Awareness of self-worth implies personal responsibility. In order to escape this responsibility, individuals deny their own personal worth and limit themselves to roles which they or society may define as circumscribed, thus destroying their own essential freedom. Societal images taught through advertising, education in schools, and social relations, reinforce such "escapism" in which individuals find themselves trapped.
Increasingly with globalization trends, individual and cultural self-esteem are eroded by the pressure to live up to media and advertising stereotypes, whose images are invariably based on an urban, Western consumer model: blonde, blue-eyed and clean. If you are a farmer or are dark-skinned, you are made to feel primitive, backward, inferior. As a consequence, women around the world use dangerous chemicals to lighten their skin and hair, and the sale of blue contact lenses is growing in markets from Bangkok to Nairobi and Mexico City. Asian women even undergo surgery to make their eyes look more Western.