American Beauty Ideal

The Beauty Myth’s central argument is the growing standards of physical beauty of women as they grow stronger. This standard has affected women in many ways, such as in the workplace, culture, and religion. The standard has taken over the work of social harassment. The beauty myth expands the belief an unbiased measurement of beauty exists and that women want to express it and men would want that women. The author, Naomi Wolf, states that the beauty myth is not about women themselves, it is about the power of men and their society. The myth supplies power to multibillion dollar cosmetics industries and it keeps women from rising too high in the workplace. Within this book, Wolf shows how the beauty myth functions and affects women in the workplace, media, sex, religion, culture, violence against women by men, and by women themselves in the configuration of cosmetic surgery and eating disorders.

As of recently, the media has been flooded with positive interpretations of beauty standards all over the world. According to various sources, beauty ideals, in women especially, are socially constructed in order to judge a person’s value based on physical attractiveness; therefore, it is highly encouraged that people pay attention to their looks and take care of themselves, in order for others to create a positive first impression of one’s character. It is no secret that beauty standards vary from one culture to the next and it is difficult to establish a universal principle of what is considered beautiful. Many countries’ ideals contrast one another and, as a result, allow for stereotypes to emerge. This is the case between American

“You will never look like the girl in the magazine. The girl in the magazine doesn’t even look like the girl in the magazine” Jessimae Peluso. Throughout American history, women have continued to strive for an ideal of beauty. Although the definition of beauty has varied between generations, the pressure and desire to fit the mold of what society deems “beautiful” remains consistent among women from all eras. Unfortunately, this abnormal example seen in magazines, on runways, and in social media platforms is impossible for the majority of the female population to physically reach. Women are always pursuing the perfect look, turning to plastic surgeries transform them into celebrity ideals. People who desire perfect appearance ignore the nature of beauty itself, naturality is a kind of beauty. In recent years, women in America turned to look at models to find the ideal beauty standard and if they don’t meet them they turn to face lifts and plastic surgery to perfect their appearance.

Beauty is a subjective term routinely used in the world to describe an object containing a combination of qualities that please the aesthetic senses, commonly sight. Appreciations of beauty often rely on the idea of perfection. In America, people invest so much attention and emphasis on what is popular in Hollywood or fashion magazines. Visuals of ideal beauty attack women daily, making it easy to forget that standards of beauty are “arbitrary and vary greatly” both from one culture to another as well as overtime. Regardless of the culture., any and all beauty standards usually lead to “a common thread: youthfulness and femininity.” This paper however will focus on how beauty standards correlate to American culture.

The argument of The Beauty Myth is that as women have received more eminence, the standard of their personal appearance has also grown. Wolf’s position on the issue is that this type of social control is potentially just as restrictive as the traditional roles of women. The Beauty Myth discusses how society’s viewpoint of beauty is detrimental to women because it causes many emotional and psychological problems to women who strive to become “perfect”. This book is important due to the fact it raises awareness to the issues that many young women are currently facing.

Kilbourne strongly agrees that women are used for advertisements, however it's the way that they're being used is the problem. When women take pictures for these advertisements, they're being photoshopped and alterations are being made to their pictures to meet the standard of the ideal woman that every man wants or that women want to be. The standard that women are compared to on what they should look like is made by these photoshopped pictures of women. The photographers are making these alterations to the models’ pictures without their say so as well, which is even worse.

The development has created much controversy because how it decides to present its perception. Humanity is at fault for how the beauty industry decides how to advertise the perfect image. Yet, in the twenty-first century, there has been a turn of events. Those have educated imaginations are realizing how one standard of beauty is not enough for the millions of versions of beauty there are. Despite, wanting to have no standards of beauty, the educated know that this is no physically possible. Frye perfectly summarizes, “ The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in. Obviously, that can’t be a separated society, so we have to understand how to relate the two.” (86) The educated imagination interprets how they want their society without losing the connection to what we live in. The beauty industry represents the society we live in: superficial, materialistic, and self-indulgent. The educated imagination represents the ideal society: accepting of all and self-confidence. Although it cannot be the ideal society, there are still possibilities of a society where beauty is not a forced by people sitting at a board table. The mixture of these two societies can develop into a society where beauty is not only external but internal. Having the educated teach the weak imaginations how to comprehend the repercussions of the beauty industry, but still, understand it is difficult to change a hundred-year-old tradition. Standards of beauty will always be part of society, it is just how will society determine what is an illusion and

As women watch these ads , they gain a sense of ambition to want to be as beautiful as the lady promoting the product. In the truth about beauty, an article written by Virginia postrel, it reveals an average woman in a photo, the woman goes through countless layers of make-up and hair transformations, after this another photo is taking. Then, technology programs that manipulate the picture until the woman was absolutely stunning were used on the photo. This is an example of how cosmetic companies give women a false sense of hope through advertisements, They are using beautiful women to promote a product and tell how great it works for them when in reality the women have yet to use the products.The media tends to capitalize on the insecurities of the people. A quote from Susan Bordo's "the empire of image in our world of bodies " demonstrate how the media use beautiful women with perfection in the areas that most women are uncomfortable with to highlight those insecurities " im 56 . The magazines tell me that at this age i can still be beautiful. -they mean cher, goldie , faye,candace. ( The Media takes these women who are generally in the same age group as Susan and exploits her insecurities turns around tries to capitalize on them by using these beautiful women as

