Miley vs Polygamy vs Plastic Faces: we're not doing ourselves any favors, ladies.

I've been.....cogitating over the best way to articulate what it is about TLC's "Sister Wives" that really gets my ire up.....and because I didn't want to dedicate an entire post to some sort of aimless rant about the fact that the premise -- in general -- bothers me, I waited until I came up with a decent way to integrate my distaste into something a little more cohesive.

And it surprised me that I took this in the direction I did.... As an entertainment junkie, I'm usually the last to take anything to task that I see on TV or catch online - I tend to think it's harmless escapism, that we're reading too much into things like this to condemn them as having much negative impact -- its desensitization, maybe, and since I'm hip-deep in FLUFF most days, I write most of it off. But I started thinking about a recent deluge of news stories and celebrity-worship that actually amounts to a really damaging knock to women...we're completely surrounded by undermining influences - most of them women themselves.

Therefore: I've come up with a trifecta of vapid popular culture influences that do grave disservices to women. I don't take the high road and try to come up with a solution (it's Friday and I would prefer to think about the nice bottle of bubbly that just arrived from the wine club that I'll be sipping tonight....honestly), instead this is more of an expose on the fact that we betray our gender by supporting these hacks.

For starters:

We've got this horrific little snot Miley Cyrus out there who -- at 17 -- is trying desperately to sell herself as a sexy adult...and the generation of Disney kids that grew up watching her are now being subjected to her ridiculously sexual antics as though grinding on strangers in a club and being filmed in her undies, blindfolded on a bed is a "normal" part of growing up.

We've got the women of Sister Wives who are attempting to convince us that a polygamist lifestyle is "normal" and deserves to be brought out of its shame closet. These women have been so brainwashed they don't even realize what an insult it is to the rest of us to try to sell Americans on the idea that it's not a problem to share your man with as many other women as he wants, that it's not creepy to let your "husband" bedroom hop and add to his harem and knock up an entire congregation of willing dunces so long as "the kids are happy." Really? You didn't kiss him until the altar because you "don't kiss married men," but - correct me if I'm wrong - you have no problem sleeping with married men? Having married men's babies? Living with married men?

And then we've got the Kat-face Kardashians, an army of plastic females with fake lashes and fake hair and foreheads that are Botoxed to high hell while the women are still in their EARLY TWENTIES, and they're given enough media coverage the rest of us start to look at their masks of makeup and their surgically enhanced cheeks and their lipo jobs and their brow lifts and think its NORMAL and that we're SUPPOSED to want to look like that (and I won't even get started on the whole "reason" Kim and her cadre of fembot sisters are "famous" in the first place may have had something to do with being demeaned on camera....and we DO consider golden showers demeaning, right? Google it. Or don't. Please don't.).

Case in point: while sitting in traffic yesterday checking out my eye makeup in my vanity mirror I ACTUALLY had these thoughts:


Wow, my eyebrows really suck. If I could get eyebrow "plugs" I would. Totally lame eyebrows. I should definitely try out some fake eyelashes - those seem fun - like a dramatic way to detract from these weak eyebrows.

The disgusting thing about this train of thought: My eyelashes already look artificially long. My eyebrows are fine. I'm a pretty girl. There is NOTHING wrong with the face God gave me. HOWEVER, I've been so completely inundated with media images of artificial, plastic girls who are Photoshopped into para-human oblivion that I start to think NORMAL and HUMAN and NATURAL looks BAD.

Seriously.

And I'm so assaulted by images of undressed pop stars doing their little simulated sex gig in crazy clothes with crazy hair and crazy makeup and crazy heels and legions of crazy followers that I think its NORMAL that a teenage girl in a barely-there disco outfit and panties writhes around in a nightclub, in a limo, on a bed, attempting to sing and dance.....I see NOTHING wrong with that.

Holy pop tarts, pardon me while I come to the screeching realization that WOMEN are destroying WOMEN and go shoot myself in the non-Botoxed face, please.

Women are telling other women that our natural eyebrows, cheeks, lips and hair aren't good enough if you're going to be employable, marketable, magazineable.

Women are telling other women that there's "nothing strange going on" when they're sharing their husband and the father of their children with three other women and encouraging us not to see them as freaks, to give their lifestyle some credibility.

Really?

So we REALLY want to teach our children that its perfectly fine not to expect your husband to be wholly devoted to you and you to him, that it's a lifestyle decision to enter into some arrangement that means you're not entirely supported, cared for, not an equal PARTNER, and if you've only got 20% of someone's heart when you marry them, it's fine. That if he sleeps next to you two nights a week, that's good enough. That you're not worth 100% of his time, that you don't deserve 100% of his love, that your children don't deserve 100% of their father?

Seriously, LADIES.

We're doing this to ourselves. We're telling ourselves we're not pretty enough, that we don't deserve the best for ourselves and that we're only good for sex.

Behold: the reason I spent the rest of my drive home from work resenting what celebrity has done to women: