Beauty Standards Essay

From various fashion magazines featuring trendy “perfect” female shapes, to television commercials implicitly messaging how people can only attain happiness by purchasing their make-up toolkits, the idealized physical body standards propagated by advertisements manifest a power relation that subjects women to be uncomfortable with their current appearances and conform to the dominant “white” aesthetic views that demand unrealistic characteristics and induce insecurity. The ideal is whitewashed and exclusive, and then creates internal kyriarchy within female group. The beauty ideal is both individualizing and totalizing, because women seem to choose for themselves, while non-conformists are socially humiliated and stigmatized as lazy and inadequate outliners with little self-control. Beauty standards are socially constructed. If people are biologically inclined to certain characteristics, such as blonde hair, it is not plausible to accuse the …show more content…
Blonde hair, white models with button-down noses and slender body are cast as reference points, which every other woman are expected to painstakingly imitate. Bulter argues heterosexuality adopts the same repetition strategy in establishing its status as original, “The parotic replication and resignification of heterosexual constructs within non-heterosexual frames brings into relief that utterly constructed status of the so-called original, but is shows that heterosexuality only constitutes itself as the original through convincing act of repetition” (Butler 1715). Constant streaming of photos and videos of perfect women on magazines, television, and Internet leads women away from their own views on normal appearances; though they may have own dressing habits before, they cannot when it is so clear what women “normally” look like. The installation of the “ideal beauty” mindset is not completed by external