Beautyism is as old as the existence of humanity itself. There are numerous examples scattered on the path of history related to bias shown only on the base of one trait: beauty. However, in today's world of advanced civilizations, where organizations have evolved greatly, this phenomenon of beautyism is gaining more strength every day. Attractive physical appearance is being perceived the key to happiness. And, this psychological weakness of many is being exploited not only by the commercial entities but also by simple individuals walking among us. A simple example of this daily exploitation can be witnessed at workplaces where better jobs, remunerations and career advancements wait for physically attractive people every day. However, one thing that cannot be ignored is how beautyism can hamper the workplace equilibrium of any organization and the effectiveness of available human resources.

Cultural Analysis Essay In today’s society, people are pressured into looking their best all the time. Advertisements, news articles and magazines set the standards for how people should appear to be considered beautiful. Even in Disney stories, the protagonist is perceived as a beautiful princess while the antagonist is a wretched witch. Corporations have made billions of dollars off of making people feel better about their bodies through plastic surgery.

Advertising uses a lot of different techniques to show the public the perfect female image. Body doubles and computer retouching are two examples of how advertisers are able to “doctor” images. The majority of women we see in magazines, music videos. and movies do not appear in reality, as we perceive them in the media. We may actually believe we are looking at one woman’s body when we are actually looking at sections of three or four women’s bodies, which, when spliced together, shows us the best parts of each women’s body as the final product. Women cannot attain these impossible standards of attractiveness. Young girls learn very quickly that they must spend much time, energy, and money on achieving these standards.

It 's not a mystery that society 's ideals of beauty have a drastic and frightening effect on women. Popular culture frequently tells society, what is supposed to recognize and accept as beauty, and even though beauty is a concept that differs on all cultures and modifies over time, society continues to set great importance on what beautiful means and the significance of achieving it; consequently, most women aspire to achieve beauty, occasionally without measuring the consequences on their emotional or physical being. Unrealistic beauty standards are causing tremendous damage to society, a growing crisis where popular culture conveys the message that external beauty is the most significant characteristic women can have. The approval of prototypes where women are presented as a beautiful object or the winner of a beauty contest by evaluating mostly their physical attractiveness creates a faulty society, causing numerous negative effects; however, some of the most apparent consequences young and adult women encounter by beauty standards, can manifest as body dissatisfaction, eating disorders that put women’s life in danger, professional disadvantage, and economic difficulty.

It has become increasing clear that beauty may play a role when it comes to social interactions involved in economic or political opportunities. Now, one may ask how beauty could possibly play a noticeable impact on situations concerning economic or political opportunities. Yet, it does. A laboratory experiment was conducted to fully study the impact of “beauty premium”, the positive association and relationship between attractiveness and wages, on economic success in the labor market. The experiment was conducted by Tatyana Deryugina, a professor of finance and her companions. Although illegal, labor market discrimination has occurred based on physical appearances and Tatyana wanted to test this notion. Deriving from this experiment, they were able to conclude that the beauty premium does indeed exist although only in certain circumstances. Only in tasks such as bargaining does beauty premium significantly show a positive correlation. In other tasks such as analysis or data entry, the notion of beauty premium does not exist. They state, “we find that the beauty premium in bargaining completely vanishes in the second round of bidding when the task is repeated, which suggests that employers learn quickly that performance is uncorrelated with attractiveness” (Deryugina 2015). The point is that physical beauty is what deceives the mind into thinking that the more attractive one is, the more competent they may be in performing and executing skills such as bargaining.

A major contribution of this article is that it paves the way for future experiments and empirical studies. The conclusion presented on premia and penalties associated with looks in the article reflect the effect of beauty in all its characteristics, not just one of its many components, such as height, weight, or facial appearance. Future experiment and empirical studies can be built on the layout or techniques presented by this article and can be focused on examining the source of wage differentials and possible discrimination due to a specific characteristic of beauty or various other dimensions such as physical and mental disabilities. Same experiment can also be conducted on data from economies outside of North America to check whether the same premia and penalties of looks exist in other economies.

Some may still be wondering what those two words ,’beauty premium’ , means anyway. Well, “beauty premium” is the idea that pretty people, whatever their aspirations, tend to do better in, well, almost everything. Handsome men earn, on average, 5 percent more than their less-attractive counterparts (good-looking women earn 4 percent more); pretty people get more attention from teachers, bosses, and mentors; even babies stare longer at good-looking faces (and we stare longer at good-looking babies).’ (NewsWeek). This is a perfect example of the role that vanity plays in society and decision making.