Core Concepts
The reviewed readings and the videos analyze the concept of the “beauty myth” and how, in essence, it is fundamentally hazardous when women’s bodies constitute socially construed objects, attaching their values to their physical appearance (Donnella, 2019; Johnson, 2016; Lewis, 2017). Embedded within this is the fact that a standard of beauty is fluid over time, across cultures, periods, or systems of power and privilege. Currently, real or ideal women for most ads are supposed to be thin, big-breasted, tanned but not too dark-skinned, and white, hence showing racist, classist, and ableist norms. One can comfortably say that perhaps what is much more shocking for the women targeted by such bleak outlooks towards impossible standards of beauty is the repressive character of such standards, which continue to be lived out in their worst manifestations by the mass media, peers, and, worst of all, are so steeped in that one internalizes it and faces critique and ‘horizontal hostility’ for going against the grain, where the leading words are “objectification,” “beauty standards,” “gender norms.”
Synthesis
While researching this topic, I came across an article about losing weight. The article is about the huge demand for semaglutide, a diabetes drug that has been approved and is now sold off-label to people who may wish to lose weight (Rosen, 2023). This attaches itself to the module theme of ways in which women feel pressured to live up to an idealized figure sold to society. The article further alludes that even with health risks, the rise in the drug reflects our culture’s obsession with thinness as an epitome of feminine beauty.
Reflection
Undoubtedly, this topic needs to be more widely spread, because it is a big problem in our society. However, there is one more thing that interests me. This question came to me when I was interested in the principles of body positivity.
Despite movements like body positivity, which aim to be oppositional to such idealistic frameworks, a few critical views insist that, in fact, such methods do not dismantle the systems oppressing certain kinds of bodies. But how do we go from simply just learning that one ought to tolerate different body sizes to a society in which everybody is respected and appreciated? What kinds of changes—both basic in attitude and industrial in nature—are going to have to transpire?
References
Donnella, L. (2019). Is Beauty in the Eye of the Colonizer? NPR Code Switch.
Johnson, M. Z. (2016). Ten Ways the Beauty Industry Tells You Being Beautiful Means Being White. Everyday Feminism.
Lewis, J., Melamede, Y., & Neidich, M. (2017). Straight/curve : redefining body image. Ro*co Films.