My thoughts on beauty

[proserpine75]

Beauty preoccupies our minds as humans, but more importantly it takes up so much space as females. We are constantly thinking about it, whether it's in disdain, envy, or just how to attain it. It's such a huge theme in stories, movies, music, any popular media.

Just think about it: the Trojan War, if the myths hold true, would not have started or (

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this post is waayyy to long. my only excus is that as an english student i'm trained to go on and on

[july_evening]

I always think that all the ancient stories of beautiful women came about because people thought at the time that women had nothing better to offer. What I find odd is that in this day and age when we know that there’s so much more that women have to offer we are just as -in fact more preoccupied with beauty (and that includes me) and not just nice normal beauty, impossible, unobtainable beauty. Women who starve themselves to death in order to look like some tiny, stick insect model presented to us with so much airbrushing that in the final image she’s barely human. And it’s not men who demand this self destruction of women. We do it to each other. Every time we look at another woman and criticize her face, or her legs or her hair, because they don’t fit into our image of perfection. Actually one of the snotty little brats on my bus, unable to come up with anything more impressive to criticize me on, today accused me of having, “dirty fingernails

Re: this post is waayyy to long. my only excus is that as an english student i'm trained to go on an

[proserpine75]

Nope, this came on my own. I had a lot of time to kill at the library (as I will at least until midterms if not longer) and this just evolved into an essay in my head. It helps that I'm reading this book, "Beauty Junkies" by Alex Kuczynski, about the obsession that our culture has with cosmetic surgery. It's very fascinating and I'd recommend it if you can get your hands on it. There are all of these cosmetic surgeons agreeing that there's a standard in everyone's head of beauty - this Jungian collective unconscious deal where there's the perfect face out there that we all have programmed into our unconscious (which says a lot more to me of Platonic ideals, but yeah). One of them is even trying to find a mathematical formula for what constitutes beauty. They don't believe the "eye of the beholder" saying; they're convinced that beauty is a definite and that it's quantifiable. It's so crazy

[july_evening]

I usually think Jung is onto something with the whole collective unconscious bit but I don’t think It really works for beauty. Same with Plato. I think his ideas on the Forms have a few to many holes in them. In my opinion, beauty is based on fashion and culture. Me and a few of my friends were chatting today about the fact that we’re all pale as milk and incapable of getting a tan and a hundred years ago that would have been considered beautiful but now it’s fashionable to be tanned. And in Africa being very overweight is considered beautiful because then it makes you look rich. How would that fit in? I saw a thing about the whole mathematical equation for beauty. There’s supposed to be an ideal equation for the face, but it doesn’t work, it makes people look like freaks. I mean what you find attractive is programmed into you, but attractiveness and beauty aren’t the same thing.