What Meets The Eye David Akst Analysis

The concept of beauty is a subject society speaks on through many channels. Social media plays a tremendous role in how society measures beauty and how to achieve these impossible standards. People from all walks of life have become obsessed with the idea of beauty and achieving the highest level it. In many cases, those who do not meet societal views of what is “beautiful” can become very resentful to these predisposed notions of beauty. David Akst in his writing “What Meets the Eye”, is bitter toward women and their ongoing obsession with beauty. We can see the bitterness dripping off Akst’s words throughout his entire writing. He states, “Everyone knows looks shouldn’t matter. Beauty after all, is only skin deep, and no right-thinking …show more content…

By doing this, Akst is preying on the seeds of doubt that may be already planted into the reader’s mind. For example, Akst implements the baby argument into his writing to sway reader’s opinions. He states, “Mother’s pay more attention to good-looking babies, for example, but, by the same token, babies pay more attention to prettier adults who wander into their fields of vision” (330). The key section that displays Akst’s bitterness is when he states “mother’s pay-more attention to good-looking babies”. By saying this, Akst is manipulating readers into believing that mothers pay less attention to their less beautiful children, without any solid evidence to support his claim. By Akst placing emphasis on only mothers rather than both mothers and fathers, he is exposing his predisposed bitterness to the …show more content…

Akst disguises his bitter nature by turning superficial into scientific. Akst states, on a scale from 1 to 3, the importance men gave to good looks rose from 1.50 to 2.11. But for women, the importance of good looks in men rose from 0.94 to 1.67. In other words, women in 1989 considered a man look’s more important than men considered women’s looks 50 years earlier Akst emphasizes how women take superficial looks more into an account than men which reveals his bitter emotions directed towards women. Akst also provides no evidence for the circumstances of this research study which leaves readers with no evidence to back up his claim. He is so bitter towards women’s obsession with beauty that he tries make a correlation that may not even be