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The Problem with Beauty (G. Armour)


By Georgia Armour



The problem with beauty.

Overrated. Sexist. Racist.


Beauty, by definition, is ‘the quality of being pleasurable, especially to look at, or someone or something that gives great pleasure, especially when you look at it’. Beauty is a concept created by us and as a result exists exclusively through people. For something to be beautiful, we must consider it so; it must be ‘looked at’ and therefore a pair of human eyes are essential.


But one question remains, how do we know if something is beautiful? What determines this? If you were to picture something or someone beautiful right now, what would you see? Go on.


Perhaps you imagined a landscape full of green fields or the ocean at sunset. The intrinsic beauty of nature after all has rarely been contested. The more interesting question, I think, is what would come to mind if you were to picture a beautiful person?


When looking up the definition of ‘beauty’, the initial definition describes it as something pleasing to the eye, but as the definition goes into further detail there is an undeniable association between beauty and femininity, the idea of ‘a beautiful woman’. Did you picture a woman? Were their features ‘feminine’? It would make sense, since ‘beautiful’ is an adjective more commonly used to describe a woman’s physical appearance than a man’s. Your view of what is considered ‘beautiful’ is a product of a society that views it as more important for women to be aesthetically pleasing.


Aesthetics are described as ‘the formal study of art, especially in relation to the idea of beauty’. The fact that the principles of aesthetics that are so closely linked to beauty demonstrates one of its crucial aspects, beauty has a set of rules. As part of society, we have customs and cultural habits that result in shared beliefs and ideals. There is also much division it's true, but generally societies have status quo.


Sexism is status quo in the West, and the aesthetic ideals in beauty both demonstrate and contribute to this. Beauty is clearly a gender issue, and it has been for centuries. The unrelenting oppression of women as nothing more than a man’s property up until the twentieth century. Consequently, a woman was valued based on her aesthetic appeal as an ‘object’ of the male gaze. Today, women show a significant concern for their physical appearance and have comparatively lower self-esteem than men as a result, with such concerns showing from the age of 10, likely younger. This is not to suggest that men do not also suffer from insecurity, but that the patriarchal system that enforces gender difference makes looks and beauty a more important factor for women, thus having a stronger impact.


This objectification of women culminates in the European genre of the nude, a category of art which depicts an idealised naked female form. She is often depicted in a decontextualized environment to create a distance between her and the viewer, separating her from contemporary society and its social expectations; it allows her to exist naked without cultural inappropriateness. It is important to highlight that a nude woman is not naked for herself, but rather for the pleasure of the viewer’s gaze, for the male gaze.


In Ways of Seeing Berger states: “To be naked is to be oneself. To be naked is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised by oneself. A naked body has to be an object in order to become a nude.” A nude is not an individual, the woman is granted neither character nor a mind but is simply an embodiment of beauty to appease a male audience. Raphael in his pursuit for the perfect female form, used several models for the depiction of Galatea in The Triumph of Galatea (1514), with her face being entirely imagined by Raphael as he deemed no model sufficiently beautiful enough. This painting sees the dissembling and reconfiguration of women body parts; they are being torn apart, part of the body accepted, and others cast away as inadequate. This blasé use of female models demonstrates a widely held view prominent today that a woman is not entirely ideally beautiful then she is inadequate, that her physical appearance is her most important feature.


(Rappaello Sanzio da Urbino (Raphael), Triumph of Galatea, c.1512.

Fresco. Villa Farnesina, Rome.)


Beauty has long been considered an asset, an advantage, even a weapon for women throughout the years, but it is, as a societal construct, immensely restricting. If a woman is ‘beautiful’, due to an entire history of aesthetics behind it, she is consequently viewed as an object rather than a person, with the main aim of appeasing whoever possesses her through sight. Additionally, the association between female nudity and male possession is still well and alive today. A depressingly typical response to seeing a woman wearing less clothing than is deemed socially proper is to say “she’s asking for it”, with “it” being unrequested sexualisation by men. By displaying herself as partly nude, she is subjecting herself to the male gaze and the consequent sexualisation.


(Gustav Courbet, The Bathers (Les Baigneuses), 1853. Oil on canvas.

227x193 centimetres. Montpellier, Musée Fabre. Photo:Erich Lessing/ART RESOURCE, New York.)


