This is a great question. The central premise of Wolf's The Beauty Myth is that as women have gained more power in social terms (suffrage, ability to work, the right to higher education), they have actually suffered increasingly from the pressure to conform to stringent beauty standards. In order to be "successful," women feel they cannot be fat (which leads to a rise in eating disorders) and must spend money on makeup and even cosmetic surgery to look a certain way. She makes the argument that women feel so pressured to be seen as "sexy" that some of the work of 1970s feminists, seeking sexual liberation, has been undone, as many women now feel they have no choice but to be sexually available. Wolf is mainly talking about women in a Western context.
The myth of universal beauty, on the other hand, connects to this but makes different points. It identifies the fact that ideas of beauty in the West are quite different from ideas of beauty in many other parts of the world. In the US, for example, strongly feminine and masculine features in the respective genders are typically seen as attractive. Additionally, symmetrical features and paler skin tones, even in people of color, are prized. Many African nations, meanwhile, prize larger women and darker skin tones. In China and India, pale skin is valued so highly that women who work outdoors and become darker endure voluntary suffering through the use of skin-whiteners to try and remain pale.
Looking at these things together, then, we can make several points about privilege. White privilege in the West means that having pale skin makes a woman fit into one of the primary areas deemed beautiful, while a black woman will not have this advantage. Meanwhile, natural hair on black women is not prized, so these women will often spend time and money on weaves. We can certainly connect this to Wolf's book: as women become more powerful socially, we can see black women in higher positions in the workplace feeling pressured to tame their natural hair (as it may be seen as "unprofessional"). It has also been shown that paler black women tend to be more successful in acting and modeling careers, and magazines will "palewash" images of black actresses. This has a further harmful impact on black girls seeing these images, as they then feel "too black."
We can also look at the issue of fatness, again an intersectional problem in terms of racial privilege, because many Latino and Afro-Caribbean societies will prize larger women and then find they do not have this privilege within the context of Western beauty standards. However, large women of all races in the Western world may suffer either to achieve thinness. It has been demonstrated statistically that larger people are likely to lose out in job interviews to thinner people. Workplace weight discrimination is an important harmful effect of what we may term "thin privilege." Again, this connects to Wolf's thesis that The Beauty Myth affects women in the areas of work and hunger.
Monday, August 1, 2016
Is the Universal Beauty Myth the most pressing moral problem with current social norms and values attached to privilege? Explain, offering two reasons explaining the harms of privilege. I am trying to link this with the book The Beauty Myth.
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