Beyonce Pretty Hurts Analysis

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Unsatisfied, you stand on the stage with the other competitors, starving, exhausted, uncomfortable, and desperately needing the trophy. You jump hearing the crackling of the mike cutting through your corrupted thoughts. “Pretty Hurts”, are the first two words the third contestant sings. You’re rammed with the depressing realization that this is your reality. Beyonce’s “Pretty Hurts” music video is about a pageant girl who has been competing in pageants for a very long time. She’s won hundreds of trophies but is still unhappy and unsatisfied with the way she looks. She has done many drastic things, even jeopardizing her health to win pageants to prove that she’s beautiful. In this particular pageant she is asked the question, “What is [her] aspiration in life?” This may be …show more content…
But what Queen B defines as beauty may be different from what you expect. She feels that “It’s just heartbreaking” to see how much pressure the media has placed on women in society today to have outer beauty. Beyoncé uses “Pretty Hurts” to discredit “the disease of a nation”, the media’s overpowering definition of “perfect”.
In her video, Beyoncé demonstrates the effect of media on women. She appeals to the emotions of her audience by displaying the drastic measures the contestants in the video took to look “perfect”. She states, “Blonder hair, flat chest, TV says bigger is better” and “South beach, sugar free, Vogue says thinner is better”, she shows that media is contradicting itself. Clips of girls dieting, throwing up their meals, taking diet pills, not eating, dyeing their hair to make it lighter in color, and having plastic surgery were flashed throughout the video. Adding this in her video proves that the effect of media is unpredictable, and that media is unsuitable to define the beauty of females.
Instead of making society beautiful, media is making society ugly. Instead of

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