What is Beauty?
Of late I seem to have fallen into the topic of gender. I wrote last week about Disney’s efforts to redefine “princess” and about what our movies teach our kids about gender roles, and even this morning in the daily devotions I asked whether we should be concerned that Jesus’ twelve disciples are male.
Gender is interesting in part, I think, because it’s as much a construct as it is a reality. Male and female are biological conditions, yes, but also social constructions. That is, what we associate with “being male” or “being female” depends a lot on cultural expectations and therefore varies from culture to culture and over history.
Did you ever wonder, for instance, why so many of the women portrayed in eighteenth and nineteenth century paintings are pale and, well, rather plump? Because only the wealthy could avoid the manual labor or outdoor life that would inevitably result in suntans and had plenty of food to eat. Hence, plump and pale were difficult to achieve and therefore desirable. Today, of course, it’s the opposite: only the privileged can afford to diet and exercise and sunbathe to the point of achieving the skinny and tanned look we think is desirable.
Beauty, in this sense, is a construction. Not all of it, of course. We are biologically inclined to respond to youth and health and symmetry, the things that will most likely yield a healthy mate and heighten our chances of passing down our genes. But as for the rest – height or skin shade or so many other things we note (and judge people by) unconsciously – these are heavily influenced by one’s culture.
Which might be why most of us don’t feel particularly good about our bodies. The social construct to which we compare ourselves is ultimately artificial. The pictures we look at in magazines and on billboards – whether of men or women – are highly stylized, often artificially enhanced, portraits of an ideal that finally doesn’t exist. Yet we still operate under the weight of those expectations.
All of which is why I found Cameron Russell’s TED Talk so interesting. Cameron is model who, as she says, won the genetic lottery in that she’s tall, skinny, pretty, and white, all of which is in vogue right now. And so there is a whole industry that is happy to pay her to let them pose her this way and that, wearing everything from outlandish dresses to the skimpiest of bikinis to embody this ideal.
And yet Cameron knows it’s superficial. The pictures of her in the magazines are not the real her – they are the artistic creation of a whole team of professionals. Moreover, even all the attention and praise she receives for her looks doesn’t make her happy. Instead, it actually makes her insecure. As she says, models “have the thinnest thighs and the shiniest hair and the coolest clothes, and they’re the most physically insecure women probably on the planet.”
Don’t get me wrong, Cameron isn’t asking anyone to feel sorry for her. Rather, she’s asking that we regard the kind of beauty that happens to be popular now for what it is – something that is only skin deep and crafted by the culture – and begin to see ourselves and each other for what we really are, fellow human beings in need of compassion and regard. Or, as we might say, as children of God.
Now that would be beautiful.
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Thanks for sharing this video and for continuing the conversation about beauty and images. The church is far too silent on such matters, especially with and for our youth, who (along with all of us) need most of all to be reassured that they are, always and only, children of God. We have far too many constructs telling us otherwise.
I’ll be showing this to junior high students soon — thank you for the resource!