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rules of attraction | by dennismv | 2008-05-05 18:52:09 |
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No. | by run.dll | 2008-05-05 19:01:06 |
| However... |
by werehatrack |
2008-05-05 20:51:00 |
The local societal definitions of "beauty" shift with time and culture; look at what was considered porn in the 19th century and you'll be left scratching your head. Today's supermodels would have been considered unacceptably bony and scrawny by the standards of that day. Much of the current emphasis can be traced to fashion industry art of the mid 20th century, which (starting in the Art Deco era) routinely portrayed women who were impossibly thin with impossibly long legs...and that image type became the model of ultimate beauty. Helping it along was the fact that there were a few women whose appearance was sufficiently close to the art that they seemed to embody the artists' standard.
Then there's the infatuation with massive mammaries which seems to be largely a product of (once again) artist renderings, this time from the WWII era, when imagery that exaggerated the secondary traits of the feminine form in every way (for distribution to a more vulgar - in the original sense - market) was produced. Once again, the porn of the 19th century indicates that this was not the ideal of earlier eras carried forward, and the correspondence between published accounts of popular taste and the timing of the appearance of the exemplars in the hardcopy media seems to indicate that life tried to imitate art.
Be that as it may, each of these shifts was mostly one of degrees over a period of time. The ideals of facial structure also show marked temporal deviation, often at least partially traceable to tastes seeming to be driven by similarity to a popular icon of the era.
To produce a shift toward a saner ideal today, then, the current moves toward choosing fashion models who aren't stick-thin, and who have more nearly median-level proportions, is a good start. When the arbiters of beauty misstep too far, the effort will fail, however, so an incremental shift should be viewed as more likely to succeed.
Of course, it would also help to get the advertising types to stop Photoshopping all the imagery into what amounts to unattainable perfection, too.
One other thought: The biggest thing keeping the ideals of beauty from being more egalitarian is the fact that most people never get the chance to actually interact with the outlier-appearance persons who embody the current image of Beauty; if they did, in a large number of cases they would discover that a certain old adage is far more true than they had ever imagined. (That one I can say from experience.) |
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[ Reply ] |
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"Beauty is only skin deep." | by run.dll | 2008-05-05 21:05:52 |
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"But ugly is down to the bone." | by josie_beller | 2008-05-05 23:46:39 |
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