Newsweek is out with a report on the importance of beauty in our society. It's a lengthy report...chock full of all kinds of information about how much we spend on beauty, the financial gains for pretty people, the dangers of plastic surgery, and on and on. Of course, while the magazine attempts to bring "handsome" men into the stories, most of the articles in the report focus on women.

It occurs to me that while all this is nice fodder for the virtual water cooler...where does it really take us as women? I would have preferred a deep analysis on the economic status of women around the world--not another take on why Heidi Montag both horrifies and captivates us.

Or we could have done with a special report about the true power of women in the workforce. But the reality is that beauty sells--both magazines and in society at large. And it occurs to me that this beauty fascination may be part of the repercussions of "civil death," which I wrote about yesterday. We are still bound to the cultural norms of our times just as Eunice Chapman was bound to ours. But where is our Ms. Chapman--the one who fights against those norms to take back her power?