American Beauty Standards

There are beauty standards all over the world, but America has one of the most highest and unreachable standard of the all. In the article “Whose Body is This,” the author Katherine Haines reflects the issue on how narrow-minded society, magazine and the rest of media is depicting the perfect body. The ideal body in America is established as skinny, tall, perfect skin, tight body are characteristics that destroyed majority of woman’s self esteem (172). As girls get older and into their teen years, they have been brainwashed to need to look like the unrealistic, and photoshopped models in magazines and advertisements. Girls don’t feel comfortable to be in their own skin, because they were not taught to love themselves for who they are right in the beginning.

Since the beginning of civilization there have been beauty standards, but as time has gone on, they have continually evolved and changed into what they currently are now. What was once beautiful two hundred years ago may only be average or desired by some, whereas in the past that may have been the most popular look or body type. However for decade’s women put beauty to the side and focused on the evolution of their rights and equality, but now since they have attained many of the same rights as their male counterparts the importance of gender equality seems to be changing. Currently many women are resorting back to issues of beauty and looks because of the societal norms that have come to be popular and important to the masses.

I grew up reading magazines and gawking over waistlines and standards of beauty that I believed were normal. I can remember the first time I watched the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. It was from a treadmill at the gym. I believe that I could achieve that body from hard work and dieting, but it took years to realize that could never happen. Those women are genetically blessed and they are born to have these types of careers. I believe that this trend of objectifying women is extremely harmful, and shows women that they can never achieve an unrealistic standard of beauty set by the media.

If every woman has the same idea of beauty, then they all have goal that they work to achieve (Ferrante, 2014, p. 28). Nonetheless, this underscores the fact that women come in a variety of shapes and sizes, which make achieving this goal difficult, if not impossible (Ferrante, 2014, pp. 201-202; Shaw & Lee, 2011, p. ?). So, while having gender ideals in a society was likely meant to promote social order, it in turn created another form of disruption. This unintended disruption, or latent dysfunction, is what can be recognized as poor body image. Not only does poor body image foster insecurity within an individual, it causes women have hostility towards each other.

Beauty is determined by society and their standards. Women are expected to be skinny, pretty and a size two which puts a lot of pressure on women. The pressures of society persuade women to go through extreme measures to fit in with society standards. This is evident in the short story “The Falling girl” and “They’re Not Your Husband” as the main characters are impacted by social expectations, insecurity and peer pressure.

We are constantly surrounded by images of the “perfect” woman. She is tall, thin and beautiful. She rarely looks older than 25, has a flawless body, and her hair and clothes are always perfect. She is not human. She is often shown in pieces – a stomach, a pair of legs, a beautifully made up eye or mouth. Our culture judges women, and women judge themselves, against this standard. It is forgotten that “beauty pornography”, as Wolf says, focuses on underweight models that are usually 15 to 20 years old. Flaws, wrinkles and other problems are airbrushed out of the picture.

Women around the world are continuously striving to reach the beauty ideal set forth by media, literature, and music and although the beauty ideal differs from culture to culture the pressure to achieve this look is enforced just the same throughout each. In many cases, young women will go to any means to achieve this look, completely disregarding a healthy lifestyle. When looking at female American culture, an unachievable body image has become idolized and women are ridiculed if they do not have all the criteria. It would not be wrong to assume that nearly all women would like to feel beautiful, or attractive, however, today’s perception of beauty limits many woman from feeling so. Lilka Areton writes, “[We] have come to believe that as soon

The women in the 17th century were incorrectly accustomed to the necessity of becoming a picture perfect person; which is a bad habit that only a handful of people are able to fathom. Perfect is an expectation that you can’t achieve in life until you realize to accept yourself for who you are. The conjecture of beauty and our bodies is set at a level that is insurmountable. To fathom this we can look at today’s society, if we aren’t what society wants we aren’t accepted. Society’s idealistic view on beauty is something we should not tolerate because we should accept people for who they are within themselves. In the dramatic monologues “Barbie Doll,” “Cinderella,” and “Applicant,” they are expected to either be something they aren’t, or desiring someone who isn’t even real.

Women have let the idea of looking beautiful take over their self-confidence and life. Healthy Place, an online magazine teaching women about living a healthy life, says that, “today's fashion models weigh twenty-three percent less than the average female, and a young woman between the ages of 18-34 has a seven percent chance of being as slim as a catwalk model and a one percent chance of being as thin as a supermodel.” So why do women push themselves to be excessively thin when these models are anomalies? They do it because the media tells them that this look is the only look that can attract men. Even if a woman is “beautiful” according to the media’s standards, she will always find something about her body that she hates, whether it is her hair or her belly button, no women is completely satisfied. Our society is very accepting of different religions and lifestyles, so why can we not accept different types of beauty as well?

Beauty standards are portrayed everywhere: on magazines, social media, ads, commercials, and even flaunted among peers. While the ideals are supposed to promote health awareness, fitness motivation, and self love, it unfortunately results in many unfavorable consequences. Women are constantly “penalized for not being beautiful and at the same time are stigmatized, even pathologized, for not feeling beautiful, for having low self-esteem, for engaging in behaviors like dieting and excessive exercising, or for having eating disorders” (Johnston and Taylor 954). Beauty standards are unrealistic and unhealthy to pursue, and misinforms the public on what true beauty is. While not all beauty image ideals promote negative feelings and dissatisfaction, many believe that the negative effects far outweighs any positive effects.

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.

All of this information just shows how people are being told to change to fit what is beautiful now. Everyone is beautiful in their own ways, yet we overlook these because they aren’t at the same level as everyone else. We should not root ourselves in society’s version of beauty because of how often it changes. Society’s current version of beautiful includes being photoshopped, participating in extreme dieting or exercise compulsion, having plastic surgery and other surgeries such as a gastric bypass or bariatric surgery (Afful). They aren’t actually the person we see in the magazines, so why are we basing our entire standard of American beauty around a group of females whose BMI is under the average? Shouldn’t we be focusing it on the American

Beauty standards have been a major issue for many years now and women have been willing to change their bodies over and over to please themselves and others. Beauty standards are often defined in terms of hairstyles, skin color, and body size. The measures involved in having to live up to these standards are often risky in nature. For decades, what is seen as beautiful is centered around a women’s weight and size. Today, that standard is often defined as being thin. Women often resort to drastic means to attain that ideal image. However, achieving these standards can be expensive, can lower self-esteem and can be a threat to a woman’s health and life.

Society creates a standard of beauty for women that often changes along with society due to a new perspective on what it means to be beautiful in our culture. These standards for beauty create what our society believes makes a woman desirable, attractive, perfect, and overall beautiful.  Which then enforces unhealthy and unrealistic beauty ideals that negatively affect women's self-image and their body image because society has attributed beauty to self worth. The result is with the ever changing standards of beauty means women use various ways to alter their bodies and appearance by clothing, makeup, hair, dieting, exercising, and even taking extreme measures to perfect their looks through surgery.

Beauty standards have been socially constructed in diverse and various shapes in every society or culture in the world, and cause people to think they are not beautiful if they do not fit the common standard of beauty that has been set by the society. Most people are pressured into the standard by the social milieu. The people who are different from the socially pursued standard of beauty do not think the standard itself is absurd, but they rather tend to be insecure about their appearance. Once people see the beauty through individual’s perspective, not through the socially constructed standard, they would realize how much they have unconsciously forced each other to be fit in the beauty standard. This is something that I have also experienced. I was not a person who fit in the standard of beauty, and that made me shy and timid. However, once I saw myself through a different perspective of beauty, I could see it as a social problem that unconsciously forces one particular standard of beauty.