Contents
“We women tend to think of ourselves as cheap imitations of model photos, rather than seeing model photos as imitations of real women.” Naomi Wolfe’s book “The Beauty Myth” turns our view of beauty and helps to get rid of the complexes.
1. The essence of the beauty myth is as follows: the property called beauty exists objectively and everywhere. Women should want to have it, and men should strive to have women who embody it. “The embodiment of beauty is a must for women, but not for men, and this situation is quite natural, as it has a biological, sexual and evolutionary justification.” Strong men compete for beautiful women, and beautiful women are more successful in terms of procreation …
None of the above is true… Beauty is not a universal or unchanging concept… For example, the Polynesian Maori people admire female fullness, and the Padung people admire sagging breasts. Beauty is not the result of evolution either – its ideals change much faster … Anthropology has turned the idea that females must be beautiful to be chosen by a male.
Today, the “mating” of older men with beautiful young women is taken for granted. But … a behavioral model in which men act “on the sidelines” also occurs. In the Nigerian Wodaabe tribe, women have economic power, and there is a cult of male beauty. The men of this tribe spend hours in elaborate elaborate make-up, and in this seductive make-up and clothes that emphasize their sexual attractiveness, swaying their hips and with a languid look of a seducer, they enter beauty contests judged by women.
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- Average beauty
2. The most profitable and powerful industries are the $33 billion a year weight loss industry, the $20 billion a year cosmetics industry, the $300 million a year aesthetic surgery industry, and the $7 billion a year pornography industry. All of them were created and thrive on subconscious fears, and all of them, due to their impact on the mass consciousness, not only use, but spur and strengthen them.
… The “mass hallucination” – to present a modern woman as a “beauty” – materialized and for women turned into something quite real and tangible, determining how they live and how they do not live. The abstract idea turned into an “iron maiden”. Once upon a time, this was the name of an instrument of torture invented in Germany, which was an iron box that repeats the shape of the human body. Outside, it showed a beautiful, young, smiling woman. The unfortunate victim was placed in this box, its lid was tightly closed, making it impossible for a person to move, and as a result, the victim died either from hunger or from wounds received from metal spikes inside the box. The modern “mass hallucination” in which women either fell into or drove themselves into a trap resembles this box. Society sees only its outer side, but behind a beautiful picture lies an instrument of torture for real, living women.
3. The economy today is heavily dependent on the practice of underpaying working women. Economically beneficial behavior becomes a social virtue. Women make up 52,4% of the population, i.e. the majority. Women work hard and hard – twice as much as men. According to a report by the Humphrey Institute, “Women make up 50% of the world’s population, work two-thirds of the total, earn only one-tenth of the world’s income and own less than 1% of the world’s real estate.” According to a UN report, “when domestic work is taken into account, women around the world work twice as much as men.”
… By artificially lowering women’s skills and abilities and linking a woman’s appearance with her professional activities, the market protects itself by preserving the fund of cheap female labor.
4. Of course, men do not age more beautiful than us physically. They age more beautifully only in terms of their social status. We … are accustomed to perceive the traces of age on the faces of women as a flaw, and on the faces of men – as evidence of individuality. But if men were called upon to serve as “decoration”, and the period of adolescence were seen as the peak of their attractiveness, then the “prominent and famous” middle-aged man would look shockingly bad in our eyes … Men die once, while women die twice . Before their physical body dies, they die like beauties.
5. Light is a key moment in our innate and natural vision of beauty, which is characteristic of most people … This light is very difficult to “catch” and successfully photograph, it cannot be evaluated on a ten-point scale or calculated in numbers in the laboratory. But most people know that people’s faces and bodies can give off a radiance that makes them beautiful.
… It often happens that a person radiates radiance, telling a story or carefully listening to another … radiance radiates most children – those of them who have not yet been told that they are ugly. We often remember our mothers as beautiful simply because we saw the light that their eyes radiated … but for the beauty myth, it means nothing.
6. The combination of the concepts of beauty and sexuality is in itself wrong and makes women mistakenly believe that they must be “beautiful” in order to be sexy … Men are sexually aroused by the sight of a female body and, to a much lesser extent, by the personal qualities of a woman, because they have been sexually aroused since childhood accustomed to this kind of reaction. And women react weaker to visual stimuli and stronger to emotional stimuli, because they are brought up that way. This asymmetry in sex education supports the power of men in the myth of beauty: they look at women’s bodies, evaluate them and move on, and their bodies are not looked at, they are not appreciated, they are not accepted or rejected … but even if you are in a certain way brought up, this does not mean that you cannot abandon the lessons previously learned.
