You're beautiful

The feminist article ‘The Beauty Myth’ by Naomi Wolp, talks about the never ending discussion of beauty. Women nowadays have gained their legal and reproductive rights, pursued higher education, entered the trades and the professions, and overturned ancient and revered beliefs about their social role. Now they look for other problems, like their physical appearance. Their bodies, faces, hair and clothes become all that matters to them, because these aspects are what define them and let them stand out in society. The need to stand out comes from our long lasting history of women that didn’t have the same rights of men, or women in different classes. Superiority can only be expressed through beauty, wealth or intelligence. Of these three factors beauty is the one thing that everyone can see at first sight. It’s like an etiquette. Prove for this is the fact that the number of eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing medical specialty. It matters to us women how we feel physically, how we feel in our own skin. That’s an important factor for a healthy life even though eating disorders and plastic surgery aren’t the solution to the problem. A healthy lifestyle would be sufficient.  At once, the diet and skin care industries became the new cultural censors of women’s intellectual space. Going back in history, you can find several times at when there were similar behaviors. Sometimes beauty portrayed fertility and women were resources that men had appropriated for themselves. At other times in different places, the ideal woman had a fat vulva and droopy breasts. Therefore there can’t be a universal beauty.

Women should be treated equally regardless from how they look like. As long as one looks healthy, she’s beautiful. There is no definition of beautiful, no matter how hard we try to find one. Women in our society go with the beauty trends, as long as the trend changes, then they have to change again if they’re truly committed. ‘Aller avec la mode’ would say a French person. Beauty that can be created by clothes or a fake nose, isn’t beauty. One might perceive someone as beautiful while someone else would say they’re ugly. The myth of beauty is an unstable concept and it always has been.