Walking the Ramps of a Beauty Pageant

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.

Throughout the years, the definition of beauty constantly changes. In our society today many children are told to be true to themselves, to be unique, to be who they are, etc.; But on the other hand social media and the celebrities on there are a constant reminder that there is a certain type of beautiful. The juxtaposition between being yourself and being what is “beautiful” has consistent grey areas and blurred lines making it almost impossible to keep up with what’s “beautiful”. The media, whether intentional or not, portrays this certain body image that you have to be in order to qualify as beautiful.

Kite points out in her article the discouraging numbers of images and portrayals of women of color in the media to be sufficient and enough to drive positivity in terms of beauty in colored skin. In media, more white women appear in positive roles compared to women of color. In the beauty industry, Kite’s asserts the business is blooming and making more money, by compelling more women to find to meet the media’s presentation of beauty. The result is that women buy more beauty products to fill in the type of flaws that they feel and think they have. Meanwhile, the effect of media’s ideal beauty causes distress to women and girls.

Beauty standards evolve as people do and are based on the need to procreate. Human beings have been adorning themselves with products to look for appealing for thousands of years. The serious problem we haven't addressed are the subversive messages our corporate owners inculcate us with through media. The hijacking of beauty standards is corporate means to an end. Putting a good looking plus sized woman on the cover of a popular magazine doesn't solve the relative that we are inculcated with falsity.We aren't tackling the root

Have you ever thought of what true beauty means? In the article “Pop Culture Is Destroying True Beauty” by Rachel Drevno, she explains how pop culture and the media are influencing people to believe that they aren’t good enough because they don’t look a certain way. The beauty Drevno discusses are the actors and celebrities in commercials, movies, and magazines. She believes that people are trying and changing themselves to look like those in commercials or movies because that’s how standard beauty has been portrayed. I strongly agree with her argument because the media only presents images of attractive, beautiful, and sexy figures.

According to Shaw and Lee (2015), in our culture, the manufacturing and consuming of products and the fashion industries create the beauty standards (pg. 191). Commercials, billboards, magazines, and other advertisements enforce these definitions. Therefore, beauty ideals reflect what the white, abled, and middle-class feel is beautiful. Even news journalists such as the women who report the newscasts are still “beautiful” women who fit the dominant ideology’s definition of beautiful.

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.

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

In today’s society beauty is a very important component to everyone. In order to be liked you must be thin, pretty, and smart, and if you don’t possess one of these qualities then you must buy products that will help you achieve them. Women especially have to face these standards every day for the rest of their lives. The beauty myth is a way for the patriarchy to control women through power, control, and consumerism.

In an increasingly visual society, wherein mediated information and reality are weaved together, making it nearly impossible to distinguish what is real from what is represented, beauty may only seem skin deep.

From an early age women learn that their appearance and public persona are integral to the status that they can achieve in society. Much of what they see and hear can be construed as a message about how they are to make themselves acceptable and advance their ability to move within the boundaries of the social construct. For example, a mother who prods here daughter to exercise, may do so because she has felt or observed to backlash from divergence with norms about weight. She may believe that she is acting in the best interest of her child, when in reality she perpetuates the vicious cycle.

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.

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.

As we all know there used to be a saying that quoted “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” That particular statement is true because even though one may feel as if they see nothing beautiful in them others might feel as if they are quite charming. Individuals feel as if outer beauty is the most important because the outer beauty is more egomaniacal and arrogant. Rather we like it or not the outer beauty is what defines people, and people may believe that one’s body figure, complexion, or sophistication is what makes them alluring. They use material things to help maintain these images; which is why we see so many beauty ads. Commercials can be prejudice towards other thing or products which makes most of these commercials/ads

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?