Related Papers
Gender and the inescapable beauty trap
Kahini Palit
Attractiveness is considered an essential quality for women. From childhood on, girls are socialized in environments in which the highest compliments about them centre on their bodies-compliments like sweet, beautiful, gorgeous. Little girls are very commonly fond of wearing ‘princess’ frocks, or dress as an ‘angel’. It is worth wondering how many little boys dress like a ‘prince’; it might be a rather ridiculous idea for most of them. Thus socialized from childhood, girls step into the arena of youth where it is literally impossible to escape cultural messages that reinforce the idea that beauty is a central feature of their identity and worth. The study is done to realize the impact of the essential beauty ideal imposed on young women, and how it works to shape their lifestyle and images of self worth.
CREATING CULTURE: THE IMPACT OF MEDIA IMAGES ON THE MYTH OF FEMALE BEAUTY 1
thilini meegaswatta
In any given society, ‘culture’ can be taken to mean an entire set of socially transmitted beliefs, values and practices which provides a common understanding which often transcends immediate individual experience. If culture is the force that constructs the social reality which often guides our actions, the concept of female beauty is unarguably an oppressively influential element in today’s cultures. The dynamic theory of social impact asserts the tendency for people to be more influenced by nearby rather than far away people, and construct local patterns of consensus that can be interpreted as subcultures. However, in the modern world various sources of media have taken the lead in disseminating uniform sets of beliefs and attitudes which have dovetailed in to these subcultures. This observation is apt in relation to Sri Lanka where Television is one of the most popular sources of entertainment with 80% of households having televisions. Among various types of media images disseminated through television, advertisem*nts are the most consistent. Starting with the understanding that the advertising’s image of women could influence the collective consciousness of society, and thereby influence and construct elements of culture, this study aims to draw a statistical profile of primetime advertising in Sri Lanka and analyze the construction of female beauty in advertisem*nts from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. A sample of advertisem*nts was chosen from the prime time broadcast of three television channels during August, 2012. According to Lanka Market Research Bureau (LMRB) statistics, advertisem*nts occupy 17%-25% of primetime. A feminist analysis of the content and ideology of advertisem*nts reveals that most advertisem*nt builds on extremely sexist ideologies of female beauty that could profoundly affect the way women are treated in real life. Most advertisem*nts objectify women, applaud a rigidly defined concept of female beauty and exhort women to pursue impossible beauty standards. Not only men would be encouraged to primarily judge women by their physical attributes and sexual appeal, but the women themselves would internalize the self-degrading, harmful belief that flawless white skin is the only acceptable appearance. The fact that billions of dollars are spent annually for cosmetics and other beauty products while more important areas of spending are ignored shows the power advertisem*nts wield in terms of creating culture. Springing from a pool of collective knowledge that is highly sexist, media images of female beauty contribute to form crippling definitions which become an integral part of the modern culture. KEY WORDS: Culture, Beauty, Media, Advertisem*nts
Buku The Beauty Myth
The Beauty Myth. Naomi-Wolf
2024 •
Jasman Rantedoda
The bestselling classic that redefined our view od the relationship between beauty and female identity. In today's world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women's movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife. It's the beauty myth, an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfill society's impossible definition of "the flawless beauty."
Representation of women’s body within popular mass-media: The concept of beauty as injected through popular print magazines and online subscriptions.
International Research Journal Commerce arts science
Representation of women's body within popular mass-media: The concept of beauty as injected through popular print magazines and online subscriptions. Kalyani. Abstract: Popular print-media has a represented women's body with a certain fixity of spatiality which depicts the larger 'public-sphere' were a woman is allowed to imagine herself. It constructs the bodies which are hegemonized to a culturally-determined symbolic order. The new-media too is no redeemer to this culturally construed order.
Health Care Analysis
Altered Images: Understanding the Influence of Unrealistic Images and Beauty Aspirations
2016 •
Heather Widdows
Steven Miller
Critical Disability Discourses
Becoming Women: The Embodied Self in Image Culture by Carla Rice (Book Review)
2016 •
Sharon Caldwell
Becoming Women is a collective ethnography of Canadian women born between the late 1970s and the early 1990s-those who grew up in the undefined space between second wave and third wave feminism. Girls who came of age in a media-dominated culture, heavy with idealized and idolized (mis)representations of women and beauty. In a culture that uses physical beauty as a measure of moral character and worth, it is no surprise that girls internalize these pressures and learn to self-regulate. The body "becomes the playground or battleground for this to get worked out" (p. 12). Between 1997 and 2001, Rice carried out telephone interviews, face-to-face interviews, and survey questionnaires that encouraged women to explore the images and messages they received about their bodies growing up. Rice refers to these women as "storytellers". This powerful language gives them agency, control, and space for their voices to be heard. Although many of their experiences were difficult and negative, Rice still manages to illustrate the subtle ways in which the storytellers resisted dominant narratives by (re)claiming power over their bodies and identities. Rice is aware of the literature that already exists on the subjects of beauty and media culture and frames her own intentions by unearthing the limitations of this previous research. Literature on the subject tends to essentialize and privilege the experiences of white, middle class, thin, able-bodied women, thereby erasing others.
Classed and racialised depictions of beauty in 'women's magazines'
Jim Forsyth Harris
Wolf's “The Beauty Myth” (1991) is a seminal text within third-wave feminism, identifying the late-modern obsession with women's appearance as a backlash against the gains made by the women's movement. However Wolf's account only discusses the relationship between beauty and middle-class white women. This project comprises an investigation into how normative beauty standards can be seen to reflect the intersection of neoliberal capitalism and white supremacy with patriarchy. This is accomplished through a thematic-discourse and a visual analysis of the depictions of beauty in contemporary women's magazines. Three major themes are found within the data; relating respectively to the reification of beauty standards, the association of beauty with glamour and commodity consumption and a lingering colonialist perspective of whiteness as inherently beautiful.
Creating the Self, A feminist critique on the creation and representation of self within aesthetics, through the female image.
Clare Chapman
On Being and Becoming Beautiful: The Social Construction of Feminine Beauty
2021 •
Saadia Abid
