Skin Deep

Lately I've been thinking a lot about societal standards of beauty and how they are really transient and, well...odd. We in the modern age like to think that we have cornered the market on superficial obsession with beauty, but, while the ideal figure has changed, the lengths that women will go to in order to achieve it have not. From constricting, deforming corsets, lead-based eye-liner, and foot-binding to high heels, anorexia and plastic surgery, women have spent centuries torturing themselves to conform these fabricated standards of beauty. Why? I would, like a good feminist, like to be able to lay all of the blame on the broad shoulders of that other gender, but I think that simplifies the issue to an insulting degree, for both men and women. Men, for the most part, have always found certain things attractive, and generally speaking, those things do not include emaciated, stick-thin bodies that would be more at home on an 11 year old boy. And, even if there does exist a certain (Neanderthalish) segment of the male population who do enjoy those things, well, that still doesn't explain why women world-wide feel the need to conform to that stereotype. Why do healthy, beautiful women starve and berate themselves if they are not a size 2? Why do women zealously rearrange their bodies and facial features surgically to obtain an ephemeral concept of physical perfection? What is it about the human experience that pushes us to strive in such unhealthy ways toward an unattainable, completely fabricated construct?
Thinking about this has led me to question why I want to lose weight so much. Is it, in some part, to better fit the societal ideal of attractiveness? As much as I would like to say that my reasons are solely healthy and not at all superficial, the truth is that most of my motivation is feeling (and looking) prettier. You would think that it should have more to do with lowering my cholesterol or building muscle and being strong and active, right? So, my question here is two-fold: does the motive matter as much as the result? and why do these issues of health seem so often to take a back seat to beauty?