Beauty has differed through time, different cultures and perceptions of the world. It’s not easy to define beauty, you could say that there are “a thousand” definitions of beauty. And there are numerous degrees of each. “Beauty depends on the eye of the beholder”. According to me, this saying is correct because what one individual considers beautiful is not necessarily what another individual may consider beautiful. Someone “beautiful on the outside” can be “ugly inside”. The media and the society are constantly using the conception of “beauty” to show us what we should strive to look like. They assert that we have to appear a certain way to be viewed as beautiful. This is wrong, so what is beauty, really, and what different ways of looking at beauty are there? The media and the norms of our society have brought new meanings to the concept “beauty”, and not good ones. Thanks to the media, beauty is something that is practically impossible to achieve. Almost everyone uses some type of social network, take Facebook for an example, they have worldwide, over 1.79 billion monthly active users. Therefore, it’s very hard for the people to catch a break without being a victim to the slaughter that the media has made out of beauty. The standards that the media has set for both sexes are out of this universe in particular women. Women need to fit into a certain size of clothes to be considered normal. Women should not have to worry about some stupid number to be called beautiful.
Beauty can be defined in different ways: Beauty describes how anything in perspective like a face, an object, an action is adorable or pleasant. Beauty also refers to the person’s character, personality, or intellect. This topic of beauty affects all because in today’s culture, society judges appearances independently and seems to completely ignore what is portrayed inside of the person. In the essay, “A Woman’s Beauty: Put Down or Power Source?” Susan Sontag explains that for women, beauty is an occupation that they have to keep to maintain their financial situation.
It’s an argument we’ve all heard before and there are more than a few books that have tackled the subject. But what’s different from even the last three years is just how widespread the media has become. Today’s teens spend an average of 10 hours and 45 minutes absorbing media in just one day, which includes the amount of time spent watching TV, listening to music, watching movies, reading magazines and using the internet. This is a generation that’s been raised watching reality TV – observing bodies transformed on Extreme Makeover; faces taken apart and pieced back together on I Want a Famous Face. They are, as Tina Fey puts it, bombarded by "a laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful.”
Some people don’t realize that and try to live up to the unrealistic standards that we have created in our heads of what is really pretty. In that same article it describes beauty standards as features that are considered “pretty” in today's society. “They determine what is “beautiful”, from body shape, to facial proportions, to height and weight.” (Povey) This shows that the issue of beauty standards is a problem we face today because we can’t change the way we look.
In Ray Bradbury’s, Something Wicked This Way Comes, the book focuses on many different topics. Good v Evil, Fear, ect. Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway go on a dark and twisted adventure to stop the evil carnival. They grow up, faster than you can say wicked. The author uses the innocence of thirteen year old boys to teach the lesson of inner vs. outer beauty with, expectations, reality, and truth.
Beauty is cherished in a place that is ugly. Anything that is perfect is looked at to be hailed. ANything that is
In today’s modern culture, almost all forms of popular media play a significant role in bombarding young people, particularly young females, with what happens to be society’s idea of the “ideal body”. This ideal is displayed all throughout different media platforms such as magazine adds, television and social media – the idea of feminine beauty being strictly a flawless thin model. The images the media displays send a distinct message that in order to be beautiful you must look a certain way. This ideal creates and puts pressure on the young female population viewing these images to attempt and be obsessed with obtaining this “ideal body”. In the process of doing so this unrealistic image causes body dissatisfaction, lack of self-confidence
Today's society is constantly besieged by the media, through advertisements and extolling the importance of female beauty and discrediting other virtues such as
Imagine being told as a female in today’s world you must look or act a ¬¬certain way in order to be accepted. Being what you want to be is not allowed and changes have to be made in order to be included. They say “pain is beauty, and beauty is pain” as they way a woman looks today are completely different from ten or even fifty years ago. In this paper, the reader will understand the mind of a woman in today’s society and the difficulties to be not only accepted but being her own person as well. Not only has the appearance of a woman changed but also role titles and job descriptions as well.
This constant fixation on physical perfection has created unreasonable beauty standards for women, ones we cannot possibly achieve on our own. Such standards permeate all forms of popular media, particularly fashion magazines and advertisements. Women are bombarded with the notion that we must be thin in order to be desirable. These images project an
The media portrays these unrealistic standards to men and women of how women should look, which suggests that their natural face is not good enough. Unrealistic standards for beauty created by the media is detrimental to girls’ self-esteem because it makes women feel constant external pressure to achieve the “ideal look”, which indicates that their natural appearance is inadequate. There has been an increasing number of women that are dissatisfied with themselves due to constant external pressure to look perfect. YWCA’s “Beauty at Any Cost” discusses this in their article saying that, “The pressure to achieve unrealistic physical beauty is an undercurrent in the lives of virtually all women in the United States, and its steady drumbeat is wreaking havoc on women in ways that far exceed the bounds of their physical selves” (YWCA).
According to Britton (2012), last 2008, YWCA USA developed a report Beauty at Any Cost wherein they discuss the consequences of beauty obsession of every woman in America. It shows that beauty obsession results from a decrease in the level of self-esteem. It also gives a problem to the Americans because it’s also putting a dent in their pockets. It states that because of those cosmetics many people have decreased the level of self-esteem because of those cosmetics.
Countless advertisements feature thin, beautiful women as either over-sexualized objects, or as subordinates to their male counterparts. The mold created by society and advertisers for women to fit into is not entirely attainable. More often than not, models are Photoshopped and altered to the point that they don’t even resemble themselves. W. Charisse Goodman suggests, “The mass media do not
These factors can be religious functions, economy, advertisements, etcetera. The beauty ideal as we know it nowadays, of course, differs from the ones ages ago or at least as far as we know. So not only culture changes the beauty ideal but also the time we live in. In this chapter the change over time in the beauty ideal will be studies and discussed.
Thus, beauty, a concept that is assumed to be subjective, now morphs into something objective. Valenti notes that in popular culture, for instance, the most desirable woman is depicted as one
I find it difficult to define beauty due to it being all around us. You can suggest that beauty is magical, yet you can also say that beauty is ordinary. Beauty is present throughout the universe. Its presence can be found in all the colors that make up individual galaxies, up to the infinite darkness that consists of the universe. The complexity of beauty can be found in modern art, yet if you flip through the pages of a history book you can see that beauty can be traced back to the Renaissance, and as far back as prehistoric times.