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In "A Woman's Beauty: Put-down or Power Source," Susan Sontag portrays how a woman's beauty has been degraded while being called beautiful and how that conceives their true identity as it seems to portray innocence and honesty while hiding the ugliness of the truth. Over the years, women have being classified as the gentler sex and regarded as the fairer gender. Sontag uses narrative structure to express the conventional attitude, which defines beauty as a concept applied today only to women and their outward appearance. She accomplishes this by using the technique of contrast to distinguish the beauty between men and women and establishing a variation in her essay, by using effective language.
Sontag introduces her essay to the audience by establishing a focal point around the fact that women viewed today are derivative from the religious perspective of how women were viewed in history. During the ancient times, Greeks and Christians practiced their own methods of analyzing and critiquing women and their beauty. The Greeks believed that the lack of ‘inner” beauty could be compensated with “outer” beauty. They distinguished the two beauties in a way that suggested that both were interconnected to one another within an individual. The preference and priority was given to the ‘outer’ beauty, while the ‘inner’ beauty would be kept at bay. Christianity, on the other hand, gave moral significance to beauty; in defining beauty, or words of physical character to be associated with woman and feminine. Gradually, Sontag introduces the distinguishable beauty between men and women. She does this by recapitulating how in a Christian religion, a woman’s body was parted into many sections to be judged and scrutinized, while men are visua...
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..., women try to make themselves beautiful to attract the best opportunities possible. Susan Sontag not only emphasizes on the out of proportion catastrophe of woman and their outer beauty, but also tries to convince her audience that there is more to a woman than just looks; there is another individual right underneath the ugliness.
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Women are told that in order to get anywhere in life they must constantly worry about their outer appearance. In Jennifer Weiner’s article, “When Can Women Stop Trying to Look Perfect?” she delves deeply into how today’s society women’s worth is based on how they look. Weiner believes that women who do not meet the standards of beauty do not have as many opportunities.
know beauty in any form”(86). We are so conditioned to see female beauty as what men
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women. New York: William Morrow, 1991.
Sarwer, D. B., Grossbart, T. A., & Didie, E. R. (2003). Beauty and society. Seminars in
Women have spent a large amount of time throughout the 20th century fighting for liberation from a patriarchal form that told them that they must be quiet and loyal to their husbands and fathers. For the duration of this essay, I will be discussing how the “Modern Woman” image that appeared through the Art Deco style — that emulated ideas such as the femme fatale and masqueraded woman, and presented new styles to enhance women’s comfortability and freedom — is still prevalent and has grown in contemporary art and design since. Overall I will describing to you how fashion, sexuality, and the newly emerged ‘female gaze’, and how these tie in together — in both periods of time — to produce what can be described as powerful femininity.
“A photograph is not an opinion. Or is it?” So begins Susan Sontag's introductory essay to the book Women, a collection of photographs by Annie Leibovitz. Collected without a stated intention other than to treat on the subject matter at hand, Leibovitz’s images confront a wide spectrum of issues surrounding women living in America at the end of the twentieth century. Sontag explains, “Any large-scale picturing of women belongs to the ongoing story of how women are presented, and how they are invited to think of themselves (20).”
For centuries, the objectification of women has become the norm, forever portraying them as submissive and passive for the benefit of the male gaze. Eternally capsulated in a world, perfected, unanimously the viewer and viewed alike. Jenny Saville defies expectations in creating the female nude with herself as both subject and painter. Taking on the roles given to women by men and making them her own, Saville elevates the status of women by making them their own judge of beauty. Kenneth Clark, a renowned art historian of his time, believed to create a form of art, the nude must be reformed and not directly recorded from life. In doing so, scouring away all evidence of the woman before the painting, before being perfected.
