Women, Beauty and Self-Esteem Essay - 5143 Words

Ambrose Bierce (1958) once wrote, â€Å"To men a man is but a mind. Who cares what face he carries or what he wears? But woman’s body is the woman.† Despite the societal changes achieved since Bierce’s time, his statement remains true. Since the height of the feminist movement in the early 1970s, women have spent more money than ever before on products and treatments designed to make them beautiful. Cosmetic sales have increased annually to reach $18 billion in 1987 (â€Å"Ignoring the economy. . . ,† 1989), sales of women’s clothing averaged $103 billion per month in 1990 (personal communication, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, 1992), dieting has become a $30-billion-per-year industry (Stoffel, 1989), and women spent $1.2 billion on cosmetic†¦show more content†¦The concept is difficult to define, as it is equated with different, sometimes contradictory, ideas. When people are asked to define beauty, they tend to mention abstract, person al qualities rather than external, quantifiable ones (Freedman, 1986, Hatfield Sprecher, 1986).The beholder’s perceptions and cognitions influence the degree of attractiveness at least as much as do the qualities of the beheld. Because beauty is an ideal, an absolute, such as truth and goodness, the pursuit of it does not require justification (Herman Polivy, 1983). An ideal, by definition, can be met by only a minority of those who strive for it. If too many women are able to meet the beauty standards of a particular time and place, then those standards must change in order to maintain their extraordinary nature. The value of beauty standards depends on their being special and unusual and is one of the reasons why the ideal changes over time. When images of beauty change, female bodies are expected to change, too. Different aspects of the female body and varying images of each body part are modified to meet the constantly fluctuating ideal (Freedman, 1986). The ideal is always that which is most difficult to achieve and most unnatural in a given time period. Because these ideals are nearly impossible to achieve, failure and disappointment are inevitable (Freedman, 1988). Although people have been decorating their bodies since prehistoric times, the Chinese may haveShow MoreRelatedThe Beauty Myth And Its Effect On Women s Sense Of Self Worth And Self Esteem901 Words   |  4 Pagesfirst chapter, Work, is about the ways in which the Beauty Myth threatens the huge steps that women have made in the workplace. 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