Here's My Secret, Victoria

(photo credit: NY Daily News)

This past week, the second-biggest television event of the year for many American men took place: #1 is the Super Bowl, which is also my #1 (my #2 is the World Series, but that’s a different story). The event I’m talking about is none other than the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.

Men all over the country and the world (and women, let’s not be judgmental) await this night with extreme levels excitement and fervor. Who can blame them? Gorgeous models waltzing around in the latest version of fancy underpants certainly doesn’t sound like the worst TV show I could think of. It was just for these reasons that a few years ago at college my friends and I grabbed a bunch of beers and sat down to watch the show. But what I saw on the screen flipped a switch in my mind.

Sure, it was a wicked exciting show: great modern music, tons of celebrities, lots of cool light shows, even the sappy segment where Heidi Klum sang a lovely duet with her husband, Seal. But with each walk down the runway by the Victoria’s Secret Angels, this spectacle turned more and more surreal. Soon enough, I became completely alienated from what I was seeing, and I quickly found that these models did absolutely nothing for me. I hesitated to voice this opinion to my friends, since I figured a couple of them would probably ask what was wrong with me. I didn’t dismiss their attractiveness, but something about it just didn’t feel real. These models, like other models, were stick thin, covered in gobs of makeup, and fairly buxom, and it all simply felt like a mirage.

Funny enough, after this year’s show, an acquaintance on Facebook noted that the most beautiful woman in the entire room was a pregnant Beyonce. The way I see it, what this woman meant was that Beyonce was the realest-looking one there; to me, being real is a woman’s most beautiful quality.

I don’t have a huge beef with the fashion show’s existence in and of itself, but I do have a beef with the Disneyland-esque world that it portrays. I’m not trying to change anything about the event by ranting about how I think it’s an artificial event. All I’m trying to do is implore the reader to keep the artificiality of such events in mind, don’t read too much into it, and take it for what it is: make-believe.