Have you ever been told you weren’t pretty enough or you were too tall, your feet and butt were too big, or you were ugly? Marge Piercy’s poem sheds a bright light on how differently women handle criticism and rejection. The poem really sadden me and it stroke me to my core. As a woman, I’ve been through puberty, acne, and poverty. While in grade school, my fellow class mates were so jaded and mean spirited with their words toward me. The same people who were calling me name where in the same situation as I. Piercy writes, “She was healthy, tested intelligent, possessed strong arms and back, abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity. She went to and fro apologizing. Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs.” It appears the young lady was happy with herself. She saw no flaws and was confident in her looks and intelligence. But it only takes one negative comment to override years of self-love. The young lady in the poem even apologized for being herself! How emotional crippling that must have been. She let a few nay sayers wreak havoc on her life and form that point on, she did whatever she thought would make the nay sayers approve of her. She sought their endorsement and no longer possessed any power within. Tragically, this did not end with a waltz to her bedroom. The lack of recognition and need to be desired ended up killing her. “In the casket displayed on satin she lay with the undertaker's cosmetics painted on, a turned-up putty nose, dressed in a pink and white nightie. Doesn’t she look pretty? Everyone said” (Piercy). She changed her nose and fat legs and only in death did they see her beauty. This poem was few in words but spoke volumes about a woman’s mental state. Women are very in tune with their feelings and are willing to appease others, even if it means killing ourselves in the
The idealized Woman that men and women alike propagated consists of four qualities. "The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors and society, could be divided into four cardinal virtues- piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity."[1] Of all of the women that Jacobs' autobiographical character Linda Brent meets, not one ...
Women in pictorial history have often been used as objects; figures that passively exist for visual consumption or as catalyst for male protagonists. Anne Hollander in her book Fabric of Vision takes the idea of women as objects to a new level in her chapter “Women as Dress”. Hollander presents the reader with an argument that beginning in the mid 19th century artists created women that ceased to exist outside of their elegantly dressed state. These women, Hollander argues, have no body, only dress. This concept, while persuasive, is lacking footing which I will attempt to provide in the following essay. In order to do this, the work of James Tissot (b. 1836 d. 1902) will further cement the idea of “women as dress” while the work of Berthe
People use art to display the beauty found in the world and, because of this, women have been subject to objection through paintings and photography all throughout history. Whether it is a commissioned oil painting from the 17th century or an advertisement from the 20th century, there will always be some type of image that objectifies women. In the book Ways of Seeing John Berger states that a woman “comes to consider the surveyor and surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman,” (Ways of Seeing 46). Berger is saying that women know they are seen as an object purely because they are women. Women in paintings and photography are objectified for the pleasure of the viewer, they are illustrated for the surveyor’s specifications, so in essence the picture is a better representation of the owner than the subject.
“Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance. (Gabrielle ‘CoCo’ Chanel) To her modesty was the chicest way of proclaiming one’s superiority. she wanted to get rid of everything that put women at the mercy of convention, that got in their way, that slowed them down.” Edelman (1997 p20)
An elevation of beauty is treated as a form of improvement, both for men and for women. Simply put, women emphasize their differences in order to gain a sense of equality and avoid comparison from men. However women are limited in the sense that beauty in itself is very restricting. And the fact that women direct their beauty towards men shows us that men are the basis and the end means of beauty. In which this beautification is not really a form of self-improvement; there is no real flourishing...
...e ability to achieve anything in life. Hopefully, readers would learn from this novel that beauty is not the most important aspect in life. Society today emphasizes the beauty of one's outer facade. The external appearance of a person is the first thing that is noticed. People should look for a person's inner beauty and love the person for the beauty inside. Beauty, a powerful aspect of life, can draw attention but at the same time it can hide things that one does not want disclosed. Beauty can be used in a variety of ways to affect one's status in culture, politics, and society. Beauty most certainly should not be used to excuse punishment for bad deeds. Beauty is associated with goodness, but that it is not always the case. This story describes how the external attractiveness of a person can influence people's behavior and can corrupt their inner beauty.
16.)Utt, Jamie. "Navigating The Difference Between The Appreciation of Beauty and Sexual Objectification." Everyday Feminism 18 Apr. 2013: n. pag. Web. 19 Apr. 2014. .