Realism, an art movement in the nineteenth century, was founded by Gustave Courbet on the principle of presenting the world as it is without an idyllic lens, with all its ‘faults’ unapologetically on display. Courbet’s The Bathers (1853) is a reaction against the concept of ideal beauty, as he takes the features of a classical nude painting and systematically deconstructs them. The woman’s figure is larger and more realistically proportioned than would have been considered ideal, departing from the traditional standard of female beauty. Her feet, if you look closely, are also covered in mud from the track, which though may seem an ordinary result of walking through a forest with bare feet, it has a wider significance. It demonstrates that the woman is affected by the world surrounding her, she is grounded in reality rather than existing as an idealisation with no connection to the real world. Though the woman still lacks any individuality, as she still has neither a name nor a face, Courbet has taken the concept of ideal beauty and turned it on its head. What we have instead is an antithetical allegory of unidealised beauty.


(William Heath. A pair of broad bottoms. 1855. Etching. 333x248 millimetres. The British Museum, London.)


This critical history of this allegorical painting reveals another significant characteristic of the concept of beauty in addition to its misogyny, which is its relation of an individual’s ethnicity. Beauty, like the rest of visual art, is massively Euro-centric and conventional beauty has become synonymous with ‘whiteness’. The contemporary reaction against Courbet’s painting is demonstrative of racism in beauty, as Théophile Gautier called the nude “Hottentot Venus”. The “Hottentot Venus” was the stage-name given to Sarah Baartman, a black woman who spent her life being paraded around Europe in “freak shows” for people to see her large buttocks. The exhibition of Sarah Baartman is representative of Britain’s role in subjugating the people of colonised countries and constructing the racial hierarchy that still exists in Britain today. This constructed white supremacy includes aesthetic superiority, as while ‘whiteness’ and beauty were treated synonymously, ‘blackness’ became associated with ugliness. When Gautier compared Courbet’s nude to a black woman, he meant it as an insult as in his eyes to be black was to be ugly.


This requirement of beauty, however, is by no means a thing of the past and in fact is very much intact today in Britain. The beauty industry reinforces the long-established affiliation between whiteness and beauty, not only are most models white, but make-up products are targeted at a white audience. Funmi Fetto talks about the first time she was trying to find a foundation that matched her skin tone and the darkest she could find was a tone called ‘biscuit’ that looked like “white chalk” on her skin. Black women have been consistently failed by the beauty industry, excluded by the lack of products made to cater to people of colour and as a result beauty standards themselves.


When you apply preconceptions you have about beauty, therefore, you are indirectly reinforcing both sexist and racist ideals which have a direct impact on women, particularly women of colour. The standards of beauty in Britain are therefore not only a fabricated set of rules that threaten everyone’s self-esteem, their self-love and mental health, but also support both a misogynistic and racist system. While there have been certain developments in the perceptions of beauty such as the introduction of plus-sized models in major brands such as H&M, ASOS, and others, there are still many problems with beauty. This problem is not going to disappear overnight, and the deconstruction of the values surrounding beauty will take time. It starts with a greater awareness that there is a problem from individuals and the deconstruction of beliefs on beauty historically established through prejudice. However, it must also be accompanied by action from those in positions of power who dictate the modern concept of beauty as those who control the trend are the ones most capable of changing it.






References:


Cambridge Dictionary. (Cambridge University Press, 2021). https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/beauty

John Berger. Ways of Seeing. (Penguin Group, 2008). 45-64.

E.H. Gombrich. “Raphael: The Nymph Galatea”. The Story of Art. (2014).

Patricia Pliner, Shelly Chaiken, Gordon L. Flett. Gender Differences in Concern with Body Weight and Physical Appearance Over the Life Span, 16(2). (1990). 263-273. Doi: 10.1177/0146167290162007.

Katherine Brion. Courbet’s The Bathers and the “hottentot Venus”: destabilising whiteness in the mid-nineteenth-century nude, 35(1). (2019). 12.39. Doi: 10.1080/02666286.2018.1515575

Justin Parkinson. The significance of Sarah Baartman. BBC News (2016).

Funmi Fetto. The beauty industry is still failing black women. The Guardian. (2019). https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/sep/29/funmi-fetto-happy-in-my-skin-beauty-industry-diversity




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