I am convinced that this country wants to kill its women.

Not through force, not with chemicals, but with the constant manipulative and contradictory messages we are feeding the women and girls of modern society.

As someone who used to starve herself in order to achieve a sick and misconstrued ideal of perfection, I know that the media and our society as a whole are producing a generation of unhappy, insecure and self conscious women, unknowingly or not. I'm not writing this from a radical feminist perspective, but from a human one. We are poisoning the minds of females and none of the XX's are safe.

As women, we just want to feel accepted and loved. We just want to feel important and needed. Yet all that matters is the size of our breasts and the width of our waists. We are not good enough unless we fit into a size 0, party all night, sleep all day and own a small, frilly dog. Celebrities make eating disorders look exotic. Would I starve myself so that I could look like Lindsay Lohan? Yes ma'am, and I'm willing to be that many other girls out there would say the same thing. We want men to find us attractive, but how are we supposed to compete with all those supermodels? How could I ever compare to a six foot woman with mile-long legs and pearly white teeth? Not to worry, there's always plastic surgery. There's always a way to fix what God didn't give you, and God intended for breasts to be large and bouncing, for hips to be small and shapely, for hair to be blonde, for legs to be long and for bottoms to be tight and perky.

Perhaps the most bothersome of all is the simultaneous chanting of Oprah and her counterparts to love and accept ourselves for who we are. Yes, of course. We're all beautiful and special in our own way and why do we need to fit any one idea of beauty? But don't miss Celebrity Fit Club, Make Me a Cheerleader, and 101 Sexiest Celebrity Bodies on primetime tonight!!!

Girls are hurting. We are screaming. We are in agonizing pain because we don't know what to think or how to feel. We want to be beautiful, because what is beautiful is good; yet we cannot be beautiful and honest at the same time. We are never good enough. We are never thin enough, never tan enough and our breasts are never the right size. We see men hanging posters of living Barbies on their walls and we think, "I could never be like that," yet we are supposed to just love ourselves for who we are, even though we're constantly being told to do something about our looks if we aren't happy. Aging is the enemy. Elderly people are disgusting and non human. We're too good for wrinkles and the normal signs of aging; we are forbidden to tell anyone our real age because our lives are a game of smoke and mirrors; we must lie and operate our way through, knowing we'll never be happy.