蜜芽传媒

Monday night saw Dani Dyer and Jack Fincham crowned the winners of Love Island - the reality TV show that has captivated younger audiences over the past eight weeks.

The couple leave with a new relationship, still in its heady days of infatuation, 拢50,000 and an endless stream of brand and social media advertising opportunities.

Like it or loathe it, this is what has occupied the minds and conversations of many of my generation over the past two months. Love Island presents an intense and accelerated microcosm of the nature of human relationships and interaction, granting insight into not just romance but friendship, betrayal and humour, hope and loyalty and loss.

But as in real life, I believe it shows the disturbing truth about what it is our society holds in the highest esteem: the body beautiful. As Germaine Greer writes in The Whole Woman: 鈥淓very woman knows that regardless of all her achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.鈥� This is the daily reality for the majority of women in the UK today, who see more images of outstandingly beautiful women in one day than our grandmothers did in their whole lifetimes. The result therefore is the normalisation of perfection; often an airbrushed version of reality.

The impact on our young people 鈥� not just girls but boys too 鈥� can be devastating. I鈥檝e heard of young women expressing their anxieties over feeling inadequate because of the picture-perfect bodies that are presented to them on shows such as Love Island. Meanwhile, young men are spending hours at the gym to achieve the sculptured physiques they see on their screens. A survey done on behalf of 蜜芽传媒 Radio 5 Live this week revealed more than half of 18 to 34-year-olds feel that reality TV and social media have a negative effect on how they view their own bodies.

At the heart of the Christian tradition lies the belief that every human being is made in the image of God 鈥� no matter what they look like 鈥� and therefore worthy of inherent dignity and worth and unconditional love. But the reality is that people of all faiths and none are complicit in putting physical beauty on a pedestal, forgetting that views about whose bodies conform to a very narrow definition of what is beautiful, are arbitrary and they are fleeting. Some say looking good has almost become a moral duty, and we are shamed should we stray outside these definitions. But what is seen as beautiful today may be repulsive in a few decades鈥� time.

I believe this is all the more reason to look not at the outward appearance, but at what is in the heart. To elevate kindness, compassion and courage as the standards towards which we should all strive. Because in the end, no matter what it is we see in the mirror, each of us is beautiful and worthy of love.

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