Social theorists call it objectification, the process of taking something more than an object and changing the perceptions concerning it so that it is not recognized as such. “That’s not a person, it’s just a physique.” Bodies are often presented as objects in the media. This view can allow actual people to be forgotten.

Within our culture, especially at colleges, there is great social pressure to look just right. This applies not only to the physical package we present, but also to the clothes in which we wrap it. That’s the fashion industry.

There is an overwhelming perception of the athletic body as the best body. This view is supported by everything from fashion advertising to late-night infomercials on every possible type of exercise machine, each one presented as the only thing you need to build that perfect body. And then, after you tone up, you can matriculate and go to the gym, to ogle and to be ogled.

Of course, the push for the perfect body wouldn’t mean a thing if people didn’t buy into it. If no one listened to them, advertising companies would be powerless. But we want to be accepted. We go out and we don’t always want to come home alone.

At the university level, people might not have a life partner yet. We’re still shopping around, and we offer our body for someone else’s. In this trade, it pays to have something nice to offer. Of course, that very mindset is what leads each of us to reduce ourselves from a person to an object, even temporarily.

So we each want to bring home the perfect body — the slim, toned, muscular body. That body we long to bring home from a night on the town is just another version of the body we want to bring home from a day at the gym.

We desire the athletic body.

Here rises an entire culture of athleticism, heralding the athlete as the ideal. There have long been views regarding physical hardship as a means to spiritual growth. Maybe this is part of it — if a person has gone through so much work as to attain that body, their soul must be good.

Of course, this is not necessarily true. Very little is actually revealed about a person’s goodness in the cut of their muscles or in the speed of their sprint.

Several weeks ago, I ran in a fun run in Perth, Western Australia. The run was set near the city center on the shores of the Swan River. With a five kilometer and 10 kilometer event, runners could choose their desired distance.

The run was set up as a fund-raiser for a charity, and as such, everyone was encouraged to participate. This served to reduce the competitive nature of such an event as a timed run, but prizes were still awarded to the winners in each class.

The run attracted thousands and some of the winners were very impressive runners.

The top male in the 10K event finished in just under 30 minutes. I don’t know very much about running, especially how long it takes an Olympian or an amateur to run a given distance, but to me that is fast.

Before and after my five-kilometer run, I was thinking about athleticism and the modern movement of exercise for health, fitness and stress relief. Something struck me as odd. This western culture that has embraced athleticism so wholly is the same culture that swallows down Big Macs and Whoppers with reckless abandon.

It seems that we do everything to its fullest. We are convinced that if a thing is good, then more of that thing is even better.

This race had sponsors ranging from an athletic wear company to a travel company. Corporate money made it all possible.

So we have an image of the perfect body, shaded by television and the media. We all want to attain the impossible figure.

Tom Cruise looked tough in the “Mission: Impossible” movies. How tall is that guy? The camera angle is consistently set to hide the fact that he is a short man. Even our media heroes aren’t perfect, but we don’t want to see that.

This is the same culture that has young men and women starving themselves for what they see as a better body. Anorexia and bulimia are diseases of a modern world. I can see it, years from now, when they’ve found a cure for AIDS, but people are still slowly killing themselves to look just right.

I remind you, as someone so recently reminded me, “Beauty is only skin deep.”