We Keep Doing This To Ourselves

My daughter takes me out of my comfort zone and into Ala Moana, the premier shopping playground in Hawaii.  It really is an alternate reality, especially coming straight off the plane from Ka'u.  It's dazzling.
The bleeding starts at Levi's which I am silly enough to think is a place that sells jeans and therefore possibly reasonable in its demands on my credit card.  That's funny, right?  It's 10 am and all the highly fashionable and attractive sales people say: "What are you doing up so early?"  That's funny, too.
Eventually we go into Pink, which, my daughter explains, "is like Victoria's Secret, just less intense." She finds some stuff to try on, and it turns out that the fitting rooms are next door in Victoria's Secret, so we go through the little passage way that leads from perky cute Pink to glam, sexy VS.  I wait in the waiting room on the slightly grungy hot pink and lace sofa.  There's a teenage girl there already and she is gazing at the wall fixedly.  On the wall are dozens of photos of VS models with their long curly hair, their slippery perfect bodies, their fake eyelashes, their pouty lips.   She is downloading all those images.  The girl is fashionably dressed with a pierced nose but slightly plump, in a way that would be considered ideal in the Victorian era (ironically).  For a second I watch, appalled, as her brain gets screwed up by unattainable body images.  It is a terrible thing to be there, in that moment, seeing it, and knowing it was just one moment in a lifetime of brain-washing that we all go through.
Yesterday I was in line at the  supermarket and all the cover pix on the women's magazines were of overmade up and super-thin white women, Lena Dunham among them.
Normal, fucked up.