to me, ‘Inner beauty never gets you picked up at a party.’ Thank goodness for the older women who consoled me as a teen with the words, ‘There is somebody for everybody’ while my prettier cousin attracted all the boyfriends.

The commodification of beauty has become the currency of the relationship market, and men expect women to attempt to meet the standard. Through participation in the beauty cult we hope to acquire not only self-actualization but also love… Sexually liberated, we seize the opportunities to use physical attraction to get the power we still lack. Through consumption of the beauty culture, any daring woman can now attempt to play the part of a man-eating vixen. The problem is that in the end a flesh-and-blood woman cannot compete with the fantasy of the feminine ideal. We always fall short with the messiness of our bodies.”[2]

The symbol for this right now is the breast. It’s all about the breasts. Just look at the magazines and the clothes that are now in the mainstream. “Historically, the breast as a symbol of femininity has been a frequent site of attention. Based on constantly changing fashion, what’s vogue has moved from the flat-chested flappers of the 1920s to the current buxom Lara Croft. Even as one group of medical doctors extols the healthful benefits of the breast as a source of nurturing for mother and child, another group is ready to put the knife to them. With breast-feeding socially marginalized and robbed of maternal meaning, breasts have become the premier sexual toy that can be purchased. In many areas, augmentation has become a rite of passage into womanhood and a suitable high school graduation gift as small breasts are increasingly considered a deformity.”[3]

Furthermore, and to get the foothold in even deeper, the culture wields its power in defining beauty with cosmetics and dieting.

The diet industry is $40-billion a year business. “As media critic Jean Kilborne has pointed out, overcoming food temptation has replaced sexual chastity as the symbol of female virtue. We’ve been told, ‘You can never be too rich or too thin,’ and some of us are out to prove it – literally. When was the last time you heard a woman talk about dieting for health reasons rather than looks? As a way to use the language of the body, excessive dieting seems to prove a woman’s ability to control an otherwise uncontrollable life and to attain social legitimacy.”[4]

“The beauty cult is a $25 billion-a-year cosmetic industry. It is ready and willing to feed women’s insecurity and help us find our ‘true’ selves. The beauty cult assumes that the body stands in the way of self-actualization and offers means to manipulate it and control its intrusion. In providing prescriptions for our disconnected selves, the beauty cult understands our spiritual need to be who we ‘really’ are and preys upon that need.”[5]

The body dissatisfaction rate is unbelievable – 60% in high school and 80% in college. 42% of girls in first to third grades express a desire to be thinner. 15% of women would sacrifice more than five years of their life to attain the weight they desire. There are at least 8 million sufferers of anorexia nervosa, bulimia and other associated eating disorders in America (90% of these are women). It seems that the closer you get to the American Dream, the more you will – as collateral damage – struggle with eating disorders.[6]

 This hasn’t always been the case. Yes, women have always struggled with going to their bodies for their significance and worth, but it’s been just that – a struggle. It’s not a struggle any more. It’s a given.

In her book, The Body Project, Joan Jacobs Brumberg exposes this by comparing American girls and women of today with those of the 1800s. In the nineteenth century, as evidenced from their writing in their journals, girls were talking about character and virtues: self-control, charity, love, service to others. In looking at the diaries of modern girls, Brumberg found almost a total obsession with outward appearance. Girls from 200 years ago still cared about how they looked of course, but it wasn’t the center of their identities. They sought to cultivate inner character as true beauty. “At a time when women of many classes and races have greater economic, political and social access, the camera that ought to reflect the multiplicity of ways women are women has instead narrowed the concept of beauty and made it more demanding…. There is not only an almost universally prescribed beauty ideal but also a universal belief that any woman can attain it through consumption. By paying the price and buying the right clothes, haircut, hair and skin products, and makeup, girls as young as eleven can be transformed – or so says the myth.”[7]

What is going on here? What is happening to women? Beauty has become an idol in our lives, and it is killing women.

The spiritual role of all human desire is to take us beyond the thing pursued and point us to God. Our desires for social acceptance and beauty reflect our spiritual needs to enter into the divine community. The pursuit of something on earth, like beauty and relationships, can awaken a desire for God because the object pursued can never be fully possessed… [this lack of contentment] is because of a mislocated desire. Nothing in this world can be fully apprehended; the lack always remains, for the nature of things on earth is to awaken our desire for something more, ultimately God. Only when we recognize this ever-present lack in ourselves and in the world will be able to live in freedom from cravings and yearnings. By listening to the lack that is evident in the world, in ourselves and revealed in our desires, we will be propelled toward true fulfillment.”[8]

Beauty as an unachievable ideal – it’s an idol. Idols provide meaning for us as they make us worship them. “They give us clarity. They tell us how to live and who we are. The claim they have on us is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to escape, and we are driven to serve them. The alternative is to be excluded, and that is to find ourselves socially adrift. What the idol promises in exchange for our devotion is an illusion of power over our life, illusory agency to become what we wish, and a fraudulent identity from which to speak…. Under the idol, all the practices in which we engage our bodies, such as the use of cosmetics, dieting, exercise, and cosmetic surgery, become spiritual service. In such a spiritual role, the body is the place of redemption. It is the altar on which we atone for failing to meet the expectations of the idols of the beauty or of the world. We have a deep desire to be acceptable, to pay for our shortcomings in ways that affect many areas of our lives beyond the realm of the feminine ideal.”[9]

Isn’t this supposed to be the age of women’s enlightenment? Yes, there have always been problems in the world. But in an age where women have more rights, more freedom, more money, more stuff, more access, more, more, more – what else do they have? More divorce. More suicide. More crime. More diseases. More eating disorders. More killing babies. More pursuit of things that will never be attained. More death. More. Is it worth it? Are people happier?

God has made women incredibly beautiful and mysterious. But our sin perverts that beauty and turns it into a power play, into a weapon and into a goal that can never, ever be achieved. God is calling His people to engage culture in such a way to redeem beauty and once again make it a beautiful thing.

~ Doug Serven