Woman's Beauty Put Down Or Power Source By Susan Sontag

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A beautiful woman has perfect, shiny hair. Her face is inviting and symmetrical. She has sparkling eyes and a dazzling smile. She is in shape and has a great body. This is beauty. Beauty has no concern for what is inside; a woman’s beauty is her body and how she preens and presents herself. Beauty is the first thing that is noticed about a woman and is given a great deal of weight when an opinion of her is formulated. The weight beauty possesses has a lasting effect on how a woman is viewed in society and how she perceives herself. As Susan Sontag argues in her essay, “Woman’s Beauty: Put Down or Power Source,” the words “woman” and “beauty” have become so deeply intertwined in our society that ultimately, woman is beauty. Despite the close relation of the two words in modern times, women were not always so closely associated with the idea of beauty. Across societies, beauty and its strongest associations have changed and evolved into what we know today. Ancient Greece, a society known for its beautiful architecture and …show more content…

By this definition, women’s worth is inherently below men’s in society and especially in the workplace, where women’s main source of power and her biggest weakness is beauty. Being a man guarantees an individual the right to care about his career without giving great concern to his appearance as he does so; however, being a woman requires an individual to “[work] at being attractive” in order to be taken seriously or gain power. Yet paradoxically, by embracing her beauty, a woman loses “her very capacity to be objective, professional, authoritative, thoughtful” (Sontag 246). Beauty has become a “crude trap” that women have no choice but to fall

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