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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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.

I avoided writing about that because it's a whole 'nother ballpark - if there's only one type of ideal beauty, and cosmetic surgeons say that they can give it to us, does that mean that eventually we'll all look the same? Would we as a worldwide society give up our individuality, our heritage, everything that differentiates us from everyone else for the sake of beauty? (See, I should have written about that, but I had the whole "beauty = power" idea in my head.)