Beauty Susan Sontag Analysis

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“You are so beautiful.” This is a phrase every woman has heard. Every female wants to be called beautiful because that it is what society is telling females to want. It is specifically advertisements that push these thoughts on the feminine gender; it is even to the point where females are the primarily targets for advertisements. According to advertisements, females have to have a certain body type, put on makeup, and wear certain type of clothing in order to be considered beautiful. This has caused women to change who they are to follow social standards. We don’t ever really hear about men being called beautiful. The problem with today’s perception of beauty has caused great disagreement and is beginning to semi-change. The issues with beauty standards is an important topic to know because it affects almost everyone. If it becomes more known and people get more involved, then the changes in beauty standards can actually start to make a difference. In Susan Sontag’s article called “A Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?”, she goes over her perspective of what the modern-day view on beauty and how the standards are different for men and women.

Sontag begins with giving some historical background on how our interpretation of what beauty is has evolved. She first mentions the Greeks point of view. They thought of beauty as something that
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Sontag’s article,“A Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?”, only focused on the negative beauty standards society had created. While, Millard’s scholarly article is focusing on the positive and how it is changing in some of today’s advertisements. In addition, Sontag’s article is over 30 years older than Millard’s article, causing Sontag’s article to be invalid. This is because Millard’s is proving that beauty standards, in this era, are beginning to change for the better, like Sontag

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