7. In books and films, girls find descriptions of the sensations that a young man experiences from his first touch on a girl’s thighs, his first impressions when he sees her breasts. Girls read and listen, absorbing these impressions and feeling that their own thighs and breasts become as if they were strangers, as if they were no longer part of their own bodies. They … learn to see their body from the side … Girls learn not to feel desire in relation to others, but to want to be desired.
8. The big world never tells girls that their bodies are valuable just because they live in them. Until our culture tells girls that they are welcome regardless of their figure, that every woman is valuable regardless of whether she is “beautiful” or not, girls will continue to starve.
9. With all our hearts we want to be loved … as in childhood, when they gently touched each of our fingers, loudly and joyfully admired every part of our body, because it was only ours, unique and incomparable. As adults, we seek in romantic love a release from comparison with others.
Each of us, even the most tormented, wants to believe that a person who sincerely loves her will see in her “the most beautiful woman”, because he will truly know her for who she really is. But the myth of beauty offers us the exact opposite perspective… the properties that make a woman unique are the unique asymmetry of her facial features, the scars forever left by childhood trauma, the fine lines and deep lines left by thought and laughter, experienced by grief and anger, – they exclude her from a number of mythical beauties and, as they try to convince us, expel her from the magical land of love.
10. In essence, the myth of beauty suppresses sexual desire … Beauty is based only on visual perception, it is easier to capture it on film or in stone than in the three-dimensional space of real life. Visual perception is monopolized by advertising … as for the rest of the senses, advertising is not in a winning position here: people are able to smell, taste, touch with the help of skin receptors and hear.
… The shape, weight, touch to the skin and the feeling of the body of a partner are all the most important components of enjoyment, but they are unique, inherent in a particular person… The world of sexual attractiveness becomes more and more featureless and cold as people (first women, and then men) start to look the same. They lose each other, putting on more and more masks and pretending to be someone they are not.
11. All women who are capable of experiencing pleasure have a “good” body. We don’t have to spend money and starve, struggle to become sensual: we always have been. We should not believe that we need to somehow earn attention to ourselves: we have always been worthy of it.
Femininity and female sexuality are beautiful. Deep down, women have long suspected this. In this sexuality, women are beautiful, magnificent, amazing. And a lot of men feel it. A man who really loves a woman admires the traces that life left on her face even before meeting him … There are many more such men than we think, although popular culture tries to inspire us to the opposite.
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- François Chen: “Beauty makes us better”
… The idea that a normal adult woman cannot arouse and satisfy male sexual desire and that this requires “beauty” as a necessary complement is a big lie born of the beauty myth. Everywhere and everywhere men prove otherwise. All those men who are currently sexually attracted to women, flirting with them, in love with them, dreaming about them, going crazy for them or making love to them, do all this with women who look the way they look. and are who they really are.
12. Men are not told from all sides that their time is running out, that they will never be caressed again, they will never again be admired and pleasing to the eye ….
With the threat of losing love comes the threat of becoming invisible. Old age is the apotheosis of gender inequality: older men rule the world, and older women disappear from the sight of our culture. Few people can stand being treated as invisible. And women decide to have a facelift, because if they do not, they will cease to exist for the society in which they live.
13. Advertising aimed at women works by lowering our self-esteem. If it flatters us, it will cease to be effective. Let’s give up hope that the officially recognized canon of beauty will correspond to what we really are. This will not happen, otherwise it will cease to perform its function. As long as the definition of “beauty” is imposed on women from the outside, it will continue to manipulate us.
14. Women should talk openly about what beauty really is: attention from strangers, rewards for not earning, sex with men who are drawn to you like a fair prize, hostility and skepticism. from other women, childishness, the drama of aging and a long hard struggle for their individuality. And we will understand that the good thing about beauty – the promise of self-confidence, sexuality and respect for our personality – has nothing to do with it as such. The best of what beauty offers us, and so belongs to us by right, simply because we are women. When we separate beauty from sexuality, when we learn to enjoy the individuality and uniqueness of our appearance and our character traits, we will be able to enjoy our bodies … and then the beauty myth will become a thing of the past.