Hottest Woman of All Time Perpetuates Measuring Stick Mentality

[caption id="attachment_1157" align="alignleft" width="212" caption="Jennifer Aniston was chosen Hottest Woman of All Time by MensHealth.com. / DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/GETTY IMAGES"][/caption]

Hottest Woman of All Time Perpetuates Measuring Stick Mentality
By Christine Agro

Men’s Health Magazine recently named Jennifer Aniston The Hottest Woman of All Time based on a reader’s poll. That’s quite an…um…honor?
Don’t get me wrong, where I do find Jennifer Aniston a beautiful women; she’s fit, she’s funny, she carries herself with a great deal of confidence and she’s smart; I’m just not so sure about this ‘honor’. Hottest Woman of All Time- it makes me think of that line in Two Weeks Notice where Sandra Bullock tells Hugh Grant that he’s the worst human being on the planet and he responds “Have you met all the human beings on the planet?”

I get it, it’s a subjective poll and I’m not incensed by the poll itself. I’m frustrated by our society’s need to instill in women a measuring stick mentality. By honoring Jennifer Aniston as The Hottest Woman of All Time it perpetuates a dynamic where we – both men and women- measure ourselves and others against the hotness, or richness, or sexiness of someone else. Although we all do it, it’s with women that this dynamic really concerns me. My generation was taught to do this by our mothers, and we teach our daughters to do this and they teach their daughters. . We teach it because whether we actually participate or we fail to address this dynamic we are condoning the measuring stick.

I call this the divide and conquer method of dis-empowerment. It is dis-empowering because it implies that our worth and our value is held by someone outside of our own self. It keeps us striving to be someone we can’t be which feeds into self-image issues. Let’s face it, we can only be who we are. I know it sounds like a ‘one-hand-clapping-in-the-wind’ statement, but it’s true. We are who we are – round, robust, flat, skinny, tall, short – it’s who we are. But this striving to be like ‘The Hottest’ has women in Japan undergoing surgery to make their eyes more round; women in India beaching their skin to make it more white; women in China undergoing painful surgery to implant metal rods so they can be taller and women in the United States changing just about everything and anything about themselves.

We talk about equality for women – in the work place, in the family unit, in government – but as long as we, as women, continue to buy into the measuring stick mentality and then sell it to our daughters, our equality will always be something that someone else has to give to us.
This is my call to all women to drop the measuring stick and instead turn your focus in and begin to recognize how amazing and powerful we each are – in our own right. By all means celebrate the awesomeness of the women around you. I absolutely celebrate Jennifer Aniston, but I don’t need to use her as a measuring stick for what I have and don’t have.

I truly believe that women are powerful beyond what we know. But it is this divide and conquer dynamic that keeps us ever so lightly scratching the surface of how powerful we truly are. Imagine if instead of measuring ourselves against others, each of us embraced who we are, celebrated ourselves and each other and recognized that at the core we, women, come from the same tribe – the Tribe of Woman.

Christine Agro is The Metaphysical Feminist. She is the Founder of FEMSocial.com a unique social networking site for women that offers both a community and experiential classes and courses that help empower women. Christine is also curating the on-line project Symptoms of Dis-Empowerment and hosts Fully Empowered – a live talk radio show heard on A2Zen.FM