Word of the Week

Beauty

Definition: a combination of qualities that pleases the aesthetic, intellectual or moral sense

Consider this...

In seeking out a formal definition of beauty, I stumbled across the following two proverbs. Surely these ideas would have been teased out of a post that focused on the word beauty, but considering their proximity to the actual definition I couldn’t resist including them now.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”

Meaning: Beauty cannot be judged objectively, for what one person finds beautiful or admirable may not appeal to another.

Most of us can agree that beauty is only something perceived by another. That is, beauty is relative. What’s attractive to one person is not necessarily so to another. Anyone who’s ever overheard two teenage guys discussing a girl with one saying, “Dude, she’s totally hot,” and the other replying, “Nah, bra, she’s busted,” knows that there is little consensus on who or what is beautiful.

This becomes increasingly apparent if we look across cultures. Though American and other western cultures may idealize thinness, being thin isn’t always viewed positively, and in many parts of the world, it still isn’t. An essay called “Ideal” by Rebecca Popenoe in the anthology Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession speaks of Rebecca’s time working amongst Nigerien Arabs who made fun of her for being thin and who couldn’t understand that she wanted to be that way.

In the Nigerien Arabs’ culture, being a fat woman was a sign of wealth, class and success because it meant that you didn’t have to work and your husband could afford to feed you. In fact, this culture took becoming fat to an unhealthy extreme in an arguably similar fashion to how Americans take being thin to an unhealthy extreme: many forced their daughters to eat excessively and not move at all so that potential wealthy suitors might find them fatter and therefore more attractive.

Thus, in different times and places different body types are considered more attractive, truly reinforcing the notion that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

“Beauty is only skin-deep”

Meaning: a pleasing appearance is not a guide to character

Well isn’t that the truth. The way someone looks has nothing to do with the quality of one’s character. I hardly think I need to elaborate on that idea, but what I will mention is that the way someone looks - despite having nothing to do with his/her character - has a great deal to do with the way others treat that person. This is injustice and there are few things that get me as riled up as injustice.

The example that comes to mind is the Lifetime television show, Drop Dead Diva. This show is an awesome portrayal of many facets of what it’s like to live fat in American society, and one of the most commonly portrayed elements of that experience is how fat women are treated by others. And treating others based on their appearance is nothing short of discrimination.

When a woman sees a black person walking down the street hastily in her direction and clutches her purse a little tighter solely on the basis of his skin color, that’s discrimination. When a barista disregards who was in line first and waits on a thinner woman by default solely based on that woman’s size, that’s also discrimination. There are arguable differences between these two scenarios, but to treat someone differently based on his or her appearance is discriminating against that person in one way or another. That is unjust because one’s appearance has nothing to do with one deserving that treatment or not.

How Changing Concepts of Beauty Can Change Us All for the Better

I have grown up in America and as much as many others I have been susceptible to the cultural baggage that comes with such a life. One of these issues is that I’ve perceived a certain type of person as beautiful. I’m not ashamed to admit that because I think it would be crazier to presume that I had been raised in America and totally avoided the aesthetic ideals that go with that upbringing (was I locked in a basement my whole life? you might ask).

In any case, perhaps one of the greatest things that has changed in my life as I have embarked on a journey of understanding and embracing size diversity, fat acceptance, and all of the other ideas that go with those, is that I have extricated myself from the nonsensical aesthetic ideals that our culture holds so dear.

That is to say that when I look at conventionally “beautiful” people, I see them as just people, attractive in their own way, but little more than that. More significantly is that I look at people typically (and quite erroneously, I might add) not viewed as beautiful according to say, Cosmo or other ‘as-good-as-toiletpaper’ beauty magazines, and find them to be beautiful people.

It’s wonderful not to look at people and think, “hot,” or “ugly” or anything like that, but just to look at a huge diversity of people and really see and know that each person is beautiful. I feel truly liberated from the aesthetic prison of American popular culture, and it’s amazing to recognize the opportunity it gives me to get to know the character of every person I encounter rather than assuming anything about them.

Join the liberation and extricate yourself from externally imposed concepts of beauty.