I Am Beautiful!

Beauty is like potential and kinetic energy. Potential energy is the energy that has yet to be acted on, while kinetic energy is energy being used from that build-up of potential energy. Beauty that is yet to be realized is potential, and it is the connotation we have of ourselves that can be acted on, either in a negative or positive way. Let us shoot for the latter.

As aforementioned, two spectrums of the issue always exist, and there is always a harmful ideology of beauty. Many women possess dangerously low self-esteems. Intervention, a television series on A&E, forces people who have come at a crossroads with their inner demons to confront their compulsive behavior before a major crisis occurs. In one episode, 51-year-old Grandmother Sharon, an obsessive shopper who is so displeased with her appearance that she has underwent several plastic surgeries, also seeks refuge in physically abusing herself. “I’m so ugly and fat and stupid,” she said as she sobbed and repeatedly banged herself in the head with a hairbrush. Sharon is not unattractive. Why does feel so physically inferior that she must bruise her entire body? It is obvious where the fault lay for all of these inane inadequacies women feel: in the media. Women airbrushed to ideal perfection from magazine cover to magazine cover, commercial to commercial, clique to clique. Many people are deaf to many concepts, the crucial one being that the majority- if not all- of pictures on television, in ads on billboards, and faces on the cover of magazines have been altered, airbrushed, fixed and enhanced on Photoshop, and the thousands of other ways to create a false idiosyncrasy that some women believe: these images are real. In her famous Boston Globe article (2010), Globe corr...

... middle of paper ...

...fection, the opposite was in fact achieved. Collins displays an intense, urgent tone that displays the importance of the issue and keeps the readers enticed from start to finish.

In his innovative poem-otherwise known as one of the greatest odes in the American language- “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” (1820), John Keats implies the beauty of an unreachable goal, in this case unfulfilled love. Keats supports this claim by forming a paradox that unspoken music is the greatest kind. "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter " He then relates this to a couple who are fixed in an irreversible state where neither one is able to embrace the other. The intent of this metaphor is to convey beauty in everything, even where one is sure its nonexistent. Keat's tone is earnest for his audience because of his goal to bring the reader to the same conclusion he is at.